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  They sat quietly for a few seconds. Gilbert again listened to the rain, then looked at Edgar. The rain was this man’s requiem. Soft and mournful. The rain lulled Gilbert into a few seconds of introspection, an examination of how easily he had pulled his gun. Had the product on the table really changed the complexion of this murder so quickly?

  “What did Foster Sung say?” he asked.

  Lombardo slid his hands into the pockets of his coat. “He said he was in the restaurant downstairs having coffee with his associates—that’s the word he used—when May Lau came in and told him her son had been shot.”

  Associates. Had Sung been having a business meeting then? This late at night? “Were you able to talk to Mrs. Lau at all, or was she too upset?” asked Gilbert.

  “Some,” said Lombardo. “But she was shaky.”

  “How’s her English?”

  “Her English is good.”

  “What did she say?”

  Lombardo took a deep breath, rubbed his nose, an Italianate nose, strong, forthright, handsome. “She said she wasn’t sure if she heard the shot or not,” he said. “She was sitting in the front room. You have a lot of trucks on Spadina Avenue. She heard something. But…you know…with this rain…she thought it was a truck backfiring. Not only that, she’s deaf in one ear. Sung says she lost her hearing when an artillery shell exploded ten yards from her in Saigon. That’s where they’re from. Ethnic Chinese from Saigon. Ho Chi Minh City.”

  “So she came up here?”

  “Not at first.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She finished hemming the skirt she was working on,” said Lombardo. “She used to work as a seamstress. She still does piecework. Sung has her working as a receptionist out in Agincourt. A firm called New Asian Solutions. They have a branch office out there but they also have an office down here, on University Avenue.”

  “So why did she come up here if she wasn’t sure about the gunshot?” asked Gilbert.

  “She had a feeling.”

  “A feeling?”

  “She’s the man’s mother, Barry.” Lombardo shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Okay,” said Gilbert. “She had a feeling.”

  “And she came up,” said Lombardo.

  Gilbert glanced at Edgar. “And saw him lying there on the floor,” he said. He scratched his head. “And was he still alive?” he asked.

  Lombardo peered at the heroin, had a closer look. “That’s the story,” he said. “She came up here, saw him lying on the floor, and ran down to get Sung because she thought Sung might be able to save him.”

  “So she knew Sung was downstairs?”

  “Sung always says hello whenever he comes to the restaurant. He said hello before he sat down with his friends. She knew he was there.”

  “And when she came up here and saw her son lying on the floor, was he alive and conscious?” asked Gilbert.

  “That’s the story.”

  “Still alive, still conscious.” Gilbert thought there might be hope after all. But his partner just as quickly destroyed his hope.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Barry,” said Lombardo. “But no, he didn’t tell her who shot him.”

  Gilbert tried not to be disappointed. “What’s with Foster Sung?” he asked. “Is he a relative? A friend?”

  “A friend,” said Lombardo. “A close family friend.”

  “How close?”

  Lombardo picked up on the implication. “I’m not sure,” he said. “But Edgar’s father is dead, if that’s what you mean.” Lombardo pointed to the photograph album. “Sung said he died on that refugee boat fleeing Vietnam twenty-four years ago.”

  “So we’re right about boat people?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Did Sung come up here?” asked Gilbert.

  “After May Lau came and got him,” said Lombardo.

  “You know,” said Gilbert, feeling angry, “it’s lucky we didn’t get a double homicide here, or even a triple homicide. The killer could have still been in the apartment.”

  “I know,” said Lombardo. “But you know how people get when they see someone they love bleeding to death on the floor.” Lombardo looked at Gilbert solemnly. “They forget about procedure. They don’t go in with guns and make sure the place is clear before rushing to aid the victim.”

  Gilbert’s face settled, and he felt at once irked and grateful. “Okay,” he said, “I’m sorry. But I just wish people would think.”

  Distant lightning flashed beyond the rain-speckled panes of the French doors. Both detectives looked. Lightning in December. Bizarre. Lombardo continued.

  “Edgar was still breathing when Sung came up here,” he said.

  “And conscious?” asked Gilbert.

  “No.”

  “So Sung phoned nine-one-one,” said Gilbert.

  “He did. Officer Kennedy got here before the fire trucks and paramedics.”

  “And by the time Officer Kennedy got here, Edgar was nearly gone.”

  “That’s right,” he said. Lombardo consulted his notebook again, as if he had just remembered something. “Kennedy’s partner, Paul Szoldra, said he took a statement from a waiter downstairs. The waiter said he saw a woman exit the downstairs door around the time of the murder. The waiter actually knew her. I talked to the waiter.”

  Gilbert gazed at his young partner, astonished by the small offerings Lombardo eked out of the most unlikely places, how he could produce, seemingly out of thin air, a woman, adding substance and depth to their cloudy first impressions, filling in with one bold stroke a disconnected but undoubtedly valuable piece of the puzzle. A woman walking down the stairs and leaving the building around the time of the murder.

  “Did you get the woman’s name?”

  “Pearl Wu.”

  Gilbert let the name settle, searched his memory to see whether he knew it, wondered why so many Chinese, when choosing English first names for their kids, chose old-fashioned ones, nineteenth-century names.

  “That’s great, Joe.”

  “I asked Mrs. Lau about Pearl Wu,” said Lombardo. “She says she’s a friend of Edgar’s.”

  “A girlfriend?” he asked.

  “I think it’s a hot-and-cold thing,” said Lombardo.

  “Did May Lau see Pearl?”

  “No.”

  Gilbert nodded. “So we go after Pearl Wu,” he said. He conceded a smile to Lombardo. “Who knows, maybe she has the other glove.”

  Lombardo shook his head. “Like I say, there’s nothing sadder than a desperate detective.”

  Three

  On Monday, Gilbert sat in the autopsy room in the Coroner’s Building on Grenville Street. Hot, bright surgical lights shone overhead. Drains pitted the floor. Edgar Lau lay on a steel table, a tag tied around his big toe. Dr. Blackstein, a short, comfortable-looking man in his late fifties, examined Edgar’s naked body. Gilbert and Blackstein were waiting for the X-rays to come down. The wrong ones had been delivered by mistake and the porter had gone upstairs to get the right ones.

  “Look at this here,” said the coroner, pointing to a dull purple spot an inch in diameter on Edgar’s right shoulder. “Another gunshot wound. A fairly recent one.”

  Gilbert examined the circular scar, the color of his favorite mauve columbines in Regina’s garden at home, puckered and uneven, like a giant vaccination scar. “How recent?” he asked.

  Blackstein had a closer look, like a jeweler examining an equivocal gem. “I’d say three or four months,” he said.

  Three or four months. A gunshot wound received late last summer. Another attempt on Edgar’s life. They had no record of this gunshot wound on file; he remembered all the assault-with-a-deadly-weapon files going back to January, and this wasn’t one of them. Which meant this one had gone unreported or had happened in another jurisdiction. The prospect teased him. Maybe there was another bullet somewhere, tweezered from Edgar’s shoulder last summer, put in a bag by some unknown officer, delivered to an evidence repo
sitory, labeled neatly, a piece of the puzzle all set to be snapped snugly into place. If their own bullet matched the bullet from this other shooting, if the people who had killed him last night were the same people who had been after him in August, if he could take this previous gunshot wound and the bullet that went with it as another signpost…was he going to get lucky on this after all?

  “Anything else?” he asked, struggling to check the tenor of optimism in his voice.

  Blackstein gazed up and down the length of Edgar’s body. “He worked out,” he said. “Look at those muscles. I’ve never seen such a physically fit victim before. The man’s perfect. I wish I had my students here. He’s a great cadaver as far as musculature’s concerned.”

  Gilbert had to agree. In death, Edgar’s body bulked with muscles—muscles as sculpted and lithe as a cougar’s, carved from his flesh as unerringly as Michelangelo had carved David.

  Blackstein glanced at the door. “I wonder what’s taking the X-rays so long?” he said. “I’m getting behind.” He turned back to the corpse and pondered Edgar’s body, reached up, twisted the thick hairs coming out of his own ear, examined his fingers for any exudate, then pulled a pair of latex gloves from the box of one hundred on the instruments table. “I might as well cut him open.” He snapped on the gloves. “We might as well dig out the bullet while we’re waiting.”

  Gilbert nodded. “Sure,” he said.

  Gilbert walked back to his chair and sat down. He emptied his mind, became a receptacle for whatever secrets Edgar’s body might yield.

  The initial Y incision, that which opened Edgar Lau’s chest and abdomen, acted like an anesthetic on Gilbert, numbed his body, sharpened his mind, prepared him for a good two-hour sit, a limbo of postmortem carnage mixed with equal parts of hope and boredom. From that point on he felt nothing but a stolid determination to learn. Edgar’s body became nothing more than an interesting puzzle, a piece of meat from which a helpful sketch of murder might emerge.

  With the Y incision complete, Dr. Blackstein removed Lau’s lungs, heart, esophagus, and trachea, and placed them to one side. “He didn’t smoke,” he commented to Gilbert. Blackstein had a closer look at the victim’s abdominal organs, picking and pulling with a long pair of surgical tweezers at the gunshot wound, working the traumatized tissue with a quick, practiced hand, as if the nature of its texture, friability, and resilience were so well known to Blackstein, the ragged mapwork of bullet wounds so well-traveled, his tweezers might as well have been a divining rod for lead.

  He spoke into the voice-activated dictation microphone above his head. “Cause of death was a gunshot wound of unknown caliber to the abdomen.” He picked at Lau’s intestine more vigorously. “The mechanism of death was exsanguination and presumably shock secondary to traumatic hemorrhage of the stomach and duodenum.” Dr. Blackstein bent lower to the body, stopped poking around, and looked more closely. He went in dexterously with the tweezers and pulled out a bullet. He held it up to Gilbert. Gilbert nodded, encouraged by the find. “Correction,” said Dr. Blackstein, dictating into the microphone. “Cause of death was a thirty-eight-caliber gunshot wound to the abdomen.” He put the bullet on a steel tray, where it shone like a dark ruby. “The officer’s warrant indicates the manner of death was homicide, occurring in and around the hour of ten P.M., on December fifteenth, in the municipality of the City of Toronto, and that the—”

  Dr. Blackstein stopped dictating, his brow knitting. His face showed a flicker of perplexity, something Gilbert hardly ever saw on the coroner’s face. Blackstein stuck his hand into Edgar’s body, oblivious to the goriness of its gaping incision, and squeezed. He turned to Gilbert.

  “What the hell is this?” he asked.

  “What?” asked Gilbert.

  “There’s a hard spot in his intestine.” He squeezed again, testing, eyes pondering. “I wish the porter would hurry up with those X-rays. This might turn out to be interesting.”

  “What is it?” asked Gilbert, forcing himself not to get too excited.

  “I don’t know,” said Blackstein. “It’s not a bullet or a bone fragment, that’s for sure. It’s too far down from the wound to be either of those things, and there’s no trauma around this particular area. We’ve got nothing but fresh meat down here.”

  Gilbert came over and had a look. “Where?” he asked.

  “Right here,” said Blackstein, pointing. “In his large intestine.” Blackstein squeezed yet again, as if he were now angry at Edgar’s intestine. “You see how there’s a lump inside there?”

  Gilbert peered at the lump. “Maybe it’s cancer,” he suggested.

  “No,” said Blackstein. “He’s the wrong age group, for one thing. And from a clinical standpoint, it’s inconsistent with cancer.” Blackstein turned to him. “You said you found drugs in his apartment?”

  “We did,” said Gilbert.

  Blackstein shrugged. “Maybe he swallowed some drugs.”

  Gilbert thought of the three football-sized pieces. “No,” he said, “he didn’t.”

  “Because I think he swallowed something, like drugs in a condom. Something like that. Only it feels really hard.”

  The porter entered the autopsy room with the X-rays. Blackstein took off his gloves, rinsed his hands, and dried them. The porter handed the large brown envelope to Dr. Blackstein, had the doctor initial for them, then quickly retreated, keeping his eyes averted from the corpse.

  “Let’s have a look,” said Blackstein, taking the stiff films from the envelope and pinning them to the panel lights.

  Both men just stared…stared in perplexity, in surprise, and with a keen sense of cynical wonder when they saw what was inside Edgar’s intestine. The image was sharp, clear, and unmistakable: a tied-off balloon with a key inside, a key such as might be used for a public locker at a swimming pool, a library, or a subway station. Gilbert remembered a suicide he worked once, where the victim had swallowed seven safety pins and two razor blades, how he had seen the safety pins and razor blades as clear as day, sharp and defined on the X-ray film. The key in the balloon appeared just as clearly. The wonders of the spectrum beyond the visible range. Farther up, the bullet wound showed up white and luminescent, star-shaped and ragged, with the bullet a solid block, hot and overt, just above Edgar’s duodenum.

  The door opened and Joe Lombardo walked in, his notebook in one hand, double-tall skinnies for all in the other.

  “Funny place to keep a key,” said Gilbert to Blackstein.

  Blackstein shook his head. “Did he never think of under the doormat?”

  Blackstein stared at the X-ray with neutral professionalism. Lombardo settled with the coffees at a table across the room.

  “We’ll have to get it out,” said Gilbert. “We’ll have to have a look.”

  Blackstein nodded distractedly. “Sure,” he said. He stared at the X-ray. “I’m going to lift his intestine onto the small-parts dissection table and make an incision,” he said. “You might as well go back to your chair. You know what a mess this makes.”

  “Thanks.”

  Gilbert went back to his chair and sat next to Lombardo. Blackstein put on fresh latex gloves.

  “Still raining?” Gilbert asked Lombardo.

  “In piss-pots.” Lombardo looked at the disemboweled body of Edgar Lau. “Anything interesting?”

  “An earlier gunshot wound.”

  “Really?”

  “Three or four months old. And Blackstein’s found something in Edgar’s intestine.”

  Lombardo’s eyebrows arched. “The other glove?” he asked.

  Gilbert raised his hands in a monk-like gesture of prayer. “You scoff, my son,” he said. “But let the wisdom of my years guide you.” Gilbert lifted his coffee. “He found a key inside a balloon.” Gilbert raised his coffee toward the panel lights. “You can see it up there on the X-ray. Go have a look.”

  Lombardo got up and had a look. He came back. He was smiling in that winsome way he had sometimes. “If I get hungry,”
he said, “I stick to glass and nails. I hear keys give you indigestion.”

  The two detectives watched the coroner remove Edgar’s liver, spleen, kidneys and adrenals, stomach and intestines and put them on the small-parts dissection table. Gilbert turned to Lombardo.

  “Any luck with Pearl Wu?” he asked.

  Lombardo flipped to a fresh page in his notebook. “She lives in a condominium on Murray Street. You know the one? With the big fountain in the courtyard? One Park Lane. Only there’s no Park Lane anywhere around, they just call it that. Right behind the National Life Building. I drove by. She’s not there right now. And I phoned. She’s got her voice mail on.”

  “Is Telford checking priors on everybody?”

  “On everybody,” said Lombardo.

  Blackstein turned to the two detectives. “I got it,” he said. “Come have a look.”

  Gilbert and Lombardo walked over to the small-parts dissection table. Gilbert looked through the incision Blackstein had made in Edgar’s small intestine. In and among the products of digestion, snug in the whitish blue tissue, Gilbert saw a yellow balloon. Blackstein went in with his tweezers and pulled it out, an uninflated yellow balloon, messy with blood, tied tightly at its neck. He held it up to the light. The balloon had some black writing on it. Blackstein wiped the balloon with an alcohol swab. “New Asian Solutions,” the writing read.