by Rhys Bowen
I went on my way toward the Golden Dragon Emporium. The sight of that man had unsettled me even further and I wanted to get this over with. I reached the store and saw that shutters covered the windows and the front door was firmly locked. I hadn’t expected the Chinese to follow the laws of the Sabbath, and it now occurred to me that perhaps it would stay shut on the coming holiday. I just hoped that the mail slot on the front door to Mr. Lee’s residence would be big enough to take my package, because I wasn’t going to risk coming back here a third time.
I went up the steps slowly. Before I reached the top several Chinamen ran past, shouting to each other in animated fashion. My thoughts turned to tong wars and I shrank into the shadow of the building, half expecting shots to ring out. But they didn’t seem to notice me and disappeared into the On Leong headquarters next door. When I reached the top of the steps I was surprised to find the front door was open. I was just leaning inside to put the package on one of the stairs when I heard the most extraordinary sound—it was the wailing of a soul in torment, the sound of a wounded animal, unearthly and frightening. And it was coming from the top of those stairs.
I looked up and saw that the upper door was open, which was also strange, considering that it had been locked on the other occasions I had been here. Telling myself I was being a fool I crept up the stairs toward the sound. There was no houseboy in the hallway and the sound came from just behind the screen into the living room, so loud that it now echoed through the high ceiling of the hallway. My thoughts went to the Chinese demons that screen was supposed to keep out, but I had to find out what it was. I crept toward the screen and peeked around it—and reeled in surprise: a tiny old Chinese woman sat on the sofa, rocking back and forth. What drew my attention immediately were her feet. Her little legs stuck out like a china doll’s, too short to reach the floor, and peeping through from the hem of her shiny black trousers were tiny little stumps instead of normal feet. Each stump had a red brocade shoe on it, no bigger than a baby’s slipper. I recoiled, thinking she had had both feet amputated until I remembered what had been said about small-foot wives. I was actually looking at a small-foot wife.
All this passed through my head in an instant until the intensity of the sound obliterated any rational thought. Her mouth was open and from it came a continuous wave of horrific wailing. Her eyes were wide open and staring and I wondered if she was having some kind of fit, and should I perhaps go to help her. I also wondered where Lee Sing Tai and the servants were that they didn’t hear her and let her carry on like this.
At that moment I was conscious of another sound over the wailing—heavy footsteps. Someone was coming down the flight of stairs from the floor above. I tried to dart back into the stairwell, but I was too late. I saw big boots, dark blue trouser legs.
“For pete’s sake stop that row, woman,” a deep voice boomed in English. “It gives me the willies.” Then a burly New York police officer came into view. I had nowhere to hide. He saw me and reacted with surprise.
“Who are you? What the devil are you doing here?” he barked. He took in what I was wearing, my neat straw hat and gloves. “Don’t tell me you’re on one of these slumming tours, poking your nose into other people’s business?”
If I’d been smart I would have said yes. But I didn’t want to be seen as a nosy parker with no right to be in the house. “I’m delivering this package to Mr. Lee,” I said.
“What kind of package?”
“A photograph that he lent me.”
Without warning he took it from me and ripped it open.
“Hey,” I said angrily. “That is private business between Mr. Lee and me.”
“Is that so?” He glanced at the photograph, put it on the hall table, then proceeded to open the letter.
“You have no right to do that,” I said indignantly. “It’s personal correspondence. What do you think you’re doing?” I tried to snatch it back from him, but he fended me off.
“Oh, I have every right,” he said, something akin to a smirk crossing his face. His eyes scanned down the letter. “He hired you? What for exactly?”
“If you really must know, he’d lost a piece of jade and he wanted me to find it for him.”
“That’s not what it says here.” He was staring hard at me with cold blue eyes. “You no longer wish to handle this case since the buying and selling of humans goes against your conscience?” he read, raised an eyebrow, and then waved the letter at me.
“This is not what you might think,” I said hastily. “He arranged to have a young bride shipped over from China and—somehow she has gone missing. Naturally Mr. Lee is most worried and hired me to find her. Nothing criminal and therefore nothing of interest to the police.”
“Really?” He was still staring hard at me. “A bride shipped over from China?”
“That’s how the Chinese arrange marriages, apparently.”
“Then who’s the old broad on the sofa if he’s just marrying a young bride?”
“I gather she’s his first wife. They can take more than one in China.”
“But not here in the States. It’s called bigamy.”
I lowered my voice. “Look, Officer, between you and me, I don’t think he actually intended to go through a proper marriage ceremony over here with the new one. She’d be called wife number two, but really just a concubine.”
“And now she’s run away, has she?”
I could feel my cheeks getting hotter. When I am being backed into a corner I start to defend myself. “Look, I just told you—this has nothing to do with the police,” I said. “I don’t know why you are grilling me. It’s a missing persons case, not a crime. And besides, if you’re trying to pin some kind of criminal activity on Mr. Lee, I thought he had an understanding with the police and they left him alone.”
“I don’t know who told you that!” the policeman snapped. “But perhaps it would have been better for him if we hadn’t left him alone.”
“What do you mean?”
“Which way did you come down Mott Street this morning?”
“From Chatham Square. Why?”
“Because had you come from the other direction, you might have noticed a commotion around the corner on Pell Street—you’d have spotted a crowd, including some of my men. It appears that Mr. Lee Sing Tai fell off the roof of his building during the night.” He paused to watch my expression, a rather satisfied one on his own face.
“Fell off the roof? You mean he’s dead?”
I have to confess that the wave of emotion that shot through me was not of horror but of relief. Now I would never have to face him. Now Bo Kei would be free of him.
The satisfied expression turned into a smirk. “There aren’t many people who survive a fall from that height unless they have wings,” he said. “Of course he’s dead. Smashed as flat as a pancake.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, because it was expected of me. Actually I wasn’t sorry at all.
“So the only question in my mind,” the officer said, still not taking his eyes from my face, “is whether he fell by accident or whether he was pushed.”
Sixteen
I stood there in the dark hallway, trying not to let my face register any emotion. I recognized the policeman now. He was the officer who had accompanied Daniel at the Elizabeth Street station.
“When did this happen?” I asked.
“Sometime during the night, I suppose. The old guy is wearing his nightshirt and I gather he’d been sleeping on the roof.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I was told that he liked to sleep on the roof during hot weather.”
“That will certainly make it easier for us,” he said. “He walked in his sleep and tripped over the low parapet.”
“And if he didn’t?” I asked.
He eyed me critically. “Then somebody pushed him, and if I don’t find out conclusively who that person was, then the rumor will go around that it was a member of Hip Sing. In case you don’t know about such t
hings, it’s—”
“The rival tong,” I said. “I do know.”
His eyes narrowed. “You seem to be remarkably well versed in Chinatown politics,” he said. “What exactly are you—one of the Irish wives from around here?”
Again I should have kept my mouth shut and just claimed to be a friend. But I don’t always stop to think through consequences. “Not at all,” I said. “I’m a private investigator. That’s why Mr. Lee hired me.”
“Really?” He was looking at me with interest tinged with amusement now. “A female dick. That’s a novel one.”
He glanced down at my letter he was still holding. “Murphy, is that the name? Molly Murphy? I’ve heard of you before somewhere.”
I wasn’t going to say that my name had probably been mentioned as Daniel’s future wife. “I have worked on cases in this part of the city,” I said.
“Have you, by george? What kind of cases?”
I tried to think of harmless things I might have done in the Lower East Side—certainly not dealing with Monk Eastman and his gang. “Another missing person case once. A girl who had come over from Ireland. Her family wanted to trace her.”
I hoped he’d be satisfied with that, but he was still frowning. “And why exactly did old Lee hire you particularly to find this bride?”
“I suppose he thought that a young woman like myself could move among other young women in the world outside of Chinatown, without arousing suspicion.”
“I see.” He paused. “And what made him think that his bride had run away and not been kidnapped by Hip Sing, for example?”
“I asked him the same question,” I said. “He indicated that his spies had looked into that aspect thoroughly before he thought of hiring me.” I hesitated, then went on. “From what I understand of the Chinese, I don’t think Mr. Lee would have resorted to hiring an outsider and a female unless he’d done everything he could himself to recover the young woman.”
“That’s true enough,” he agreed, then he stood looking at me, head cocked to one side, like a bird’s. “You know what I find interesting? That Mr. Lee smuggles in a new bride from China—which I might point out to you is breaking the law to start with, Chinese women not being allowed to enter the United States. Then this bride does a flit, he hires you to find her, and immediately afterward he plunges to his death. Odd chain of events, don’t you think? And in my twenty years of experience in the New York Police Department, I’ve always found that when strange things happen, one after the other, there’s always a connection.”
He was staring at me, long and hard, as if he expected me to crack and confess all. “Now look here,” I said, my hackles rising. “I don’t know if you’re hinting that I might have had anything to do with his death. If so, I’ve no idea why you’d think that. For one thing, he hasn’t yet paid me my fee—and now he’s not going to, so I’m left out of pocket. Besides, I’d never met the man before and I have no interest in Chinatown or its inhabitants.”
As I said this, unwanted thoughts were racing through my brain. I could think of several people who might want Lee Sing Tai dead, and first on the list was his runaway bride. The officer’s mind must have been working along the same lines because he said, “So you haven’t located this runaway bride yet?”
Now what do I say? Lying to the police was a serious matter, but I also realized that she’d make a perfect scapegoat for them, so that the case could be solved neatly and a new tong war would not erupt. “I did start to look for her. I went around the local missions. But as you can see from the letter, I decided to withdraw from the case,” I said. “I realized that I didn’t wish to be any part of this sordid business. I don’t approve.”
Suddenly his expression changed. He was no longer looking at me as if I was his prime suspect. I could see an idea had just come to him. “Look, Miss Murphy, I’m Captain Kear of the Sixth Precinct,” he said. “Can I ask you to do something for me? Nobody has officially verified the identification of the body for us yet. The old woman in there couldn’t make it down the stairs on those feet, even if we could get her to shut up.”
“What about the servants?” I asked.
“They must have run off when they heard the police were on their way,” he said. “There was nobody in the house when we got here and the door was wide open. Probably thought we were going to blame them. And the Chinamen in the crowd suddenly can’t understand any English or claim to be complete strangers.”
“Is Mr. Lee’s son nowhere around?” I asked.
“He has a son?”
“Bobby Lee,” I said.
“Oh, Bobby Lee, that’s right. Old Lee’s paper son, isn’t he? I haven’t seen him for a while. I heard old Lee shipped him out to the cigar factory in Brooklyn after the last dustup with Hip Sing.”
“He was around here yesterday,” I said.
“Was he? I’ll send someone to look for him. But in the meantime I wondered if you’d take a look at the body yourself. If you’re not too squeamish, that is? I need him officially identified before we move him. These Chinese would lie to their grandmother if it suited them. They all claim they’ve never seen him before.”
“All right.” I swallowed hard. Frankly I was not at all keen to view a body described as flatter than a pancake, but I had my image as a cool-headed detective to uphold, and I was rather flattered that Captain Kear was treating me as an equal and not as a helpless woman who might swoon at any second.
He ushered me down the stairs ahead of him. The street was still deserted and the church was now silent. I thought that probably any sensible Chinese had shut himself in his rooms, just in case he found himself grabbed as a suspect or new tong violence erupted. There was still a crowd around the body. Hardly any of them were Chinese, but there were curious Italians, Jews, and Irish, being held back by constables. I heard one of them saying, “Here’s the captain now,” as Captain Kear elbowed his way ungraciously through the crowd.
“Is the morgue wagon on its way?” he asked one of the constables holding back the crowd.
“Yes, sir. Should be here any moment.”
“And the doctor?”
“Been summoned, sir,” the same constable replied. “Might have a problem locating him. It’s a holiday.” His tone implied that it should have been a holiday for him too, if he hadn’t been summoned to this scene.
“And has somebody been to HQ on Mulberry to request a photographer? I want a photograph of him before he’s moved.”
“I’d say he’s not looking at his best for a photograph,” one of the constables quipped and got a general laugh.
“Get going then, Mafini.” The captain barked the order.
One of the constables forced his way through the crowd and took off, running.
“I’ve brought this young lady to identify him,” Captain Kear said. “If you don’t mind taking a look, Miss Murphy.”
I sensed the curious stares of the crowd as they parted for me to step closer. I took a deep breath, then looked. He was lying on his back, spread-eagled like a starfish, limbs sticking out at unnatural angles like a broken rag doll. His mouth was open in surprise, his eyes staring up at the sky. He was wearing a nightshirt that made him somehow look even more pathetic, like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. The white nightshirt was now spattered with blood. There was a great pool of blood around his head, now black with a carpet of flies. I shut my eyes and looked away.
“Yes,” I said, turning back to Captain Kear when I had composed myself. “That is definitely Lee Sing Tai.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Come away now. I’ll just need a few particulars and then you can go.”
I looked back at the corpse. “There is no way he’d have landed like this if he’d tripped and fallen,” I said, as the thought came to me. “He’d have fallen forward and landed on his face. He had to have been pushed.”
As I said the words I heard a murmur go through the crowd and a couple of Chinese at the back took off running. Captain Kear looked up and frown
ed. “It wasn’t the smartest thing to say that out loud,” he said. “They’ll be reporting back to On Leong in seconds.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think. Besides, you said they didn’t understand English.”
“Only when it suits them. Most of them understand pretty well.” He took my arm and dragged me away from the crowd. “If what you say is true, then we’d better make it quite clear that we don’t see this as a tong murder. For starters, I’d like to question your runaway bride. Why don’t you come back with me and you can give me her particulars and tell us how far you’ve got on the search.”
He’d phrased it as an invitation, but it really was a command.
“You’d better come along to take notes, O’Byrne,” the captain added. “And I want the missing servants found. Houseboy and cook, wasn’t it? And I gather there are usually bodyguards outside his place. Where the hell were they? They’ve run off too. Get to it, Hanratty, and spread the word that these men are our main suspects if they don’t show up immediately. The rest of you keep the crowd away. Ask if anyone saw him fall, or saw anything at all. Not that I’m hopeful that anyone will come forward, but we can try. Oh, and make sure someone comes to get me the moment the doctor and photographer arrive.”