I used the stairway to go from the first to the third floor, wanting to get a better sense of the building itself. It was a dark and dreary stairway.
I passed apartment 3B, the empty one. I was too early for the Wens, so I decided to check it out. The door opened without effort. Inside, the sun illuminated what appeared to be a relatively new paint job.
It had the same layout as Norman Chinn’s. It was starkly white. On the floor was a drop cloth. I kicked the canvas, which also had newish spots of lime and lemon as well as dozens of other trampled-upon colors. In the folds of the cloth I noticed a piece of thin yellow cardboard. Just a torn edge. It was from a box. I recognized the color and a portion of the name Kodak.
I put it into my pocket as I looked around for signs of a struggle or blood. If there had been a struggle, there was nothing in the apartment to reveal it. There was no blood. I checked the bathroom. There were ashes in the sink. There was a cigarette butt floating in the toilet bowl. I poked it with a hanger. Filtered, but otherwise unidentifiable.
Of course it seemed strange that the first person I’d see after noticing this was someone with a cigarette.
SIX
May Wen was attractive. I guessed her to be in her late twenties or early thirties. But even if I were good at telling ages, it would be next to impossible to tell what lay beneath the heavy application of makeup. It was around noon on Saturday, and it looked to me as if she could be on her way out to a midnight soiree.
She puffed on a cigarette as we stood waiting in the living room for David Wen, her husband, to emerge from the bedroom.
“I don’t have a lot of time,” she said. “My boss is throwing a little brunch.”
“It won’t take long,” I said. “How well did you know Ted Zheng?”
“One couldn’t not know him,” May said. “He’s always around, always in your face.”
“Did you like him?”
“I didn’t dislike him,” she said. “But we didn’t socialize, if that’s what you mean.”
Her deep-colored lipstick matched her deep-colored fingernails. Her tight-fitting slacks were made of something shiny. Patent leather maybe. Latex. She spoke English like a native. No trace of an accent. I thought she might have come from Hong Kong, but what did I know?
“Did he ever work for you? Do odd jobs maybe?”
“No,” she said vaguely.
“Painting? I understand he sometimes did that around the building.”
“No, I do all the painting,” David Wen said, coming into the living room carrying a Moschino suit bag and matching suitcase. He extended his hand. David couldn’t have been more different from May. He was dressed casually. He wore jeans, loafers without socks and a baggy sweater. Nice smile. Poised.
“We didn’t know Ted very well,” David continued. “We saw him in the hallways. Seemed okay.”
“He was okay,” May said. Her smile was to an imaginary audience, one her husband didn’t see.
“I think he had a crush on May,” David said. His tone was indulgent, amused, not jealous.
Her smile was hateful.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. He seemed like a nice guy. I’m sorry about his death. Gruesome. Right here in the building.” He shook his head.
“Did either of you see him on the night he died?”
“No,” May said.
“No,” David said. “I was out of town. I remember coming home the next day and May telling me about it.”
“You travel in your job?”
“Some,” he said.
“Some?” she repeated, rolling her eyes. “You practically live at the Ritz-Carlton.”
“I’m not gone all that often. It’s just that when I am, it’s for long periods of time.”
“How well did he get along with the others in the building?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know much about the others in the building,” May said. “Actually, this isn’t my ideal place to live.” She shot her husband a glance.
“We’re looking.” This was a response to May, despite his looking at me when he said it.
“Did the nature of Ted’s death bother you much?”
“No. These things can happen anywhere.”
I got the sense that this was an attractive couple riding high on the trends, living in the now of their choice. They wanted desperately to be or at least appear successful. This too made them seem an unlikely couple for Chinatown. Here, it seemed an older Chinese culture was struggling to hold on to its own way of life. These two didn’t look like they wanted the old ways.
Now I was well ahead of my schedule. Too much ahead to intrude on the Siu sisters.
I went out for a walk. I had about an hour to kill. While I walked through the narrow and crowded streets, gathering in the smells, the faces, the foreign signs, I fingered the torn edge of the Kodak box in my jacket pocket. A connection with Ted. He’d been the one painting the apartment. When I returned to the Blue Dragon, Ray was waiting.
“What have you learned?” he asked, smiling. He was glad to have a co-conspirator. I was feeling a little smarmy with the association. But then, what was I doing? What business did I have digging into these private lives? And wasn’t I beginning to enjoy it?
“Nothing much, but I have a question.”
That made him happy.
“Ask me.”
“Do the tenants socialize with each other?”
Ray looked puzzled.
“I mean, do the Siu sisters have dinner with the Zhengs, for example?”
A broad grin. “Noooooo,” he said, shaking his head, laughing. When the laughter stopped, he looked particularly serious. “Very strange, these people. Very different from each other. I see them come in. Sometimes I see them on the stairs. They don’t talk.”
“It’s unusual to have Caucasians in apartments here in Chinatown?”
His lips formed a frown that was intended to convey the seriousness of his thought.
“Quite true,” he said, as if he were someone else suddenly. He grinned. “Miss Ferris. Mr. Broder. And Mr. Emmerich. Mr. Emmerich very different. He own this building once upon a time. Not so odd for him to live here. He live in China and he tell me one day he likes Chinese better than his own.” Ray looked around the tiny lobby. “Strange, special place.”
“Ted knew everyone though? Everyone?”
“Oh yes,” Ray said. “Ted know everybody everywhere.”
For all appearances, the Siu sisters lived in a copy shop. Stacks of brightly colored sheets of paper occupied nearly all the flat surfaces in the living room. LINDA SIU FOR SUPERVISOR, read the top sheet on one of the stacks. There were various proposition numbers on them. Most of the other stacks were obviously intended for a Chinese audience.
“Thank you for seeing me,” I said to the two of them. They were polar opposites. One shrunk back, frightened. The other grabbed my hand the way a plumber or football player—or a politician, I guess—might. Firmly.
The shrinking violet was Barbara Siu. The glad-hander was Linda. She was the one running for a city supervisor slot, an important and prized office in San Francisco political circles. Dianne Feinstein launched her career from that board. She became mayor, then a powerful United States senator.
Certainly Linda Siu seemed serious about making a run. As I was to find out, she was a serious person in all respects.
There was no obvious place to sit down. For a moment I thought we’d have whatever conversation I was permitted while we stood there in the narrow pathway carved from the overwhelming abundance of political propaganda.
They led me, however, into the kitchen, where we sat around a small red Formica-topped table. The kitchen, smelling of ginger, pepper and other spices that I could not recognize, was a propaganda-free zone. It too was cluttered, but with things normally found in kitchens—or fairly normal.
As we sat, Linda asked, “You are aware that this is an active police investigation? Your involvement could be counterproductive, not
to mention foolish.”
“I’ve talked with the police. They’ve given me guidelines,” I told her. “Other than interfering with their gang investigations, I have their blessing.”
The demure sister readied some tea. Linda sat stiffly, hands folded on the table like a teacher waiting for the class to stop fidgeting.
“Then we might as well begin. What is it that you’d like to know?” she asked.
“I’d like to know how well you and your sister knew Ted Zheng.”
“Fairly well. As well as you might know a neighbor, but not a friend,” she said brusquely. “Ted helped me from time to time.”
“Helped?”
“I say help, but what I mean is, he was paid to provide services—handling some of the copying arrangements, making some deliveries.” She shook her head, more in frustration, it seemed, than sadness. “He was organizing a group of people to distribute flyers and buttons and hang banners. I don’t know what I’ll do now.”
She shook her head again, this time to dismiss the thoughts. She seemed aware that she had veered away from the moment and was revealing an inherent coldness. Her concern was for her loss, not his or his family’s.
“And your sister?” I asked as Barbara came to the table with the teacups and saucers.
There was some family resemblance. Barbara’s face, for lack of a better way to describe it, was trapezoidal. She reminded me a bit of a fish underwater—hesitantly coming forward, then darting back. Linda’s face was flatter. Yet I wouldn’t doubt they were sisters for one moment.
“My sister,” Linda said, “had little to do with Ted. He was kind of a blustery kind of fellow. Full of energy. Loud sometimes. I think my sister was frightened of him.”
“Did she have reason?” I looked at the quiet sister, but Linda answered.
“No, not at all.”
“What do you have to say, Barbara?”
Linda spoke again, this time to her sister, and in Chinese. Barbara spoke in return, now pouring pale green tea from the white teapot.
“She says he was a nice young man,” Linda said, smiling. “She is sorry to hear that he has died. She said he brought her flowers once.” Linda seemed surprised. “I didn’t know that.”
“When was the last time she saw him?”
More Chinese.
“She saw him that day. He came here to deliver some more pamphlets.”
“Did he seem upset or worried or anything?”
I waited for the translation.
“No, he seemed normal.”
“What about you?” I asked Linda.
“I’m not sure I saw him at all that day. I come and go. I work hard. Sometimes I don’t know what day it is. But under no circumstances did I see anything I thought suspicious.”
“He seemed very likable. I think everyone in the building liked him,” I said, seeing if I could get any response.
“Well,” she said, thinking as she spoke, “he was a likable sort. Young, immature—but his heart was in a good place, I suppose.”
“Who were his friends in the building? You know, who did he hang out with?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know.”
“There was some indication that he used drugs,” I said.
“Most people do, of one sort or another. I never saw him out of control.”
“Are you a photographer by chance?”
She looked puzzled. Shook her head.
“I was thinking someone told me there was someone in the building who was an avid photographer.”
“There might be. I don’t know the other residents all that well.”
“No one seems to know each other, but they all seem to have known Ted Zheng.”
She was silent. It wasn’t a question. And she wasn’t going to answer it.
“I would think a politician like you would get to know everybody.”
“Is that what you think?” she said curtly. “Thinking doesn’t make it so, Mr. Strand.”
A phrase my third-grade teacher had used.
“You have no thoughts about Ted Zheng’s death?” I pressed.
“As I said, thinking doesn’t make it true.”
“Yes, but it might help us start down the path as we seek the truth,” I said, hoping the sarcasm would bridge any gap in cultures.
“I’m afraid we can’t help you.”
“How’s your campaign going?”
“Quite well, thank you,” she said.
It was clear my time was up. That was fine by me. I couldn’t think of anything else to ask.
“Thank you,” I said, standing, my tea just now cool enough to drink. “I won’t take up any more of your time.”
“How soon will you be wrapping up your investigation?”
“Oh, I’ve just started,” I said. “Unlike the police, I think the solution to this matter lies inside this building.”
She blinked. For a split second, I saw surprise. For just that moment, I had a peek through the mask.
When I left, I passed by Mr. Emmerich’s door. It was ajar as usual. I noticed that he was moving about. I crept a little closer to the door and looked in. He was moving an urn to the window. It couldn’t have been an easy task. It contained a large fern and, I suspected, a decent amount of soil to sustain it.
SEVEN
I was most curious about the empty apartment. I hadn’t thought to ask. And, too, my most ready access to information would come from Ray, ever eager to exchange gossip.
Ray found his way to me before I found my way to him.
“You find what you are looking for?” he asked. His face looked like those drawings of a happy sun.
“Bits and pieces,” I said. “What about 3B? Who lived there?”
“Old Chinese woman.”
“She moved?”
“She die.”
“Here?”
He grinned again. “Accident. Fall down elevator shaft.”
“And everyone believes it was an accident?” I wondered why Mr. Lehr hadn’t told me about this. A death preceding a death, no matter how unrelated it might seem, ought to have been on his mind. Perhaps it was.
“Oh, Mr. Detective, honorable Mr. Chan, this is an old building. Elevator door work, elevator do not. Boom!” Ray clapped his hands together once.
“I think splat was the word you were searching for,” I said, impatient with and unappreciative of Ray’s gallows humor.
“That is why there is a sign on the elevator,” he said, suggesting I had been more than remiss not to have figured it all out earlier.
“Thanks. When did she die?”
“About a month or so ago?”
“Ted Zheng was still alive then?”
“Yes. You think he did it?”
“That’s not why I was asking. Did he know her?”
“Sure, he ran errands for her.”
That evening I set out my clothes for the next day, realizing that it might be better if I fit into the neighborhood. My standard dress was not casual. But there were few western-style suits on streets dominated by working-class Chinese and tourists.
I also called my client, Mr. Lehr, and asked him why he hadn’t bothered to tell me about the woman who fell down the elevator shaft.
“Not related,” he said.
I didn’t tell him that maybe that was why his tenants—actually, only Mr. Emmerich, as far as I could tell—were so upset. An elderly tenant lands at the bottom of an elevator shaft, and another is bludgeoned to death.
I wanted to know more about the so-called accidental death. And I was pretty sure I could find out.
When I pressed, Mr. Lehr told me more. The dead woman was Mrs. Ho. She’d been seventy-two and was becoming increasingly senile.
“She acted crazy,” Mr. Lehr said. “I got calls from everybody about her. She was a problem.”
“The problem was solved when she fell.” Perhaps I was becoming too invested in this case. After all, I wasn’t expected to solve crimes.
“There was a barricade
in front of the door,” Mr. Lehr fired back. “Not a big one, but big enough that no one but an idiot—”
“Or someone suffering from severe mental illness.”
“—could miss it. Listen, safety inspectors and the police investigated. The elevator car was on four. The elevator technicians were working underneath and using the third-floor doors to move in and out. They took a break or something. She was just crazy. She belonged in a home.”
“Wasn’t anyone watching after her?”
“Toward the end, one of the Siu sisters helped her—helped with the groceries, paying the bills, that sort of thing. That kid, the dead kid, helped her.”
That evening I kept a vigil outside the Blue Dragon. At ten thirty Norman Chinn came out. He was dressed casually. He walked down to California Street and hailed a taxi. Fortunately, it wasn’t raining, and there were other cabs hanging around the gates to Chinatown. I calmly asked the driver to follow the other cab. I expected some kind of comment but got only silence until we arrived at a bar on Polk Street. Norman went inside. I counted to ten slowly before going in.
Not a woman in sight. On the dance floor was a mix of Asian and Caucasian men. Norman Chinn got a drink and went to the back of the bar, where a scantily clad young Asian boy danced for tips. I’d lived long enough in San Francisco to know there wasn’t anything shocking about all this—but it was telling.
EIGHT
When I came back the next morning to stake out the apartment building, Sandy Ferris was bringing boxes out to the street. I stayed back. She was far too rushed and flustered to notice. In and out. The last few trips, she bore suitcases.
Seemed to me that if she had her entire life with her, it was a small life, materially speaking. She hadn’t been too lucky in love either. In a few minutes she was done. She sat on the stack of boxes, looking tired, dejected.
Ray came out and talked with her briefly. It seemed to be a friendly chat. If she was skipping out on the rent, he didn’t care. If she was being tossed out because she didn’t have the rent, she didn’t put up much of a fight. My guess was that she was leaving of her own accord. It would be hard for a social worker to afford an apartment by herself in Chinatown—or anywhere in the city, for that matter. And it was coming up to the first of the month.
The Blue Dragon Page 4