Crown 2, page 8
part #2 of Crown Series
‘I must tell…’
‘Downstairs,’ Crown said softly. ‘Let’s not wake the kid.’
The old man’s wife was still sobbing behind the closed door. He made to open the door, but Crown waved a dissuading hand at him.
‘You’ve been trying to tell me I’m not the first caller tonight, Fung-shun?’ the Australian asked, and glanced at Chang. ‘She was a very neat girl, Po,’ he explained in English. ‘Somebody was pawing through Mu Li’s things before I started hunting.’
Fung-shun kept the language English. ‘Yes, Mr. Crown. Two men come. Chinese. Not see before. Two hours ago, maybe. Very tough. Frighten us. Wake child and frighten her. After they go, take long time to get child back asleep.’
‘They take anything away?’
The sagging shoulders rose briefly in a negative shrug. ‘I not see. Shut me out of room upstairs. They not carrying anything when they went away.’
‘Can you describe them?’ Chang asked.
‘Forget it,’ Crown cut in, and started down the stairs to the ground floor. ‘Even with the glasses he can’t see clearly over two feet.’
‘Mr. Crown, what we do about child?’ Fung-shun called.
‘Look after her,’ the Australian replied. ‘I’ll fix for somebody from the Social Welfare Department to call tomorrow.’
‘We like keep if that okay,’ the old man said.
Crown did not reply as he led the way through the shop. It was not okay. Fung-shun and his wife were too old to be given custody of a child. But it was the job of the child welfare people to tell them that. Crown was a copper and that drew him enough unpleasant tasks in his own sector of the dirty side of life.
‘What were you looking for, Mr. Crown?’ Chang asked when they were outside on the pavement, the shop door closed and the light from the upper window falling over them.
Crown knocked a Marlboro out of a pack and lit it. ‘Something to tie in Mu Li with the man in Macau,’ he replied, blowing smoke into the humid air and watching a car as it turned off Hill Road on to Pokfulum.
‘Did you find it?’
‘Just these.’ He held out his free hand and Chang saw a half dozen Hong Kong-Macao hydrofoil tickets. ‘In the kid’s writing desk.’
‘There are a lot of men in Macao,’ Chang pointed out.
‘Don’t think of them as tickets, Po,’ Crown said, pushing them back into his shirt pocket. ‘Consider them straws—the kind you clutch at when there’s nothing firmer to hang on to.’
The Snub Magnum cracked three times, its double action spacing the shots close together. Both Chang and Crown were moving before the first bullet spun out of the rear window of the Ford Escort. Crown was on the pavement and Chang was sprawled on top of him when the last of the three slugs smashed through the falling glass of the shop window broken by the first. Crown had been watching the approach of the car pensively, his mind concerned with other things. Chang was not so involved with the death of a call girl. Was sufficiently alert to the present to be suspicious of the abrupt increase in the car’s speed. And the moment the rear window began to wind down, he lunged at Crown, curling a leg behind the Australian’s calves to ensure the big man went down.
Now, as the car roared away with a surge of low-gear power, the Chinese detective rolled off the struggling form beneath him and sat on the pavement. He snapped the .38 from the shoulder holster and jerked it up to the aim. But the Escort was already out of range, its blue colour and local number plate clearly visible as windows sprang light on to the street in response to the shooting. Chang lowered his gun and leapt to his feet.
‘Looks like they don’t care about shooting coppers anymore, Mr. Crown,’ he said as the Australian got painfully to his feet, rubbing his elbow and then the back of his skull. ‘We going after them?’
‘It’ll be a nicked car and they’ll dump it in less than two minutes,’ Crown muttered, and shrugged when Fung-shun appeared in the shop doorway and peered disconsolately at his broken window. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he growled. ‘But it was either us or the glass. The karate king here made it the way it was.’
Chang was dusting off his trousers, and he raised a quiet smile. ‘Way it had to be,’ he said. ‘I have to take care of you. What’s a king without his Crown?’
Chapter Eight
IN THE PLUSH bungalow on Pok Fu Lam Reservoir Road Antonio Tiroa rose early. On the pillow beside him were two long black hairs still retaining enough natural oil to glisten in the first rays of the new day’s sun shafting through the glass wall. If a memory trigger had been needed, these would have reminded him that he had some hours cleaning to do before setting off on the trip to Macao. But Tiroa was familiar with the act of murder and its repercussions and had, in fact, set the digital alarm clock for an early waking time so that he could be thorough in erasing all traces of Huang Mu Li from his house.
He began the chore in the bathroom, for he needed a shower anyway, after the humid night. But he didn’t confine himself to sluicing the cubicle with the soap and water off his own body. He carefully picked all the soggy tangle of hair out of the drain hole grille—in the shower cubicle, bath and washbasin—and flushed it down the toilet. Then he ran a damp rag over every surface capable of retaining a fingerprint. Back in the bedroom, he stripped the bed of linen and remade it with fresh. Here, and in the living room and hallway, he erased all fingerprints with a duster sprayed with liquid polish from an aerosol can. The same duster wiped every surface on the garden furniture spread across the patio. Mu Li had been in no other part of the house. So the final act of eradicating all signs that the girl had been there was to burn the bed linen in the barbecue pit. He piled some charcoal on top and cooked himself a rare steak for breakfast. Afterwards, he packed an overnight bag, had another shower and dressed in smart, casual, lightweight clothes specially tailored to underplay his bulging belly.
He had completed the entire routine in total silence: a look of intense concentration on his square face, like a man engaged in a hard mental exercise. But, after locking up the house and getting behind the wheel of the low-line Espada, he whistled happily all the way down the hill into the city.
The day was still young, but growing older and brighter and hotter. But the air-conditioning in the sleek red sports car kept Tiroa pleasantly cool until he stepped out into the steamy morning on the top floor of the three-tier car park behind the Star Ferry Pier. Willie Ng and Lam Ju had been waiting for him for thirty minutes, and their faces dripped with sweat as they approached the Espada. Willie took the keys offered by Tiroa, took the overnight bag from the boot and then locked the car. None of the men smiled at the others and Tiroa’s voice was tense as he accompanied Ju to the stairs. Willie brought up the rear, impassively disinterested that he was not involved in the conversation.
‘It went well?’ Tiroa asked in English.
‘Beautifully, at first,’ Ju replied.
‘At first?’ The frown on Tiroa’s face threatened an anger which lay just beneath the smooth surface of the man.
‘On the road and at the hotel,’ Ju told him quickly. ‘Like clockwork, Mr. Tiroa. A man came into the room just as we were leaving, but it proved fortunate. He was drunk and we were able to make it appear that he did the—’
‘He didn’t see you?’
‘No.’
‘What went wrong then?’
They moved close to another group going down the stairs and became silent until they were out on the sunlit, crowded Connaught Road Central.
‘We will walk!’ Tiroa rasped when Willie moved to the edge of the pavement to call a taxi. ‘Well?’ This last, snapped, to Ju.
‘There was trouble elsewhere, Mr. Tiroa. First, at Shing Wong. The police were there.’
Tiroa resisted the impulse to pull up short on the pavement, thronging with workers heading for the daily grind in office, shop and factory.
‘And?’
‘Our men escaped. The two Reds were killed in a car’ crash trying to evade capture. They died instantly.’
‘Not good, but better than it may have been,’ Tiroa announced callously. ‘You intimated this was not the only trouble last night?’
Ju nodded. ‘We checked the girl’s apartment and the place where she lodged her child, Mr. Tiroa. At her apartment there was nothing to link her with the man in Macao.’ A sidelong glance at the Portuguese warned Ju that the man was getting close to a display of anger again. He hurried on: ‘Nor at the room above the shop near the university. But the child had a picture of the policeman, Senior Superintendent Crown. And some clippings from the newspapers about him.’
‘I’ve heard of Crown,’ Tiroa said flatly.
‘There were two detectives staked out at Shing Wong, Mr. Tiroa. One of them we know was Inspector Chang—who always works with Crown.’
‘We are afraid of a reputation?’ Tiroa was sweating now, as profusely as the others. Partly from the exertion of the walk through the clammy heat of morning: partly from tension.
‘You asked not to be disturbed, so we telephoned the man in Macao,’ Ju said.
Tiroa was pleased Ju was worried that he had skipped a link in the chain of command. ‘And he gave you instructions?’
‘To dispose of Crown and Chang, Mr. Tiroa.’
The Portuguese made a low tutting sound, but did not voice his disapproval beyond this. However, he thought, as he always did on such occasions, that the man in Macao was too remote from the theatre of operations to appreciate the effects of his less discreet orders. And Ju and Willie, whose business was killing, could not be expected to advise the big man of the local situation: the pay rate for murder was too high.
‘You did this?’
‘We tried,’ Ju answered morosely.
Tiroa smiled and looked out over the sun bright, churned-up surface of the harbour. Because he had not been consulted, he would be able to remain detached from the ramifications of failure. He detested trouble in which he was involved: but enjoyed watching others suffer. Especially men like Ju and Willie, whom he hated.
To try is not good enough, is it?’ he asked rhetorically as he led the two Chinese out across the Central Reclamation Ground towards the piers of the Hong Kong Macao Hydrofoil Company. The nine o’clock departure was loading and each man bought his own ticket. The gleaming hydrofoil left on time and picked up two minutes on the scheduled one-and-a-quarter hour crossing to the Portuguese colony. Tiroa and the killers did not do any more talking.
Senior Superintendent John Crown was awakened at eight: by the shrilling of the telephone in the master bedroom of his villa on a wooded hillside behind the bustling fishing port and tourist attraction of Aberdeen on the south coast of the island. It was not really his villa, for the pay scale of a high ranking policeman did not run to such an extravagance—if he were honest, which Crown indubitably was. The house, built in the style of rural Spanish with arched windows and wooden shutters that were not just decoration, belonged to his wealthy ex-wife. Because she was very rich she could afford the gesture of allowing Crown to live there, rent free. As a kind of consolation prize to help him recover from the traumatic effect of the divorce.
Crown had to get out of the big double bed to reach the telephone on a table under the window. Like the rest of the house and the small garden in which it stood, the bedroom suggested opulence gone to seed. It was untidy and urgently in need of cleaning attention from the amah who came in twice a week. But there were certain aspects of the room’s appearance which could not be improved by the cheerful old Chinese lady. The carpet would still be worn J the walls would still be in need of repainting and the scuffs, burns and stains on the furniture would remain in place after she had been, done her work and gone. Crown, the reluctant bachelor, played his cynically undomesticated part to the full.
‘Crown,’ he drawled into the mouthpiece, scratching the hair on his chest through the gaping front of his pyjama tops.
‘I wake you, Mr. Crown?’ Chang asked brightly.
‘I’ve been sitting by the ‘phone waiting for you to call, Po,’ the Australian replied wryly, transferring his hand to rasp it over the bristles on his jaw. ‘Tell me you’ve solved the case, son.’
‘Big oaks from little acorns grow,’ the Chinese detective came back. ‘The Escort’s been found. In Happy Valley. Nothing. Wiped cleaner than when it was in the showroom. It was stolen from the Botanic Gardens two hours before we saw it.’
‘That’s the fertilizer,’ Crown growled.
‘The acorn’s a name, Mr. Crown. Antonio Tiroa. Portuguese national. Been living in the Colony for ten years. Rich. House in Victoria Gap.’
There was an opened packet of Marlboro and a lighter on the telephone table. Crown lit a cigarette and looked out of the window at the overgrown lawns and beds of the garden. ‘How does he fit in?’ he asked.
‘Inspector James dug out the name. He doesn’t like us horning in on his case and he’s working like hell on it to make sure he doesn’t miss anything we may pick up later. It seems Mu Li was going steady with Tiroa. Inspector James talked to a girl friend of Mu Li’s who lived on the same floor at the Bowen Road apartment block.’
‘Was she with him last night?’
‘The girlfriend didn’t know.’
‘What do we know about Tiroa?’
‘Inspector James has been doing the digging, Mr. Crown. Tiroa is apparently respectable. There’s nothing in CRO on him, anyway. But he has no visible means of support—and the way he lives, he needs a lot of support. What may be interesting is that he goes back and forth between Hong Kong and Macao almost as much as a walla walla across the harbour.’
‘What’s friend Eric doing about him?’
‘He’s just got back from visiting Tiroa’s house. The feller’s gone and the house is shut up tight.’
‘Give me his address, Po,’ Crown said. ‘And meet me there in an hour.’
‘Not official?’
‘No way.’
‘Pokfolam Reservoir Road. About half a mile back from where it joins Peak Road.’
Crown broke the connection without saying goodbye. Then he plugged in the coffee percolator, put a stack of ancient Roy Rogers 78s on the turntable and went into the bathroom to shower and shave. Twin hi-fi speakers in the bathroom wailed mono country music above the hiss of the tepid water. Breakfast was coffee and a cigarette. The singing cowboy sang single track of horses and sage brush and far horizons through speakers mounted on the dining-room wall. Crown heard the records through before going out into the steam heat of the Hong Kong morning.
His route took him down into Aberdeen, then up the steeply rising, twisting and turning secondary road of Peel Rise. This was restricted up beyond Mount Kellett, but his warrant card assured him of access. He reached the overtly luxurious house of Antonio Tiroa in less than the hour he had specified. Chang was already there, standing in the shade of the car port wearing the expression of unlimited patience which sits so well on the Oriental face.
‘Enjoy the walk?’ Crown asked as he got out of the VW, parked on the apron fronting the house.
‘Cab,’ Chang replied. ‘I keep hearing my expenses are the lowest for my grade at Headquarters. Makes it bad for the other Inspectors. We going to break in, Mr. Crown?’
‘Gain access, Po,’ the Australian corrected, and rang the doorbell. ‘He may have come back.’
After the ringing had stopped, the crickets chirped and some unidentified insects buzzed. There were no other sounds.
‘Did you get in touch with somebody at the child welfare department?’ he asked as he began to circle the house, seeking a method of entry that wouldn’t involve too much damage.
‘Yes, Mr. Crown. A woman will be calling at the shop this morning. Why did you keep going there if Mu Li didn’t like it?’
A side window in the kitchen wall had a fanlight above it. Crown used a rock from the garden to smash the fanlight and was then able to reach inside and lift the catches on the larger window. He replied to Chang as he indulged in the act of house breaking.
‘The little girl took a shine to me, Po. Why do people like other people? I don’t know. It’s not a situation I’m too familiar with.’ He opened the window and swung a leg into the house. ‘And there was nothing personal in Mu Li not liking me to go there. She just resented the fact that I was a copper and I knew her history. Matter of fact, I think she sort of liked to know I was on call. In case anything like this ever happened, I suppose.’
Chang stepped over the window sill into the gleaming, spotlessly clean kitchen which was packed tight with the latest in labour saving equipment. Crown led the way on a cursory tour of the plushly furnished house. Chang tagged on, not feeling sorry for his partner. He knew it was not expected of him. Crown picked his own friends and did not allow them to pick him. The fact that he liked so few people was not a cause for self-pity and invited none from others.
‘He sure lives rich,’ Crown said when the superficial examination was complete.
‘Drives an expensive Italian sports car and can afford high price call girls?’ Chang informed and suggested.
‘Ugly?’
‘We don’t have any pictures of him.’
‘Even if he looks like Dracula’s uncle, his money ought to counter it. Why would he need to use a call girl with this kind of money bait?’
‘Maybe he goes for kinky sex,’ Chang suggested.
‘Then he wouldn’t have used Mu Li,’ Crown argued. ‘She was one of your old-fashioned prude prostitutes.’
Chang shrugged. ‘The girlfriend said Mu Li was going steady with Tiroa. So maybe it wasn’t a financial deal. Maybe she didn’t tell him what she was and he had no other way of knowing, Mr. Crown.’
‘Maybes are what we use when there’s nothing else going for us, Po,’ Crown said. ‘Right at this moment we have the empty house of a man who might be as innocent as a monk. Let’s check him out, son.’
