Murder In Chinatown (10 page)

Women in the tenements frequently did piecework at home to earn extra money. Jobs for females were scarce, and women with children couldn’t leave home to take them, anyway.

“Who’s Iris?”

“My brother Donald’s wife.”

“Where were your brothers?”

“Out. I don’t know where. They go looking for work most days.”

Or for cheap beer, Frank thought. “Why weren’t you with them?”

“I worked yesterday,” O’Neal defended himself. “Angel was upset today, so I stayed with her.”

“Why was she upset?”

He bristled at the question, defensive again. “She gets scared when she’s here without me.”

“Who’s she scared of?”

“Nobody!” he snapped, then caught himself. “I mean, she gets homesick. She’s still just a kid, and she misses her family.”

They heard a commotion in the hallway, and then the door opened. A woman came in carrying a grubby toddler in a threadbare gown on her hip. Frank figured she was probably in her forties, although she looked older. Life had worn her out, and everything about her looked faded—her hair, her eyes, her skin, her dress. She stopped in her tracks when she saw Frank sitting at her kitchen table, and he watched the various emotions play across her face. She feared him because he was with the police and could only bring trouble to her family, but she also hated him for having such power.

“What’s he doing here?” she asked the boy.

“Asking me questions about Angel,” he told her.

“Wasting his time,” she sniffed, shifting the baby she carried to her other hip. He stared at Frank with vacant eyes. His nose was running. “You want to know who killed her, you should be asking her family. They was the ones who was mad.”

“What were they mad about?” Frank asked.

“Because she married my boy,” Mrs. O’Neal said in a tone that said she thought Frank stupid for not having figured that out himself. “You ask me, they shoulda been happy a white boy would have her. Not many would.”

“How about you, Mrs. O’Neal?” Frank asked casually. “Were you happy your boy married her?”

She gave him a hateful look. “He’s too young to be getting a wife. Can’t even keep himself, and here he is, bringing home this girl we never even saw before.”

“And a Chinese girl at that,” Frank remarked. “That must’ve been a shock.”

“I’ll tell you it was!” Mrs. O’Neal said, warming to the subject. “I didn’t even know he knew any Chinese, much less one he wanted to marry.” She glared at Quinn, who dropped his gaze. “I hope you’re happy now,” she scolded. “I told you that girl’d be nothing but trouble! Always thought she was too good for us and crying all the time.”

“You son said she was homesick,” Frank said.

“Homesick? I guess she was. Nothing we had was good enough for her, and do you think she’d turn her hand to help out? Not a bit of it! Expected us to wait on her, she did.”

“That’s not true,” the boy protested. “She’d help when you told her what to do!”

His mother made a rude noise. “You mean when I
taught
her what to do! I don’t know how that girl got to be as old as she was. Didn’t hardly know how to feed herself when she come here.”

“Ma!”

“It’s the God’s truth. Lazy and worthless, like the rest of them Chinamen.”

“Where were you when Angel was killed, Mrs. O’Neal?” Frank asked mildly.

She looked at him in surprise, as if she’d forgotten he was there for a moment. Then her face turned an unbecoming shade of purple. “I was right here, taking care of Baby.”

“Anybody else with you?”

“No, why should there be?” she asked belligerently, although he could see the fear in her eyes. She knew Frank could arrest her or anyone in her family and charge them with murder and make it stick.

“No reason,” Frank said. “I was just wondering where Quinn was.”

“Oh, he was here, too,” she said too quickly. “I forgot about that.”

“No, I wasn’t,” the boy said.

“Shut up!” his mother warned him. “Of course you was. You was here with me when they come to tell us she was dead in the yard.”

So neither of them had an alibi, Frank noted. “When was the last time you saw Angel?”

The two exchanged a look, but Frank couldn’t read their expressions. “I don’t remember,” Mrs. O’Neal claimed.

“I took her downstairs to buy her something to eat around noontime,” Quinn said. “From a street vendor.”

“What did you do after that?”

Quinn looked a little sheepish. “We sort of…We had a little argument. I went for a walk to cool off.”

Frank looked at Mrs. O’Neal. “Did she come back up here?”

Mrs. O’Neal didn’t look happy. “I guess she did, for a while. Next thing I know, she’s gone again, though.”

“What time was it?”

“How should I know?” Mrs. O’Neal asked. “I was working.”

“Did she go off with Keely?” Frank asked, remembering what Quinn had said about the two girls.

The question seemed to startle Mrs. O’Neal. “No, she…Keely wasn’t…Angel went off by herself.”

“Why did she go outside again?” Frank asked.

The two of them exchanged another look. The boy had realized he needed to get his story straight with his mother’s or else keep his mouth shut. He chose silence.

“Who knows?” she said. “She was a strange girl, always going off by herself. Hiding,” she decided, “so nobody’d ask her to do anything.”

“That ain’t true!” the boy claimed, but his mother silenced him with a sharp look, and this time he took the hint.

The door to the flat still stood open, and a younger woman came in, looking bewildered. She was dressed for the street in a ratty hat and cape. Her hair was untidy, as if she’d just stuck a few pins in it this morning without bothering with a comb or brush. “They said Angel’s dead,” she said before she noticed Frank. When she saw him, she made a small sound of distressed surprise.

“She got herself killed,” Mrs. O’Neal said. “Outside in the yard. Where’ve you been, and where’s the goods?”

“They didn’t have any work for us,” she replied angrily.

“What do you mean, no work?” Mrs. O’Neal demanded in alarm.

“They said they’d have some tomorrow. The cloth didn’t come in yet.”

“I knew I should’ve gone myself,” Mrs. O’Neal moaned. “You can’t believe them. They gave the work to somebody who’ll do it cheaper.”

“But they said they didn’t have any cloth!” she protested.

“You stupid bitch!” Mrs. O’Neal cried, raising her free hand to strike her, but the girl dodged out of the way.

Quinn jumped to his feet to intervene, grabbing his mother’s arm and yelling, “Ma!”

“You must be Iris,” Frank said, surprising all of them.

Iris looked at him with renewed terror. “That’s right.” She kept glancing over at Mrs. O’Neal and back again to Frank, as if trying to judge which was the bigger threat.

“What did you think of Angel?”

“Why does that matter now?” she asked in dismay.

“I don’t know that it does, but tell me anyway.”

She gave the matter a few seconds of consideration. “She was all right, I guess,” she allowed. “Didn’t have much to say for herself. You’d hardly even know she was here except…” She caught herself, glancing over at Mrs. O’Neal again.

“Except what?” Frank prodded.

He watched as Iris weighed her options. Refuse to answer and risk his wrath or answer and risk Mrs. O’Neal’s. After a few seconds, a slow, cunning smile creased her plain face. “Except when Quinn was trying to poke her. Then she’d scream like a banshee. Didn’t like it much, I guess,” she added with a sneer at her brother-in-law.

Quinn cursed and lunged to his feet. He would’ve come across the table at her if Frank hadn’t clapped a hand on his shoulder and shoved him back down in the chair. “Now, now, nothing to get riled up about,” he cautioned.

Quinn called her a few choice names, but she just grinned back at him.

“Mrs. O’Neal,” Frank said, “where were your other children today?”

“I already told you,” Quinn reminded him indignantly, but Frank silenced him with a pinch to a particular spot on his shoulder that he knew would cause excruciating pain. It did, and Quinn’s howl made the women flinch.

When he was quiet again, Frank said, “Your other children, Mrs. O’Neal?”

She swallowed. “I don’t know,” she claimed. “The boys, they usually go out in the morning looking for work. Nobody’s offering steady work, so they got to do whatever they can find.”

“When did they leave this morning?”

“I don’t know. Early.”

“What about your daughter?”

“She’s, uh…she’s in school.”

“She’s young then,” Frank guessed.

“Fifteen,” she admitted reluctantly.

Same age as Angel, Frank remembered. Few girls in this neighborhood were still in school at fifteen, though. She’d be helping out with the piecework unless she was lucky enough to get a job at a factory. What was her mother hiding?

Frank turned to the younger woman. “When did you see Angel last?”

Iris frowned. “I don’t know. I didn’t pay attention. She was here when we all woke up this morning. After that, I don’t remember.”

“Where were you?”

“When do you mean?”

Frank realized he didn’t know exactly when Angel had died, so he said, “Tell me everything you did today.”

She glanced at her mother-in-law, but Mrs. O’Neal offered nothing. “We all got up, like I said. I ate a roll for breakfast, then tied up all the vests to take to the Sweater,” she said, using a slang term for the man who provided the raw materials for their piecework. “Then I took them over to Broome Street and delivered them.”

“At least tell me you got paid!” Mrs. O’Neal interrupted.

Iris refused to meet her eye.

“Holy Mary,” Mrs. O’Neal lamented. “You let them have the goods and didn’t get any money at all!”

“I got some!” Iris defended herself. “He said they weren’t as good as usual, though, so he gave me a dollar less.”

“Stupid cow!” Mrs. O’Neal screeched. The child in her arms puckered up his face and began to cry, and so did his mother.

Frank sighed. “I’ll be back later to talk to the rest of the family,” he shouted above the din and made his way to the door.

The two women were screaming at each other, so no one really noticed his departure.

Once outside, Frank consulted his notebook, where he’d jotted down Mrs. Lee’s address earlier, before Sarah had arrived and things got out of hand. With a sigh, he headed over to Chinatown.

He found the building a block off Mott Street. Mott was the heart of Chinatown, where all the businesses that catered to the Celestials—as the Chinese were called—were located. Real estate there was too valuable for living space. Gambling houses and opium dens mingled with dry goods stores and laundries, all of them doing a brisk business and making their owners rich. The building where the Lee family lived contrasted sharply with the one he’d just left. It was new and well kept, the hallways and stairwells neatly swept. Chinatown as a whole was almost eerily clean, even the streets, as if it didn’t really belong to the rest of the city. Mrs. Lee answered his knock.

Her expression lightened the instant she recognized Frank. “Did you find out anything yet?”

“No, I’m sorry, I haven’t,” he said. “I need to ask you and your family some questions, though. Do you mind if I come in?”

“No, not at all,” she said, stepping aside so he could enter. “We’ll do anything we can to help.”

Frank doubted that she spoke for her husband with that promise, but he let it pass. He looked around the Lee flat as he had done at the O’Neals’, and what he saw here couldn’t have been more different. The furniture was fairly new and of high quality. They had carpets on the floor, draperies on the windows, and wallpaper on the walls. Paintings hung on long wires from the picture molding, and the bric-a-brac that was so fashionable was present in abundance, cluttering tabletops all around the room.

“Please, sit down,” Mrs. Lee said, indicating the overstuffed sofa.

Frank took the offered seat gratefully, and also accepted a cup of coffee. Minnie Lee was an interesting lady, Frank decided after watching her for a few minutes as she served him. She must have been a typical Irish girl once, big boned and hearty. Not blessed with beauty, she would have been hard pressed to find a hardworking white man to marry her. Men with something to offer had their pick, and they invariably picked the pretty ones. The rest of the men, the worthless ones, would use whatever charm they possessed to find a woman who’d be willing to slave for them and bear their children and keep them in beer money by doing piecework eighteen hours a day in a suffocating tenement flat. That was the life Mrs. O’Neal had chosen. Minnie Lee had taken a different path.

Choosing to marry outside her race had probably cost her some friends and maybe earned her the disapproval of her family, if she had any to disapprove. In exchange, she lived in a nice house and wore good clothes and never had to worry about her children starving.