China Trade (7 page)

“This is a lot of things,” I said, a little lamely. “It seems like there’s more down here than on display.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Steve confirmed. “That’s true in any museum. The size of your collection is always much bigger than your exhibit space.”

“I guess that makes sense. I just never thought about it
before.” I was still feeling a little melancholy when we left the basement, and when Steve shook hands with us at the huge green door.

My tea arrived, pulling me out of my thoughts and back to the diner.

“What’s up?” Bill asked.

The tea was chamomile; I squeezed some lemon into it. “Oh, I don’t know. I was just thinking how sad it must be for all those things, locked up in a basement all the time.”

“They’re things,” Bill said. “They don’t get sad.”

“Narrow-minded Western rationalism.” I sipped my tea. “Actually, that’s only one thing I was thinking. The other was: the mid-five-figures? For a soup bowl? When families are sleeping on the street?”

Bill’s eyes met mine, and what I saw in them was what I was feeling. He didn’t say anything, just drank his coffee.

“Well,” I said, “but it’s the case we have, right?”

“Right.”

“Right. Okay, what’s the plan?”

“Hey, you’re the boss.” He held up his hands innocently.

“Just wanted to see if you were paying attention. Okay. I’m going to see if I can catch Mary before she goes on duty. She’s on the night shift this week.”

Mary Kee is my oldest friend. We went to kindergarten, grade school, Chinese school, and high school together. Then I went to college and she went to the police academy. My mother was horrified when Mary chose to do that, and took every opportunity to console Mrs. Kee over her ill fortune in not having a daughter as exemplary as me.

She had no idea what was in store for her. Now Mrs. Kee consoles her, at every opportunity.

“You want to see if Mary can give you a lead on Bic?” Bill asked.

“Is my strategy that obvious?”

“Only to another brilliant detective.”

“Oh. Okay.” I finished my tea. “What are you going to do?”

“I thought I’d go see these dealers.” He patted his jacket pocket, where Dr. Caldwell’s list was. “Unless, as boss, you have another idea.”

“No, I like that idea. We’ll talk around dinnertime?”

He smiled over his coffee cup. “Warn your mother I might call.”

“If she expects you she’ll unplug the phone.”

He sighed. “I’m not so bad, you know. I mean, I’m big, white, clumsy, ugly, and I don’t speak Chinese, but otherwise I’m not so bad.”

“You’re a private eye,” I reminded him. “My mother doesn’t like private eyes.”

“You’re a private eye.”

“And she considers that your fault.” I left money on the counter, climbed down off my stool.

“That’s completely unfair,” Bill protested. He zipped his jacket and followed me out onto the sidewalk. “I didn’t even know you when you started in this profession.”

“What do you want, logic? She thinks if I hadn’t ever met you I’d have gotten over this detective nonsense and found a respectable job. She’s my mother. She’s got to blame someone besides me.”

“So you can still be innocent?”

“No, more because it’s not
possible
that I would go on deliberately doing something she doesn’t want me to do all on my own. There must be a stronger influence than hers at work, and the only influence stronger than a Chinese mother is an evil-intentioned man.”

“Tell her my intentions are good.”

“It’s actually better if I mention you as little as possible. I’m freezing out here. Talk to you later, okay?”

We kissed goodbye lightly, the way we always do. We’ve talked it out a couple of times, what I want him to be—my partner—and what he wants me to be—more than that—and, though he teases, he doesn’t push it. We make a great team, and it’s all really good.

It’s just that sometimes I feel a little lonely when he walks one way, and I turn and walk the other.

S
E V E N

I
found Mary Kee at her mother’s apartment on Madison Street, which is miles away, and miles away, from Madison Avenue. It’s at the edge of Chinatown, although when the projects where Mary was raised were built, they were outside Chinatown by blocks and blocks. Chinatown, in the last ten years, has spread like a stain, grown like a weed, metastasized like a cancer, or expanded like a culturally vibrant, economically vital, hard-working immigrant neighborhood. It depends on your point of view.

When I’d called her mother’s, on the chance she’d drop by there on her way to work, Mary had told me to come on over. The Fifth Precinct station house is a quick walk from Madison Street—one of the reasons Mary had requested assignment there. Sometimes, she told me, it’s hard for cops to get the precinct assignment they want, but the NYPD is so desperate for Asian cops in Chinatown, Flushing, and now, Sunset Park, that they sent her here right out of the academy. She made detective here, and she’s planning to stay.

Nice for me. And I try not to be too annoying.

I crossed Madison Street from the subway as the wind, pushing its way up the hill from the East River, draped plastic bags on the bare trees and redistributed cigarette butts and candy wrappers around the desolate lawns. The downstairs door to the boring slab of brick building where Mary’s mother lives is always locked, but I’ve always had a key. I had it out, but I didn’t need it; Mary was waiting, sheltered in the doorway, when I got there.

We greeted each other with a quick hug. “Hi,” Mary said. “I’m running late. I didn’t want my mother to start trying to feed you and all that.”

“Late? You don’t have to be in until four, do you?”

“I’m heading in early to finish some paperwork. Also,” she admitted, “I get the feeling this is business.” She didn’t elaborate, but I knew what she meant: She also didn’t want her mother to hear us talking investigating. Unlike my mother, Mrs. Kee speaks English. Just like my mother, she has this idea that if everyone totally ignores this detective foolishness her daughter will get tired of it and find something respectable to do.

“Except,” I said, because it had just occurred to me, “I’m hungry. I’ll walk you part way to work if we can go along Henry by the turnip-cake man.”

“Sure. So,” she said, tucking her arm into mine as we started into the wind, “I understand you have a favor to ask me that will involve risking my badge, my career, and possibly my life.”

“Absolutely not,” I said indignantly. “Who told you that?”

“You said ‘favor’ on the phone, Lydia.”

“Maybe I want your mother’s recipe for sticky rice balls.”

“Take two pounds of rice—”

“Oh, never mind. Do you know a Flushing gang called the Main Street Boys?”

She cut me a sideways look from beneath her flat-brimmed toreador hat. A hat like that won’t keep your ears warm, but I guess it’s better than nothing. “I’ve heard of them. Why?”

“What have you heard?”

She sighed. “They’re new, probably less than a year. It’s all still shifting out there, the territories, not like Chinatown, but the Main Street Boys seem to be established. I think their
dai lo
is from somewhere out west, but I don’t know if they’re connected to a West Coast gang. Why?”

She’d answered my question, in a cop sort of way, so I had
to answer hers. “I need to talk to their
dai lo
. A guy called Bic. Bic,” I added, “like the lighter.”

That was a p.i. sort of answer.

Mary’s reply wasn’t unexpected. “Don’t do that, Lydia.”

“Why not?”

“Every time you get near a gang member I get ulcers. If a gang is involved it’s a police matter. Tell us and we’ll deal with it.”

I avoided the question of why, if the police could deal with it, there were so many gangs running their brutal operations in this small neighborhood. I knew the answer: That will continue as long as honest citizens like me refuse to come forward to talk to the police.

I also avoided telling her I’d had tea with one
dai lo
this week already.

“They may not be involved, Mary. That’s why I want to talk to them. To find out.”

“We can find things out.”

“This is for a client.”

“Oh, no kidding. Who?”

“I can’t tell you.”

We had reached the turnip-cake man’s stand on Henry Street. Our conversation stopped while I bought two of the soft, salty, chewy squares he had sizzling on the wok. He slipped them into a wax-paper envelope for me. I offered a bite to Mary, who nibbled on a corner of one; then, as I was munching, she said, “So you can’t tell me who the client is, and he doesn’t want to report the crime, but he wants it solved anyway. So you have to mess with a gang. Do I have that right?”

“The client has a good reason for—”

“They always do, Lydia. The gangs and the tongs count on that.”

“I don’t think this is that kind of crime. I really don’t know. If I could talk to this Bic I’d have a better idea.”

We both stopped, without discussion, at the corner of the next block. It isn’t good for either of us to be seen together in
the heart of Chinatown, except at family association banquets or other social events where we might be expected to appear, regardless of what we do for a living.

Mary looked at me closely for a long time, long enough for me to finish both my turnip cakes. “Well,” she finally said, “I can’t run him, because nothing I’m working on could remotely involve him, and someone would pick it up.” I understood that. The NYPD frowns on cops using the computer system for personal reasons, and helping out a p.i. who won’t even tell you what the case is about is definitely a personal reason. “But I’ll ask around.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“I still think you shouldn’t go near him, or any of them. But if I don’t check him out for you you’ll probably go over to Flushing with a sandwich board that says, ‘For a good time call Lydia Chin but only if your name is Bic.’ ”

“Not a good time. A hot time.”

“Matchless.”

“He could be my new flame.”

“You could carry a torch for him.”

“Have a torrid affair.”

We both collapsed in giggles. Mary recovered first.

“Will you promise me,” she asked, “that if it looks like trouble, you’ll call me? Before, not from the hospital?”

“I’ve never ended up in the hospital,” I said, my professional dignity affronted.

“Upstate, that time—”

“That wasn’t my case! That was Bill’s case, so it was his fault.”

“Oh. If it’s somebody else’s fault it doesn’t count? What if this time it’s Bic’s fault?”

I winced. “I see what you mean. I’ll be careful, Mary. I really will.”

“That’s not what I asked you. But I guess it’ll have to do. I’ve got to go. If I get anything I’ll call you.”

“Thanks.”

She turned, walked a few steps, turned back. “I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you to do something less dangerous and more respectable for a living?”

“Sure.” I grinned. “But police work is so boring.”

Mary made a face, turned again. I watched her toreador hat and her long swinging braid disappear into the currents of people flowing through Chinatown.

There were a couple of things I could profitably do now. I could go over to Mulberry Street and talk to Nora, or I could go uptown and try to catch Dr. Mead Browning, who was, as it were, the last person to see the Blair porcelains alive.

Nora was closer. Besides, my head was about as full of talk about porcelain as I could take for one day.

I called CP from the phone on the corner, the one in the little enclosure that replaced the pagoda-shaped booth that stood there for years and years. I always found that booth sort of offensive, but my mother liked it, so maybe I’m just touchy.

Nora was there and said she’d be glad to see me.

“Is Tim there, by any chance?” I asked her.

“No, I think he’s at his office. Do you want to talk to him?”

“No, I want to
not
talk to him. Unless you think he knows something I should know about, in which case I would reluctantly interview him. As a hostile witness.”

“I don’t suppose he does. What is it between you two, Lydia? Tim’s a good guy, just a little stiff. You never give him a chance.”

“What is it between you and Matt? And Tim’s the one who never gives
me
a chance. Nora, I’m freezing. I’m going to hang up and come over, okay?”

She said okay, so I hung up.

The streetcorner astrologer was squatting, in five layers of jackets, in his usual spot as I rounded the corner at Mulberry Street. His hand-lettered charts—magic marker on squares of cardboard box—waited patiently, like him, for customers. His
sticks and coins in their little silk pouches were just ready, I could tell, to jump out and reveal to some anxious soul the nature of the luck he could expect in the coming year. Or she could expect.

Or I could expect. But I didn’t stop.

The cranky downstairs door at the CP building was unlocked because the museum was open. I let myself in and up. Nora, looking tired, smiled when I poked my head through her office door.

“Come on in,” she said, dropping her pen onto a neat pile of papers. “Save me.”

“You’re sure it’s an okay time?”

“I’m drowning in paperwork. Didn’t you take an EMS training course?”

“Paperwork rescue isn’t covered until the advanced session.”

Nora’s office wasn’t as warm and cozy as Roger Caldwell’s had been. The furniture was older, the decoration more sparse. The view out her window was of the building across the street, not the broad sky over Central Park. Seating myself in the chair across the desk from her, watching her fold her files and paperclip her papers, I realized with a quick gulp of guilt that, in spite of what I’d said to Roger Caldwell, of course I had met a museum director before.

“Did you find out anything?” she asked. Then, “Wait, I’m sorry. Do you want some tea?”

“Yes, thanks.” I unbuttoned my coat but kept it on. “And I don’t think I found out anything, but I might have some leads. Can I ask you some questions?”

“Sure.” Nora handed me a steaming cup. I cradled it against me, then lifted it to drink. It was chrysanthemum this time, sweet and light like morning sunshine in summer.