MQuinn 03 - Lethal Beauty

by Wiehl, Lis

  She remembered her feet and where they were. “I guess I’ll worry about it when I get home.” Bringing herself back to the matter at hand, Mia asked, “Do you think Kenny was telling the truth?”

  “About what? Since Scott was his accountant, it’s pretty likely there’s a lot Kenny doesn’t tell the truth about, starting with the IRS and probably moving out from there.”

  Mia had found a note to Kenny that Scott had written shortly before he died. He had warned him that, when compared to his credit transactions, Kenny seemed to be underreporting his cash and that the IRS was going to notice. Scott hadn’t spelled out any remedy. At least not in writing. But she had since learned that he had helped other clients hide money from the IRS.

  “I think Scott probably helped him get better at hiding things.”

  “And didn’t you tell me Scott had to warn Kenny about—what was that term?”

  “Guan-xi.” Mia pronounced it gwan-she. “I guess in China they say, ‘No guan xi? No good!’ Kenny tried to spin it as being all about building relationships.”

  “In America, otherwise known as bribes and kickbacks.” Charlie shook his head. “I think the guy in the morgue is Lihong, and I think Kenny knows it. He probably figured it was safer to hedge his bets. And you also can’t tell me he believes that all his workers are here legally. Financially, it probably makes more sense for him to look the other way. That way you can pay people below the market rate, because where else are they going to go? But maybe Lihong’s papers were so bad he decided he had to turn him loose. Or I guess it could even be like he said—that Lihong spent all his time out back smoking.”

  “Or maybe Kenny fired him because he was complaining about the way they were being treated. Remember what Lihong told me? He said something about Kenny hurting them. In fact, I saw Kenny hit him.” Mia remembered the shock of it, Lihong cowering, his hand raised. Kenny hadn’t known he had a witness.

  “Was he physically hurt?”

  Mia didn’t know. “It was an open-handed slap.”

  Charlie’s mouth twisted. “That would certainly sting, but would it leave a permanent mark? There were plenty of bruises on that body. Even if it does belong to Lihong, who’s to say the bruises were from Kenny? Maybe he got them after he was fired.”

  “Didn’t you say they were in different stages of healing? Maybe they were accidental, like those wok burns.” Thinking of what Kenny had said, she asked, “Do you think Lihong could have killed himself? No job, no money, no papers, no English. He must have felt pretty hopeless.”

  Charlie made a raspberry sound. “So how would that have worked? He stood naked in the Sound, fired the gun at his own back at what would have to be near point-blank range, yet somehow managed to make it so that the bullet didn’t punch through him and it didn’t leave any powder burns on his skin? I don’t think so. So please stop beating yourself up.”

  Mia remembered Lihong’s face, the desperation warring with hope as he beckoned to her. “He was looking at me like I was going to save him. And instead, I just forgot about him.”

  “You were in the middle of a big case, remember? In fact, you almost got killed. And it’s not like Lihong gave you a lot to go on. Besides, if Kenny’s right, and he was looking for help with illegal papers, there’s no way you could have helped him.”

  “He got fired, he came looking for me, and he didn’t find me. Maybe he wasn’t desperate enough to commit suicide, but he could have been desperate enough to do something illegal. He wouldn’t have had a lot of other options for making money.”

  It was irrational—she hadn’t even known Lihong had been looking for her—but Mia couldn’t help feeling she had let him down. Twice.

  As Mia was speaking, Charlie lifted his head to stare at the restaurant. The back door had opened and the bow-tied manager walked out. He got into a small, dark Honda just as a white fifteen-passenger van pulled up at the back door. The rest of the restaurant workers—and certainly there were more than the fifteen the van should hold—shuffled out of the restaurant and started filing on. Even from this distance, their slumped shoulders and dragging footsteps made it clear just how tired everyone was.

  Charlie started the car. “I’m starting to get the feeling Chun doesn’t live alone,” he said.

  CHAPTER 26

  Charlie followed the white van, hanging far enough back not to arouse suspicion but not so far that he might lose it. When it turned to get on the freeway, he got closer, leaving only one car in between. Even so he almost missed the van when it suddenly took an exit without signaling.

  Was the driver trying to lose him? But as they started driving through a run-down area that paralleled the freeway, the van didn’t take any more evasive maneuvers. Used car lots and small, worn-out-looking houses were interspersed with strip clubs and restaurants offering pho or tacos. A car pulled up to a girl standing on the corner, and she leaned in to bargain.

  Finally the van stopped in front of a shabby two-story house that had once been white. To the right was a windowless tavern. To the left stood a house with boarded-up windows and a listing FOR RENT sign in the yard.

  “Home sweet home,” Mia said as Charlie drove past the workers who were beginning to climb out of the van. He circled the block and pulled into the trash-strewn 7-Eleven parking lot kitty-corner from the house.

  “You still want to try to talk to Chun?” he asked. Thin seams of light showed on the edges of the windows, which appeared to be covered with newspapers. “’Cause there’s gonna be an audience.”

  “At least the manager won’t be there.” She waved one slender hand at their surroundings: the cracked asphalt, the shabby buildings, the tags on any blank surface. “I’m sure when people dream about coming to America, this is not what they picture.”

  “Maybe living in this neighborhood gives them the incentive to work hard so they can climb the ladder and get to someplace better.” Charlie didn’t really believe that, and judging by the look Mia gave him, she didn’t either.

  The white van passed, empty now except for the driver. That meant a minimum of fifteen people were living in what looked like a two-or three-bedroom house.

  Mia was tapping on her phone. “This is the app I was telling you about.” She held it out in landscape mode. On one side it said English and on the other Chinese. In the middle was the illustration of a button. “You press that before you start talking and then again when you’re done. It listens to you, figures out whether you’re speaking English or Chinese, and then translates it into the other language.”

  Charlie was impressed. “How the heck does it work? Are there real people sitting in a room someplace on the other side of the world, translating away?”

  “Not for a five-dollar app. I think it just uses some database to make its best guess. And sometimes what it guesses doesn’t make much sense.”

  They got out of the car and walked up the now-empty driveway. The lawn was nothing but calf-high weeds. As they went up the chipped concrete of the front steps, Charlie could hear people moving inside, a few quiet conversations. Then he knocked on the door, and all sound ceased.

  He knocked again. “Chun?” Mia called out.

  On the far side of the house, a door banged open. A figure barreled through the side yard and then down the street. It was a man, shirtless and barefoot. And flat-out panicked.

  “We’re not with ICE. Not ICE! Tell them.” Charlie turned to Mia. “Have your phone tell them we’re not ICE.” ICE was US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

  She hit the speaker button on her phone. “We’re not with immigration. We just want to speak with Chun. We are friends of Lihong.”

  After she pressed the button to translate, a mechanical-sounding voice began to speak, presumably repeating her words in Chinese while Mia held the phone up toward the door.

  Finally it creaked open an inch. Two. A frightened eye peeked out.

  “What do you want?” A young woman’s voice. Charlie thought it sounded like Chun.
r />   “We don’t care about your status, or anyone’s status,” he said. “We just want to talk to Chun. We want to talk about Lihong.”

  Farther back in the house, people were arguing. They sounded panicked, angry. Charlie didn’t have to understand Chinese to guess what they were arguing about. Their voices were overlaid by a steady chirping. It was the sound of a smoke detector with a dying battery.

  Finally the girl opened the door. It was Chun. She was biting her lip.

  Charlie went in first and almost fell. Mia grabbed his elbow. He had tripped on one of several dozen pairs of shoes parked next to the front door.

  The carpeting was a dirty gray, worn to the backing in places. Laundry hung from a rope strung on their right. To their left was what should have been the living room. Instead, it held a set of bunk beds and an air mattress.

  The people they had seen working at the restaurant tonight—plus several more who must have been laboring out of sight—were huddled together at the edge of the kitchen, staring at them. One middle-aged woman was weeping silently, tears sliding down her face. A skinny old man was drinking something from a bowl, his face impassive. His yellow T-shirt said Sarah Goldberg’s Big Fat Bat Mitzvah! None of them paid the slightest attention to the beeps of the smoke alarm.

  Charlie took Mia’s phone from her and spoke into it. “Don’t worry. I’m not with immigration. I’m with the police.” He pressed the button to translate. After a few seconds, characters showed up on the Chinese side and the phone began to speak.

  Their expressions changed, but not in the way he had thought. At the news that he was a cop, they wailed and hid their faces, or cowered with their arms wrapped around their heads. They looked, Charlie realized, like they thought he was going to hurt them. It was one thing to be feared because someone felt guilty when they looked at you because of something they had done. This was something else entirely.

  He tried again. “I don’t care about your immigration status. We just want to ask you some questions about Lihong.”

  “No!” said a man in English. Charlie recognized him as one of the waiters. He shook his finger at Chun. “They should not be here. You should not have let them in.”

  “But, Feng—” she started to say.

  He cut her off with a wave of his hand and stomped out of the room.

  “So Lihong talk to you?” Chun’s expression trembled between hope and fear. “You help us?”

  “Help with what?” Mia asked.

  “We work every day. But no money. The boss, he takes our tips.”

  “You be quiet,” the older man said. He had burn marks on his wrists and hands that looked like the ones on the body. “The bosses will know you talked.”

  The girl lifted her chin. “They come here because of Lihong. They help us.”

  Charlie was counting in his head. With the addition of the guy who had run out and the waiter who had stormed out, nineteen people were living in this small house. Split that many ways, the rent on this dump of a place had to be next to nothing.

  “Can we talk to you alone for a minute?” Mia asked Chun.

  After a moment, she nodded. “We can go up.” She started up the narrow stairs, and they followed.

  At the top there was a short hall with four doors, two on either side. Three were padlocked. The fourth belonged to a small bathroom with a peeling linoleum floor. Chun hooked a string from around her neck. At the end was a key, which she put into the nearest door on the right-hand side.

  The room was crammed with two sets of bunk beds as well as clothing, food, battered suitcases, and old shopping bags now stuffed with belongings. A white ten-gallon Kikkoman soy sauce bucket had been balanced on one top bunk to catch water that was leaking through the ceiling.

  “This place is a death trap,” Charlie whispered in Mia’s ear. The sole outlet bristled with cords, and old smoke marks streaked the wallpaper above it. The window looked like it had been painted shut.

  Since there wasn’t really any place to sit, they all stayed on their feet.

  “So Lihong told you?” Chun asked again. This close, Charlie could see her lips were trembling. “You help us?”

  “Kenny told us he fired Lihong,” Mia said. “Why did he do that?”

  “Kenny always say Lihong lo sow.” Her face scrunched up as she sought the English word, smoothed out when she found it. “Trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “He talk back to the bosses. He break things.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Maybe … ten days? No one hear him go, but we know why. To get help. He always saying we not treated right. That this is America.”

  “Not treated right,” Charlie repeated. “Are you paid minimum wage?”

  Her eyebrows drew together. “What is this?”

  “You should be making something like ten dollars an hour.”

  Chun looked at him for a long second and then laughed as if he had told a joke. Charlie realized she hadn’t been asking him for the amount she should be paid. Instead, she was unfamiliar with the idea of minimum wage altogether.

  Charlie and Mia exchanged a glance, then she said softly, “Are any of you in this house legal immigrants?”

  Chun didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. Her expression was answer enough.

  It was clear that Kenny could pay them whatever he wanted. After all, who were they going to complain to?

  “What about the bruises on your wrist, Chun?” Mia asked. “Where did those come from?”

  She looked from Mia to Charlie. “My skin is tender.”

  Did she mean she was an easy bruiser, or was she saying her skin was sore from being bruised? Meanwhile, Chun clearly had other things on her mind.

  “So Lihong talk to you? You help us?” she asked again. “We need help. Help to be legal. Help to be free.”

  Mia sighed. “I talked with Lihong at the restaurant once, but it wasn’t for very long. Then about two weeks ago, I guess he tried to come to my office. But I never saw him.”

  Her eyes went wide. “Then where is he?”

  “The thing is, Chun, a body has been found,” Mia said softly. “It might be Lihong’s.”

  “You mean he is dead?” The girl put her hand to her mouth.

  “We don’t know whose body it is for sure,” Charlie said.

  “How is he dead?”

  “A gunshot wound.”

  “A gun?” Her eyes darted around the room as if she were trapped and seeking an exit. Her whole body was shaking now.

  “Yes,” Mia said. “If it was Lihong, do you know anyone who would want to kill him?”

  She clamped her lips together and stiffened her body, as if trying to force herself to be still. She stared at her hands, which were squeezing each other so tightly that her knuckles had turned white. “We do not know America well. He must have met the wrong people.”

  Charlie said, “Does Lihong have any family here?” If he did, maybe they could identify his body.

  Chun shook her head.

  “Is there a hairbrush or comb of his here? A toothbrush? Clothes, even?” With luck, they could match DNA. But Chun just shook her head again.

  “Who is his closest friend?”

  “No friends.” Seeing their expressions, she hastened to explain. “In China, we did not know one another. And here we just work. Work and sleep. No time for friends.”

  Mia’s expression softened. “Didn’t you come here wanting more than that? Didn’t you come here with a dream?”

  “We have no dreams now.” She lifted her head to look at them. Her face was drawn, her eyes empty of hope. “Now we know what we are. We are so low.”

  And when he showed her the picture of the dead man’s face, she said she did not recognize it.

  The thing was, Charlie was pretty sure she was lying.

  CHAPTER 27

  SATURDAY

  Kenny fisted his fingers in the hair on top of Chun’s head. He yanked up until she was looki
ng into his dark, dead eyes. Then he raised his free hand and drew it back over his shoulder. The movement was slow and deliberate. Almost theatrical. As if he were enjoying himself. And judging by his smile, he was.

  Chun twisted her head to one side, ignoring the sharp pain as her hair began to rip free from her scalp. There was no way she could run or hide or even protect her face because she was handcuffed to a pipe. The same pipe Ying had been shackled to before she had finally been taken away.

  Chun knew that Ying’s fate would soon be her own.

  No matter how much she tried to tuck her head, to turn her face away, she couldn’t avoid Kenny’s slap. She had lost count of how many times he had hit her. This blow was so hard that for a moment she saw sparkling white dots of light floating through the air. Her mouth filled with a sharp, salty taste of blood. Her tongue probed the sharpest source of pain. One of her teeth was loose.

  The rest of her housemates were watching in silence, clustered on the stairs or standing farther back in the basement. Kenny had insisted they gather around, serve as the audience for her punishment. She was the lesson they were supposed to learn. This was what happened when you talked to outsiders.

  Through the one eye that could still see, Chun looked from one face to the next. Feng pressed his lips together and slowly shook his head as if to say, I told you so. Most of the others adjusted their heads a few millimeters so they would not meet her gaze. A few were biting their lips or twisting their hands, but she knew none of them would interfere.

  At this moment, all they wanted was to not be her. They would do whatever was required to avoid her fate. The only one who might have been willing to stand up to Kenny was Lihong. And now he was a cold body in a metal refrigerator drawer in a country far from home.

  “You knew the rules,” Kenny said. “But you talked to the police. You talked to that woman.” He used the term that meant old barbarian or foreign Westerner.