Spider Bones(39)

"L'il Bud T'eo and his buddies are USO," Lô said. "Lapasa and his crew are SOS Crips. Word might not travel across gang lines all that fast."
"What's your plan?" Hung asked.
"We have Nickie Lapasa's lawyer call Al Lapasa and say he has a client who's been searching for him for years. He'll say that Al is mentioned in Theresa-Sophia's will."
"Why would Nickie go along with something like that?"
"We tell him Al could be his long-lost brother."
"You just told him his long-lost brother is lying on a shelf at the CIL."
"We say that since Danny talked to him, researchers at the CIL discovered they could be wrong, that Xander could be this man living in Oakland. We play to Nickie's ego. Tell him he was probably right all along."
"What makes you think Nickie isn't already hip? If he does have drug connections, and Al Lapasa is in the game, why wouldn't Nickie be aware of who Al really is?" Lô asked.
"Because Xander didn't want Nickie to know. For whatever reason, he's been lying low for forty years. JPAC queries spanning that entire time have obtained not a single hint to suggest any family member suspected Xander was alive. And I doubt Nickie knows the story on every drug dealer up and down the West Coast."
"In this little fantasy, how'd Nickie finally track Al down?" Lô.
"The administrator of Theresa-Sophia's estate has had lost heirs investigators searching off and on for years. They finally found him. Look, it's worth a shot. Al may believe that he has to come to Honolulu, meet with the executor of the will, and prove his identity in person. I'm sure the attorney can come up with legal jargon that sounds convincing."
A few moments passed while everyone considered my idea.
"Al was born in Honolulu," Hung said. "Even if he's not your long-lost Xander, he might figure he's got relatives here he knows nothing about."
"He'll hit the Internet, learn the Honolulu Lapasas are loaded, get greedy, get sloppy." Lô was coming around.
"And if he is Xander Lapasa, it's even more likely he'll buy into the story," I said.
Lô and Hung exchanged glances. I knew what they were thinking.
"If you want to try selling this guy a line, we've got no objection," Lô said. "But we can't compromise the Kealoha-Faalogo investigation. If this falls apart without Al ever leaving Oakland, this is strictly a CIL inquiry. My partner and I never heard any of this."
"Any of what?" I asked.
"So," Ryan said. "Who calls Nickie?"
"I'll be right back."
I retraced my steps to the hall.
     
 

      DANNY INSISTED ON RECIPROCITY. THOUGH HE DOUBTED THE scheme would succeed, he'd call Nickie if I'd take one more run at Plato.
I agreed.
Back in the squad room, I gave Lô and Hung a thumbs-up.
We chatted a moment, then Ryan and I left. Everyone said they'd keep in touch.
Little did we know how quickly we'd reconvene.
Ryan and I stopped for dim sum at the Chinatown Cultural Plaza Shopping Center. As Ryan made selections from an armada of carts, I called Plato Lowery.
"When will you people give up? I told that French guy and I told that army guy. No. N. O. This is harassment."
"I'm sorry you feel that way, sir."
"I do."
"We don't mean to offend. We're just puzzled by your refusal to cooperate in a small way."
"You're barking up the wrong tree."
"My colleagues and I want to get it right."
"Then send my boy home and leave us be."
Conversation hummed around me. Glassware clinked.
"Mr. Lowery, may I ask why you won't submit a sample for DNA testing?"
"No. You may not."
Through a window I looked across at the statue of Sun Yat-sen. He looked as unbending as Plato sounded.
"The process isn't painful," I said.
"Painful? I'll tell you what's painful. Having someone tell you your boy ain't your boy. That's painful. That's painful as hell."
"Sir, that's not-"
"You people got no idea the hurt you can cause."
Lowery was growing more strident with every word.
"All these years I've been telling myself the past is past. Those doctors and nurses with their needles and probes and fancy words. It was crazy. They were crazy. Those fools and their tests nearly cost me my family."
The old man's voice sizzled through the handset pressed to my ear.
"And the damndest part? They all died anyway. Spider. Tom. Harriet. In the end, all that science didn't make one spit of difference."
I looked over to see Ryan studying my face.
"Now the army comes along wanting to churn the whole mess up again. I didn't believe nothing then, and I don't believe nothing now. It's done. Spider was my boy. He died in the war. That's it. Done. You got it?"
I found myself listening to empty air.
"He sounded a bit overwrought." Ryan placed a dumpling on my plate.
"A bit. That's the largest number of words I've ever heard him connect."
"Why so distressed?"
"I'm not really sure." I set Ryan's phone on the table. "Half of what he said didn't make sense."
"Like what?"
I tried to reconstruct Plato's outburst in my mind.
"Basically, he doesn't trust doctors or science."
"I gather he won't be submitting a swab."
"Definitely not."
"Now what?"
I raised frustrated hands. "We work with what we've got."
Danny rang as Ryan was paying the bill.
His task had gone far better than mine.
Nickie Lapasa wanted answers concerning his brother. He and his attorney would concoct a convincing scenario. The attorney would contact Al Lapasa. Nickie would phone when he had news.
I was pleased. But stunned.
So was Ryan. Did Nickie have reasons other than closure on Xander?
That night the clouds and mist gave way to rain. Rivulets ran down the glass doors opening onto my balcony. Now and then a gust snuck in and rattled the frame.
Danny phoned at nine.
"Al Lapasa bit."
"You're kidding."
"He'll arrive in Honolulu tomorrow afternoon."
"Get out!"
"Avarice is a wonderful thing."
"You think that's it?" I asked.
"Who knows," Danny said.
I told Ryan, then called Lô.
He reacted as I had, though in somewhat more colorful prose. He'd talk to Hung, let me know when they had a plan.
Finally, I brought Hadley Perry up to speed.
Her surprise was delivered in hues as vivid as Lô's. As we spoke, I also detected a note of annoyance. Because I was in and she was out of the loop on her case? Because I was with Ryan and she was not? Because the court testimony in which she was engaged was not yet finished and she would remain on the sidelines? Answering Perry's questions, I felt a smug sense of satisfaction. Petty, but there you have it.
That night sleep refused to come. My mind kept chewing on the two recent shockers.
Harriet Lowery's DNA was not a match for the Hemmingford floater.
Xander Lapasa might be alive.
Had Danny and I made too great a leap when comparing the antemortem and postmortem dental X-rays? The partial filling? The mandibular fractures?
Why had Nickie Lapasa gone along with my plan? What did he hope to gain from Al Lapasa's presence in Honolulu? Did he actually believe the man was his brother?
Xander Lapasa went missing in Vietnam in 1968. Had he survived? Lived all those years as Al Lapasa? If so, why had he never contacted his family?
Or had he?
What had Xander been doing in Vietnam?
When did Al Lapasa surface in Oakland? Where was he prior to that?
What did Nickie know?
What did Nickie want?
Why did Nickie refuse to allow a DNA comparison between a Lapasa family member and JPAC's 1968-979, presumably his brother, Xander?
Ditto for Plato Lowery. Why did he refuse to submit a sample?
Plato's rant suggested that his wife's death had been wrenching. Had Harriet's illness scarred the old man so deeply it destroyed his faith in medicine and hospitals?
What had Plato said? In the end, doctors and science didn't make one spit of difference.
I replayed Plato's words in my mind, trying to better understand his thinking.
One comment seemed a disconnect. Those fools and their fancy test nearly cost me my family.
What fools? What test?
Cost his family? How?
Now the army comes along wanting to churn the whole mess up again.
I'd assumed the reference was to Spider's death. If not, what mess?
I organized what little I knew about the Lowerys.
Harriet had passed away five years earlier. She'd suffered from kidney disease all her life, eventually received a transplant. Sheriff Beasley had said that neither son was the donor.
I pictured Plato clutching his album in my car. Thumping his chest so hard I flinched. My boy!
Again, on the phone today. Spider was my boy!
Both sons had offered their mother a kidney. Spider in the sixties, Tom years later.
Why could neither donate an organ?
Harriet's twins were obviously not matches for her. Was that what had Plato so upset? Had testing turned up something the old man didn't like?
The thought hit me like a bullet.
Paternity.
Had Plato discovered he was not the father of Harriet's twins? Was he desperate to keep that fact hidden?
The digits on my clock said 2:18.
Rain still swished softly in the gutter overhanging my balcony.
I was twisting the notion this way and that when a scream shattered the silence.
Heart banging, I threw back the covers and shot from my bed.
Ryan was barreling up the stairs two at a time.
Katy was flying through her door.
The three of us met in the hall.
"I saw someone!" Katy's face was adrenaline white. "Rain was coming in. I got up to close the door and there he was."