by S. J. Rozan
At the mention of Joel she lost a little starch. “It wasn’t worth enough. Joan needs much more money than that. Mr. Chen and Mr. Zhang had to believe Wong Pan had the Shanghai Moon and was desperate to sell it before I caught up with him. So they wouldn’t ask why it wasn’t offered on the open market.”
“You knew who they were?” Mary? Girlfriend? Any time now.
“Of course. But they had to believe I didn’t. That Wong Pan was ahead of me. I thought it was a clever plan, but I’m a plodding lawyer, not a strategist. Joel called that morning to ask why I’d inquired about a detective before I’d even left Zurich. I put him off with a promise to come in and talk about it. Then I called Wong Pan. Just to say we had to hurry. I didn’t know he’d already made a deal with the White Eagles, already gotten a gun from them, already killed that Shanghai policeman. Lydia, I’m so sorry.”
“I knew it. I knew you didn’t mean to have anything to do with killing Joel.” I tried to sound as if I’d had faith in her all along. “Alice, put the gun down. This can all be worked out.”
“No. I’m going to jail, I don’t doubt it. And I should. So many bad things were my fault. But I’ve got to take care of my sister first.”
“I’m very sorry.” Mr. Zhang spoke up, and he really did sound sorry. “But my cousin and I don’t have the money you’re asking for.”
“You were going to pay a million dollars for the Shanghai Moon. I’ve looked into your history of chasing it. That was part of my research for my plan. Like asking about a detective.” She shook her head sadly.
“Yes. And earlier today we had it, and could have given it to you. Now it’s gone. Even the police don’t know where.”
“Someone stole it, Alice,” I said. “Before the noodle shop.”
“What are you talking about? Who?”
“We don’t know. So you see-”
She shook her head. “No. No.”
“Yes. I-”
“No!” In rising panic, she said, “There must be more! Anyone willing to spend that much, there must be more.”
“No.” Mr. Zhang’s voice was gentle with regret. “No more.”
Maybe I should go for the gun, I thought, even in this crowded room, before Alice totally loses control.
Suddenly her face brightened. “Jewelry! Oh, yes! I’ll take what you have here and sell it, and Mr. Chen, I’m sure you’re insured! Everyone will be fine! Oh, I wish I’d thought of this sooner!” Smiling happily, she stood and gestured for Mr. Chen and Mr. Zhang to get up. Mr. Zhang rose and helped his cousin, whose pale face was sweating.
Okay, I thought. We’ll go to the front, and someone will see this crazy lady with a gun and call the cops. Or I’ll distract her and Bill can jump her. Or Mary will finally turn up.
I followed Bill, who followed the cousins, with Alice behind us. Irene Ng’s confusion when Bill and I charged in was nothing to her shock as our little parade came out.
“It’s all right, Irene,” Mr. Zhang said soothingly. Mr. Chen didn’t speak.
“Lock the door,” Alice told Irene. The young assistant seemed rooted to the spot, but Alice moved the gun an inch or so, and Irene hurried to the front.
Mr. Zhang spoke again, calmly. “Irene, please open that case”-he pointed to a display of diamonds, sapphires, and emeralds in gold settings-“and put everything into a bag.” Irene’s wide eyes found Mr. Chen, who managed a nod. With shaking hands she unlocked the case, took a velvet sack from a drawer, and slipped necklace after bracelet after ring into it. I glanced at Alice, hoping her hands weren’t shaking, too. All right, I thought, bystanders, it’s time to show some Chinatown spirit. Get involved! Call a cop! I mean, here was a daylight robbery on Canal Street. Someone had to care.
Someone did, too. Just not someone I was expecting.
Irene had the case emptied when shattering glass tinkled and the burglar alarm started to shriek. Shards rained, a brick hit the floor, and seconds later so did my cousin, Armpit.
Bill, less dumbfounded than I-or just more able to function in surreal situations-yanked Alice’s hand ceilingward. A bullet screamed and brought down a spray of plaster.
And that was it. Bill had the gun. Alice’s face crumpled into disbelief, then defeat. She leaned heavily on the emptied case.
As the alarm howled, everyone but Alice stared at my cousin. Blood oozed onto his skeevy tee from a cut down the center of his new tattoo. His face was scratched, too, from his dive through the broken window. Bill asked Irene to turn off the alarm, and by the time the screeching stopped I’d located my voice.
“Armpit? What are you doing?”
He looked up at me as though I’d just won the Year’s Dumbest Question prize. “She was holding up the store.”
“You didn’t have to come crashing through a window. You could have called the police.”
“The police? Are you tripping, cuz? Old Man Chen pays good money for his orange trees.”
I just stared, and stared some more. Could I really be related to the only gangster in Chinatown dumb enough to think a protection racket was about protection?
Apparently I was.
“Dai lo and all are in jail,” Armpit explained. “Someone has to take care of the customers.”
Armpit’s astounding brainlessness and attendant bravery merited hours of discussion, which they would certainly get. For one thing, I couldn’t wait to tell my mother.
But I’d have to wait. Mr. Chen, pale and sweating, collapsed in a heap on the glass-strewn floor.
41
“You wouldn’t consider”-Mary stirred honey into her tea-“moving to, say, New Smyrna Beach, Florida?”
“Why would I?”
“Because I understand they have no crime there.”
Bill and I were sitting with Mary and Inspector Wei over debriefing caffeine in a diner near St. Vincent’s. Mr. Chen’s heart attack, serious but survivable, had put him on the same floor in the same hospital as his cousin C. D. Zhang.
“If I did, you’d have to explain to my mother why you made me go all the way there.”
Mary had a solution to that: “Take her with you.”
That was a laughable idea, but I wasn’t ready to laugh in Mary’s company yet. I was cautiously optimistic, however, that her attitude toward me might have improved, based on her afternoon. The Helga Ulrich tip had given her Alice’s hotel room at the Peninsula and Rosalie’s jewelry in the hotel safe. And though Fishface Deng and his attorney were still swearing the White Eagles had been up to absolutely nothing, Alice, completely deflated, had already told her story on NYPD videotape. Plus one more thing: that she’d hired Fishface to shoot at us-and miss-in Sara Roosevelt Park. As a diversion, in case I’d brought cops along to hamper her escape. Since in fact I had, I could only admire her foresight.
“You know, Lydia,” Mary said, “for someone who was supposed to be your client, you’ve messed up her plans right and left.”
“I thought her being my client didn’t matter to you.”
Mary gave me a searching look, and then a sigh. “I know how hard this was for you guys, turning a client over. I appreciate it.”
From Mary, at that moment, that was huge. “You do know we wouldn’t do this for just any cop?”
Inspector Wei grinned slyly. “You mean, if officer needs informations is Detective Mulgrew, you don’t give?”
“If officer needs a Kleenex is Detective Mulgrew, I don’t give.”
“Well, as long as we’re talking about things no one likes,” Mary said, “I might as well tell you this: The DA wants to charge C. D. Zhang as a co-conspirator.”
“What?” My tea took on a bitter taste. “You can’t.”
“Not us, the DA. He stole the money.”
“Um. I don’t think he stole the money.”
“He had to. Who else?”
Keeping things from Mary made my tea taste even worse, but I just said, “Well, what if he did? If Mr. Zhang won’t press charges-”
“If it’s part of
the conspiracy, it doesn’t matter. They won’t charge him with theft, just racketeering. The DA doesn’t really want him. They want to squeeze him into rolling on the White Eagles.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
“Then I guess he’ll go to prison.”
“Mary! He’s an old man!” Which she’d pointed out to me just a few hours ago.
“That’s why he’ll cooperate. I’m sure he’d rather have his relatives know he stole their money than end up in Green Haven.”
“What if he didn’t?”
“Cooperate?”
“Steal it.”
She shrugged. “Then maybe he can help figure out who did.”
That was it for the diner meeting, besides Mary’s suggestion that I leave town, which was looking better and better. Bill and I declined her offer of a ride and stood on the corner watching her and the inspector drive away.
“I would seriously hate it if C. D. Zhang went to prison for not stealing his brother’s money,” I said.
Bill didn’t answer, just lit a cigarette. I waited, in case it helped him think. “If he didn’t steal that money-”
“Then who did? I know,” I said crossly. “But-”
“No, wait. If he didn’t, it might be because it wasn’t there.”
I eyed him. “The briefcase was full of newspaper from the beginning? Why?”
“There are only two possibilities I can think of.”
We discussed them. Neither was pleasant, and it didn’t take long. We didn’t discuss what to do next. But as if we had, we stepped off the curb and headed for the hospital in perfect sync.
We found Mr. Zhang sitting in Mr. Chen’s room, drinking vending-machine tea. He smiled when he saw us. “It’s kind of you to come,” he whispered. “I’m afraid my cousin is asleep. Can I offer you tea?”
“Thank you, we just had some,” I said. “Mr. Zhang, we need to talk to you.”
Mr. Zhang glanced at his cousin, hooked to a bank of blinking, peeping, and line-drawing machines. He stood and led us down the hall to a sitting area. We settled on bright vinyl chairs, which didn’t match my mood at all.
“How’s Mr. Chen?” I asked, before we started on the real business.
“Doing well, thank you, for which I’m grateful. His son is on his way here.”
“And your brother?”
“Also recovering nicely. He’ll be going home soon, I believe.”
Then came an awkward silence while Mr. Zhang waited politely to hear the reason for our visit and I mentally tried out and trashed a number of openings. Bill gave me a look that asked, Want me to do it? I shook my head. These old Chinese men were my problem.
“It may be,” I told Mr. Zhang, “that your brother won’t be going home. The district attorney is planning to arrest him.”
“Arrest him? For what?”
“They think he was part of the conspiracy with Alice Fairchild and Wong Pan. That together they hired the White Eagles. Then he double-crossed the others, stole your million dollars, and was planning to blame the gang.”
Mr. Zhang’s round face turned pale. “Oh, but that’s nonsense. My brother, the White Eagles? It’s ridiculous.”
“Maybe, but they’re going to charge him.”
“He’s my brother. I won’t have him arrested. I don’t care what he did.”
“They don’t either. It’s a pressure tactic. They want him to give them the White Eagles.”
“I’ll say there was no theft. I’ll say I told him he could have the money.”
“It’s not the money that matters. It’s the conspiracy.”
“They cannot do this!”
Bill, with all the authority of a large white man, said, “Yes, they can.”
I gave Mr. Zhang a moment to worry. “But here’s the thing. He told us he didn’t take the money. And we believe him.”
“It makes no difference whether he did or didn’t,” Mr. Zhang tried stoutly once more.
I hated this. I gave Bill back that look: Yes, you do it.
“I’m sorry,” Bill said, quiet, respectful, “but you’re wrong. What matters is that he didn’t. Because when all he does is tell the truth, even under threat of prison, when all he says is he got a locked briefcase from you and when it was opened it was full of newspaper, they’ll begin to doubt their theory. Then they’ll start looking around for the real conspirator.”
Out the window, summer twilight was falling. In here, hospital fluorescents notwithstanding, it seemed already dark.
“There never was a million dollars in that briefcase, was there?” Bill asked, though we all knew the question was rhetorical. “Or maybe there was, but not by the time your brother got it. Maybe when you got it from Chen. Your brother told us most of the money behind this hunt was yours, but most isn’t all. This money was your cousin’s. And you’re the one who stole it.”
Mr. Zhang’s eyes widened in what looked like true surprise. “No! Certainly not. Steal from Lao-li? I would never do that.”
“It’s the only way it makes sense,” Bill said, “if your brother didn’t take it. Are you saying he did?”
Slowly, Mr. Zhang shook his head. “No. No, he did not.”
“Well, there’s only one thing left,” I elbowed back in. It wasn’t fair to make Bill do it all. “If your brother didn’t take it and you didn’t take it, Mr. Chen must have stolen the money from you.”
There it was, the heart of the matter, the theory Bill and I had worked out on the street corner, the theory I hated so much. One of these close, loving cousins was swindling the other.
And as had happened so often in this case, it turned out we were right.
And wrong.
“No,” said Mr. Zhang. “Lao-li would no more steal from me than I from him.”
“Sir,” Bill said, “even if we believe you, the police won’t. That newspaper’s going to eat at them. They won’t stop until they find out where it came from and where the million dollars went. One of the three of you knows.”
An orderly rolled a tinkling cart down the corridor, passing us just as Bill said “million dollars.” He raised his eyebrows and grinned. Mr. Zhang abruptly stood. “Come with me.”
We got on the elevator, but we weren’t alone there, so it wasn’t until we were outside in the damp twilight that Mr. Zhang said angrily, “The million dollars went nowhere. There was no million dollars.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said flatly. “How were you going to buy the Shanghai Moon?”
“We were not going to buy the Shanghai Moon. Wong Pan didn’t have it.”
“That’s clear now, but you couldn’t have been so sure before.”
Mr. Zhang gave no answer.
“You were taking a big risk,” Bill said. “Losing what you’ve been after for so long.”
“There was no risk. My brother would have known whatever Wong Pan presented him with for what it was-a fraud.”
“Your brother hadn’t seen the gem since he was a boy.”
“He’s a man of fine eye. He wouldn’t need to be able to recognize the Shanghai Moon to know that Wong Pan was attempting to pass off, at best, some other gem, and more likely a worthless piece of glass.”
I said, “But what if he wasn’t?”
“He was.”
“Then why go through the charade?” Bill asked. “Why send your brother to the meeting at all, if you were so sure?”
“I was sure. My cousin wasn’t.”
“Why not just tell him your reasons?”
“Oh,” he said, almost too softly to hear. “I have.”
“No,” I snapped. “No, I don’t buy it. You’ve been hunting this gem for forty years, racing around the world. An offer as promising as this comes along and you’re absolutely sure it’s not worth following up? Then you go through a whole dangerous farce just to humor your cousin? I don’t believe it.”
“However, it’s the truth.”
Wham. I’d had it. Why was I arguing with this old man? So much love, so
much loss wrapped around this jewel across sixty years, and these guys were screwing with each other over money? “Okay. You know what? It’s not my problem. Joel’s killer’s been found, Rosalie’s jewelry’s been found. We’re done. Good-bye, Mr. Zhang. Maybe you’ll be lucky and the police will forget about the missing million dollars. But don’t count on it.”
I’d stepped from the curb and raised my arm for a cab when I heard, “No, Ms. Chin, please.”
The taxi sped away again as I turned. “What?”
Mr. Zhang drew a breath. “I have no right to ask for your help, but I must. This investigation cannot continue. This is a private matter, involving only my brother, my cousin, and myself. We must be allowed to settle it.”
“A private matter? Two people dead, fake passports, stolen jewelry, missing money, gangsters shooting up the streets? Oh, no, this investigation is going to continue. The next thing they’ll do is subpoena your bank records, yours and Mr. Chen’s. They’ll find out whose money it was and who was cheating whom.” Would you look at that? The world’s falling apart and Lydia Chin finally gets her grammar right.
“You can’t let them do that.”
“I can’t stop them.”
“My cousin is a sick man! Knowing that money wasn’t there could prove dangerous! Thinking I was cheating him-!”
“But you were.”
“Not in the way you think.” Mr. Zhang’s accustomed calm had vaporized. His voice was hot and his eyes pleaded.
“But you were.” I heard the sorrow in my own words. Right up until this moment I’d been waiting for another explanation, one that would make all this make sense and these old men still turn out to be the close and caring family they appeared.
Bill spoke, probably because he knew I couldn’t. “Mr. Zhang? Even if we knew the truth, I’m not sure there’s anything we could do. But without it…”
Mr. Zhang shook his head desperately. He stepped from the curb and flagged down a cab. I expected him to get in and speed away, but he held the door, all anger and impatience. We got in with him and in silence drove back to Chinatown.
42
The silence continued as we climbed the stairs to Fast River Imports, as Mr. Zhang unlocked the door and shut down the alarm, and as he switched on lights and took us through to his office. The terra-cotta soldiers on the windowsill seemed suspicious and alert.