by S. J. Rozan
“Your money?”
“My father left me that money. Me. But my mother got to him and made him set it up as a trust. I can’t touch a goddamn penny unless she gives it to me.”
Someone passed by the yellow square of light shining in the glass in the door. I said, “So you decided to take it this way.”
“It was my money.”
“And the first theft? The sketches?”
John smiled, almost as though with a fond memory. “That was Roland’s genius. He knew my mother wouldn’t buy it if I just got snatched. She’d figure I was behind it, trying to get at my money.
“So we built this elaborate thing, where it would be plausible that I’d go running off to be a hero for Genna. And look, she almost didn’t buy it anyway, did she?”
I shook my head, thinking about Mrs. Ryan in her huge white living room, thinking about how my mother would react if someone called and demanded money for the return of Ted, Elliot, Andrew, or Tim. Or me.
“John,” I said, “why did Roland kill Wayne Lewis?”
“Can you get me some water?” John asked. Bill found a plastic cup, filled it, and held it for John to drink.
“Thanks,” John said. “Shit, my head hurts.”
“I’m sorry, John,” I said. “But—”
“No,” John said, “I’ll tell you the rest. I … None of this is what I wanted, you know. I just wanted to help Genna.”
“I know,” I said.
We waited for him to go on.
“Wayne,” John said. “Genna had this crazy idea it was Wayne. I don’t know what made her think that.”
Bill and I exchanged looks.
“She didn’t think that,” I said.
“What?”
“She thought it was Dawn. She was trying to point us at Wayne to mislead us. So we wouldn’t find out, and especially so you wouldn’t find out, that Genna has a sister who’s a hooker.”
“Oh, God.” John closed his eyes. “Is that true?” For some reason, opening his eyes again, he looked to Bill.
“Yes.” Bill confirmed it for him.
John breathed deeply. “What did she think was going to happen if I knew that? Why did she think I’d care?”
“What did you think was going to happen if you told Genna about your mother? If you admitted that you didn’t have any money, instead of trying to be her sugar daddy?” I countered. Why couldn’t any of these people have told each other the truth? “Why did Roland kill Wayne?”
“I—” John looked as though he wanted to say something else, not what I was asking him, but he set his jaw and continued. “When I found out Genna had told you about Wayne, I called Roland. I thought he ought to know, just to keep up. I didn’t know Wayne dealt drugs, but Roland did.”
“How?”
“Roland was Wayne’s connection.”
“Roland? Roland dealt drugs, too?”
“Not in a big way. I had the idea it was more to show he knew the right people, you know? You come to Roland Lum, he’ll help you out, that kind of thing.”
“Did Andi know that?”
“Sure.”
Which was why Andi didn’t have to go to Ed, after Wayne was killed. And if Krch had let Francie Rossi follow through on that, Roland might have had the narcotics cops on his tail. This whole scheme might have been aborted. And Andi Shechter might be alive, right now.
Krch, I thought. Ed Everest. Someone had called the Police Commissioner to get the Ed Everest investigation started.
“Your mother,” I said to John, who looked at me, waiting to hear the rest. “She was behind the cops looking into Ed Everest, wasn’t she?”
“Yes,” John said. He shifted his eyes away. “She’d heard rumors about Dawn, but she couldn’t prove anything. She couldn’t find her, because Dawn doesn’t use her own name. My mother thought Dawn was still working for Ed, and that if she blew that up in a big scandal that would ruin Genna.”
I was appalled into silence by the strength of Mrs. Ryan’s obsession with destroying the woman her son loved.
“I still haven’t heard why Roland killed Lewis,” Bill said, pulling me back to the hospital room, to now.
“He was afraid that when you two went to Wayne, as soon as Wayne heard ‘Mandarin Plaid’ he’d tell you about being bought off by my mother, just to get you off his back before you dug up the drug stuff. Roland thought that once you knew that, you might start wondering who else my mother was paying off. He thought you might get onto us from there. I didn’t know any of this until this afternoon,” he added. “When I went to the building to meet them, and wait.”
“That was it?” I said, feeling a little sick. “Wayne had nothing to do with any of this? Roland killed him in case?”
John gave me a long look. “You have no idea how much Roland hated that factory,” he said.
Dusk had turned to darkness now in the street outside John’s room. In here it was not much better, lit by what the street and the corridor could spare.
“What will happen now?” John said, sounding as though he was reluctant to hear the answer.
“I don’t know,” I told him. I looked at Bill. Your play, his eyes said. I went on, thinking out loud. “Roland and Andi are dead. Dawn shot them both.”
“I thought you … ?” John turned his eyes to Bill.
Bill shook his head. “Amateurs. Andi couldn’t have seen us; the only light was in the room right in front of her. She just panicked and shot. If Dawn had kept down, she’d never have been hit. She panicked and shot back. It didn’t have to happen.” Nothing showed on his face, but if you knew what to look for and you looked in his eyes, it was there. “I didn’t know Dawn was with me,” he went on. “I told her to wait outside. She told me she would. By the time I heard her behind me, it was too late to say anything. She knew that. It was pretty dark down there, but I know I saw her grin.”
“What will happen to her?”
“There’ll be an investigation,” Bill said, “but it’s pretty clear what happened. We’ll have to testify. If her gun was licensed, she’ll probably be okay.”
“And the rest?” This question was to me, and we all knew what “the rest” was.
“From where the police stand now, this kidnapping thing is pretty straightforward,” I said. I looked at John, thinking of Genna’s hands clenching the telephone receiver in his mother’s cold apartment. “They’ll match one of Roland’s guns to the bullet that killed Wayne Lewis, and that case will be solved and they won’t care why.” I stared out the window, looking for inspiration. “We could tell the police you were involved from the beginning. Or not,” I finished. Great, Lydia, I thought. How’s that for the decisive, definite, and self-assured P.I.?
John didn’t say anything.
“If we do,” I said, “I’m not sure you won’t just worm out of it. I know your mother has a phalanx of lawyers who salivate over the prospect of a lot of billable time.” He looked away from me when I said that, as though I’d discovered something true but shameful about his family.
“If we don’t, though, it won’t be to do you a favor. I think you’re a lot like your mother. I can’t believe you would do this to Genna.”
“To Genna?” In the dimness of his room John appeared genuinely puzzled. “I did it for Genna.”
“For Genna? Do you have any idea what a wreck she is by now?” I exploded. “The sketches, and waiting for another phone call, and then this happening to you? What she’s been through? And so close to her first big show! You did it for her? God, men are such idiots!”
John looked to Bill, maybe for support, but Bill was looking at me. “What she needed was for you to be there helping her!” I ranted on. “Everybody has money problems. Those could have been worked out. She needed you there! But you had to be the mighty hunter. You had to go out and drag some goddamn woolly mammoth into the cave, when all she wanted was for you to help her build the fire. And the damn mammoth wasn’t even dead, and it stomped all over her, and now you have no d
inner and Genna’s a wreck!”
John’s face was a confusion of emotions. Bill’s was more obvious: surprise and smothered laughter, an attempt to look as serious as the situation demanded, in the face of woolly mammoths.
“I’ll have to think about it,” I concluded, maybe a little feeble in content but strong in delivery.
John seemed to be about to make an answer to that, but the door swung open and Genna stepped into the room.
Holding the door to let the light in, she stopped and looked around. “What’s wrong?” Her voice was quick with worry.
“Nothing,” I said. “John’s head hurts. He didn’t want the light.”
Genna let the door go, stepped to the side of the bed, and bent over John. She kissed him softly. “Baby,” she murmured. “I was so scared.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. He lifted his hand to stroke her glossy hair. “It’s okay now. Everything’s going to be okay.”
She took his hand in hers, kissed him again, and straightened up. She spoke to me. “You were going to call me. To tell me where John was. I had to call the police and ask them.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “There were some things we had to go over. I needed to talk to him first.”
Genna looked from me to John, seeming unsure of what to make of that.
I didn’t want to say anything more, and I didn’t have to. John spoke. “Baby,” he said to Genna, “Lydia told me about my mother’s contract.”
“Forget about that. I don’t care about that.”
“You can’t just blow it off like that. If she takes you to court you’ll lose Mandarin Plaid.”
“I don’t care about that, either. I can go back to work for someone else. I don’t need my own line. All I need is you.”
Genna leaned down again and gently touched John’s cheek. Their eyes met, and Bill and I were suddenly and unequivocally redundant.
“I’ll call you,” I told Genna as I opened the door to leave, but I couldn’t tell whether or not she heard me.
She certainly didn’t answer.
Out in the brightly lit hallway, on our way to the elevator, Bill and I stepped to opposite walls to let a linen-laden cart pass us. When we came together again, Bill said, “Is all that really true, about the woolly mammoth?”
“All right, so I’m not so good at metaphors,” I grumbled. “It’s not my fault. A genetic failing. One more thing the Chinese are supposed to be able to do that Lydia Chin can’t manage.”
“A disgrace to your race,” Bill agreed. “A credit to your gender, though, if I may say so.”
I looked at him in surprise. “You may say so anytime you like,” I told him. “You mean that?”
“If what you said was true.”
“Of course it’s true. Why is it men just don’t get it? Men all think they have to be Superman. Women all love Clark Kent.”
“Really?”
“God!” I groaned. “Yes, really.”
The elevator came, and we got in it. We had to squeeze; visiting hours were ending, and civilians were packed in pretty tightly with doctors in white coats and nurses in strong shoes.
“Glasses,” Bill muttered as the doors slid shut.
“What?” I asked, but I couldn’t turn around to look at him.
“Glasses,” he repeated. The elevator arrived at the first floor and we spilled with the rest of the crowd into the lobby. We headed through the big sliding doors that would take us out into the street. “A boxy kind of suit,” Bill said in a thoughtful tone. “White shirts and dull ties. Maybe even a briefcase. Will you help me shop?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Clark Kent. I’m going to start looking like Clark Kent. I’ll be irresistible to women. I’ll practice being irresistible to everyone else, and then I’ll come back and be irresistible to you.”
I stopped on the sidewalk and turned to face him. “There’s only one problem with that idea.”
“What’s that?”
I stood on tiptoe; even still, he had to lean down for our lips to meet. Just before they did, I whispered to him what the problem was. “I already know you’re Superman.”
THIRTY-ONE
Five days later I got a call from Genna.
I was at home, finishing up the straightening-the-drawers project I had started at the beginning of this case. The project had grown, seeping like a cloud of smoke into all corners of my room. I was in the back of the closet when my mother came to say there was a call for me.
There had been some unpleasantness with my mother over the Roland business. It might have been my fault. When she heard the story—not including the part about John’s involvement, which no one but John and Bill had heard yet—she probably also heard, no matter how I was trying to hide it, the tiny note of I-told-you-so in my voice. Not that I’d actually told her so, but honestly, I thought it was reasonable to expect that my mother’s relentless attempts at matchmaking might abate a little in the face of the knowledge that the most recent guy she’d tried to set me up with was an extortionist and would-be killer.
“Pah,” she’d sniffed, when I was done with the tale. “A tragedy. Poor Roland Lum.”
“Poor Roland?” I asked. “What about everyone else? Roland was the bad guy, Ma.”
“Misled,” she said. “From being alone. Because he didn’t have a good Chinese wife. A Chinese wife would have stopped that white witch from enchanting him.”
“White witch? Andi? Ma, she was just a dumb kid. Roland enchanted her. This whole thing was his idea.”
She gave me a look I’ve seen before, the one where the squashed-together, turned-down mouth means Lydia Chin, in the opinion of her mother, will never understand anything about how the world really works. “Men like Roland Lum are full of ideas,” she told me, with a touch of impatience, as though this was something I should already know. “Some are good, some are bad. They need a woman to tell them which are which.” She shook her head at the preventable sadness of it all. “If only you had stayed in touch with Roland Lum after your brother went away to college,” she said. “Then Roland Lum wouldn’t have forgotten about you, Ling Wan-ju, when he got lonely. Instead he became confused, as a man will who has no wife, and he couldn’t choose between his good and bad ideas.”
I stood, amazed, in the living room as she wandered into the kitchen still shaking her head. She began to rinse bokchoy in the sink. I felt like I needed cold water splashed on me, too.
She had completely outdone herself. My mother had made this my fault.
So when she stuck her head into my closet that bright Monday morning, I thought she’d come to give me another installment of the long-running lecture on Why Lydia’s Responsible for Everything. At least I remembered the morning as bright, though from where I was, in the Siberia of shoes, you couldn’t tell. I was hefting sandals over my shoulder when the clothes on their hangers above me rustled and my mother’s face appeared hovering like a wardrobe ghost between two shirts.
She looked around her as any ghost would who had materialized in the middle of an inexplicable and distasteful scene. “In the kitchen,” she said. “Someone wants to talk to you.”
“There’s someone here?” I sat back on my heels, brushing dust from my face.
“Of course not, foolish girl. Who would I make wait in the kitchen?” She closed the shirts like a curtain and vanished.
Must be the telephone, then. Any distraction at a time like this. I followed her to the kitchen, where the red receiver—“More likely to bring good news”—dangled an inch above the floor. I picked it up and stretched it around the corner to the tiny front hall, where I would have at least the illusion of privacy.
“Lydia, it’s Genna. Are you okay?”
“Me? I’m fine. How are you?”
“I’m sorry I didn’t call you back when you called a few days ago. I was just … things happened. I needed to think. And everything was so crazy. But I called your office this morning and your machine said you weren’t a
vailable for the next week. Andrew gave me this number. Is it okay that I called?”
“Of course it is. I left that on my machine because I’m not ready to take on another case right now. But I didn’t mean you. I’d have called again but I thought you might want some space.”
“Thanks. I did.” There was a pause. “John’s gone.”
“What?”
I could hear her take a deep breath, readying herself to tell me her story. “They only kept him in the hospital overnight, but when I went to pick him up to take him home the next day, he’d already checked out. He left me a letter. He said he’d never been anything but trouble for me, and made a lot of trouble for everyone, but now he had a chance to make it up and he was going to do it. By leaving.”
My mother stuck her head around the kitchen doorway to see what had gotten the gasp of surprise from me. I turned away, to hear Genna say, “But he’s wrong. He’s crazy. It’s not his fault he got kidnapped. And what does he mean, he’s been trouble? He’s the one I counted on to fix things when they went wrong. What does he mean?”
“I …”
“His letter said to ask you, Lydia.”
Oh, John. What a thing to do.
I decided, then, to tell her half the truth. “His mother, Genna. John’s mother was behind the things that were going wrong for you. The things you counted on him to fix.” I told her the whole story about that.
“Oh, my God,” she choked, when I was done. “My God, what a horrible woman. And that’s what he means by making it up.”
“What?”
“The contract. If—if I don’t see him again, I get to keep the million dollars. To start Mandarin Plaid off right. He said in his letter that he’s going to tell his mother that everyone she knows will hear about the contract and how she breached it if she doesn’t honor it.”
“Then what he’s done—his leaving—really is for you, Genna,” I said gently.