But excitement: Shall we not worship excitement?
And after all, what is life for, except for opportunities of excitement?
—STEPHEN CRANE
Laura could have been sauntering down a runway rather than a hallway in a real estate office. Her tight tube dress revealed a model-lean body, and her cheekbones were dramatically high—even for a Chinese. When she reached the reception desk I asked if she remembered me from the pool hall. She ran her eyes from my trench-coat cop costume to my face and said no, but the gang-girl smirk said yes. I was with Saturday Night now, I informed her, writing about Steven’s life and death.
Laura surprised me with a burst of warm laughter. “Don’t you have anything better to do? Can’t you let the guy rest in peace?” Then she turned on her toes and walked back down the hallway. “Sorry, I don’t have anything to tell you,” she announced, with a contemptuous lilt and a goodbye wave.
“Laura,” I called after her. She stopped, swiveled her head sideways to look at my reflection in the glass wall of the boardroom. “I don’t have to use your full name or where you work,” I said, “if we talk. Otherwise you’re in there all the way—number one girlfriend of heroin boss Steven Wong until he dumped you for Patsy and Lily.”
“Dumped me?” She spun around to confront my flesh-and-blood self, her uncertain expression transformed into wide-eyed outrage, and I thought, Jeez, classing her with the other girlfriends was even more persuasive than mentioning exposure.
“Patsy was obsessed with Steven!” Laura explained an hour later, hissing at me from across the boardroom table. “God, she’s like forty? She’s married?”
“Sounds pretty tacky,” I said, taking her side.
“Exactly! Edison Yee told me Patsy had a crush on Steve, he couldn’t get her off his back. So you know what she did? She told Steve, ‘Oh, Stevie, Laura’s at all the clubs, drinking and cheating.’ Which was a total lie—I was at some clubs, but I never cheated! She didn’t care what was true. For her it was only what she wanted: Oooh, there’s Steven Wong—everybody follows him around….”
Not that Laura hadn’t been impressed with the Paper Fan’s status as well—at least at the beginning. She’d admitted as much at the very start of our interview, stressing that the fascination had been completely age appropriate. She was 15 and Steve 20 when he’d picked her out of a crowd in the school yard at John Oliver. A middle-class girl with high marks and a fast streak, Laura had been dating a Lotus gang member named Barney, a low ranker whose purview was street enforcement. Steve, on the other hand, was then the royal co-chief of the Red Eagles. “Everybody knew Steve and what he was, so I talked to him,” she said. “I was curious. Then he told me all these terrible things that Barney did in the Lotus, and that guys like Barney were trying to take over by killing everybody. That really upset me so I told Barney about it. Instead of denying it, Barney said, ‘He’s trying to pick you up? Well, I can’t see you anymore.’ See, John Oliver was Red Eagle territory, so the next day Barney saw me with Steve and he ran away.”
“Wise man,” I observed. “But I gotta tell you, Laura, Steve used to play that good-gangster-bad-gangster routine with school-yard recruits. He used the same technique on you.”
“Well, I wasn’t stupid.” She fluffed her hair and narrowed her street-smart eyes at me. “I knew he was a smooth-talking guy. In fact, I told him, ‘If you think you’re gonna get back at the Lotus by breaking up me and Barney—’ Because I liked Barney, he was actually a nice guy, really cute and shy.”
“As opposed to loudmouth fatso Steve,” I said. “Laura, if I’d’a been a teacher at J.O. I would never have pictured you two together—because you could’ve probably been a teen movie star, right?”
“I know it’s hard to believe from looking at him,” she laughed, “but he did have a lot of girlfriends. Like you mentioned Lily Lee, she was his age, and a few others, so I guess the impression everyone had was: ‘He’s glamorous.’ Also he could be very romantic. See, when I wouldn’t go out with him at first, he sent me chocolate and flowers. And then he went away to Asia, he wrote me very romantic letters every day, he said, ‘I may not make it back, it’s really dangerous and everything, but I really want you to know I’m thinking about you way more than Lily.’”
Lily got so jealous she ended up bopping Laura over the head with a baseball bat at a party. “Can you believe it!?” Laura exclaimed. “I would never do that to someone! She was frustrated that Steve liked me so much and not her. But it was really hard for me because he still kept seeing her. Finally, a year later, she gave up and took a job in Calgary and we began going steady. That was actually a thrilling time for me. Steve’s a very generous person. He bought me jewelry and rings he had specially designed, he took me to Hong Kong, I once mentioned to him I wanted a better car, but I didn’t want to spend a lot—so what does he do? He goes out and spends like $30,000 cash on a new car for me.”
“You knew where the money came from, of course,” I said.
“No, not really,” she hedged, looking at her watch—an end-of-interview threat she’d been flashing whenever I’d pushed the conversation towards her knowledge of Steve’s business dealings. “I just didn’t understand that stuff. I just thought he was mysterious. He’d say he had to do his own things, ‘There’s some things that you don’t have to know, Laura.’ So I just stopped asking and I didn’t know.”
I let it slide. “How long did that honeymoon period last?”
“I’d say three years.” That is, until Laura turned 19 and could go into bars with her girlfriends after work. “I haven’t told this to anybody, so don’t make it sound too weird. He was very insecure about his looks—I didn’t find him ugly but he was always saying he was ugly and that he was gaining weight and that I was looking at this person or that person. Just looking was a threat to him. Finally he wouldn’t take me anywhere but his hangouts. He would say, ‘I won’t go to those karaoke places anymore, the older guys from Hong Kong want to pick you up, you could get drunk there and cause me problems.’ Things like that. I said, ‘Steve, I’m with you.’ But Steven wouldn’t go to those places with me anymore. He decided to keep me really sheltered. So it came to a point I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere—just to where he went.”
“How charming,” I commented, remembering the dingy gambling clubs and the crushingly depressing Fraser Billiards.
“I got so sick of those people,” she went on, referring to fun folks like Phu and Kim. “They were very crude and ignorant. In fact, that’s why I didn’t go to the funeral, I just didn’t want to see them again. And I have to say, for the last year that we were together, we argued every day, we argued every night, we argued every morning—we always argued. By then we didn’t have a lot of trust going either way, to tell you the truth. He would go through my things and I would go through his, looking for whether there was cheating—which I wasn’t doing. We were always breaking up and getting back together. Finally he told me he was losing his mind, he had so much else to worry about besides losing me.”
“Wasn’t that about the time he was also worried about his trial?”
“Really worried. In fact, he would say, ‘I’m going crazy, Laura. If I don’t get out of this, I swear—’ I think he got something from his lawyer about his case and he said he was thinking about suicide. He couldn’t face jail, not for ten years.”
“Twenty with bad behavior.”
“I guess I should’ve been more understanding of the pressures he was under. Because he was also worried what would happen to his mother and father if something happened to him. You know, a couple of times he was shot at and he was afraid for them if he wasn’t there to support them. So I actually went with him and we increased his life insurance like ten times, just so he’d feel a little better, at least about that. I’m in the real estate business so I’m a big believer in being insured. What are you writing?”
I was writing: She thinks it was her idea. “Was that when Patsy entered the picture?” I asked.
“All I know is what Edison Yee told me later. Because I actually didn’t know anything was going on with Patsy then. Apparently, though, she did get him a birthday present.”
“Laura, to me it sounds like he was scheming behind your back even then,” I said, “running around with this Wicked Witch of the East he’s supposedly marrying. Because you’re aware how he got his passport back two months later? He had to have been cooking it up with her.”
“I don’t think he thought of marrying her for a second,” she said. “He was just using her. I know who the husband is—they own that Japanese restaurant next to Red Robin—Ray didn’t say anything about a divorce, and he’s the type who would. See, he actually tried to pick me up. I met him at a karaoke club, he gave me his card and told me to come eat at the restaurant. So I had it in my purse, Steve was going through my purse one time and he says, ‘Who’s this!?’ Really shocked. ‘How do you know Ray?’ So right away he drags me to the restaurant. Ray didn’t show up but we had a fight anyway. He says, ‘He’s trying to take advantage of the situation.’ Meaning he’s so rich and Steve and I are breaking up—”
“Or meaning that he’s having an affair with Ray’s wife,” I pointed out. “His boss’s wife.”
“Oh, that I don’t know,” Laura replied, again looking at her watch. “He never told me he worked for Ray.”
“Okay, I won’t take up much more of your supper hour,” I backtracked for the umpteenth time. “So then what happened?”
“We broke up again and this time I gave him back the rings he gave me.”
She placed both hands on the table and pointedly leaned forward. “You say ‘dumped me,’ but I’ll tell you how much he loved me then. He started to cry and said, ‘People that know me, Laura, would never believe you would get me down like this. Like the police can’t get me; they call Revenue Canada, get the tax people after me, they can’t get me. The Lotus can’t get me. Everybody’s trying to get me down—but who does it? You do.’ And he begged me to go back with him but I wouldn’t. Are you writing that now?”
I was writing, He begs her to go back so she could sign for Sonny’s girlfriend. “Right, about his love for you,” I said.
“In fact, he went to my parents and asked what they could do to get me to go back with him. So my mother said, ‘You want us to make her go back with you when we didn’t want her to go with you in the first place?’ It was really sad—he even went to my brother—my brother never liked him either. Anyway, finally he called me for my birthday in February, he told me he had a present for me, and then we saw one another and it started up again.”
“Was that also about the time you sponsored Newson’s girlfriend?”
“Let’s see—yeah, about then, maybe a little later—but I don’t think that’s why Steve got back with me, if that’s what you mean. He would never use me like that.”
“Laura,” I said. I leveled with her. “He begs you to get back with him and then asks you to do something that’s equivalent to cosigning a loan for his partner in crime? Come on!”
She leaned forward again, this time pointing at my pad and shaking her head as she ordered: “Don’t write anything funny like that, because he wouldn’t! Steven asked, so I did it for Norm—”
“Norm? Oh, you mean Sonny!” I had to laugh at that. “Tall skinny white guy?”
“Well, his friend—I knew him as Norm, I guess that was his name that week,” she said, reciprocating my smile. “But Steven would not get me to do something that would get me into trouble. All she was coming over for was to be Norm’s wife anyway—I don’t think she was involved in anything else. Steven felt it wouldn’t do any harm. I’m sure if anything happened he would back me up anyway, he wouldn’t desert me, so I did it for him. But then she never came over anyway. Steve told me she doesn’t want to come over because her dad’s a big-time lawyer over there and she was happier living in the Philippines.”
“But not living happily ever after,” I pointed out. “Because she did come over and just got deported, with your name popping up on her file. And Steven’s not around to deal with the fallout.”
“Oh, really? I haven’t heard anything about that.”
“Well maybe you’re just lucky on it.”
She restlessly teased her hair and looked at her watch.
“Anyway, you say he didn’t dump you. So how’d he wind up going over with Lily?”
“Okay, see no one knows this, but he asked me to go. I was the one who was supposed to go over with him, not Lily. Not Lily!” she repeated, once again indicating the correct words she wanted on my pad. “He said he had to get away before the trial and wanted to go maybe in July, visit Hong Kong and his friend Norm in the Philippines. But—” She took a deep breath and fell silent.
“But?” I asked.
“But when he got his passport and started talking about buying tickets, there was so much between us, I said no. See, that was the time when we broke up in March for a lot of reasons, but I was also getting fed up with Patsy, that’s when I found out from Edison Yee that she was telling him I was going to bars and cheating. And he believed her and started with her.”
“You didn’t know about Patsy before then?”
“No, that was the first.”
“So it was one of Steve’s best friends who told you?”
“It was Edison, yeah. He was the only one of Steve’s friends I liked. So I guess Edison wanted me to know the truth finally.”
Or else Steve asked him to tell you, I thought.
“So what does he do the day after we broke up?” she asked rhetorically. “He calls Lily Lee! And one girl I didn’t want him speaking to at all was Lily! I only found out because after our breakup I went by to see how he was doing, and he wasn’t there, so I went into his room and I found all her letters! She was writing to him all those years. And I found a piece of paper in with them that he’d just written, it had her name and a new number on it, and I knew that he was talking to her.”
“What a low blow,” I said. “First Patsy, then Lily—”
“When he came home he admitted he’d phoned Lily, but he said he just really needed someone to take with him over there, he didn’t want to go alone. Then Lily right away called me at home and tried to explain it wasn’t true she was going, she told me that she’s married. I told her, ‘Don’t lie—I seen the letters, the last name’s still Lee!’ So that lie didn’t work with me. Because he did make the decision to go with her. Later I found out he sent Lily money to buy an Audi—”
Laura’s eyes were closed. She tightened her lips, sniffled and squeezed out two makeup-stained tears.
“He wrote me a letter after that.” She reached over to a black plastic box and sat back with a tissue, patted her eyes. “He said, ‘I’m sorry about the way things have turned out between us.’ He said, ‘I know you’re going out with Mike’—which wasn’t true, Mike was just a guy who was calling me. But Steve probably thought it to make himself feel better. He said, ‘If you guys are ever together and we bump into each other, don’t cry, because I’ll respect you till the end of time.’” She covered her eyes with the tissue and began blubbering mightily into it. “‘Till the end of time,’” she wept.
“Laura,” I said, reaching over and holding her hand. “I’d take all that with a grain of salt.”
“That was the last I ever heard from him. And in July I found out he passed away.”
“So when did you find out he actually met Patsy over there?” I asked.
She instantly stopped crying, and snatched her hand from mine. “Who told you that, did Lily tell you that?! I don’t want you to write he was serious about Patsy!”
I raised my hand and swore scout’s honor that she had me 100 percent wrong on that. I flipped back a dozen pages in my notes, scanned what she’d been telling me. “Believe me, I’m on your side, Laura. Listen to this—because this guy’s a virtuoso of deceit. He didn’t dump you for anybody. This is what I think happened.” I then began enumerating for her what I thought of as the deep structure of Steve’s actions, literally placing numbers beside paragraphs as I narrated the events between February and July.
“One: he begs you to go back with him on your birthday and then asks you to sponsor Sonny’s fiancée; that’s so he can swing a tit-for-tat with Sonny and his father-in-law in the Philippines. Two: he asks you to go to Asia with him, but that’s before he firms things up with Patsy. Three: he sets up this marriage bullshit with Patsy. Four: we’re talking March now, he draws up the affidavit and realizes the last person he wants in Hong Kong with him is you. Why? Because it’ll interfere with what he has going on with Patsy—”
“Don’t say it like that!” she protested, but I hushed her.
“Not because he feels anything for Patsy but because she’s tied into Macau, where he’s looking for a haven. Five: he gets Edison Yee to tell you about Patsy so you’ll break up with him. Six: okay, this is the one time in all those years he doesn’t beg you to get back with him. Seven: that leaves him free to go to Hong Kong with Lily. Lily’s not gonna complain when he meets Patsy—Lily’s just an ex who’s getting a free trip and a car and who’ll wash his underwear and bring back his gifts to his mom. So eight: he goes over to Hong Kong, meets with Patsy, then goes to Macau—for reasons I’m pretty sure of—then flies off to the Philippines and stages his death with the help of Sonny and the crooked lawyer—whose daughter he’s just helped out, thanks to you sponsoring her. That,” I said, looking up from my pad, “makes perfect sense to me, Laura.”
Laura lowered her eyes to a spot on the hardwood tabletop between us, soundlessly drumming her lean fingers on the wood. She remained quiet for so many seconds in a row that I could hear my wristwatch ticking. She seemed to be applying her businesswoman’s mind to my logic. “You want to know what I think?” she finally asked.
“Please,” I said.
“Some of that may be true, but not all of it, because, from my point of view, I personally don’t believe he’s alive,” she said. “Because I would have heard from him by now.”
“Not likely,” I retorted. “He doesn’t need you anymore. You’d only hear from him if he needed something he couldn’t get from Patsy. He didn’t die in any jungle accident, Laura. Nobody believes that: not the police, not the insurance companies, not his friends, at least if you listen to them carefully. I think he set up a haven for himself in the Lisboa. The Lisboa’s where Triad guys like Steve hide; that’s why he’s involved with the daughter-in-law of Fong Ngo Lam.”
“Who?” she asked.
“The lady that administers the corporation for the guy who owns the goddamn place.” I told her that Steve’s Triad ran the Macau underworld, and that Macau was one of those rare countries that didn’t include the offense of drug trafficking in its extradition treaties with other countries. “Whether he’s there now or not, I don’t know. It’s a year later.”
I left it at that, went back to waiting, because her fingers were drumming again and her beautiful almond eyes were contemplating something on the table.
“Okay, Terry,” she said, using my name for the first time in two hours. “Actually, everybody’s gonna have different things to tell you about that,” she said. “I mean, I do hear things about Steven. Myself, I don’t know what to believe about them. But my father does have a friend who called him from Hong Kong a few months ago and said he saw Steve Wong alive—just saw. I don’t know the circumstances. Whether it was in a crowd or what—” She leaned over. “Is that what you’re writing now?”
I looked up just as she put her finger on the corner of my pad and rudely twirled it her way on the smooth tabletop. “I have to talk to your father,” I said, twirling it back. “Can you tell him I’ll be phoning him?”
“Oh no, I don’t want to get him involved in any way, that’s not why I said I’d talk.” To make the point, she stood up, grabbed my pen and drew a line through the top of my page, dotted it vociferously. “His friend’s not even here and anyway I’m sure he doesn’t speak a word of English and neither does my father. My parents have been here for twenty-something years, but my dad works in a kitchen, he’s always with Chinese people, he never learned English. Even I don’t want to be involved in any way. The police are trying to get me to show up at his court case. I don’t want to go. Even if he was alive I wouldn’t go.” She shoved her sleeve up and looked at her watch again. “It’s really late.”
“Okay, okay. How about this, Laura—” I circled her negative exclamation point on my page, fattened the period “—I’ll stay away from your family. But I have to talk to Patsy, I need to find out what’s what. Where’s a good place to catch up with her?”
“I don’t know if I should tell you that,” she said. “What are you gonna ask her?”
“Not about you. And whatever I find out, you’ll be the first to know. I promise.”
She relented. “Well, everyone says she hangs around the Bauhinia now—I only saw her once myself, and it was there.”
“Yeah, I know it. High-tone Thai place on Broadway. It’s a pretty young crowd in there. Like your age.”
“Right. Just look for a pudgy older lady trying to look sexy.”
Not long after this interview I was sitting in a friend’s pad on Oak Street, just a few blocks from the Bauhinia. Gary Bush was a documentary film director, and we were drawing up a list of investors for an avant-garde film we wanted to make. (My Moieni script was still sitting unmade over at the CBC, but the experience of writing it had given me the film bug.) Gary happened to have a black belt in kung fu—an accomplishment that meant more to me than his Academy Award nomination when I decided I wanted his company at the Bauhinia. When Leslie said she was hungry, I suggested Thai food.
Twenty minutes later, we strolled into the second-level Bauhinia. There were a hundred or so young Chinese at the tables. Gary said, “I’m not getting into any gang brawl here.”
I led us around to the bar and ordered three beers. I put down three 10s, fanned like cards. “Tell Patsy I need to pass on a message from Steve. Tell her it can’t wait.”
The bartender shouted something to a fellow standing at the other end of the counter, who went up to a middle-aged woman playing Rock, Paper, Scissors with some kids at a crowded table. He pointed us out and she stood up and headed our way. “Queenly” was the word that came to my mind, if the queen were a true shorty. No more than five feet, a little chunky, but quite pretty actually, with boy-cut hair and dripping white gold and diamonds over her formal black dress. “What do you want?” she asked, with a barely detectable accent.
I started out as if we’d just broken off an argument two minutes ago. “Where’s your head, Patsy? Where is your head!?” She backed up a step, poor kid. “I just got back from Steve. You know what he gave up for you, and now that he needs friends, where are they?”
Patsy looked left at Gary and right at Leslie, and then said, “Come here,” leading me to a table that overlooked Broadway. “Where is he now? Is he all right?”
“The guy’s on the balls of his ass,” I said, as I sat down, mean as a two-bit drifter in a gas station heist. “He gave up Laura for you, Patsy. Eight years he threw down the drain for you!”
Patsy theatrically covered her diamond-draped ears with her diamond-ringed hands. “I’m sick of hearing that,” she said, shaking her head, as if we’d been arguing this subject every day for the last year. Talk about instant intimacy. “You know I’m sick of hearing that?!”
“You want me to tell him that? Is that your message? You’re sick of hearing that?”
“Why doesn’t he call?!” she begged. “He’s disappeared from me, he said he would phone, where is he now!?”
“Did you even try and find out!? You’re the one with the connections there! You can’t pick up the phone?”
“But I’m not supposed to—”
Oh yeah, of course. Idiot! To recover I jabbed air her way with a forefinger. “He’s on the run, Patsy. You think that doesn’t cost money?”
“But I sent him fifty thousand!”
“How long did you think that would cover him? How long, Patsy!?”
“But he said he was all right. How much does he need now?”
“Bottom line another fifty,” I said. “I don’t know where he is myself. He’s gonna be in touch with me over there. Where’d that money catch up with him anyway?”
Unfortunately, you only have so much line to play on this kind of con, and I reached the end of it as soon as those words were out of my mouth.
“Listen, please, I don’t even know who you are.”
“You don’t have to! They’re on his tail, Patsy, he needs help, that’s all you have to know!”
“Gimme your pen.” She ripped a strip off the bottom of the drink menu and wrote her cell phone number—351–6133—saying, “If he lost it I’ll send him whatever he needs when he calls. Tell him to call! I know they’re on his tail, but just tell him to call!”
She stood up, and in three steps was swallowed by the crowd. I sat there for a minute, so tense I knew it would take me an hour to come down.
“Ah, she doesn’t know where he is now,” I said to my compadres at the bar. “But at least she knew where he was, enough to send him fifty grand. I’m thinking Macau or Hong Kong.”
If Patsy was of minimal help in locating Steve, the most I could expect to accomplish with Sonny was to spark some international pages that might develop into a call to Patsy’s cell. On the day of Sonny’s sentencing for the passport caper, I went through the metal detector at the provincial courthouse, thinking, At least I won’t have to worry about getting chopped in these corridors. I considered Chuck’s admonition that Sonny had “a paranoia that counts,” but the sheriffs would be leading him away in chains after the gavel came down.
Not surprisingly, Sonny was late for his appearance. His counsel of the moment was a wild-haired, middle-aged hipster named Alex Murray, who was filling in for Sonny’s vacationing lawyer, Phil Rankin. I recognized Alex right away; he’d been written up in the Province newspaper as a noted racehorse owner who’d made a midlife career change. That gave me material to gossip about while we strolled the corridor waiting for his client to show. Eventually I was able to broach the subject of Newson and learned the reason for his delayed appearance: Son-of-Sam had been arrested last night on a cocaine charge. “I suspect he’s probably in and out on it under one of a dozen names or other,” Alex Murray said dryly, “so he’ll be here. Then he’s got a surprise.”
“What’s that?”
Murray chuckled at the vagaries of the justice system. “Well, the judge who’s supposed to sentence him isn’t here. He’s over at 190 Alexander”—that is, traffic court.
“So he won’t be going to jail today?”
“I suspect it’ll get held over till the fall.”
I didn’t like that.
“Did you ever meet his wife, Ajile? I heard she’s some beauty.”
“He thinks so.”
“Done in by a femme fatale?”
“Actually, he’s a very intelligent guy. There’s a possibility that Newson is smarter than any of us.”
Murray pushed into the bathroom, leaving me to ponder that intriguing assessment while I took a seat in the court gallery.
Sonny finally arrived, two and a half hours late. I was struck by his looks. Despite the millions of dollars’ worth of drugs he’d pumped into his body in his 38 years, he was a handsome dead ringer for the late actor Tony Perkins. I wrote: “The picture of health. At least 6′1″, lean, with a strong chin, brilliant blue eyes. Dressed for Bacolod: a thin Hawaiian shirt, light blue jeans and loafers with no socks.” Murray brought up the business about the judge being in the wrong place; the judge on the bench politely asked Sonny if he could come back September 1 at 9:30; and Sonny consulted with his lawyer. I leaned forward. “A clear, articulate voice that is remarkably intelligent-sounding,” I wrote. Sonny didn’t share his sensitive side with the judge. “Sure, I’ll be here,” was all he said. He turned and his azure eyes passed neutrally over me as he walked out.
I followed him outside the courtroom. “Sonny!” I called and when he turned, I extended my hand. He looked at it coming towards him. Reluctantly, he raised his own hand 10 degrees. I reached for it—reached down for it—and held it, limp as a fish in my own. I thought of the evolutionary origin of the handshake: it shows you don’t have a weapon. Sonny’s high-IQ eyes told me he thought mine were filled with menace. I dropped his cold palm and played Ping-Pong with that perception.
“Hey I’m Terry Gould! I was interviewing Laura for a few hours, and I’m doing an article on Steven now! Did Chuck get in touch with you—did he let you know? Because I was talking to him for hours, too. Guy really has a high opinion of you. Maybe Chuck let ya know that basically what I’m after is Steve’s spiritual side. When I knew him, back in ’90, we discussed Buddhism, and with his Triad initiation, he believed really deeply in Buddhist stuff. And I’m just wondering if you ever saw him practice it?”
Sonny’s head moved slowly right and left.
“No, huh? You’re not giving me a line of BS because it’s Triad stuff? Do you know who I am? Do you know what I had to do with Steven?”
This time Sonny’s head didn’t move. But something definitely registered inside it, which was reflected in his eyes.
“Well, if you ask me he was a dozen cuts above Kim and Phu and those guys. Like when we were driving around town once, he showed off his photographic memory for me. He rattled off license plates we just passed, then came around the corner, and there they were. So he had an enormous degree of intelligence.”
Sonny seemed to be coiling back into himself, occasionally blinking—this must be his reptilian version of the gangster “look.” Very effective. No there there.
“Anyway, what people are talking about was that you did a wonderful thing for Ajile, if you want the feedback from Chuck, Laura—although Patsy, I can tell ya, probably doesn’t give a fuck about Ajile. That’s not her movie. But, hey, I’m just putting together some pieces in Steve’s life. Like I say, he had a high degree of intelligence, he had a heart. Yeah, he was into things, but if he had a genius, it was his personality. You knew him as one of the closest, aside from Eddie Yee, so I thought you wouldn’t mind telling me where Celestino Guara kept him until you identified him over there in Binalbagan.”
At that his eyes went completely dead. I took that as a challenge and tried something else. Fuck him. What’s he gonna do to me here?
“You know, I’m asking because Chuck’s saying, there’s Steven dead, and there’s you IDing him. So we’re talking about over a million dollars in insurance. Your name’s on all those documents.”
“So?” It was his first word.
“So, since I’m writing about all this, I was wondering about the rumors that you maybe know he’s alive and where he is.”
A couple of sheriff’s deputies were standing to our right and left, and Sonny’s lawyer was watching us uncomfortably from about 30 feet away. Sonny looked at all four points on the compass. I loved the thought of him losing his composure and not being able to strike.
“Sonny?” Alex Murray called. “Sonny?”
“I thought Steve told you never to write about him again,” Sonny enunciated in a clear whisper, with maximum subtext, then turned away, trying for that calm, uncoiling slither.
“Yeah, but he’s dead.”
“Hisss, arrr,” I said to my spook over the phone, in answer to his question about what Sonny had told me. I gave him Patsy’s cell phone number and brought up the 50 grand. “If there’s overseas calls to it, maybe somebody should be tracing where they came from.”
Two weeks later I headed down to Las Vegas with Leslie and Gary Bush. I knew that Ray Chau liked to gamble at the Mirage and that his bookie André Ouellette was tied into its underside. Coincidentally, the avant-garde documentary for which Gary and I were trying to raise funds had a Vegas connection: the film was to be about a fast-growing subculture that at the time the mainstream media was ignoring—middle-class married swingers. That week, 3,000 of them were holding a “Lifestyles Convention” at the Riviera Hotel. Given Steve’s connection to Ray and Patsy, and Ray’s connections to the Mirage, I thought it might be possible to attend the swing convention and also discover some rounder at the Mirage who had knowledge of my disappeared desperado.
The first thing I unpacked in our Riviera hotel room was a package containing copies of the Paper Fan’s four-color mug shot. Steve had a strangely celestial look to his hooded eyes, staring to the right of the camera as if communing with a divine birdie. Otherwise, he looked like he’d had a bad day. Concentric creases of flesh circled his neck beneath his Adam’s apple. His complexion was greasy and mottled. His wormlike lips were redder than usual. Studying him, I had to wonder again why so many impressive women threw themselves at his feet.
I set to stapling my Saturday Night card to a corner above his messy hair, since I was planning on handing Steve’s photo out to swinging police officers. From talking to swinging cops in Vancouver, I knew there would be lots here.
At the opening dance in the skytop ballroom, Dr. Robert McGinley, the California-based impresario of the three-day extravaganza, introduced us to an Orange County detective who was on the organizing committee of the convention. At the Erotic Art Exhibition the next afternoon, the detective introduced us to a patrolman from Detroit. That evening, at the Black-and-White costume ball, the Detroit patrolman introduced us to a Vegas-based drug agent he’d met at a seminar. I’ll call him Edwin. I showed him Steve’s photo and a copy of my article in the RCMP bulletin, and we spent almost an hour in that crazy environment talking about the Mexican cartels and the frustrations of drug enforcement.
On the last day of the convention, Edwin drove me to the Mirage to meet an André Ouellette-type who he said might be able to help out in the Steve search. The fellow said he’d hold on to Steve’s picture, but he seemed more interested in finding out what the escort services in Vancouver were charging these days. Then he unwittingly insulted Edwin. “I heard the girls in the bar last night complaining there’s no work on the north end. That pervert swinger convention’s killing ’em! Ha ha ha!”
As we drove back to the Riviera, Edwin was furious. He said that bad guys were sexually square—in a twisted way. “Someone’s always gotta lose on the deal or they get nothing out of it. Big bad dudes with their big-mouth bimbos. You should see them around this guy.”
I told him that Steve had crowds of girls around him, too. Maybe the dangerous-guy thing turned them on.
Edwin thought that might hold true in the nonswinging world, but not in his lifestyle. “Guy thinks he’s big and bad here, women go the other way. You never find guys tryin’ to brag it up when they meet a lady. It’s just strictly friendly.”
After the grand-finale masquerade ball I sat at my laptop and began typing, occasionally looking up at Steve while 1,500 mainstream couples cavorted in their rooms. I was convinced there was a reason I was on these two stories at once.
It took me some time to work it all through, and one day I would set to writing a whole book about it (that is, after three years of “fund-raising” left Gary and me 30 grand in the hole). But even in 1993, running with subcultures on opposite ends of the human rainbow, I beheld the first glimmerings of a golden insight. The world that occupied most of the bell curve considered both subcultures extreme, but I believed they informed each other and everything else. All these gang tarts ran to Steve and his gang guys because of their gangster “face,” which was accrued through violence; on the other side of the law were the men who fought the good fight against them—but for not entirely different reasons. At some level, every male (including me) understood that one of the rewards of living dangerously was being considered attractive by women. The equation was one of the biological mysteries of life. Lawmen, lawyers, gangsters, and journalists were particularly well placed to demonstrate to women that they were hunters able to provide resources and excitement. Yet at swinger parties even undercover cops didn’t need to posture as dangerous risk takers in order to make themselves more attractive to women. Their swinging women didn’t need them to do so. The exhibition of strength and assets was not necessary to the acquisition of partners in their world, whereas it was-a prime motive for criminality in the underworld. I had the feeling I was perceiving something profound, and was only slightly tempted to deface this perception with a crude punch line.