I’m on my nineteenth arrest. I got nothin’ to hide.
—CHUCK GOUGH
I was standing in the first-floor apartment of the middle-aged managers of 711 Broughton, just a few blocks from Tsunami Sushi in the downtown’s swankiest rental neighborhood. “I guess Mr. Wong and Mr. Newson didn’t want nobody to know they were here,” said Carol Smith, one hand touching at her hair and the other jangling the big ring of keys in her housedress pocket. “We only knew their names after the RCMP showed us their photographs.”
“We never even got the rent from anyone in penthouse 2002,” said her lanky husband, Al, leaning against the fridge in dusty work clothes, a pipe wrench hung like a gun from his belt. “It was Chuck Gough always paid the rent. He’s the one we dealt with on it.”
“See, Mr. Yee was supposed to be the tenant there,” Carol explained, pointing 200 feet skyward. “But Mr. Gough was on the rental contract for 2002 and his apartment 1605. That’s why he paid the rent for both units. The Mounties were sayin’, ‘We don’t like the looks of it, be careful.’ I told ’em, ‘Well, if I half act like I don’t know nothin’—’”
All this was very helpful, I thought. Over the phone Carol and Al had agreed to buzz me in but seemed too suspicious to offer anything else. Now that I’d talked myself from the building’s art deco lobby into their humble quarters, however, they were gushing geysers of gossip, as if the pressure had been building inside them for a year.
“Were all three living together at once then?” I asked.
“Well, Mr. Wong and Mr. Yee, they moved in together,” Carol said, “but only Mr. Yee was full-time. Mr. Wong, he’d be here a month and then not. Mr. Newson, he’d just be on some weekends. Then, when Mr. Wong was supposed to have died, Mr. Yee stayed a couple months, then he moved across the street to the Sheraton-Landmark. Mr. Newson, we don’t know when he moved in, except that when Mr. Gough give us the notice for the penthouse in March, I went to show it and there was Mr. Newson living there. And I’m thinking, Okay, Mr. Gough pays cash—never by check—so at least it’s covered—”
“Hey listen, that man, he doesn’t use a bank for anything,” growled Al. “I seen stacks of bills this high all over his apartment, I just can’t believe this man, stacks with paper straps, you wouldn’t believe the amount of money! He says, ‘That’s why I don’t want anybody in my suite.’ I said, ‘Well, why don’t you put that stuff in the bank?’ He says, ‘I don’t need one.’ I guess he doesn’t need mail either, because he doesn’t get mail here. No mailbox, no bank account—”
“Anybody tell you he was arrested nineteen times on thirty charges?” I asked.
“Well, I kinda knew he didn’t get that dough from no janitor business,” Al replied, referring to the Chink’s official occupation. “Strange thing is, he admits he’s friends with all of them that’s involved in Chinese gangs. He’s pretty damn well open about all this, talks about it all the time to me. He’s even got a fairly well-known tattoo from the gangs he showed me. See, we have Asians like that here, they usually shy away from whites—I guess the language—but Charles, he’s an exception, he was raised in Hong Kong, speaks the language fluently—he’s a very likable guy so I guess they take him as their own. Kind’ve a remarkable fellow, actually—”
“Al, wasn’t he saying something about going over to Hong Kong to marry Mr. Wong’s sister?” Carol asked her husband.
“Ed Yee’s sister,” Al informed me. “Says he’s headed over August 15 and bringing her back to start a family, but I don’t believe it. He’s likable but not respectable—girls in, girls out—all the time. Everything with him is pretty heavy-duty gang stuff. Certainly they own a big casino over there and everything else.”
This took me by surprise. “They? Where? In Macau?”
“Outside of Hong Kong somewhere. His people. You oughta talk to him yourself. You’ll probably get more information outta him than from anyone. Just maybe you wanna take this,” Al cracked, reaching for his pipe wrench. “Man, the people I seen around him all the time—one’s charged with murder and he’s out on bail and poking around his apartment all the time. Newson’s there off and on, too. Him I wouldn’t—”
The phone rang and Al grabbed a call from a tenant. When the conversation turned to a dispute over a damage deposit, Carol discreetly offered to walk me to the door. “I guess it’s pretty important you find out what’s goin’ on from Mr. Gough,” she said to my card, then looked up with a shrug of mild concern.
“Well the guy’s been tied up with Wong for ten years. Even if he doesn’t know where Wong is, he knows Newson, and Newson knows where Wong is.”
“Okay just—like Al says, he’s very friendly—but you can see it in his eyes—” Carol looked up and down the hall, then whispered “—him goin’ psycho on a person.”
Maybe it was stage fright, but the elevator seemed awfully slow rising the 16 stories. As the doors grumbled back I inhaled the floor’s sweet disinfectant several times, then walked the quiet corridor until I got to 1605, where it was quiet no more. Through the paneled apartment door I could hear what sounded like a whorehouse party going on, complete with loud rock music, a man’s hearty laughter, and two women squealing as if they were being thrown into a hot tub against their will.
I knocked. Waited. I knocked again, more loudly. Still no answer. Finally I BAM-BAM-BAMMED the door with my fist. Still nothing.
It occurred to me that if I were a heroin dealer living in a secure tower I wouldn’t be answering my door either—unless I was expecting company. I would, however, answer the buzzer downstairs. So I took the elevator down and waited in the landscaped breezeway, chewing Nicorettes by the flower bed that encircled the splashing fountain, giving Chuck enough time to finish his engagement. After half an hour I found his code on the buzzer panel, and pressed. A grouchy voice answered my ring with a “Yup.”
There you go, I thought.
“Chuckie, ay, Chuck the Chink!!” I called into the polished metal receiver, as if I’d known him for a million years. “I’m a friend’a Steve’s! It’s Terry, for Christ’s sake!”
Silence. Then: “Who are ya?” he asked.
“Terry Gould! You must’ve heard’a me from years back. Ay! I was just up at your fucking door but you were fucking, so I’m comin’ back up!”
Again there was a silence, followed by: “How did you know to find me?”
“Chuck, everybody’s talkin’ about ya since Steve went over to visit Sonny.”
Another moment of silence. I could picture him staring at the rug, wondering whether it was better to ignore me or find out what was going on. “I’ll come down,” he said.
Fifteen minutes later a big-gutted guy in baggy sweatpants and a mustard T-shirt pushed through the glass doors. He was maybe six foot one, with gray hair that was fashionably buzz-cut on top and shaved on the sides. Al and Carol were right: Chuck had a friendly face—almost avuncular, with a sweet porpoise grin—at odds with his black little pupils set in icy pale irises. Those killer eyes cased me hard, head to toe, as we closed on each other. “Hey! Great to see ya, Chuck,” I greeted him. “Ya remember me?”
He grasped my extended hand, said, “No. I don’t know ya at all.”
It took an awkward second of silence for me to realize that he was inappropriately holding on, and another second to realize his huge palm was tightening. He darted a look over my shoulder, and I swiveled to see a cobalt Carrera double-parked. At the wheel was a T-shirted young Chinese, staring at us, hand in the console. Now where did he come from? I thought. I told myself: be cool, this has nothing to do with you, Chuck’s just being on the safe side, standard procedure given the threat to him of surprise visits. “Hey, I’m Terry Gould, Chuck,” I beamed. “The writer. About 1990 I hung with Steve for a while and I wrote quite a bit about the guy?” I held my left hand up like a Hollywood Indian, then moved it slowly into my breast pocket and pinched a card, showed it like a ticket.
Chuck lowered his semipsycho eyes to nearsightedly inspect my credentials. “Oh, you’re the one that did the writings?” he said, not unkindly, letting go of my hand. He threw another look over my shoulder and hitched his head towards Alberni Street.
“And of course Steve’s gone now from that accident in the Philippines,” I went on, pretending to ignore the tires screeching behind me with heart-stopping panache. “I mean, I don’t know if he’s alive or not alive, but what I’m doing now, Chuck, I’m writing a history of Steve and the Gum Wah. And since Steve left, they’ve become a pretty dispersed gang. So Ed Yee and James Newson—everybody’s saying you still hang with them.”
“Who’s everybody?” Chuck asked.
“Oh, you know,” I began, and then broke into my usual strategic story, peppering it with the names of the gangsters with whom the Chink had committed his crimes, the cops who’d arrested him, the judges who’d convicted him, the judge who was listening to his current case, and the lawyers who were now defending him, Hogan and Sacks—getting traction on him by pouring his secret biography over his head, letting him know I could be a good friend or a poor enemy. I concluded this threatening shower with a bowl of cream: “Because I gotta tell ya, Chuck, you’re a legend for where you are.” I shook my head in wonder. “Nobody, but nobody, gets there who’s white. I mean, couple’a years ago Bill Chu told me you talked the language and everything, but to get that kind of respect—you’re kind of a giant to anybody that knows what’s what, who cares what’s what.”
I actually meant that last part, and Chuck seemed to respond well to my sincerity.
“Ah, from what I hear they’re all chasin’ ghosts,” the Chink said, 15 minutes later, sitting on the hood of a rattletrap Camaro at the curb and smoking a cigarette. He took a puff and flicked the butt in the general direction of CLEU headquarters. “Somebody put the bug in their ear somewhere that he’s not dead, but as far as I’m concerned, they’re chasin’ ghosts. I mean, I was at the house, his mom and dad’s, and at the funeral. And I stood—like from where we are, the mother was where that bus is—and I could hear her just going through pain and agony. You know, you can’t do that to your mother. I don’t believe he could.”
“Well, you know what they’re saying, a million-dollar life insurance policy,” I reminded Chuck. “Steve’s looking at a tough trial, so Sonny helps him out on Negros—and now the jungle’s got a story to tell.”
“Ah, if you believe that you probably think Elvis Presley’s alive,” Chuck retorted. “Christ! There’s nothin’ to hide. It’s all in black and white. He goes for a holiday with Sonny and it just happens to end in tragedy. ‘Chuck, I was kicking an $800-a-day habit,’ Sonny told me, ‘but I still know what I was looking at. I still know Steve. He was all rotted and the top of his head may have been crashed in, but you still recognize the face of your best friend, and the tattoos!’ You seen these on him yourself.” The Chink compressed his fleshy chin to indicate the heads of several signature Triad dragons I could see writhing beneath his wiry gray chest hairs. “Is there any mistaking them?”
“Of course not.” I brought my face so close to inspect his red and blue monsters that I could whiff his girlfriends’ lavender perfume.
“See, Steve never had to worry about money,” Chuck went on. “It’s not money with the Orientals, it’s face. You got your face, the money comes anyway. You lose your face, you lose everything. Steve was a man of face. I know that personally. I was there when the Buddhist priest blessed him and put that chain and dragon around his neck. And the guy that’s the head of the Triad in Hong Kong, the 14K, him and his three sons, they treated him like a king.”
I nodded along, as if I knew what he was talking about—Steve must have received that trinket and blessing after we’d said goodbye. “So did you go through the whole initiation yourself?” I asked. “With the chickens and walking over the burning stones and all that Triad Society Lodge stuff?”
“Years ago,” he shrugged. “When he got promoted for his deal over here, he put it in for me. Fact is, I’ve always been well respected in the Triads. Them that knows me knows me, but I’ve always kept a low profile. Steve, though, he was number one here and he never hid nothin’. That’s why the cops just hated him. They tried to put him away, and he told ’em, ‘You’ll never get me.’ Did they get him? No. They had everybody on him. They had Strike Force on him, Mounties, CLEU, Asian Gang Squad. They had him constantly under surveillance. They even tried to get him through his phone in the Philippines. Couldn’t get the phone back for ages [after the accident]. They sent it to the FBI and they still couldn’t break the codes. That phone was important! Man, it had everything. Only other thing the family couldn’t get back was the watch. Sonny figures somebody in the Philippines snaffued it because it wasn’t on him when he unzippered the bag. He says he almost threw up. ‘Bad enough Steven was dead, but this is like three days later—only thing to do was cremate him.’”
“Well, if he’s gone, he’s gone—just—” Letting him know I was getting a little tired of the propaganda, I asked if there was an outside chance Sonny would talk to me about the ultimate event—maybe we could trade some information on other matters of concern. Chuck thought my chances were slim. “Sonny don’t talk to nobody. Anyway, he’s checking in. He took the rap on that passport job. He had his wife over here—”
“Yeah, Ajile Abastillas, the lawyer’s girl from Negros,” I said. “She got deported yesterday.”
Chuck looked at me, a smile finally reaching his cruel eyes. “Not fucking much you don’t know, is there?”
“Well it’s a sad story,” I told him. “It breaks your heart to love a girl and then she’s outta the country—”
Sad, but entertainingly congruent with everything else I’d heard about the Sonny-Steve saga. Four months before the Paper Fan had skipped town Sonny decided that his criminal record would probably demolish his fiancée’s chances of immigrating to Canada, at least if she applied as Mrs. James Newson. So Steve had offered his assistance, persuading his own girlfriend, Laura, to sponsor Ajile as an immigrant. With no employment prospects, however, Ajile had only managed to get herself on a waiting list. Sonny, who lived by the credo “Ask once nice and then take,” had then forged a Canadian passport for Ajile after the wedding, and brought her over as Brenda Yargo. Unfortunately, on June 5 the couple had been driving away from the Broughton Tower when they were stopped by the Vancouver city police. For ID Ajile produced her ersatz passport, showing she was born in Vancouver, but when the cops asked her the location of Stanley Park (just six blocks away and visible from the corner) she said in a thick Tagalog accent that the famous park was near the airport, 12 miles south. After checking with the Department of Immigration, the city cops handed Ajile over to the feds. “She was from a very substantial family, by my judgment,” one officer had told me, recalling his interview with the hysterically crying Ajile, who wouldn’t admit she knew anything about Steve. “Very well dressed, very sophisticated, and very good-looking. So we said to Newson, ‘Look at the mess you got your wife into.’” Newson wasn’t interested in cutting any deals for Ajile in return for information on Steve, but he definitely didn’t want his wife to go down for the passport, so he pled guilty to uttering forged documents, and, despite an attempt at a delay by his lawyer, Phil Rankin, Ajile had been shipped back to Bacolod.
When I told Chuck that I would be showing up for Sonny’s sentencing next week—whether he wanted to talk to me or not—the Chink cautioned me, “Well, buddy, just don’t make him jittery. Even the Asians are scared to death of him. They’re the ones who gave him his nickname, Son of Sam. The guy’s got a paranoia that counts.”
“Oh, I’m sure he doesn’t do anything casually,” I acknowledged.
“I would say so. And you never know who he is. He must have a couple thousand pieces of identification. To this day, I don’t know where he lives. When he wants me, he’ll call me from a booth and he’ll tell me to meet him somewhere. I don’t know if he lives in Vancouver or Richmond or Burnaby. The guy wants privacy, he wants privacy. He’s a good guy, really, but—” Chuck frosted me with his pale irises. “I mean, for your own safety, I’m sayin’ just don’t cross him. That’s my advice. You’re better off speaking to the ladies.”
“Well jeez, Chuck—” I punched his arm “—there’s a fucking lot to talk to!” I boosted myself onto the car hood beside him. “And between you and me, I’ll let you in on something. That’s what sticks in the craw of the cops, you know, is that Steven got his bail because he was going to marry Patsy over there, but he went over with another girlfriend, Lily Lee, eh?”
“Ex-girlfriend,” Chuck reminded me. “Just because you break up with a girl, does that mean you gotta be bad friends for the rest of your life? There’s such a thing as friendship, and Lily was really close to the mother and father. It just didn’t work out with Steven and her, that’s all.”
Chuck was disappointingly mum on how to get hold of Lily, who’d disconnected her phone and moved since her interview with the Mounties. So I went at the subject from another angle. From Lily’s interview with the cops I knew she hadn’t had time to deliver Steve’s gifts to his mother, and so she had given the ring, pendant, and mah-jongg set to her sister, Lisa Lee, who’d dropped them off at the Clarendon big house. Lisa, I’d recently learned, was a Vancouver auxiliary policewoman.
“You ever meet Lily’s sister?” I asked the Chink.
“Oh yeah, Lily, Lisa—they’re good friends of ours and the family. We all threw a party for Lisa upstairs when she made the force, she’s a Vancouver cop now, you know. I told her, ‘Congratulations—but now stay away from me. You’re one’a them now!’”
I made a mental note of that little nugget. What’s a cop doing being par-tied up in the penthouse by the likes of Chuck and Steve? “I always knew Steve had his connections,” I said. “Because he went into his bedroom once and he came out with a stack of police reports. He implied it’s coming from the Royal Hong Kong Police, Vancouver’s sending it out, and it’s coming back to him, eh?”
“Well, the Royal Hong Kong Police Department is so corrupt it’s unreal,” Chuck volunteered. “I remember, I was in a room in Hong Kong, and I heard BAM BAM BAM. I look through the peephole, and there’s the cops out there. When I opened the door, all I saw was the uniforms. I was panic struck. But one’a them’s Steve—dressed up in a uniform! He took his dark glasses off, took his hat off, and there he was. What he did, he went around for two or three days on patrol. He never made any arrests, just wanted to go and trip around with the Royal cops, tour the slum areas and scare the shit outta his friends. He’s mysterious. That’s what I used to tell him. ‘Steve, you’re a mysterious guy.’ He always told Sonny—”
The front door of the tower swung open and out strode a woman who would stop any gangster conversation. She had silky ash-blond hair, was sunburned the color of an orange and attired in high-heeled sneakers and a terry-cloth two-piece number that held her buttocks and breasts like tightly wrapped packages. She winked with full meaning at Chuck, and then headed for a bike locked to a rack. Chuck must have seen me swallow.
“My gal,” Chuck said.
“Get outta here,” I whispered. “She looks like a movie star.” I meant porn star, but under the circumstances—
“No, her and her sister—both students here. Just a casual thing with us. Actually, I like the women in Hong Kong. They’re loyal, faithful, keep their mouths shut.”
As she pedaled away towards the park I confided something that had been on my mind for years. “Chuck, you I could see it. But with Steve—maybe it’s prejudice—but I always found it nuts that Steve was boyfriend to so many chicks who looked like—” I nodded in the direction of his babe, whose rear was in the air as she rounded Alberni. “Because he wasn’t a physically impressive guy, like you. He wasn’t tall, he wasn’t handsome at all. But he had all these gals—it used to blow me away.”
“Another face thing,” Chuck said. “You see, they know who he is. We’re in our world over here, they’re in their world over there. Like I say, everything’s face in their world. Steve had face. He had money, yeah, but some of ’em, money was just a toy. The girl that met Steve in Hong Kong? Her family owns the Lisboa Hotel in Macau.”
Abruptly, I remembered Al and Carol’s gossip. A spiderweb of chills spread inward from my shoulders to my spine and then traveled up my neck to freeze my scalp.
“The Lisboa. That’s Stanley Ho,” I said, using Herculean restraint to keep my voice casual. The man owned the monopoly license on gambling in the Portuguese colony, and was the dapper multibillionaire whose name Steve had pointed out to me in the U.S. Justice Department’s report. The 72-year-old Ho had three wives and over a dozen children and was now planning a five-story mansion on the corner opposite Stanley Park because the park bore his first name.
“They have an Oriental restaurant up the street here,” Chuck went on, pointing down Alberni. “Her husband does,” he added, referring, I assumed, to the husband of the woman Steve had met in Hong Kong. “It’s beside the Red Robin. Tomakazu. You go into Red Robin, look to the right. It’s just a plaything with her husband. Ray. He’s the one with the family connection. She was heavy involved with Steve. Just an extra-marriage thing was all it was.”
“Patsy is her name. The one he went to meet. It’s her you’re talking about?”
“Yeah,” he said, and I thought, My God, he’s giving me the peg the scam hung from.
“Her husband’s family owns the Lisboa with Stanley Ho?” I asked. “He’s like the third-richest man in Asia. After Li Ka-shing and Cheng Yu-tung, then comes Stanley Ho.”
“Oh, he’s big all right,” Chuck said.
“Look, there’s no charges on Ho, but there’s been a lot written about him in police reports.” I was thinking of an Asian Organized Crime Roster put together by the Mounties in 1990, which listed Ho as a suspected “leader/member” of the Kung Lok Triad—the group senior Mounties believed to be the Toronto extension of the 14K. The roster was secret, but it was wide-open news that the Triads thrived side by side with Ho’s legitimate empire: one gangster was a partner in his Jumbo floating restaurant; others ran loan-shark operations on the eighth floor of the Lisboa, in Macau, held leases on his VIP gambling rooms, and headed his casino security. Wouldn’t it be just like Steve to use Patsy or Ray to insinuate himself into the Lisboa’s Triad paradise? “Ho just about owns Macau,” I said, “and you know what they say about Macau, Chuck—it’s even looser than Hong Kong. It’s one big safe house.” (See source notes.)
“Oh, yeah, I love Macau,” Chuck mused. “Go upstairs to geisha row. Eat what you want, relax, gamble. Gambling’s my big thing. What really floors everybody over there is that I got no accent when I talk Chinese. Steve, he couldn’t write in Chinese, couldn’t read it or write. Whenever we’d go into a restaurant—I was with him seven days a week in Macau—he’d sit there and ask me, ‘What’s this, what’s this?’ He’d tell me what he wants to eat, and then I’d order it. It used to blow the waitresses away. His family too. I’m sitting with about fifteen or twenty Chinese people, and they’re looking—‘Who’s that talking?’ I’m used to that, because for years and years …”
But by then I was barely listening.