Kirk Russell - Shell Games

“When is the wedding?”

“Now only two weeks. Everything I take is here. You take it now.”

Marquez had done the rough count. Maybe a tenth of what Li had taken was here and he didn’t think he needed to argue this for long with Li. He thought he could explain fairly fast.

“We’ve followed you for over a week, Tran. We have videotape and a strong case.” He let a beat pass. “You have a prior conviction within a three-year time frame, which is bad in California.” Li stared past him and Marquez heard someone in the hall, then the older son looked in. He moved into the garage as though he needed to protect his father and the suffering in the older boy’s eyes was unmistakable. Marquez turned toward him. “I need to talk with your father alone, and it’s all right, we’re just talking. Nothing is going to happen today.” He studied him, gauging how much was boy, how much was man, whether he ought to sit in on the conversation because there was a real possibility he knew what Li knew. “Unless you can tell me something about the two men who were here earlier.”

Joe Li looked at his father, then back at Marquez. He spoke in rapid Vietnamese and his father answered quickly. Marquez had the feeling the boy was arguing they should talk with him.

“We want to work with you,” Marquez said while looking at Joe Li. “But you’re going to have to help us.” Tran shook his head, said something in Vietnamese and as his son left the garage Li murmured in barely audible Vietnamese, speaking to himself, as though responding to voices only he could hear. Marquez waited and then spoke softly, explaining where they stood in very frank tones. He made no threats but repeated that he had to know today who the men were.

“Did these men threaten you?” He waited. He could smell the abalone in the garage. “Did they tell you they’d hurt you and your family if you didn’t cooperate? You want to talk to me, Tran, because I’m going to try to get the DA to work with you.” It was the third time he’d said it but still wasn’t getting any acknowledg-ment. “Did they come here to warn you?” Li shook his head. “Have you dealt with those two men before?”

Li’s fingers worked on the cuff of his shirt. “We’re going to arrest them and they’ll go to prison. You want to be on our side when it goes down.” The statement sounded like hollow cop talk and he knew as he said it, he wouldn’t get through to Li today.

“I go to prison and my wife and son move to Colorado. After prison I go there.”

“You don’t have to go to prison.” Li shook his head in dis-agreement and Marquez couldn’t remember a suspect arguing his way into prison. “You can work with us to take them down.”

“You arrest me and take everything.”

“I’m not going to arrest you, today.”

“Yes.”

Marquez didn’t know whether he meant yes he should arrest him, or yes, he was acknowledging he wouldn’t be arrested. There was a vacant emptiness to his eyes that made it pointless to try to reach him today and he regretted knocking on the door. They’d lost whatever shock value they’d have and had gotten nothing in return and Li’s resignation would only deepen.

He moved out in the hallway and toward the front door and gave Li a card with phone numbers for Sacramento headquarters and Chief Keeler. He’d give Keeler a heads-up call now and looked at Li standing like a ghost at the end of the hall, then softly shut the door. When he started down the steps he heard a voice call, “Officer,” and stopped, recognizing the son, Joe, who was standing behind a fence screening the backyard.

“I’m here,” Marquez said.

“I heard them tell dad they’d kill me next. That’s why he won’t say anything. They said there was nothing any police could do to stop them. They aren’t afraid of you.”

“No one is going to kill you, Joe.”

“My dad says they would.” A door opened in the backyard and Marquez heard a woman call for Joe. “I have to go.”

“Don’t be afraid, we’ll take them down. But I need your help.”

There was no answer. He’d already gone.

Toward dusk Marquez returned a call from Ruter. It sounded like the detective was having trouble breathing. “Give me a second,” Ruter said, and Marquez heard him coughing, heard something knocked over and Ruter swearing before coming back on the line. “Sheriff’s orders are to lose weight, so I’ve got a tread-mill in my garage and I’m out here with my cat. My wife is in there watching TV with a bag of cookies, but I’m not supposed to eat anything except carrots. But that’s not your problem. I’ve got a tape of an interview with Davies we made this afternoon that I want you to hear parts of. I can play it for you over the phone, right now, if you’re okay with that. I want to know if this is the guy you thought you were dealing with.”

“Okay, go ahead.”

“Hang on a minute.” Marquez held the phone wondering what had happened that made Ruter willing to pick a phone up and call him. “Okay, here we go.” He heard the whine of the tape and then Ruter’s voice, its pitch made higher and tone more mechanical by the recording equipment, asking, “Did you force Danny Huega onto your boat?”

“No, he took a ride with me because he wanted to talk.”

“What about?”

“His friends.”

“He got on your boat because he wanted to talk about what friends? Mutual friends?”

“I told him Stocker talked before he died and he’d better come see me.”

“You were playing him?”

“Same as you goofballs are playing me right now.”

“Did you tell Danny Huega that you killed Stocker and Han?”

“Sure, and I told him the same thing would happen to him, that you and your partner weren’t smart enough to take me down. I told him he’d better get his ass down to my boat and talk to me.”

Ruter clicked the recorder off. “Marquez, when he called Huega, Huega called me right after and said Davies had just told him he’d murdered Stocker and Han. We wired Huega and told him not to get on the boat under any conditions, but he did any-way. We were ready to arrest Davies right there, but Davies must have guessed what we’d do and got him on the boat, ran him out of range, then stripped the fuckin’ wire off him.”

“That’s how you got the jump on finding Davies that night.”

“That’s right, as soon as the boat started out of Shelter Cove I was on the phone. Okay, here we go again. It’ll be me talking first.” Marquez heard the tape recorder whine as it started up.

“Are you saying you killed them?”

“No, I didn’t kill them, but I was there when they died. There were three men, but only one did the real cutting, a tall man. When the knife work started, Stocker kept saying Huega’s name over and over. He was trying hard to give the right answer, but there weren’t any right answers that night.”

“The killer was a tall man?”

“Yeah, about six foot three. You could see Stocker’s eyes bulge and the tall man, he made it go slow.”

“You watched this?”

“Yes, sir.”

“From where?”

“From the brush off to the right. I’ll take you up there, Ruter, if you can handle the distance. It’s about half a mile, but we can rest along the way.”

“Cut the shit.”

“I followed when they led the prisoners out across the grass, then maintained a forward position near the edge of the clearing.”

“You watched two men chained to a tree get murdered?” Davies didn’t answer. “Without trying to stop it?”

“I was outmanned and unarmed.”

“Did you think of making noise or throwing something?”

“Sure, I thought of a lot of stuff.”