by S. J. Rozan
“Shut up and listen. You missing any girls?”
“What?”
“That’s what happened to Lei-lei, right? She went off with a john and she never came back? So you followed her GPS?”
“She went off with you. And how—”
“Anyone else missing?”
Warily: “Not that I know about. What the hell’s going on?”
“Call around and ask. There’s a lunatic out there kidnapping Chinese hookers.”
“Oh, right, the lunatic! You still trying to sell me that bullshit?”
“Hey, I’m not in your car getting stomped on by Ming anymore. Why would I call to sell you anything? This guy’s kidnapping Chinese hookers and he’s got one on Sixty-second Street. Corner of Madison. A custom tailor shop. Closed. You may have to break in, but I’m sure Ming and Strawman can take care of that.”
“How the fuck do you know?”
“He’s leaving me clues. He thinks this is a game.”
“Why?”
“He hates me.”
“He’s not alone.”
“He says if I keep following the clues I’ll find my partner.”
“What does this have to do with my girls?”
“My partner’s Chinese. A woman. He’s playing with me.”
“Your partner— Wait, a Chinese girl private eye? Not what’s her-name, Chin, Lydia Chin?”
“You know her?” A spark flared in my chest, but any hope that the better angel of Chinese solidarity might change Lu’s attitude was squelched right away.
“She’s a pain in the ass around Chinatown, of course I know her. That’s all I need in this shit—her, too.”
I went back to business: “Look, Lu, check out the tailor shop. Only thing, when you find your girl, if there’s anything else there, I want it.”
“Anything like what?”
“An orange plastic bag.” Whatever Lu had to say to that, I didn’t want to hear it. I hung up, grabbed my jacket, told Linus and Trella, “I’m going up there.”
Linus reached the door before I did, pulled it open. “We.” Woof bounded into the hall.
I stopped. “ ‘We,’ nothing.”
“What are you going to do?” Trella asked. “Take a cab?”
“And plus, dude, no way we’re hanging here in Stinkville.”
“If Mary finds out—”
“What? We’re not, like under arrest or anything. She can’t make us stay here.”
“She’ll be mad as hell.”
“She’s been mad as hell since I was five. I don’t remember why.”
I looked at them. “All right. But I drive.”
They exchanged glances, then Trella nodded. Linus shrugged.
“Where are you parked?” I said when we hit the street. The air was crisp and cold and car exhaust had never smelled so good.
“Bus stop, two blocks.”
We were halfway to the car when my phone rang.
“Smith.”
“A girl named Angelique. Where you said, Sixty-second Street.” It was Lu, not sounding any friendlier just because I’d been right. “She doesn’t answer her page.”
“Same whorehouse as Lei-lei?”
“ ‘Whorehouse’? Fucking asshole. No, a different crib.”
“But a high-class girl?”
“That’s all I run, cocksucker.”
“Yeah, fine. You on the way?”
“I’m almost there. I swear, if this is some setup, Fatboy Cho or somebody—”
“Yeah, that’s a hell of a setup, Sixty-second and Madison in the middle of the day.”
“Maybe the cops are waiting.”
“For what, Ming to kick down a door so they can hang a B&E on his fat ass? They don’t sit around with kidnap victims waiting to see who shows. I’m telling you, they don’t know she’s there.”
“But you do. Why aren’t you calling them? Instead of me?”
“The lunatic you don’t believe in? He said no cops or he’ll kill Lydia. This Angelique—how long has she been gone?”
He grunted. “Her mama-san says she left early last night.”
“And she hadn’t been missed yet? A little careless, looks like to me.”
“The john was taking her to a party. With friends. He paid very, very well. That kind of thing can run long. Listen, you son of a bitch, I still don’t get why you’re calling me. If this is a game and you’re supposed to find that Chin bitch by finding my girls, why don’t you just go up there and find her?”
“Can’t risk it. That cop, the one who stopped you, she let me go—”
“Why?”
“Christ, why do you think? I bought her off!” Linus, eavesdropping, looked at me in mock shock. “But I’m still on the top of every cop’s list, for murder and assault. Show my face in Midtown, I’m completely fucked.”
“So I’m supposed to break into some closed store? Help you out?”
“Why not? Someone sees you, you say she didn’t answer her phone, you were worried about her. As a friend.”
“And me finding her, your lunatic’s good with that?”
“I’ll deal with him.”
“Or I could just cut my losses. Write Angelique off.”
“He’ll keep doing it. Angelique won’t be the last.”
“You threatening me?”
“Christ, Lu, how stupid are you? Forget it. Hell with the lunatic, I’ll send the cops, they’ll find her, she’ll get deported, screw you. Or maybe she hates the idea of going back so much, she’ll roll on you and your operation. If they give enough of a shit to offer her that deal. Or are you too small time?”
A moment. Then: “You and me, Smith, we’re not done yet.” He hung up.
Half a block later, Linus, Trella, Woof, and I reached the car. Parking in a bus stop is risky business. They really do tow. But through the windshield I could see a bright orange card on the dash. EMERGENCY TELECOMMUNICATIONS REPAIR. KEEPING NEW YORK CONNECTED. It had a New York City seal in the right corner, New York State seal in the left.
“That works?” I asked Linus.
“Has that Homeland Security smell, know what I mean?”
Trella pressed the unlock button on the keytab, then flipped me the keys over the hood. She, Linus, and Woof had scooted inside before I got my door open.
“You don’t trust me?” I said, buckling in. “You think I’d drive off and leave you?”
“Dude.” Linus grinned.
Trella beside me, Linus and Woof in back, I started the engine and peeled out, cutting off a bus.
New York traffic lights are timed. If you’re not a cop car with a light bar and siren, the best idea is to keep it to twenty-eight mph. Any slower, any faster, you get caught behind a red. I learned that long ago and that was the speed I drove at all the way uptown.
With my jaw clamped, and fingers almost tight enough to crush the wheel.
Once we were rolling steadily I unhooked one hand, took out my phone, dialed Mary.
“Bill? What?” Her peremptory voice was fuzzed by traffic noise.
“You’re going to have company at the tailor shop. That pimp, Lu? He’s on the way.”
“What are you talking about? How do you know?”
“He called me. He’s missing another girl.”
“And she’s there?”
“Apparently.”
“You didn’t tell him to stay the hell away?”
“He’d listen to me? Besides, it’s good. Whatever happens, better him than you. It’ll throw the lunatic off his game, and you won’t get made.”
“He’ll think you sent him.”
“If I have to I’ll tell him about the GPSs. And I told Lu if there’s an orange bag in there, I want it.”
“You think the clues are there?”
“No, I think it’s the same as before: I’m supposed to find a dead Chinese woman, then get more clues. But just in case.”
“So I’m supposed to let Lu and his boys stomp all over a crime scene?”
“Do what you h
ave to do. But if our guy’s rattled he might make a mistake.”
“Or decide this whole game was a mistake.”
That was a risk. When all roads lead down, you go with the least steep. “Watch for Lu,” I said, and clicked off.
From the back, Linus said, “That was pretty slick.”
“It’s true.”
“Sorta. You didn’t say you called him first. You also didn’t say we were on the way.”
“She didn’t ask.”
“Hah! But dig, dude. You also also didn’t tell Lu his girl was dead.”
“He wouldn’t go if he knew.”
“And the place might be wired again, like last time. Cops might come anyway, whatever Aunt Mary does.”
“They might.”
“That’s slick, too.”
“Linus? He’s a pimp who puts GPS chips in his girls.”
“And besides, his guy beat the crap out of you.”
“You think this is personal?”
“It would be with me.”
I lit a cigarette. Trella rolled her window down. “It would be with me, too, any other time,” I said. “Right now, everything’s about Lydia. All I care about is buying time, and the guy calling me again.”
“Dude?” Linus asked. “You really think we can find her? Lydia?”
“We have to.”
After about a hundred years we hit Sixty-first Street. I swung over and pulled into a bus stop on Madison.
“You guys stay in the car until we know what’s going on.” I got out and Trella slid into the driver’s seat.
“Where are you going?” Linus demanded.
“I want the lunatic to know I got here.”
“Well, don’t go over that way, dude. There’s Aunt Mary’s car, with Aunt Mary in it.”
“And up there,” I said, “there’s Lu’s.”
The Escalade idled in a no standing zone two blocks away. No one got out, and no giant Chinese men were icebreaking through the pedestrian river. Lu must have beat us by a lot; Ming and Strawman must already be inside. I was about to slam the door and leave when I heard the pulse of a distant siren.
“Dude, it was wired! Here come the cops,” said Linus.
Trella and I agreed.
We were all wrong.
When the siren wailed around the corner, it wasn’t coming from a cop car. It was an ambulance.
11
The ambulance sped past us, setting Woof howling, and pulled up at the closed tailor shop on the far corner. I squinted to read the tattered awning: BUCKINGHAM HABERDASHER. The window, in chipped gold leaf, added, CUSTOM AND BESPOKE GENTLEMEN’S CLOTHING. REWEAVING. REPAIRS. ALTERATIONS. The door’s glass was smashed and sprinkled on the sidewalk. Like iron filings to a magnet, people had started to collect around the scene. A break-in and an ambulance, your classic New York sideshow. A few folks who had somewhere to go—a dog walker, a chubby woman, three guys in business suits—pushed impatiently through, but the corner was growing thick with people who didn’t.
That worked for me, because they hid me from the Escalade. I left the car, crossed the street, broke through the crowd. I couldn’t risk staying here long, where cops were sure to show, but if the lunatic was here I wanted him to see me. Probably he wasn’t. Probably he was safe in his basement, wherever he had Lydia locked up, listening to his police scanner. But maybe he had a closed-circuit camera. Or X-ray vision.
Something moved inside the dusty storefront. The EMTs wheeled a gurney from the ambulance but they didn’t get inside. Strawman burst out the door, held it open for Ming, who followed, his sport coat swathed around a small Asian woman he carried in his arms. My heart lurched: but again, not Lydia. No, not Lydia. Ming laid her down on the gurney and the EMTs buzzed around, fitting a mask to her face and a drip to her arm. They covered her with a blanket, rolled the gurney into the ambulance, and took off. Their siren, dwindling in the distance, crossed paths with more sirens rushing our way.
I stood stunned on the sidewalk. This girl was alive. That had never entered my mind.
The best way to fight the lunatic for time, doing what he wanted while I tried to outsmart him, how to use her—his second victim—to help me: all that I’d been frantically working on. That she was alive, that she could be saved, and the flip side, that while we were screwing around with disguises and cleverness she could have run out of time: that never occurred to me.
The approaching sirens turned out to be cops, two cars. Fade back into the shadows, Smith, you’re a wanted man. SON OF A BITCH! I wanted to shove my fist through a wall. But a voice in my head said, Later. Lydia.
I was trapped playing games with a lunatic, for Lydia.
I’d almost let a girl die, as part of his game.
I’d told Linus it wasn’t about me.
That had better be true.
I retreated to a Starbucks across the street, fueled up on a coffee the size of a popcorn bucket, watched a cop who’d just arrived hold a long discussion with Ming and Strawman. Strawman showed him the same granite disinterest he’d shown me. Ming waved his concrete-block hands around. Neither looked once toward Lu’s black Escalade.
Finally Ming tapped behind his ear, at what would have been his hairline if he’d had hair. From his belt he unclipped a handheld device, showed it to the detective. The GPS thing was a new one on this cop, too. I could see that in the stare, the recovery shrug. The detective spoke to two uniforms, and Ming and Strawman were loaded into the back of a radio car.
Two blocks uptown, Lu’s Escalade pulled out, blended into traffic.
This was Manhattan, not Brooklyn. This wasn’t a homicide, at least not yet. Ming and Strawman would be out in an hour. A B&E into an empty building to save a life, what judge wouldn’t laugh that out of court, creepy GPS notwithstanding? But it wouldn’t be long before the NYPD connected this to the dead girl in Red Hook. And connected them both to Lu. What would happen then? The lunatic can’t have thought he could scatter bodies around—similar bodies, a pattern of bodies—just for me, and the cops would stay out of it. I gave it two hours, maybe a shade over or under—depending on whether Angelique lived, and woke up, and talked—before detectives were pounding on the door of her whorehouse. Her crib. Another five minutes until they hit the street again, armed with her mama-san’s description of the man Angelique went off with.
The same description Brooklyn Homicide, with the help of Chinatown Vice, would have gotten from Lei-lei’s mama-san.
The description Lydia had encoded in that first phone call.
Which also fit me.
I looked up the street. Mary, who’d found a legit parking place, hadn’t left her car. The detective entered the tailor shop and the crowd began to drift apart.
I wondered which of my phones would ring first.
The new one.
Lu.
“Motherfucker. You’re dead, motherfucker.”
“Are you crazy? You think I did that?”
“Did what, dead man? Tried to kill my girl? Or set me up? Fucking cops, you said there wouldn’t be any fucking cops!”
“Back off. One: the guy who killed Lei-lei was responsible for this, too. And two, who called 911 for an ambulance? You, right? Ming, Strawman? What the hell did you think would happen?”
“Where are you?”
“I was watching. Now I’m on the move.”
“You get your kicks like that, watching? I’ll kill you.”
“You’d be wasting your time. And the lunatic would still be going after your girls. This—Angelique? Was she poisoned, same as Lei-lei?”
“Like you don’t know.”
“Humor me.”
“Sick fuck. You want to hear it? She was on the roof. Tied, gagged. In a baby-doll nightie.”
Shit. “It was cold last night.”
“Cold today. She wasn’t even shivering anymore. That what you were looking to do? Freeze my girl to death?”
“Christ, you sound like you care.”
“Sweet kid,
Angelique. A favorite of mine. That why you picked her?”
“God almighty, you trip over that ego when you walk? I don’t give a shit about you, your girls, your operation. All I want is my partner back.”
“From the lunatic who kills Chinese girls.”
“That’s right. Who left the orange plastic bag on the roof with Angelique.”
“Oh, right. The imaginary bag, left by the imaginary lunatic.”
“It wasn’t there?” No surprise. I’d just been hoping.
“Nothing was there except my girl, freezing to death. Don’t ever stop looking over your shoulder, motherfucker.”
“If I were you I’d focus on keeping an eye on your other girls. Until I get this lunatic, maybe you don’t want to let them out of the house.”
“How am I supposed to make a living?”
“Oh, there’s the Lu I know. See you around, amigo. I have to find my partner.”
He paused. “If there really is a lunatic, don’t you think when you find her, she’ll be dead, too?”
“I hope not,” I said. And again: “I hope not.”
I called Trella, told her to drive around to the other side of the block where Mary was less likely to spot her.
“Where are you?”
“In Starbucks, waiting for the cops to clear off.”
I drank my coffee. Something was scratching at the back of my brain. I tried to stop thinking, to give it room. Angelique, in a nightie, left to die in the cold. Lei-lei, poisoned. Same pimp, different cribs. Brilliant clues, great game. Frozen, poisoned. Poisoned, frozen.
I’d just about finished the coffee when my phone finally rang. Not the new one, mine.
“You can’t really be that stupid?” Under the mechanical monotone, an earthquake rage. “You can’t really think you can call the cops and I won’t mind? Just because last time I called the cops?”
“I didn’t. I didn’t even get there first.”
“What I hear, you didn’t get there at all.”
“You hear wrong. I’m here. Why don’t you come up, see for yourself? Your sources obviously suck.”
“If you’re there, who’re the rice-eating gorillas? That my sucky sources told me about?”
“They work for the girl’s pimp. They called the ambulance, the dispatcher must’ve called the cops.”