China Trade (23 page)

“Hel-
lo
,” a man with a carefully trimmed goatee and three gold earrings in his left ear said over the music, smiling at Bill as we made our way into the room. “You’re new here.” He didn’t look at me at all. Bill nodded noncommittally. He may have been about to say something, but a figure rose and an arm waved and Steve Bailey called, “Ms. Chin! Over here.”

The man with the earrings looked disappointed as Bill and I crossed the room to join Steve in his booth near the dance floor. He stayed half-standing until we got there, as though he were afraid he’d lose sight of us. He had a beer in front of him, and he wore a leather jacket and an anxious expression.

“Where have you
been?
” He looked from one of us to the other. “I’ve been calling all night. Jesus. I have to talk to you. I have to tell you what happened. I—oh, god, did you go up there?” His wide eyes rested on me, and I nodded. “Did you—did you see what happened?”

“Tell us what happened, Steve,” I said.

A waiter, a skinny young man with black daggers tattooed on his forearms, came to our booth. Bill ordered beers for himself and Steve and a club soda for me. I kept my eyes on Steve.

“I’m scared,” he said. A thought seemed to strike him. “Did you tell anyone where I am?”

“No,” I said. “Have you been here all night?”

He nodded. “I come here all the time. They know me. I guess I figured I’d be safe. Oh, god. Was that stupid?”

“Safe from what? Steve, tell us what happened. Why did you call us?”

“Safe from him.” He spoke as if he were surprised I didn’t know that was what he meant. “I called you—well, that’s different. Wait, I don’t know, maybe it’s not. That’s what I’m afraid of, that it was him.”

“That what was him, Steve?”

“The man who—the man who—” He gulped, opened his mouth, closed it again. “The man who—” He seemed stuck, like a needle on a record. His eyes widened with alarm.

“The man who killed Trish?” Bill asked calmly, as though it were a natural thing to say.

Steve turned to him, nodded slowly. The tattooed waiter came and went, leaving our drinks. Steve looked into his, quickly gulped some of it, put it down and spoke. “He came this morning. That’s why I called you. He was looking for stolen porcelains. I mean, I guessed that was why you came, even though the Director didn’t tell us. He acted like it was confidential. Well, he should. I mean, he shouldn’t go around telling secret things if they’re secret. But you
were
private investigators and you were interested in porcelains and so was he and he said he was looking for stolen ones so I figured so
were you probably and then after I talked to Trish I thought—I thought—”

“Steve,” I said, “slow down.” He sounded like a train about to roar off the tracks. “Who was this man, the one who came this morning?”

“He was a private detective. His name was Jim Johnson. He wanted to see the Director, but he was out, so he talked to me and Trish.” Steve gulped some more beer, then went on. “He said he was looking for some stolen porcelains and wanted to know if we knew of any on the market—you know, if the museum had been offered any. He described some of them. Trish is the—was the—was the porcelain person, not me, and she said no, we hadn’t been offered anything recently, but she’d look out for them. He said he’d be in touch. Then he left.”

“What did he look like?”

“Just sort of average. A little taller than me, but not as tall as you,” nodding to Bill. “Brown hair. I guess maybe brown eyes, too. I didn’t really look. I’m sorry.”

“Did he see Dr. Caldwell?”

“No.”

“And that’s why you called us? Because of his visit?”

“Almost. I mean, I might have anyway, but after I talked to Trish …,” he stalled out.

“After you talked about what, Steve?” I asked, to keep him moving.

“The pieces. The pieces Jim Johnson asked about. Well, one of them really.” He drank some more beer, and then blurted, as though confessing a transgression he really needed to get off his chest, “It was ours.”

“Yours?” Bill and I exchanged glances. “It belonged to the Kurtz?”

Steve nodded miserably. “It did. I’m sure it did. But Trish said no, I was wrong. But I thought about it, and I looked. I’m not wrong.”

“If Trish was the Kurtz’s porcelain expert, why do you know about this piece?”

“She wasn’t really our porcelain expert,” he corrected me, sounding distracted. “I mean, porcelains were her field, but the Director is the real expert. Oh, but anyway, that doesn’t matter,” he said, impatient with himself. “The thing is, Trish and I help each other pack and unpack. When shipments come in or go out. Gifts and loans and stuff. Things come and go from museums all the time, you know.”

“I didn’t know. But go on.”

“Well, anyway, we do. Help each other.” He swallowed. “Did.” He picked up his beer, then put it down without drinking any. “That piece came about a year ago. It was a covered dish, small, like for cooked fruit or something. I remember it because it had a dog’s head knob on the lid, and dogs painted on it, and they weren’t Chinese dogs. They were spotted terrier kinds of dogs, which meant they must have been copied from the customer’s sketch. They did that all the time. But I remember it because I had a dog that looked just like that when I was a kid.”

“Could there be another dish like it?”

“Oh, sure there could. That wouldn’t be strange. There could have been a whole set. What was strange was Trish telling me I was wrong. You know how I am. I mean, I’m not subtle. I always make too much noise. I got excited to see Spike on a museum dish, and I went on about it. She thought it was funny, and she agreed he was a cute little dog, and I told her about the tricks he used to do. But then yesterday she told me I was wrong, and we’d never had a dish like that.”

“Did Jim Johnson know you recognized the dish?”

“I said, ‘Oh, that sounds like that one we have, remember, Trish?’ and she said, ‘No, we never had anything like that,’ and she gave me this sort of look which means, ‘Shut up, Steve.’ So I shut up because I thought she didn’t want him to know for some reason. But when he left and I asked her she acted as though we
really
never had that dish. And I know we did.”

“All right,” I said. “Tell us the rest. How do you know about Trish?”

“About Trish.” His soft blue eyes blinked. “I went up
there,” he said. “To meet you. We close at four-thirty, and I went out to do some errands. Trish was still there when I left but she said she was leaving soon, and when I got back the museum was dark. I went in—”

“You have a key?”

“Sure. We all do, Trish and the Director and me.”

“What about the alarm system?” Bill wanted to know.

“That was a little weird. It was off. But sometimes, like if someone’s just running out to pick up a sandwich, like if you’re working late, we don’t put it on, because it’s complicated and if you screw it up the security company gets mad and sometimes the cops come. In fact it worried me a little that it was off. I was afraid the Director or Trish might be coming back, and they’d be there when you got there. But there wasn’t anything I could do about it, and anyway it was dark, so I went up, and I got to the office, and I turned on the light … and there she was, Blood, and papers, and the computers all smashed … all this blood …” He looked away from us, his face gray-white in the smokey, packed room. The pounding of the rock music had increased steadily while we talked, so that we’d been leaning close, focussing tightly on each other’s loud voices. Steve stared into the gyrating crowd, holding his lips squashed shut. I wondered if he was going to be sick.

He suddenly turned back to us. “I think it was him.”

“Jim Johnson?” I asked.

He nodded.

“You think he killed Trish?”

He nodded again. “Doesn’t it make sense?”

“Not really,” I said gently. “Why would he do that?”

“Oh,” Steve said, blinking. “Oh. I didn’t tell you the other thing.”

“What other thing?”

“He called. He called back later.”

“Johnson?”

“Uh-huh. I was in the Director’s office, filing something, but I heard Trish talk to him. She told him I wasn’t there. I guess he must have wanted to ask me about the dish. But then
she talked to him some more. She said she wanted to meet him, that she might be able to help him, maybe.”

“Did they arrange to meet?”

“I think so, but I couldn’t hear where. But it could have been there, after work.”

Bill tapped the ash from his cigarette. “Steve,” he said, “why did you want us to come up to the museum? Why didn’t you arrange to meet us somewhere else, where there wasn’t any chance of running into anyone?”

“I wanted to show you. In the computer. I was right.”

“About the dish?” I said.

“I looked it up. Later, when Trish went to the bathroom. I called it up in the computer, in the Acquisitions file. It’s there. That stupid dish. It’s there.”

T
W E N T Y - S I X

T
he music continued to pound, and the air had grown so smokey and thickly warm that I was beginning to long for the wind-blown January streets.

“Steve,” I said, “the police are looking for you. Did you know that?”

“The police?” He turned even paler, if that was possible. “Me? Why?”

“You had a key to the museum. You were supposed to meet us there. You weren’t there when we got there, and Trish was dead.”

“Wait—they think I killed her?” He said it as though it were a totally new idea. “That’s crazy. Why would I do that?”

“They look at everybody,” I said. “They have to. You have to go see them, Steve.”

“I have to go to the police? But what if he finds me?”

“Who, Johnson?”

He nodded rapidly. “What if whatever reason he killed Trish for, he thinks I know about it too?”

“Tell the police about him. Tell them that’s why you haven’t called them.”

“Will you come with me?”

I looked to Bill.

“It might be a good idea,” he said. “They’re going to want to check his story with us anyway. And ours with him. I we don’t come in with him they’ll wonder why.”

So the three of us inched our way through the throbbing music and the now shoulder-to-shoulder crowd of leather jacketed men until we reached the door. West Street, when we hit it, seemed to me more like the vast, empty, quiet reaches ο an Alaskan glacier than it probably ever had to anyone before.

Glacier or not, we found a cab right away, and after a wordless ride uptown presented ourselves at the Nineteenth Precinct. Outside, it looks like the building that’s been there for more than a hundred years, but the inside is all new and shiny and fluorescent-lit, reflecting modern police operations in a city where crime and cops never sleep.

After midnight, though, the cops get a little chip on their shoulders about it.

At the main desk, which is up on a platform so even people like Bill aren’t taller than the cop in charge, we asked for Detective Bernstein. The desk sergeant made a phone call, and a uniformed cop took us up in an elevator. In the squad room Bernstein was leaning back in a desk chair, watching for our entrance. When we made it, he didn’t get up.

“I knew I should’ve left ten minutes ago. What do you people want?”

“We can come back if this isn’t a convenient time,” I offered cooperatively.

“I already told you, don’t get smart with me,” Bernstein said without particular hostility. “Who’s this?”

“Steve Bailey,” I told him, since Steve didn’t answer.

“Oh ho, no shit.” Bernstein showed a glimmer of interest. “Where’ve you been, Mr. Bailey?”

Steve swallowed, and then looked at me, and then told Bernstein where he’d been.

Then came a period when Steve, Bill, and I were all talking to different cops in different rooms, so they could make sure the where-Steve-had-been-all-evening stories matched. Then the cop talking to me left and was replaced, after the required period of leaving me alone with my thoughts—presumably so my conscience would start to gnaw at me and I’d confess—by Bernstein.

“It’s so nice to see you again, Miss Chin,” Bernstein said, not too weary to be sarcastic. He tugged at his trouser legs and plopped his bulk into a molded plastic chair. “Especially in the company of a material witness—maybe even a suspect—who I’ve been looking for all night.”

“I’m happy to help, Detective.”

“Let’s talk about porcelains. The theft you’re investigating for the client you won’t name.”

“That’s right.”

“What if I told you Bailey already named them?”

“He doesn’t know who my client is. No one at the Kurtz does, or did.”

“Ah, what the hell. I didn’t think it would work.” He rubbed his upper lip and regarded me thoughtfully. “You still going to try to tell me your case has nothing to do with this?”

“I really don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure what Steve’s story even means. Or if it’s true. If it is, this Jim Johnson seems kind of important.”

“If he exists.”

“I think he does,” I said slowly. “But that’s probably not his name.”

“Oh?”

I told him what Franco Ciardi had told us. “And Mr. Ciardi says he checked with the State Board, and there’s no Jim Johnson with a p.i. license in New York,” I finished.

Bernstein nodded. “Well, at least that’s true.”

“You know that?”

“I just ran him, after I heard Bailey’s story.”

“Steve’s afraid of him. He’s afraid he’s next.”

“If he exists,” Bernstein said again.

“If he does, Steve could be in danger.”

“Yeah. And if he doesn’t, Bailey could be full of crap. Come to think of it, even if he does, Bailey could be full of crap. Don’t get your shorts in a knot.” He waved his hand as I was about to speak. “We’re sticking him in a hotel with a cop in the hall, at least for tonight.”

“Not in jail?”

“It’d make me happier,” he admitted. “But I don’t have a motive and I can’t link him to the weapon, except that it came from his desk. That’s not enough to indict, so why bother? This way at least I’ll know where he is while I’m looking. And just in case he’s right, maybe I’ll be a hero and save his life, too. You know, Miss Chin, it would be awfully nice if you told me who your client was.”