by S. J. Rozan
“You shouldn’t go,” my mother started. “Too many rough men at that school.”
“Ba-ba wanted me to,” I cut her off. That was unfair but accurate, although I’d been eight then, twenty years ago, when my father started my brothers at a Chinatown Kung Fu school and me at a Tae Kwon Do dojo uptown, where they would take girls. It was unfair because one of my mother’s favorite weapons is, “Your father would have wanted it.” It’s a cheap trick to turn that weapon back on her, but I get the chance so rarely that I use it when I can.
“Humph,” she sniffed. She tried again. “You should call your brother.”
“An Zhong? We just had a drink together.”
One-upped twice. This was too much for her. She reached for something else, but not too far; for my mother, finding something to criticize is never a stretch. She put a shocked look on her face. “Ling Wan-ju, you’ve been drinking?” She sounded scandalized, even in Chinese.
“Orange juice, Ma. Full of vitamin C. I’m going to bed. I’ll get the groceries in the morning.”
Now it was morning.
My plan was to dress, get the groceries, and see if I could find someone who could help me find Dawn Jing.
It had occurred to me as I was falling asleep the night before that there was one person who could shortcut that search, and that was Genna. I’d toyed with the idea of just giving her a call and repeating what Andrew had said. “Come clean, Genna!” I’d demand. “Who’s who and what’s what around here?”
What stopped me was the bruise on my cheek, and the soreness in my hip where I’d hit the pavement. Someone was willing to go some distance to chase us off this case. Since I didn’t know who or why, maybe the best thing was to let as few people as possible know what I was doing.
That, of course, didn’t include Bill. I called him as soon as I was showered, dressed, and breakfasted.
“Still speaking to me?” I asked.
“Till the cows come home. Hold on a minute. Be right with you, Bossie!” he shouted.
“Very funny.”
“Are you okay?”
“Sore. As soon as I get up and move I’ll be fine.”
“Ah, youth. What’s your plan?”
“I’m going hunting for Dawn Jing, after I come home with the water spinach.”
“Dawn Jing on a bed of water spinach. Sounds irresistible.”
“You’re in a jolly mood.”
“Want to know why?”
“Of course.”
“I just got off the phone with Visa, MasterCard, and American Express. I don’t think they believed I was mit der Deutsche Bank in Zurich, but I was so Teutonically pushy they gave me rundowns of Genna’s accounts anyway.”
“Where’d you get her card numbers?”
“Velez got them for me from TRW.”
Antonio Velez was a skip-tracer Bill and I often used to hunt up the kind of data that’s most easily gotten from computers.
“How come you called them yourself?” I asked. “Why didn’t you just let Velez finish it up?”
“I wasn’t sure where it would lead, and I wanted to be able to improvise if I had to.”
“And because it’s fun,” I suggested.
“And because it’s fun.”
It is fun: the exhilaration of convincing someone you’re someone you’re not, for a particular purpose; the switch of identities, making up one, assuming it totally, then dropping it; the bearing away of the prize by virtue of your own wits, guts, and fast-stepping.
It’s exciting, it’s a victory, and sometimes, when maybe you should be wondering about whether it’s okay to be doing this, you go with the rush and the thrill and leave that uncomfortable idea behind.
“What did you find out?” I asked.
“John Ryan was right. She maxed out her credit to get the ransom money. She pulled about forty-three thousand out of her credit lines on the cards yesterday. The rest she probably had in the bank; I didn’t look. And it’s a good thing, too.”
“What is, that you didn’t look at the bank?”
“No, that she maxed out her credit.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” he said, triumph shining in his voice, “that she wasn’t about to get it anywhere else. John Ryan has not a cent.”
“What?”
“Negative moolah. One-way cash flow. The guy is maxed to his eyebrows on his credit cards and has been for months.”
“You checked him out, too?”
“You bet. He’s had two credit cards canceled in the last couple of years. His BMW was practically repossessed last summer. His bank account is periodically overdrawn, this being one of those periods. According to Citibank, they only keep him because his mother is such an outstanding customer.”
“No kidding,” I said slowly. “So John Ryan isn’t what he seems to be?”
“Well, he is a chip off the gold-buillion block. But he’s not flush.”
“Not flush,” I said slowly, emphasizing both words, ruminating.
“Not flush,” Bill repeated, “right now.”
“Right now?” I perked up. “As opposed to when?”
“Those periods when he’s not overdrawn.”
“When are those?”
“Random. His account gets infusions of cash, six in the last eighteen months.”
“From where?”
“I don’t know. It comes in as cash, literally. In ten to thirty thousand dollar lumps.”
“Cash? Could it be from his mother?”
“Not from the action I’ve seen in her accounts.”
“God, you’ve been busy.”
“She was crappy to you. That puts her high on my hit list.”
He said that lightly, as though he didn’t mean it, or if he did, it didn’t matter much.
But he meant it. And it mattered.
But I didn’t want to talk about that, now. “What happens to all this money?” I asked.
“Some of it he uses as a life preserver to beat the wolf from the door.”
“I can’t believe you mixed a metaphor like that.”
“You wouldn’t beat a wolf with a life preserver?”
“No. A shark, maybe.”
“You’d beat a wolf with a shark?”
“Oh, stop. What does he do with the rest of the cash?”
“Not entirely clear. But, interestingly enough, his account takes a major drop at just about those times Genna’s gets an infusion of its own.”
“Is this true?”
“Would I lie?”
“A fruitless line of inquiry if I ever heard one. Well, he said he’d given her money; that’s not a surprise. What’s his situation right now?”
“Bustola.”
“Right. You said that, didn’t you? But then what about the big scene at Andrew’s about Genna getting the ransom money from him?”
“Exactly: what about it?”
“I don’t know.” I bit my lip in thought. “Is it possible he has some source of funds you didn’t find, and he was planning to give her the ransom money from that?”
“Sure it is. I haven’t had a chance to rummage through his whole life yet. He could have a lot of stuff I haven’t found. But if he did, don’t you suppose he would have rescued his credit rating with it?”
“I’d think so. Bill?” I asked, with a thought that I wasn’t sure of the end of. “Does his mother make good his overdrafts at the bank?”
“No, according to them.”
“Does she know about them?”
“Yes.”
So much for that thought. “So what was he trying to do?” I asked. “Impress Genna because he knew she wouldn’t take his money, so it was a no-risk way to look like a generous bigshot? But she’s taken it before. How could he be that sure?”
“I don’t know,” Bill said. “I’m never that sure of anything.”
“You hide your insecurities well, though.”
“Kind of you to say so. Maybe he was trying to impress you and And
rew.”
“Why would he want to do that?”
“I don’t know,” he said again. “Mine not to reason why.”
“God, you’re almost unbearable when you’re cheery. What are you going to do now?”
“I’m on a roll. I think I’ll stay on the phone and see what I can find out about the gun that killed Wayne Lewis. I can’t lose.”
“How do you figure that?”
“If I find out something, that’s good. If I don’t, I’ll get depressed. Then I won’t be cheery and you’ll like me better.”
“You know,” I said, sweetly and ambiguously, “I don’t think I could like you any better.”
I hung up and went out in search of water spinach.
Water spinach, in Chinatown on a bright weekday morning, is not hard to find. Fruit and vegetable sellers weight their sidewalk stands down with shiny oranges and ugly misshapen jackfruit, crowded beside bundles of foot-long beans as thin as a shoelace and surrounded by bunches of deep green leaves, some rounded, some serrated, all glistening with water sprinkled enthusiastically over them by the sharp-eyed merchants and their fresh-off-the-boat assistants.
I was swinging my string bag down Mulberry Street, past the blue crabs and fish displayed on ice in their cardboard boxes—unless it’s a dire emergency I don’t buy the fish; my mother is convinced I’m going to pick out a spoiled one and poison us all—heading for the newsstand to buy Ma a copy of the China Post, when I heard my name.
“Lydia? Lydia Chin!” It was a handsome man, older than me but not by a lot, wearing a smile, his voice full of surprise and delight. I tried to place him; it took a moment, and then I knew who he was.
“Roland Lum?”
“Absolutely!” He grinned. He wore ironed jeans and a pale silk shirt with no tie under a double-breasted gray raw silk jacket. His fine black hair was brushed straight back from his high-cheekboned face. Hands on his hips, he looked me up and down and said, “Boy, I haven’t seen you in years. You look great! How’s Elliot, and your mom and everyone?”
“They’re all fine,” I said. “It has been a long time, hasn’t it? Elliot’s a doctor. An orthopedist at Mt. Sinai. He’s married, you know, with two children, a boy and a girl.”
“No way! Elliot? Someone finally hooked Chin Ai Liang, the Don Juan of Chinatown?” He lowered his voice confidentially. “Some Shanghai aristocrat? Or a Swedish masseuse?”
“Janie Ling,” I said. “From Bayard Street.”
Roland Lum threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, Elliot.” He shook his head. “Elliot. Well, more power to him. I really should call him, find out how he did it. Hasn’t happened for me yet. But that’s cool. How about you? Married, kids, anything? God, I can’t get over how great you look.”
“Not yet,” I said. Then: “I heard about your father, Roland. I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “He was old,” he said. “He always thought there’d be more for him someday than that stupid factory, but he bugged out before he found it. Look, you have time for a cup of coffee?” He grinned again. “Come on, let me buy you one, catch up on old times.”
I checked my watch, although I didn’t really need to. None of the fruits or vegetables in my string bag were urgently needed at home, and my search for Dawn Jing could wait another twenty minutes before it began. It was more to give me a brief moment to think, and to keep me from looking too eager.
Because this was one cup of coffee I definitely wanted to have.
Roland Lum, who had only ever been peripherally in my life as a not-particularly-close friend of my six-years-older brother, and had not been thought of by me since then, had reappeared as a name mentioned by a now ex-client and suddenly, the next day, as a grinning face on the street. Chinatown’s crowded and small, and you do keep running into people from your past. Sometimes they even offer to buy you a cup of coffee.
Usually it doesn’t mean a thing, except when they sandbag you with a request for a donation to your village burial society or an invitation to invest in a can’t-miss real estate deal. But my mother, who believes the entire concept of coincidence is a Western idea invented out of abysmal ignorance of the workings of the world, and is also an evil low faan scheme to trick the Chinese—that is, that it’s something Westerners are simultaneously subtle enough to manufacture and stupid enough to believe—would, throw up her hands in hopeless disgust if I even for a minute entertained the thought that Roland Lum’s materialization on Mulberry Street on a sunny Wednesday morning was not, in some way, connected to this case.
Roland and I strolled to the Maria’s on Canal Street, discussing our families and the paths everyone had taken over the years. I caught him up on my brothers, and he told me about his brother Henry, who was a surgeon now in California, and his baby sister Megan, an intern with a public television station.
“She expects me to bankroll her when she’s ready to produce her first Bruce Willis film,” Roland said with a laugh. “From the factory. I’m running it now, you know.”
“Yes, I’d heard that,” I said. “Do you enjoy it?”
Roland made a face as he held open the door to Maria’s for me. “One of the great privileges of being Eldest Son,” he said in a voice heavy with irony. “Proves that an MBA from U. of P. can lead straight to s-h-i-t. I told Megan not to hold her breath.”
We found a table, which I held down for us while Roland went up to the counter. Maria’s is a Hong Kong bakery chain that, in the past few years, has been hedging its bets against the future like almost every business in Hong Kong by opening overseas branches. Being Hong Kong based, Maria’s baking is heavily influenced by British taste, and the three New York stores have introduced the butter-creme horn and the jam tart to Chinatown. They serve strong high-quality black tea with milk, the English way, and the lighting is bright and the tables are brass-edged Formica, the Hong Kong way. All three stores are always crowded, almost entirely with Asian faces. White tourists, in search of the Authentic Chinese Experience, just don’t know what to make of Maria’s.
The strong black tea was what I had, and though I usually take my tea with lemon, I had it with milk because it’s good that way here. Roland had coffee, dark and sweet, and though I’d protested that I wasn’t hungry, he came back to the table with two forks and a flaky square of custard-filled pastry on the tray between the tea and the coffee.
“So,” he said, grinning as he emptied the tray and sat down on a brass-backed cafe chair, “you told me all about the other Chins: now, about you. I heard you’re a private eye. Is that really true?”
“Yes,” I said noncommittally, over my teacup. “How do you know?”
“Oh, I know one of your clients,” Roland said, swallowing some coffee. “Or clients-to-be, or something. John Ryan. Genna Jing’s significant other? He’s a client-to-be of mine, too. Maybe.”
“He told you he was my client?”
“He was bitching to me a day or two ago, about someone trying to extort money from Genna. He said he wanted to hire a private eye to stop it. He asked if I knew you. You know the way the low faan always think we all know each other?”
I didn’t point out to Roland that we did know each other. “What did you say?”
He winked. “I said of course I knew you. I said you were the best, that you had a tremendous reputation in Chinatown and he’d be lucky to get you. I figured that was the least I could do for old Elliot. Did it work? Did he hire you?”
“We talked,” I said. “It didn’t go very far.”
“Damn,” he said. “Too bad. Might have been a good gig for you. Well, I tried. What was it about?”
I lifted my eyebrows. “You can’t really expect me to answer that.”
“Why not?” He stopped with his fork halfway into the pastry. Flakes of dough splintered onto the plate.
“Because that’s where the ‘private’ in ‘private investigator’ comes from.”
“But this is just John Ryan,” Roland protested. “It’s not like it’s international
intrigue or anything. Or is it?” He grinned wickedly. “Genna Jing is smuggling illegal aliens! Right? No: drugs. Heroin, rolled up in bolts of Chinese silk. I’m right, Lydia, I know I am. At least I’m on the right track, aren’t I? Come on, tell!”
I just shook my head, smiling.
Roland scooped out another forkful of custard filling. “Hey, try some of this. It’s great. You’re not going to tell me, huh?”
“No.” I picked up my own fork and tried the pastry. The dough was light and the custard was lemony and sweet.
“Damn. Well, I didn’t really want to know anyway. I was just testing to see if you really kept things private.” Roland’s grin let us both know that wasn’t true. He stuck his fork back into the pastry. “Well, I just hope whatever his problem is, Ryan’s not trying to deal with it himself.”
“Why not?”
“The guy’s nuts.”
“He is?” I licked off some lemon filling and put my fork back on the plate.
“Off the wall.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know. He’s a rich white guy who thinks the world belongs to him. If he doesn’t get his way, he gets a little crazed.”
“I guess I saw some of that,” I said, thinking back to John’s reaction to Genna’s saying she’d already borrowed the ransom money.
“Yeah?” Roland dug into the dwindling pastry once more. “Well, that’s what’s been keeping me from signing on with them. They’ve been trying to talk me into producing their fall line.”
“Genna said you’d already signed on to do it, and then changed your mind.”
“Oh, she told you that, huh? Well, I got a great offer I couldn’t turn down. But it was a one-time.”
“So you might do their line after all?”
“It’s a hard call. This would be a good time to hook up with them. If she makes it big and they’re an account of mine, I have steady work all six seasons. Better than having to go out and hustle.” Having finished the lion’s share of the pastry, Roland leaned back in his chair, crossing his ankle over his knee. “But I don’t know,” he said. He pulled a pack of Marlboros from his pocket, drew one out, flipped the pack onto the table. “The guy’s a pain,” he said, lighting up. “Might be more trouble than he’s worth. And she’s a little nuts, too. ‘Mandarin Plaid.’ What the hell does that mean? I have plenty of accounts, anyway. You want a cig?”