Murder In Chinatown (11 page)

“What do you want to ask me, Mr. Malloy?” she asked when Frank had his coffee and she was seated on the sofa opposite him.

“I need to know a little more about Angel,” he began as gently as he could. “So I’ll know who might have wanted to harm her.”

He watched the pain shudder through her, but she raised her chin in silent defiance against it. Only her red-rimmed eyes betrayed the anguish she’d endured today. “I’ll tell you what I can. I thought I knew her better than anyone, but I never would’ve guessed she’d run off like she did.”

“What do you know about Quinn O’Neal?”

“Not much. I’d never heard of him until a week or so ago. Mrs. Brandt got the idea to question Angel’s friends,” she reminded him. “We’d already talked to them, and they said they didn’t know where she was, but Mrs. Brandt made them admit the truth.”

Frank nodded politely, not betraying his inner rage. If Sarah was an expert detective, he had no one but himself to blame, so the rage was at himself. At least he could take comfort in knowing she wasn’t going to be involved in this case anymore.

“What did they tell you exactly?”

She took a deep breath, as if fortifying herself to dredge up the painful memories. “They said she’d been sneaking out to meet this boy…Well, I suppose he’s a man, isn’t he? Anyway, she’d tell me she was going to visit her friends—they live upstairs—and then she’d climb down the fire escape and go to him. I don’t know how long she’d been seeing him, but it was several months, I guess.”

“Why do you think Angel ran off with him when she did?”

He saw the slight tightening of her lips and knew she was going to lie. “Children do foolish things when they think they’re in love. Angel was innocent and didn’t know any better. We never warned her about men like this O’Neal. Why should we? She never should’ve even met him.”

“He said they ran away because you were going to force Angel to marry an old Chinese man,” Frank said.

Her whole body stiffened and the color drained from her cheeks. She hated him for this, for making her remember that she might have driven her child away. For a second he thought she might even deny it. Lots of mothers would have. “We only wanted the best for Angel,” she said, her voice as thin as paper. “Mr. Wong isn’t old at all, not even forty. He’s also very successful. He would have made a good husband. Better than that good-for-nothing O’Neal!”

Frank thought that was probably true. “How did Wong react when he found out the girl had run away with another man?”

She swallowed. “He was…upset, of course. He…You can’t blame him.”

“No,” Frank agreed. “If I was him, I’d be pretty mad.”

“I…I didn’t talk to him myself,” she hedged. “You’ll have to ask Mr. Lee.”

“What about the people in the neighborhood? I guess Angel made this Mr. Wong a laughingstock, didn’t she?”

She stared back at him, her silence telling him far more than words. Wong would have been totally humiliated, and probably mad enough to strangle the girl. He’d have to talk to Wong. And to Charlie Lee, too.

“I understand that Mr. Lee went to Angel and asked her to come home with him,” Frank said.

She blinked at the change of subject. “Yes, he did, as soon as we found out where she was living. He was that mad at her, but we couldn’t leave her in that awful place with those people. What would become of her?”

Frank nodded his understanding. “Why do you think she refused to go with him?”

“I don’t know!” she cried, her composure cracking a bit as she realized Angel might still be alive if she had. “She said she loved her husband and all that foolishness, like young girls do when they don’t know any better. She said she’d never go home again.”

“I guess that made your husband even madder.”

She looked at him for a long moment, judging his meaning. She didn’t like it one bit. “He would never hurt her, Mr. Malloy. He never raised a hand to her in her whole life!”

“He was going to marry her off against her will to somebody she didn’t like,” he reminded her.

“That would’ve been better than what she got, now wouldn’t it?” she countered.

Before Frank could reply, they heard footsteps outside and then the front door banged open. Charlie Lee came through it, half carrying, half dragging a Chinese man with him.

“He was in opium den,” Lee said in disgust, apparently to his wife.

He threw the fellow onto the floor, and when he rolled over onto his back with a groan, Frank got a good look at him. It was Charlie’s son, Harry Lee.

T
HE BOY SEEMED UNAWARE OF WHAT WAS HAPPENING
around him. He stared at nothing, his face set in a slight smile, as his mother howled in renewed anguish, knelt beside him, and tried to rouse him. Frank was amazed at the transformation in Harry. When he’d come to the scene of his sister’s death, he’d been dressed as a white man and could have passed unnoticed anywhere in the city. Now he wore a blue silk blouse and baggy black pants with embroidered, thick-soled slippers and white socks. Like a uniform identified a soldier, these clothes identified a Chinaman.

Charlie Lee finally noticed Frank, who had risen to his feet. “Why you here?” he demanded.

Mrs. Lee looked up from her vain attempt to slap Harry back to consciousness. “He came to ask some questions about Angel,” she said. “He’s trying to find out who killed her.”

“Does not matter,” Lee informed him. “She still dead. I no pay!”

“I’m not looking for a reward,” Frank told him testily. He didn’t have to take abuse from a Chinaman, of all people. “I just want to find out who killed your daughter.”

“Why?” he challenged. “No punish for man who kill Chinee girl.”

Frank had to admit he had a point. “I’ll make sure her killer is punished,” he tried.

His promise earned him a disgusted glare. Charlie Lee straightened his well-made suit jacket and turned back to his wife and son.

“He’s barely breathing,” Mrs. Lee said in alarm. “He wasn’t gone very long. How could he have smoked enough to make him unconscious?”

Frank vaguely registered Mrs. Lee’s unusual knowledge of opium’s effects.

“He eat, not smoke,” his father reported in disgust.

“He ate too much, then,” she cried. “He’s poisoned himself! What can we do?”

Lee muttered something in Chinese and bolted from the room, presumably to get some help.

“Noooo!” Mrs. Lee was wailing in despair as Frank stood by, helpless.

He’d seen plenty of people die from taking too many drugs, but he’d never been called upon to save one. In most cases, the poor wretches were better off dead anyway. This case was different, though. Harry Lee shouldn’t die, not on the same day his sister was murdered. For one single second, he found himself wishing…

“What’s going on?” a familiar voice demanded from the doorway.

Charlie Lee had left the door hanging open, and Frank was somehow not at all surprised to see Sarah Brandt coming through it. His reluctant wish had come true.

“Harry’s eaten opium,” his mother informed her. “I can’t wake him up!”

Sarah looked down at the boy and instantly realized he was dangerously ill. His skin was bluish, and when she touched his cheek, she found it clammy. His breath was shallow and slow. “I’ll need to get my bag,” she said.

“Where is it?” a familiar voice asked.

She looked up in surprise. “Malloy! What are you doing here?”

“Investigating a murder,” he said in that tone she knew too well. “The question is, what are
you
doing here when you were supposed to go home.”

“I walked Mrs. Lee home, and then stopped in to see the other Mrs. Lee, my patient, the one who had the baby,” she explained defensively. “We heard all the commotion so I came up to…Well, it doesn’t matter now. My bag is downstairs in the other Mrs. Lee’s flat. Will you get it for me?”

His look told her he’d have more to say to her later, but he moved quickly to do her bidding.

Sarah turned back to the boy. “Help me get him on his feet. We have to try to keep him awake. Do you have any coffee made?”

The next hour was a blur as Sarah found the emetic in her medical bag and forced it down Harry’s throat. To her great relief, they were able to get him to vomit up a good bit of the opium he’d eaten. Then they poured coffee down his throat, and between the three of them, they walked him around the room to keep him as awake as possible as the effects of the drug wore off.

Mr. Lee returned to the flat at some point with a small Chinese man. The two of them shouted at each other in Chinese, gesturing wildly, and then Mr. Lee told his wife what to do. Sarah surmised that he was from the establishment where Harry had obtained his opium. He’d brought along some herbs, but since they were to induce vomiting, Sarah informed him they weren’t needed. The man eventually confirmed that Sarah was already doing everything that needed to be done, and then he left.

When he was gone, Mrs. Lee turned on her husband. “What was Harry doing in that place? He knows better!”

“Ask Harry,” was her husband’s bitter suggestion. Then he took Sarah’s place supporting his son as they continued to walk him around the room.

The sun had long set by the time Harry was lucid enough to convince Sarah the danger had passed. Sitting slumped in a chair while his attendants glared at him wearily, he frowned up at them in confusion. “Am I in hell?”

His mother cuffed him across the head. “Is that any way to talk?” she demanded. “You
would
be in hell if it wasn’t for Mrs. Brandt here, who saved your life, you ungrateful brat!”

Harry stared at Sarah for a long moment, as if searching his memory in vain to identify her.

“What were you thinking!” his mother asked, her voice cracking with grief now that the crisis had passed. “You could’ve killed yourself! It’s not bad enough I lost your sister today!”

His young face crumpled as the memory came rushing back. “Angel,” he murmured, and then he smiled bitterly. “She’s dead,” he remembered. “She’s the lucky one.”

His mother gasped in horror, and his father made a strangled sound in his throat. Sarah gasped herself, but she quickly said, “He’s still not himself. It’s the drug.” She didn’t know if that was true or not, but she had to soften his outrageous statement somehow.

Minnie looked at her, desperate to believe her. “Yes, of course it is,” she agreed. “The drug. He don’t know what he’s saying, Charlie.”

Mr. Lee simply stared at his son, his expression unreadable.

“We should be going, Mrs. Brandt,” Malloy said. “You’ve done all you can here.”

Sarah knew he was right. More things would be said, and she and Malloy shouldn’t be here to hear them. She gave Minnie some final instructions for Harry’s care, and then she allowed Malloy to bundle her off into the night.

When they reached the street, she gratefully inhaled the cool evening air, glad to have escaped the suffocating atmosphere of the Lees’ flat. Every bone in her body ached from helping to haul Harry around his parents’ flat, and she wasn’t sure she’d make it home if she had to walk.

“Do you think we can find a cab?” she asked.

“I’ll find one,” he said with amazing confidence, taking her arm and heading for the nearest corner.

Sure enough, he did find one, and his sigh of relief echoed hers as they settled into it for the long ride to Bank Street.

“How did you know what to do for the boy?” he asked when the cab had lurched into motion.

“I was a nurse before I was a midwife, Malloy,” she reminded him wryly. “I know how to do a lot of things besides deliver babies.”

He made a disgusted noise but refrained from expressing his disapproval. He knew it wouldn’t make any difference.

“Do you have any idea who killed Angel yet?” she asked after a moment.

“No. She managed to irritate a lot of people, though, so I’ll have a lot of suspects to choose from.”

“Who did she irritate? Besides her parents, I mean.”

“The man her father wanted her to marry, for one. I guess he’s pretty mad that people are laughing at him. Then there’s the whole O’Neal family. They thought she was sneaky and lazy and above herself.”

“She wasn’t!” Sarah protested.

“Maybe not, but that’s what they thought.”

“She was just homesick and frightened!” Sarah insisted. “And who wouldn’t be in that situation?”

“Yeah, it must’ve been a shock to go from that place where she lived to the O’Neals’,” he agreed. “The women do piecework all day, and they’d expect her to help, to earn her keep. I guess she and her new husband didn’t have any privacy for their honeymoon, either,” he added meaningfully.

“Oh, dear.” Sarah knew there were no secrets in a tenement flat. How awful to find herself sleeping with a man who wanted to enjoy his new wife while all his relatives were only a few feet away, witnessing everything. Not at all the romantic adventure she must have envisioned. “No wonder she was unhappy.”

“Why didn’t she go home with her parents, then?” he asked.

Sarah considered, trying to remember how it felt to be fifteen. “Pride, maybe. She didn’t want to admit she’d made a mistake. Or maybe she was afraid of what they’d do to her.”

“Punish her, you mean?”

“That, or maybe she thought they’d still marry her off to the old man. Would she have thought that would be worse than what she had to endure at the O’Neals’?”

“Maybe. Young girls can be really stupid,” he said.

“Young boys, too,” she reminded him. “Why do you suppose Harry ate too much opium?”

“He probably didn’t know it was too much,” he said.

“But why take any at all? Do you suppose he’s a regular user?”

“His parents didn’t think so,” he reminded her, “and I expect somebody would tell an important man like Lee if his son was a hophead.”

“So on the day his sister is found dead, he goes to an opium den for the first time and swallows enough opium to kill him,” Sarah mused. “Was he that upset over her death?”

“I don’t know,” Malloy said, “but I’ll find out.”

“Maybe he killed her,” Sarah said. “Maybe he couldn’t stand the guilt, so he decided to kill himself.”

“Sarah,”
Malloy said sharply, the warning thick in his voice.

She couldn’t see his face in the shadowed interior of the cab, but she knew what his expression would be. She’d seen it a hundred times. “I’m not going to get involved,” she insisted. “I promised!”

“Yeah, and then you show up at the Lees’ flat when their boy is sick after you swore you were going straight home.”

“I don’t think I said
straight
home,” she argued. “I was only going to check on Cora and the baby first. There’s no harm in that. I didn’t know the boy was going to take opium!”

He didn’t reply. He didn’t say a word. She wanted to punch him.

“It’s a good thing I was there, in any case,” she pointed out. “He might have died.”

“The Chinaman that Lee brought knew what to do, too,” he reminded her.

Sarah sighed. She knew he was right. She really shouldn’t be involving herself in murder investigations. She’d put herself in danger more than once in the past. Things had been different when she only had herself to think of, but now she had a child. Catherine needed her. “I’m going home now,” she reminded him. “And I’m not going to do another thing in regard to Angel’s murder. I’m just going to wait for you to show up on my doorstep one morning to tell me that you’ve solved the case. Is that what you want to hear?”

“Yes,” he sighed. “But I’d also like for you to mean it.”

S
ARAH ARRIVED HOME IN TIME TO PUT
C
ATHERINE TO
bed. The child clung to her and didn’t seem to want to let go when Sarah kissed her good night. She remembered how upset both Catherine and Maeve had been when they heard about Angel’s death earlier that day.

“Were you frightened when you heard about the girl who died?” Sarah asked.

Catherine nodded uncertainly, as if she didn’t want to admit it but wanted Sarah to know, too.

“I’m sorry you had to hear about her, but you don’t have to be scared. Nothing like that can happen to you and Maeve. You’re safe here.”

Catherine’s soft brown eyes were wide and solemn. She shook her head and pointed at Sarah, jabbing her finger into Sarah’s chest several times to make her understand her real fear.

“Me?” Sarah asked in surprise. “You’re afraid something will happen to me?”

Catherine nodded vigorously at that.

Tears sprang to Sarah’s eyes, and she hugged the child tightly to her breast. How she wished she could promise that nothing would ever happen to her, that she would be there for Catherine forever. No one could make such a promise, though, as well she knew. She’d seen too many people die tragically and well before their time—Tom and her sister Maggie and poor Angel and all those whose other deaths she’d helped Malloy investigate.

Still, she could promise one thing. “I’ll be careful, sweetheart,” she whispered into Catherine’s soft hair. “I want to watch you grow up into a beautiful young woman.”

And if that meant she wouldn’t help Malloy with any more cases, then it was a small price to pay.

When Sarah finally released her, Catherine reached up with one small finger and wiped a tear from Sarah’s cheek. Sarah smiled reassuringly. “I love you,” she said.

Catherine wouldn’t let go of Sarah’s hand, so she sat beside her until the child was, at long last, fast asleep. Then she made her way downstairs to find Maeve sitting at the kitchen table waiting for her.

“That girl,” she asked when Sarah took a seat at the table opposite her. “How did she die?”