The Blue Dragon

by Ronald Tierney

  A big yellow taxi found its way through the buildings like a big ship in a narrow harbor. The driver complained but helped her load her belongings. Should I follow? I couldn’t, actually. Would she vanish?

  Didn’t matter. I couldn’t do anything about it.

  I moved down the street and sat on a step, waiting—for what, I wasn’t sure. The question was, would I recognize it when it came? At one point, after an hour or so of waiting, I saw Mrs. Zheng and the little boy emerge. I couldn’t imagine what I would learn from following them. But sometimes it’s the seemingly ordinary act that reveals something important. She walked him to the park. And he wandered about from ladder to swing and from swing to slide.

  Mrs. Zheng talked with another elderly Chinese lady. There were no smiles and no pauses in the conversation. There was nodding and frequent glances at the children. Afraid I’d be suspected of being a loitering pedophile, I went back to the Blue Dragon.

  I wondered if Ted’s things were still in the apartment. I would have loved to take a look through his belongings. However, I didn’t want Ray to know I was outside the building, watching, staking it out, so I decided I’d wait until evening to check out Ted’s apartment, now that his girlfriend was gone. I would come back dressed in my usual natty manner.

  I must have missed those who went off to work early—Mr. Zheng, the Wens. At nearly eleven, as the sun climbed down the brick walls of the buildings, Mr. Emmerich came out. He had a canvas bag in his hand and headed toward Stockton Street and its produce markets. I followed him.

  He went to one of the larger markets. I watched as he haggled in Chinese with the woman behind the counter over the price of the oranges and later a twisted ginger-root. He was not a pleasant man. Voices were raised. A few people turned to look, but most didn’t, and those who did turned away quickly. I assumed they knew him.

  He made two more stops. He went inside a shop that appeared to specialize in herbs and teas. He picked up a Chinese newspaper. Then he headed back to the apartment.

  If someone had come or gone in the interim, I had missed it. I waited and waited. At noon the narrow and comparatively quiet street was fully lit. Traffic had increased, and the plastic clicking of mahjong had begun.

  A homeless man sat down beside me.

  “You want to know how the universe began?” he asked.

  “How?” I asked.

  “A speck of sand.” He was very brown, but beneath the dirt and tan, he was Caucasian. He had a dusty look—his face, his beard, his jacket, his pants and shoes. He looked like a large speck of sand himself.

  “That’s quite possible,” I said.

  Norman Chinn passed by. He had his briefcase and was heading toward the building. He looked bedraggled.

  My new philosophical friend continued. “It was a perfect place, perfectly balanced in such a way that it didn’t exist. And there came a speck of sand. And it disrupted the harmony of nothing and this”—he waved his hands broadly to encompass all of the world they could—“is the result.”

  I nodded.

  “Do you believe that?” he asked.

  “I believe that’s possible,” I said. “It’s called the vacuum theory.”

  “What?”

  “The world exists in a pristine state. Everything is symmetrical. And the introduction of a single particle—your grain of sand, for example—causes reality to come tumbling out.”

  “True?” he exclaimed in disbelief.

  “I don’t know. It’s a theory.”

  “I’ll be damned,” he said. He stood up, shook his head and walked away, saying, “Crazy, crazy, crazy.”

  Mrs. Zheng came back with the little boy and a large bag of what I presumed to be food. She stopped in front of the door to get her keys. She dropped them. When she stooped down, she kissed the boy on the cheek, dabbed her thumb on her tongue and wiped away something above the boy’s eye. She smiled. The boy smiled back. He reached out his arms, pulled her down so low she almost fell, and hugged her.

  I stopped in at a small noodle joint. How out of touch I felt. When I’d finished eating I walked back out into the Chinatown street and its constant river of people, feeling that sense of not belonging more intensely than ever.

  Norman Chinn was coming toward me. I brought the brim of my hat and my head down. I was sure he didn’t notice me. A quick glance indicated that he had freshened up. He’d changed shirts and walked more briskly than before.

  About four, as I began thinking about giving up, Steven Broder came out of the building. He was wearing a white shirt, black pants and shiny black shoes. Again, he carried a black jacket over his arm. I followed, but it was a long walk to a building that housed a catering firm. Others dressed like Steven entered or lounged around the doorway, smoking cigarettes.

  Before he went inside, Steven turned in such a way that I could see him more clearly. The harsh light of the sun revealed a face more ravaged by time than I had realized when I’d seen him earlier in the hallway at the apartment building. He was even younger in the framed photograph in his and his lover’s apartment.

  Should I go back to the Blue Dragon or go home? Who else should I watch out for? The Wens would come home from work sometime after six. I decided to go see Ray in the evening and ask to go through—as ghoulish as it sounded to me—Ted Zheng’s possessions or what was left of them.

  Ray was there. When wasn’t he? Initially, he pondered my request with consternation. But his obsession with participating in the investigation eventually won out in his quandary about the ethics of showing me Ted’s things.

  “I promised to box this stuff up for his parents,” he said, still wary.

  “Then I’ll help,” I said.

  He smiled. Nodded. “Nothing wrong with that.”

  We went inside. Apartment 1B was in shambles. What else could anyone expect? Sandy Ferris had just extracted her life. That’s what it looked like. There were empty spaces now, the physical manifestation of the emotion of leaving.

  “Did Sandy Ferris leave you with an address?” I asked him.

  “Oh yes. Forward mail. Phone number.”

  She wasn’t running—or if she was, she certainly wasn’t running smart.

  “Why did she leave?”

  “Couldn’t pay rent alone. Have friend to stay with.”

  Ray went to find boxes. I went to the small battered desk and rummaged through the drawers. The first thing I found of interest was a bunch of old ledger sheets. These words were scrawled at the top: Debt, parents.

  Underneath were dozens of entries, dating back several years. Simple addition and subtraction. It didn’t take a professional accountant to make sense of them. Ted Zheng was more than fifty thousand dollars in debt to his parents. There were entries showing payments to them. But there were more frequent entries of larger amounts that only added to an ever-increasing debt.

  I put these pages aside for later, more serious evaluation. I looked for letters. None. No diaries. I found a jewelry box. It had a velvet interior with specific places for cuff links and tie clasps and a space for other jewelry or mementos. The box was old and of European tradition, not Asian.

  Inside the box were a couple of cuff links that didn’t match, from a era that probably predated Ted Zheng. A plastic tortoiseshell ring, some rhinestones and two pins, one the shape of California. I found two keys as well. One still had its shine. The number 314 was etched in the shiny metal. It didn’t look like a key to a serious lock. The other could have been a key to just about anything. Perhaps it was a spare to his apartment or to the front door. Or to another apartment.

  At any rate, I wasn’t sure I had found anything of value. Yet, since these items were in a lower drawer and in the back of that drawer, it seemed they were intentionally hidden.

  I looked at the box more carefully. Not enough room for a hidden compartment. But I did notice that the velvet on the top was loose. I peeled away the corner and found a white envelope.

  Inside was a photograph of Ted Zheng.
I didn’t know how recent it was. It seemed fairly recent, judging by the photo of him and Sandy I’d seen earlier. The only difference was that in this one Ted Zheng was as naked as can be, smiling big for the camera.

  This perplexed me. The background of the photo was pretty nondescript. No telling where it had been taken. No telling why. But I was getting nervous. I was worried Ray might come in at any moment, so I put the photo back in the envelope and stuffed it and the ledger sheets into my jacket pocket. Then I remembered the keys. Might as well take them too. I had no idea what they unlocked, but if I came upon locks without keys, these might be what I’d need. I put the keys in my pocket.

  When Ray came in, I was searching through Ted’s clothing.

  “Find anything?” Ray asked.

  “People keep the strangest things, don’t they?” I asked, to avoid having to lie.

  I stayed an hour longer than I needed to, to help Ray feel his compromise was legitimate.

  Once at home, I dumped out the contents of my search on the table in the dining room.

  I took the photograph from the envelope. Yellow paint on the back of it. The room in which Ted Zheng was photographed looked a little more familiar now. The molding on the side of a door. Judging by the background, the photo had been taken in the empty apartment, the one Ted Zheng had been painting. But he was painting the apartment white, not yellow.

  NINE

  “You sure you don’t want to rent 3B?” Ray said to me, grinning. “You here a lot, Mr. Chan.” He’d interrupted a conversation he was having with Mrs. Zheng. I smiled in the direction of Mrs. Zheng, despite my irritation with Ray’s needling references to the fictional detective Charlie Chan.

  The little boy, hanging on to his grandmother’s hand, twisted around to look at me. Eyes widened. He said something in Chinese. He kept his eyes fixed on me, obviously waiting for a reply.

  “Hello,” I said, knowing I had failed in some way.

  The child’s eyes went blank. Then he turned away.

  Mrs. Zheng and Ray wound up their conversation. As the woman and her grandchild went past me to the door, the boy looked away sharply.

  “Glad you are up and about,” I said to Ray, who was smiling.

  “Up early,” he said. “Early bird catches the worm.”

  “Doesn’t pay the worm to get up early then, does it?” I asked.

  He looked at me like I was a fool. “You have solved the mystery?”

  “No, but listen, uh…I found these keys and wondered who they might belong to.”

  “Where’d you find them?” Ray asked suspiciously. Ray was no fool. It was a fact I kept losing when he lapsed into his goofiness.

  “On the stairway the other day. I just remembered.”

  “Let’s see,” he said with a knowing smile. “No one report a key missing.” He handed back the smaller of the two keys. “I don’t know about this one. Maybe small box. Maybe bicycle lock. I don’t know.”

  “Not your mailboxes?”

  “No, mailbox key even smaller. I don’t know,” he said.

  I followed him into his apartment. He stopped just inside at a wooden board with eight hooks and keys.

  “Mmmn,” he said, examining the larger key. He began comparing its teeth with those of the keys on hooks. I was guessing it was a key to Ted’s parents’ apartment. Or, knowing that Ted had run some errands for Mrs. Ho and was painting apartments, it might be the key for 3B. But why had Ted hidden it?

  “3A,” Ray said. “Look.”

  “3A?”

  He handed me the two keys. The teeth matched perfectly.

  This was not what I wanted to hear. I had pretty much ruled out the Wens as irrelevant.

  “You want key back?” He held it out to me as if he were the snake and this was the apple.

  I took it and went upstairs to the empty apartment. I dismissed Ray’s offer to accompany me. I compared the molding and floor with the photograph of naked Ted Zheng. There was a washed-out streak of white on the hardwood floor that told me exactly where the picture had been taken.

  Next, I compared the yellow paint smudge on the back of the photo with the smudge on the canvas drop cloth. Another match. Ted or someone else had had fresh paint on his or her hands when they handled the photograph. And, if I wasn’t mistaken, the color was the special one Ted had used in Norman and Steven’s place.

  I decided to wait. If Norman Chinn followed his routine, he would be home around lunchtime to freshen up and would leave again around two.

  There would be a bit of a problem with this though. The yellow paint only indicated that Ted had handled the photograph at the same time he was using the yellow paint. The same paint as in the apartment occupied by Norman and Steven. It did not necessarily mean that either of the apartment occupants had anything to do with it. It did not mean that, but the implication was pretty clear nonetheless.

  The problem was that even asking the question could be unnecessarily destructive. It could suggest or fuel a suspicion that might prove to be untrue. This could further tax what appeared to be an already fractious relationship.

  And which of them should I approach first?

  Either of them could have done this. It was clear that Steven found Asians attractive (at least one Asian anyway) or he wouldn’t have settled in with Norman. It was clear that Norman liked younger men but was attracted to Asians as well.

  I decided, rightly or wrongly, that Norman was the one I’d approach first, because he was the more mature. Steven, during our brief interaction, had seemed less patient and more likely to fly off the handle. With his apparent fondness for half-nude boys, Norman would have no grounds for righteous indignation.

  I thought about all of this in the empty apartment. I was trying to imagine what set of circumstances would lead Norman or Steven to murder. Jealousy, of course. Blackmail. An unwelcome advance that led to a struggle that got out of hand.

  The lobby beckoned. I didn’t exactly want the company of Ray. On the other hand, I didn’t want to miss Norman Chinn.

  “Ted was a bit of a flirt?” I suggested to Ray as we stood in the small entry.

  “Flirt?” Then he laughed and shook his head, no doubt at the images that appeared in his mind. “He take his shirt off, you know, walk around like a lion or something.” Ray walked, moving his shoulders comically. “Not like Chinese to do that. His mother see him. She tell him to put on shirt and stop acting like that. She was ashamed of him. He laugh at her. Say this isn’t China.”

  “And his father?” I asked.

  “Nice man. Gentleman. I never see him tell his son bad things, you know.” Ray seemed serious. “Mr. Zheng…Cheng Ye very nice man. If he want to say something to Ted, he take him into other room or something. Never in front of other people.”

  When Norman Chinn entered, he didn’t look at us.

  “Mr. Chinn,” I said. He looked, nodded, went to the stairway. “I’m really sorry to disturb you, but I need a few more words with you, if you don’t mind.”

  He stopped and turned toward me. He looked tired—exhausted, really. He looked at Ray, then back at me.

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ll fix some coffee or something.”

  “Rough morning?” I asked as we went up the stairs. It was probably a rough night.

  “When you get old, you forget more easily,” Norman said. “Unfortunately, that means you forget you’re getting old and do foolish things.”

  Inside his apartment, I declined a repeat of the offer for coffee, saying I wouldn’t be that long. I knew he had things to do. A nap, probably.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to be a little indiscreet,” I told him.

  He looked at me. His face was stone. Gave away nothing. I reached in my pocket and pulled out the photograph of Ted Zheng.

  There wasn’t one iota of surprise in his face. He knew the photograph.

  “What of it?” he asked. The tone was conversational, not defensive.

  “Did you take it?”

&nb
sp; He was quiet. I took the picture to the wall, turned it over and let the yellow on the back of the photo touch the wall. Perfect match. I looked at him. He looked at me.

  “Sit down, Mr. Strand.”

  “Peter.”

  “Peter.”

  He looked down at his feet, then up at me.

  “I fall in love every day of my life. Some days I fall in love many times. I crave beauty. I’m addicted to it. It’s harmless for the most part. Sometimes the objects of my desire are paintings, or flowers, or music, or furniture…whatever.

  “For the most part, I am fickle about it,” he continued. “The next day I see another painting or another chair. And I have a new love. The fickleness is a good thing. I am not wealthy enough, smart enough, young enough or good-looking enough to actually possess these objects. But that doesn’t stop me from having these deep but fleeting infatuations.”

  Norman took a deep breath and continued. “All that being said, I am most deeply and totally and eternally in love with Steven. Though I hate him sometimes”—he laughed—“I cannot imagine life without him. Believe it or not, I rarely contemplate it. It is too frightening.”

  He paused again. It was as if he translated his thoughts in sections.

  “Most Asians my age who grew up in the United States as I did received their cultural bearings not only from their families but from the popular culture. The Caucasian culture. The American culture. In those days the standards were completely and totally American. Cigarettes, movies, automobiles, fashion and celebrity.

  “There was James Dean. And Marilyn Monroe. Elvis Presley and Cary Grant. There were no Asians. There were no Asian models in Vogue or Esquire. No Asians in Playboy magazine. No Asians in The Young Physique and Demi-Gods, where beautiful young white men wore nothing but a posing strap.”