China Trade (14 page)

“Actually, you have not.”

I listened to the rush of bath water. The empty apartment felt lonely and sad. “You’re right. I’ve never been beat up like this and I hate it. I want to be all right and I want you to come over and I want to solve this stupid case so we don’t have to work on it anymore. But my head is killing me and I’m all sore and you can’t come over anyway, so unless there’s something I need to know right now I’m going to take a hot bath and go to bed. I’ll call you later, when maybe I’ll be able to think like a detective and we can work on the case. Okay?”

He agreed about as reluctantly as I’d ever heard him agree to anything.

“You’d better call,” he said. “Because I’ll call you if you don’t. And you know your mother hates that.”

“I’ll call.”

The bathroom was full of rolling steam and of scents that made me think of silent stands of pine on high mountains, of mist and moss and tiny creamy white flowers and no gangsters anywhere at all. I lowered my aching self into the water tinted green with Mr. Gao’s herbs. The enveloping heat was so comforting I almost started to cry. A dried chrysanthemum blossom floated by. I brushed the surface of the water, watched the leaves and twigs bobble away.

Maybe I should give up this detective nonsense. Think of all the people I’d make happy. I could become an apothecary,
studying with Mr. Gao until I knew all the Chinese medicines, all the plants and roots and ground bones and their uses and properties. Maybe knowing that would satisfy my need to know, to get to the bottom of things, to dig and dig until nothing was hidden from me anymore.

Maybe that was a good idea.

Maybe I’d think about it.

After I found the Blair porcelains, and found a way to let Trouble know he couldn’t do this to Lydia Chin.

The bath was beginning to cool, and I was aching a lot less, when I realized with a guilty start that there was one phone call I was going to have to make, now.

I dried off, pulled on a long-sleeved T-shirt and some leggings, and dialed the Fifth Precinct. I was hoping Mary wouldn’t be there, but she was.

“Hey,” she said cautiously. “What’s up?” I rarely call Mary at work. If she’d come up with anything about Bic that she thought I’d want to know—or that she could tell me—she would have called me, and she knew I knew that.

“Don’t yell at me,” I started.

“That means you did something bad.”

There wasn’t any better way to tell her than to just jump in and tell her. “I got roughed up a little by some Golden Dragons this afternoon.”

“ ‘Roughed up a little’? What does that mean?” I could almost see her propelled out of her seat in the noisy squad room. “Where are you? Are you all right?”

“I’m all right. I’m home. It’s okay, Mary. I’m only calling you because they took my gun.”

“Your gun? The Golden Dragons? What happened?” she demanded.

I gave her as short a version as I could come up with.

“God, Lydia,” she said, blowing out air with an exasperated sound. “You’re nuts. They have a dead boy, a dead
Dragon in another gang’s territory, and you yell both gangs’ names all up and down the block and then you wonder why you get hurt!”

“I don’t wonder,” I said huffily. “I didn’t call you to ask why I got hurt. And I didn’t get all that hurt. And I wasn’t yelling!”

“How hurt are you?” Her voice was cold.

“I saw Mr. Gao. He sent me home with herbs.” I didn’t tell her he’d rescued me. I didn’t want her to know I’d needed rescuing.

“He says you’re okay?”

“Uh-huh.”

“All right,” she said. For Mary, as for me, Mr. Gao’s word was enough on things like this. She seemed to warm up just a little. “Now tell me why you needed to know who’s protecting which businesses on that corner.”

“I can’t.”

“Lydia! When the Golden Dragons go to all that trouble to keep you out of their business it must be important business. We have a dead Dragon in Queens and any minute now we’re expecting the streets to be littered with Main Street Boys. I want to know why.”

“They’re not yet?”

“Who’s not yet?”

“The streets. Littered with Main Street Boys.”

“The retaliation hasn’t come. But hey, it’s only been a day. These guys can nurse grudges over less for years.”

“Over less. But don’t they usually take care of important stuff pretty fast?”

“Yeah, but not necessarily this fast. Or maybe there’s something else going on here, other factors they’re considering. Like what you’re doing. So tell me about it.”

“Mary, I can’t. Too many people’s face is involved.”

“Including yours?”

“Of course including mine. If I get known as a p.i. who tells all, I’m finished, and not just in Chinatown.”

“You could be finished faster if you don’t take Trouble seriously.”

“I am taking him seriously.” Which might mean something different to me from what it meant to Mary. “But I can’t believe the dead guy is related to what I’m working on.”

“Excuse me? Which one of us has a bloody nose?”

“What I think happened,” I said, feeling my nose, “what I think is that the Golden Dragons are planning to deal with the Main Street Boys soon and they don’t want anybody pointing out the connection too loudly. That’s all.”

“Just a coincidence.”

“Right.”

“Ridiculous.”

“It is not! Oh, come on, Mary. I’m sore and I have a headache. I want to report a stolen gun and then I want to take a nap.”

“In a minute. I’ll pass you to a uniform for paperwork on the gun. You don’t want to press charges?”

“No. Why? There won’t be any witnesses, and Trouble and his boys will have a dozen respectable citizens to alibi them.”

She didn’t argue with me about that; she knew it was true. But she said, “I don’t like this, Lydia. I don’t like having to deal with you like cop and p.i.”

“I don’t either, Mary. And the minute I feel like it’s okay to tell you what my case is I will. Or the minute I feel like it’s more important that you know than that I keep my promise to my client.”

“I don’t think you can make that decision on your own.”

“I’m going to have to.”

In her silence I could hear cop conversations around her. “All right,” she finally said. “All right, Lydia. I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

“Too late. But I’m okay, Mary. I really am.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

She sighed, then said, “Look, I’m sorry about your gun. I know it meant something to you. Maybe we can get it back.”

That’s what I love about Mary. She knows what’s important in life.

“Thanks.”

“Lydia? What are you going to tell your mom?”

“I fell off a roof?”

“I think you used that last time.”

“I think you’re right. What haven’t I used lately?”

“Runaway horse? Tripped on the sidewalk?”

“Slipped on a banana peel? What do you tell your mom when you get hurt?”

“I never get hurt. I’m a cop. This is the safest job in the world.”

She transferred me to a uniform who took the information about my gun and the permit for it. When I hung up, I peeled a tangerine and wandered around the apartment eating it. The juice was sweet but it stung my lip where it was cut. Coincidence, I’d told Mary. My case and the dead boy and Trouble’s warning to me had nothing to do with each other.

Mary hadn’t believed it.

Neither did I.

But if there was a connection, I sure didn’t know what it was. I washed sticky tangerine juice off my hands and climbed into bed. I snuggled under the covers and tried to cut my mind loose from the demand for logic, to see if just free associating would help me figure anything out.

Within minutes, I was asleep.

S
I X T E E N

T
he only real piece of luck I had that day was that my mother wasn’t home when I got there.

But she did come home. The clinking of keys—or, a single key—in four locks woke me up. I pushed the covers aside and sat up stiffly as my mother poked her nose into my room.

“Ling Wan-ju! Why are you in bed in the middle of the day? Are you sick? Let me see you.”

“I’m fine, Ma.” That wasn’t going to work, but it was a good position to retreat from. I got carefully out of bed.

“Fine? Look at you! Your cheek is swollen. You’re moving as though you’re made of porcelain and you’re afraid you’ll break! What happened to you?”

Made of porcelain, I thought. Very funny, Ma. “Nothing. I made a mistake. I’m fine.”

“A mistake? What does that mean?”

“It means I’m as foolish as you’re always saying I am.” I moved gingerly to my dresser, trying to keep my face from showing the clamps of pain that grabbed my ribs and back in syncopated rhythm.

“What are you doing? Get back into bed. I’m going to see Grandfather Gao.”

“I already saw him, Ma. He gave me those.” I pointed to the two kinds of square packages piled on my desk.

My mother sniffed at them. “For tea or for the bath?”

“Both.” I pulled a thick snuggly sweatshirt over the long-sleeve T, replaced the leggings with quilted trousers. I sat on the bed and stuffed my feet into heavy wool socks, stood again
feeling about as warm and enveloped as I could outside of my blankets.

“What are you doing?” she demanded again.

“I drank the tea. I had the bath. I’m going out.”

“To get in more trouble? Ling Wan-ju …”

“Ma, I’m working. I’ll try to be home for dinner but don’t wait.” At the door I put my shoes on; bending down was hard, so I sat on the floor. My mother’s lips flattened into a thin line. As I worked my way into my jacket and left she was lighting three sticks of incense at the little altar in the living room. I didn’t know who she was talking to, or about what, but I could guess.

At the first pay phone I came to I called Bill’s number. I got his service, told them I was at my office, and headed there.

It was late afternoon. Neon glowed red, yellow, and blue against the purple-gray sky. The fish and five-spice smells were strong as the restaurants prepared for the dinner crowd. People hurried home with bags of groceries as I walked slowly the other way, out to my office beyond the outskirts of Chinatown.

I needed to think and, if I could find him, to talk to Bill: two things I couldn’t do at home.

The three women—two Chinese, one white—who ran the travel agency were doing end-of-the-business-day things when I got there. We all smiled and greeted each other, and no one asked about my swollen jaw. Maybe it didn’t look so bad. Or maybe their mothers had just raised them well.

I unlocked the door with my name on it at the end of the narrow hall that led off the street doorway we shared. Inside, I flipped on the light and put the kettle on the hot plate to boil. The radiator was spitting merrily under the window and everything was warm and cozy, though maybe not as tidy as it could have been. Well, my job was to find things, not put them away.

I brewed tea, a mixture of oolong and chrysanthemum, and settled in my desk chair to drink it. I resettled twice until I found an almost-comfortable position. The tea, a good mixture,
woke my brain gently. My eyes drifted from the print of misty brush-painted Guilin mountains on one wall to the poster opposite, of the first rays of sun reddening the northern Rockies. I’d never been to either place, but both pictures were beautiful.

Why had Trouble cared enough today about the questions I was asking to give me a very unpleasant warning about it, when he’d answered pretty much the same questions himself yesterday?

Why didn’t the Main Street Boys extort money from Chinatown Pride?

Why hadn’t there been any retaliation yet about the murdered Golden Dragon?

Who had been following me, and why, and where was he now?

And who had stolen two crates of the Blair porcelains, and where were
they
now?

The phone rang, startling me into splashing my tea and pulling my shoulder painfully as I reached for it.

“Chin Investigative Services, Lydia Chin speaking.” I said this first in English, then in Chinese, because you never know.

“What are you doing out of bed?” said Bill.

“You sound like my mother.”

“Never. How do you feel?”

“Lousy. You want specifics?”

“If it’ll make you feel better.”

I considered briefly. “It won’t. The only thing that would make me feel better is for you to tell me right now that you solved this case.”

“No, it wouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because
you
want to solve this case. Especially now. Now you have a chip on your shoulder the size of the Chrysler Building, right?”

I bristled. Who asked him to read my mind? “
You
might, under the circumstances. I’m not just like you, you know.”

“You’re not like me at all. You’re gorgeous and young and Chinese. And a woman. And you have a chip on your shoulder the size of the Chrysler Building. Don’t you want to know what I did today?”

“Why would I?”

“You’re paying me.”

“Oh.” I ran my hand through my hair. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Am I being obnoxious?”

“It’s just the chip—”

“Oh, shut up. Tell me what you did today.”

“I went back to the Upper East Side. I talked to some art dealers. And I had lunch.”

“Which was most interesting?”

“Lunch.”

“Why?”

“Because I ate in a pizza place on Lexington and Eighty-second. You would have liked it, by the way. Huge calzone with olives in them.”

That did sound good, I admitted. I have a weakness for Italian food. “And?”

“I was hungry. And cold. I was there awhile, sitting by the window. Nice view up Eighty-second.”

“Eighty-second?” Wake up, Lydia! “Lexington and Eighty-second is where the Blairs live. Lived. She lives. You were doing a surveillance?”

“Me? I was having lunch. I had to walk two blocks over and nine blocks down from where I was to find the right greasy pizza place, that’s all.”

“Bill, come on! You were up to something. What was it?”

“Just curiosity. The Blairs were beginning to intrigue me. I just wanted a look at the house, and I figured maybe I’d get lucky and get a look at Mrs. Blair. I wanted to know what gorgeous Chinese women look like when they’re sixty.”