Read The Dark Root for Free Online Page A

me.”
    Sally was contemptuous. “Not Williams. Jesus. Williams couldn’t whack
himself
, for Christ’s sake.”
    “A new player,” I said quietly, as a point of fact, although it was the first I’d heard of him, too.
    “No shit,” Mike muttered angrily.
    Sol remained undaunted. “Who the hell’s Sonny?”
    “Bad news.” Sally’s face was hard, shut down—scared, I suddenly realized.
    “He in town tonight?” I asked.
    “Could be. Some of his boys are.”
    “Do we know them?”
    She shook her head. “You will. Benny was nothin’—a free advertisement.”
    “What does this Sonny want?” Sol asked, obviously frustrated at having completely missed a new development in his streets.
    “Some of the action, of course,” Sally said bitterly. “He’s moving to get a gang going… Fucking chink.”
    I sat forward and stared at her. “He’s Chinese?”
    “I’d be pretty stupid to miss that.”
    “Where’s he from?”
    Sally was suddenly angry. “Jesus, Gunther—fucking China. What d’you think?”
    But Mike knew what I meant. “I don’t know where he’s from—maybe the West Coast. But some of his boys’re from Montreal.”

4
    CHIEF TONY BRANDT STARED into the bowl of his ever-present pipe. The conversation with Sally Javits and the Beauprés had triggered an intense investigation into the last days of Ben Travers, but forty-eight hours later, we still had little to go on.
    “Does Sonny have a last name?”
    "Not that we know of. Even the
Sonny
part might be bogus, as well as his actually being Chinese. That was Sally’s opinion, but she’s probably met all of three Asians in her life. Nobody else we’ve interviewed has set eyes on him, although the paranoia on the street’s making him look like Fu Manchu. Everyone’s keeping very quiet on this one.”
    Tony frowned and shoved the pipe back into his mouth. He’d recently had the flu and was looking run-down. He was not in the mood for a publicity-grabbing major case. “You quoted one of the boys saying, ‘Maybe Sonny did it.’ Do we have any evidence pointing one way or the other?”
    “Supposedly Sonny made a move on Benny’s drug business. A meet was arranged between principals and seconds. Everybody puffed out their chests and strutted around and Travers was dead within twenty-four hours. People drew whatever conclusion suited them.”
    “But Sonny hasn’t swooped in to grab Benny’s business?”
    We were sitting in Tony’s office, and he, as usual, had his long, thin frame draped along an old tilt-back office chair, his legs extending across a paper-strewn desk. The smoke from his pipe hovered like a fog bank a couple of feet above us.
    “Not visibly,” I answered. “But I don’t think drugs are Sonny’s only interest anyhow. Sally told us he’d made a move on Scott Fisher’s burglary operation, and supposedly Alfie Brewster’s worried Sonny’s been hustling some of his girls. Maybe Benny overreacted to the same kind of overture and Sonny got rid of him. Or maybe he was killed because he was the toughest of the locals, and Sonny needed to set an example. There’s talk of a real gang being formed, with guns, money, and fast cars—a lot more sophisticated than the bands of kids we have roaming around here now. It wouldn’t take much to win a lot of them over.
    “I’d love to chat with Sonny—just to introduce myself, if nothing else—but I was told he’s out of town, and the people he’s left behind aren’t talking.”
    “They Asian, too?”
    “His head lieutenant is—named Michael Vu—a graduate of the Dragon Boys gang in California. He has a rap sheet for sexual assault and extortion, but he’s clean right now. He prides himself on being inscrutable, and he’s got an ironclad alibi for when Travers went for his drive.”
    Tony let out a sigh. “Sounds like he may be a dead end, at least for now.”
    I rubbed the back of my neck. Tony and I had known each other for decades, and he’d been chief for much