by S. J. Rozan
I frowned. I didn’t like it, but she was right.
“How did you find out?” Nora asked me. “That Mrs. Blair was responsible?”
“Did she say I did?”
“She was very impressed with you and your partner, she said. She congratulated me on hiring you. She said you reminded her of herself when she was young, except you were braver.”
I sat up a little straighter and tried to keep my chest from swelling. “She’s being very generous. Anyway, we didn’t figure it out. We were close but on the wrong track. Once we knew about the laundered porcelains it started to come together, but I’m not sure we’d have gotten it if she hadn’t come out and said it.”
“How did you know about the laundering?”
“Dr. Browning.” I thought of Dr. Browning, his anxious solicitude for his little ones, their gleaming small presences in his dim, musty room. I thought about the reason Hamilton Blair’s ghost was angry with Mrs. Blair. I made a decision. “He remembered something he’d forgotten about the Kurtz museum. It tied things together for us.”
“Poor Dr. Browning,” she said. “It’ll break his heart when he hears that those pieces were destroyed.”
“It will,” I agreed. And cause him to treasure the tiger cup I still had in my office safe even more deeply, when I gave it back.
Almost as deeply as Mrs. Hsing would treasure hers.
“You should have told me about Matt,” Nora said then, her eyes on mine. “I could have helped him.”
“He thought he was helping you.”
“And you. And you thought you were helping both of us. And now look.”
“Has …” I hesitated to ask, but I did anyway. “Have they found him?”
She shook her head. “He’s completely disappeared. I think he may have headed back West. He has a lot of friends out there, in all sorts of places.” I was silent, not wanting to ask the next question, not feeling I had any right to the answer. Nora answered it anyway. “I told Mary all the ones I knew. But I think he has a lot of friends I don’t know about.”
“You sort of hope it, right?” I asked quietly.
“I don’t know what to hope. I don’t know how to think about this at all.”
I didn’t either, know what to hope or what to think.
Nora got up, turned on the electric kettle. We sat in silence until it boiled. Spooning jasmine tea into a creamy white pot, Nora said, “There’s going to be a major investigation at the Kurtz. One of the Board members called me this morning about being on the outside committee.”
“Are you going to do it?”
“Probably. The more credentials we acquire in the outside world the better it is for CP.”
“Caldwell’s other assistant,” I said. “Steve Bailey? I don’t think he knew anything about it. It would be good if you could clear him. He loves this work. It would be a shame if he came out looking bad and couldn’t work in this field anymore.”
“That’s one of the things we’ll try to do, then. But I don’t know anything about investigating.”
She handed me one of the thick cups. I tasted the tea. It took me a minute to understand what she was saying to me.
“Nora? You want me to be involved?”
“We’ll need a professional investigator. You already know about this case.”
“I can’t believe you ever want to work with me again.”
“You’re pushy and headstrong.”
“That’s what my mother says.”
She smiled. “But no one can say you’re not discreet.” Her face got serious again. “You just have to learn to trust other people, Lydia.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, sipping my jasmine tea. “I’m working on it.”
When I left Chinatown Pride I called Bill. He was home, so I went over. I walked along Canal Street through the sunny, cold day, stopping to glance at the earrings and scarves, the electronics parts and the leather jackets the shopping crowds were pawing through. Two tall black men were selling Rolex knock-offs from a stand set up on a pair of cardboard boxes. I watched them stamp their feet and blow puffs of steam out with each breath. I wondered if they were the Senegalese vendors Bill had spent the night with, and what Waloof sounded like.
At a Korean fruit stand a few blocks from his place I stopped and bought flowers. He buzzed me in and held the apartment door open while I came up the steps.
At the top I handed him the bouquet.
He kissed my cheek. “You brought me flowers?”
“The etiquette book says always bring flowers to people who spend the night in jail for you.” I unzipped my jacket. “You didn’t have to do that, you know.”
“I had no idea how much you wanted to tell them. I thought it was safest just to keep my mouth shut. You would’ve done it if it’d been my case.”
“Oh, you think so?” I flung my jacket and hat on the sofa.
“I know it. That’s why I bought you a present.”
He lifted a ribbon-tied shoebox from his desk.
“Wait,” I said. “I want to tell you some stuff first, that you probably don’t know.”
“This must be important stuff. I’ve never seen you turn down a present before.”
“I’m not turning it down. I’m saving it.”
“Okay. Sit down, and tell me the stuff.”
I started with Matt’s disappearance. He already knew; he’d called a friend in the NYPD and asked him to check on the situation.
“I don’t know how I feel,” I said. “He gunned down two people in cold blood. I saw him do it. I ought to want him caught.”
“But you don’t.”
“I don’t know,” I said again, helplessly.
“You don’t have to want anything. The police are going to do what they do and they’re going to find him or not. You can’t stop them and you can’t help, can you?”
I shook my head.
“Then you don’t have to decide how you feel.”
I looked into his deep brown eyes, just looked for awhile. “You know,” I said, “sometimes you’re particularly smart.”
“Don’t spread it, you’ll blow my cover. Open your present.”
“No, there’s still something else.”
“What’s that?”
“Jim Johnson.”
“You’re kidding. You smoked him out?”
“Not exactly. I found out who he was working for.”
“Who?”
I told him who, and why, and what the scene with Tim had been like.
“My mother thinks he was worried about me. But that wasn’t it. And it’s not the point anyway,” I said at the end. “Even if he was worried about me, it’s because he thinks I’m no good at what I do. Otherwise he wouldn’t think I’d screw up. Is he right?”
My question caught Bill off guard. “Is Tim right? About what?”
“Me being an incompetent, lousy detective.”
Bill lit a cigarette, shook out the match, looked at me with an expression I wasn’t sure how to read.
Finally he said, “Open your present.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“It’s the same subject.”
He reached for the shoebox and handed it to me. I took it; it was surprisingly heavy.
“Lead Nikes?” I asked doubtfully, weighing it in my hands. I untied the ribbon and lifted the lid.
Under one layer of crumpled red tissue paper and nestled on another was a Smith & Wesson Model 10 .38 revolver.
I lifted it out, broke it open. It was empty, so I took aim, fired, let the hammer click. It fit my hand perfectly. I opened my mouth to say something and realized there was a lump in my throat. Oh, come on, Lydia! I thought. You’re getting choked up about a gun.
“I didn’t like you running around with a .22,” Bill said. He was grinning. “I asked Mike when I called about Matt Yin whether there was any word that they’d found guns anywhere they’d searched. He told me no, so I figured your .38 was gone. So I got you a new one.”
“You can’t do that,” I stammered.
“Why not?”
“Well, for one thing, you can’t do that. You can’t just buy me a gun and give it to me in a shoebox. There’s paperwork. There’s all sorts of things, i.d. and things—”
“I know. We have to go do the paperwork. The guy who runs the gun shop where I got it is a friend of mine. I promised I’d bring you in this afternoon. We’d better go or he’ll kill me. And we need to get all that done in time for dinner.”
“Dinner?”
“Doesn’t the etiquette book say you have to take your employee to dinner at the end of a case?”
“Oh, I’m taking you?”
“There’s a clam house in Hoboken where they make linguini with calamari that’s been haunting my dreams.”
“I thought I haunted your dreams.”
“No. You haunt my every waking moment. My dreams are still my own. But I’ll tell them to you if you want.”
I put the gun carefully in the box, put the box carefully on the coffee table. I got up, walked over, and kissed him. The kiss made me think of another, on a bench by Central Park under the glow of a streetlight.
“You know,” I said, “I think someday I might want you to do that. But not now.”
I stood up and straightened my shirt. “Right now, I think we should go do the paperwork Then maybe I’ll take you to dinner. There’s this clam house in Hoboken where I hear they make great linguini.”
I picked up the gun in the shoebox. We put our jackets on and we locked up Bill’s place. Sunshine glowed off glass and chrome and the cloudless blue sky seemed huge, endless, and full of possibility as we walked out onto the New York streets.
If you enjoyed China Trade, read on for an excerpt from Concourse, S. J. Rozan’s next exciting mystery featuring Lydia Chin and Bill Smith…
O N E
At Mike Downey’s wake the coffin was closed.
In the large front room at Boyle’s Funeral Home, dark-dressed women kissed each other’s cheeks, murmured gentle words. The older men stood together in small groups, looking uncomfortable in out-of-date suits; the younger ones, Mike’s friends, passed a surreptitious flask, and told each other stories about Mike they’d all heard a hundred times, and laughed too loudly at the stories.
Bobby Moran nodded to me across the flower-choked room. He spoke parting words to the men around him and headed over. His limp was worse than I’d seen it, giving him a halting, rolling gait.
“Kid,” he said. “Thanks for coming.” His face, usually ruddy, was gray, the slackness on the left side pronounced. His blue eyes were pale, washed-out. Twenty-five years ago, when I’d met him, Bobby Moran’s eyes had been sharp and clear as a January morning.
“I’d have come anyway,” I told him. “Even if you hadn’t called.”
“I was afraid you’d be out of town. Upstate.”
Bobby knew me well enough to know that about me: that I try, if I can, to spend some time at my cabin this time of year. I was born in the South, raised on Army bases in Europe and Asia, and though I’ve lived in New York since I was fifteen, the extravagance of an eastern hillside in autumn still amazes me.
“I was going,” I told Bobby. “I put it off.”
“Thanks.” He looked away. “Seen Sheila yet?”
“Just now.” Mike’s widow, to whom I’d said clumsy words, sat by the coffin. She was quiet, but she seemed to be trembling inside, like a teardrop held together by surface tension.
Bobby and I stood in silence for a moment, surrounded by voices and soft light. The air was sweet with white roses, camellias, lilies. Bobby said, “I need you, kid.”
“I owe you, Bobby. You know that.”
He scowled. “No, to hell with that. I’ll hire you. I’ll pay you. Pay you better than the dumb fucks who work for me now. Pay you better than I used to.”
I shook my head no. He nodded his yes.
“It’s just—I’d do it myself,” he said, his voice tight with targetless anger, “but I can’t. I’ve got no one else to ask, kid. I’ve got no investigators anymore. I gave that up, because of this…” He trailed off, gestured at his left side, where the arm hung slack and the leg limped. “This” was Bobby’s stroke. “But the guard business, I thought I could keep that up. Take dumb fucks, train ’em and pay ’em, how hard could that be? How goddamn hard?” He didn’t meet my eyes.
“Come with me,” I said.
We worked our way through the crowded room, Bobby’s eyes fixed savagely ahead, acknowledging no one’s words of comfort or greeting.
We crossed a deeply carpeted hall to a small, plain chapel where a crucifix hung. Beside it a stained-glass St. Patrick, staff raised and halo glowing, drove the snakes out of Ireland. The panel shone from behind, lit by fluorescent lights. Bobby gave me a shaky grin.
“Ah, piety,” he said.
From my jacket pocket I took my own surreptitious flask, handed it to him.
“I’m not supposed to,” he told me.
“Who is?”
He eased onto an upholstered folding chair. The chairs were set in rows; I swung one around to face him. He pulled on the flask, handed it back.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I told him, words no one who needs them ever believes.
“Yeah,” he said. “My sister’s son. The dumb fuck.” He looked at St. Patrick, or maybe at the snakes. He said to me, “How soon can you start?”
I drank from the flask. I’d filled it with Bushmill’s, Bobby’s drink, thinner than my bourbon, and smoother. “Just tell me what you want me to do.”
Bobby turned away from St. Patrick, to me. “Do? Do what I goddamn taught you to do, kid. Do your job.” He looked around the chapel as though looking for something to help him say the words. “Find out who killed Mike.”
T W O
We sat in the St. Patrick chapel for a while, as Bobby sketched for me the place I’d be going and the people I’d meet there. It was like the old days, Bobby giving me a job, sending me out; but it wasn’t like that at all.
“You can trust Al Dayton,” Bobby said, running down his mental list, but absently, as though his thoughts were elsewhere. “Been with me seven, eight years. Been job super out at the Bronx Home since I took it on three years ago.”
“Who had it before you?” I tried to ask normal questions, things I’d need to know, as though this were just a normal case.
“Nobody, they did it themselves. Their maintenance guys doubled for security, like in a lot of places, but the neighborhood got worse. You know.” He shrugged. “Arab shopkeeper on the next block was shot in the back by some local punks. That was the last straw for the organization that runs the place. Helping Hands, they’re called. Their offices are in the Home building.”
“They’re a charity?” I passed him the flask.
“Yeah. And listen, watch out for the lady who runs it.”
“The Home?”
“No, that’s Dr. Reynolds. Nice guy. No, I mean Mrs. Wyckoff. Eats guys your size for breakfast. Only thing she cares about is Helping Hands’ reputation. Just don’t make the place look bad, you’ll be okay.”
I sipped whiskey. Bobby said, “Listen, kid, you want me to tell Dayton why you’re there? He’s a good man. Ex-Navy man, like you.” He tried a smile, but it didn’t get far.
“Not a recommendation,” I said.
He grunted. “Could help, having someone who knows the place working with you.”
“No. I’ll go in alone. But I’ll want someone working with me, on the outside.”
“Doing what?”
“I’m not sure. Poking around.”
I expected more discussion, maybe even an argument, but Bobby just shrugged and said, “Okay, kid. Play it however you want. Let me know, whatever you need.”
I let my eyes wander the chapel: the soft cream walls, the altar where candles waited to be lit, St. Patrick glowering down on us the way Bobby used to glower when I screwed up, in the early years. I wanted to say something t
hat would erase the pain and helplessness from Bobby’s eyes, but I didn’t know what that was, what could do that. So I drank some whiskey, and I said, “I’ll need to talk to the police, whoever’s handling the case. Can you set it up? Is it someone you knew?”
He shook his head. “I’ve been off the job a long time, kid. There’s almost no one left I knew. But I set it up already. Hank Lindfors, at the four-one.”
I had to smile at that. Bobby knew my moves; but then, he’d taught me most of them. “Did you speak to him?”
The old fire flashed in Bobby’s eyes, just for a second. “For Chrissakes, I’m a cripple but I’m not senile! Sure I spoke to him. Asshole,” he added.
“Me or Lindfors?”
He looked as if he were making up his mind; then he said, “Lindfors.”
“What did he say?”
“He said I’ve been off the job twenty years and I don’t know what it’s like out there anymore. He said he doubted if I liked it when civilians crapped up my cases then, and he doesn’t like it any better now. He said there’s an ongoing police investigation and if my private talent screws it up he’s going to throw you and me and everyone we ever met in the can, just to make his quota.”
“Big quota.”
Bobby looked away. “He told me to go back home and wait, not to call him again. He said he’d call me if anything broke.” Anger and shame darkened his face. “Like an old man, kid. Like what you’d say to an old man.”
“Asshole,” I said. “Lindfors,” I added.
Bobby shook his head. The color receded, left him gray and tired, like before.
“Will Lindfors see me?” I asked.
Bobby took the flask from me, drank. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“Christ, kid, I don’t know. Maybe because he doesn’t know you.”
“Oh, thanks.”
He looked at me swiftly, then gave a short laugh. “Well, he’s all yours.”
I started to take out a cigarette, but St. Patrick glared. I shoved it back in the pack. “Does Lindfors have any leads?”
Bobby waited before he answered. “It’s his opinion”—he emphasized each syllable in ‘opinion’—“that Mike surprised a gang of kids who came over the wall. He faced them down and he lost.”