Michael Connelly - 9 Dragons

“For how long?” he asked.

“I don’t know, all his life-all my life, I guess. It was just something he always did. To him, it was part of being Chinese. You paid.”

Bosch nodded.

“Thank you, Robert, for telling us this. Now, yesterday you told us that with the economy and everything, things were not going so well at the store. Do you know, was your father behind on his payments”

“I don’t know, maybe. He didn’t tell me. We didn’t see eye to eye on that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I didn’t think he should pay. I told him a million times. This is America, Pop, you don’t have to pay them.”

“But he still paid.”

“Yeah, every week. He was just old school.”

“So you don’t pay here?”

Li shook his head but his eyes darted to the side a moment. An easy giveaway.

“You do pay, don’t you?”

“No.”

“Robert, we need the-”

“I don’t pay, because he paid for me. Now I don’t know what will happen.”

Bosch leaned closer to him.

“You mean your father paid for both stores.”

“Yes.”

Li’s eyes were cast down. He rubbed his palms on his pants again.

“The double payment-one oh eight times two-was to cover both stores.”

“That’s right. Last week.”

Li nodded and Bosch thought he saw tears welling in his eyes. Harry knew the next question was the most important one.

“What happened this week?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you have an idea, right, Robert?”

He nodded again.

“Both stores are losing money. We expanded at the wrong time-right before the downturn. The banks get the government bailout but not us. We could lose everything. I told him…I told my father we couldn’t keep paying. I told him we were paying for nothing and we were going to lose the stores if we didn’t stop.”

“Did he say he would stop making the payments”

“He didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything. I thought that meant he was going to keep on paying until we were out of business. It was adding up. Eight hundred dollars a month is a lot in a business like this. My old man, he thought if he found other ways…”

His voice trailed off.

“Other ways of what, Robert?”

“Other ways of saving money. He became obsessed with catching shoplifters. He thought if he stopped the losses he’d make a difference. He was from a different time. He didn’t get it.”

Bosch leaned back in his chair and looked over at Chu. They had broken through and gotten Li to open up. It would now be Chu’s turn to move in with specific questions relating to the triad.

“Robert, you have been very helpful,” Chu said. “I want to ask you a few questions in regard to the man in the photo.”

“I was telling the truth. I don’t know who he is. I never saw him before in my life.”

“Okay, but did your father ever talk about him when, you know, you were discussing the payments?”

“He never used his name. He just said he would be upset if we stopped the payments.”

“Did he ever mention the name of the group he paid? The triad”

Li shook his head.

“No, he never-wait, yes, he did once. It was something about a knife. Like the name came from a kind of knife or something. But I don’t remember it.”

“Are you sure? That could help us narrow it.”

Li frowned and shook his head again.

“I’ll try to remember it. I can’t right now.”

“Okay, Robert.”

Chu continued the interview but his questions were too specific and Li continually answered that he didn’t know. All that was okay with Bosch. They had made a big breakthrough. He saw the case coming together with a stronger focus now.

After a while Chu finished up and passed the baton back to Bosch.

“Okay, Robert,” Harry said. “Do you think the man or men your father was paying will now come to you for the money?”

The question prompted a deep frown from Li.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Do you want protection from the LAPD?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“Well, you have our numbers. If someone shows up, cooperate. Promise him the money if you have to.”

“I don’t have the money!”

“That’s the point. Promise him the money but say it will take you a day to get it. Then call us. We’ll take it from there.”

“What if he just takes it out of the cash registers? You told me yesterday that the cash drawer was empty in my father’s store?.”

“If he does that, let him and then you call us. We’ll get him when he comes back the next time.”

Li nodded and Bosch could see he had thoroughly spooked the young man.

“Robert, do you have a gun in the store”

It was a test. They had already checked gun records. Only the gun in the other store was registered.

“No, my father had the gun. He was in the bad area.”

“Good. Don’t bring a gun into this. If the guy shows up, just cooperate.”

“Okay.”

“By the way, why did your father buy that gun? He had been there for almost thirty years and then six months ago he buys the gun.”

“The last time he was robbed, they hurt him. Two gangbangers. They hit him with a bottle. I told him if he wouldn’t sell the store, then he had to get a gun. But it didn’t do him any good.”

“They usually don’t.”

The detectives thanked Li and left him in his office, a twenty-six-year-old who somehow seemed a couple decades older now. As they walked through the store Bosch checked his watch and saw it was now after one. He was starving and wanted to grab something before heading to the medical examiner’s office for the autopsy at two. He stopped in front of the hot case and zeroed in on the meatloaf. He pulled a service number out of the dispenser. When he offered to buy Chu a slice, he said he was a vegetarian.

Bosch shook his head.

“What?” Chu asked.

“I don’t think we could make it as partners, Chu,” Bosch said. “I don’t trust a guy who doesn’t eat a hot dog every once in a while.”

“I eat tofu hot dogs.”

Bosch cringed.

“They don’t count.”

He then saw Robert Li approaching them.

“I forgot to ask. When will my father’s body be released to us”

“Probably tomorrow,” Bosch said. “The autopsy is today.”

Li looked crestfallen.

“My father was a very spiritual man. Do they have to desecrate his body”

Bosch nodded.

“It’s a law. There’s an autopsy after any homicide.”

“When will they do it?”

“In about an hour.”

Li nodded in acceptance.

“Please don’t tell my mother this was done. Will they call me when I can have his body?”

“I’ll make sure they do.”

Li thanked them and headed back to his office. Bosch heard his number called by the man behind the counter.

On the way back downtown Chu informed Bosch that after fourteen years on the job he had yet to witness an autopsy and didn’t care to change course. He said he wanted to get back to the AGU office to continue efforts to identify the triad bagman. Bosch dropped him off and then headed over to the county coroner’s office on Mission Road. By the time he checked in, gowned up and got into suite 3, the autopsy of John Li was well under way. The coroner’s office performed six thousand autopsies a year. The autopsy suites were tightly scheduled and managed and the medical examiners didn’t wait for late-arriving cops. A good one could knock off a surgical autopsy in an hour.

All of this was fine with Bosch. He was interested in the findings of the autopsy, not the process.

John Li’s body was lying naked and violated on the cold stainless-steel autopsy table. The chest had been opened and the vital organs removed. Dr. Sharon Laksmi was working at a nearby table where she was putting tissue samples on slides.