Authors: Rhys Bowen
The house seemed awfully quiet as I stepped into the hallway. Someone had been cooking and the odor of fried bacon wafted from the kitchen.
“Hello!” I called and Sarah appeared at the top of the stairs.
“Molly, it’s you,” she said, coming down the stairs to meet me. “Good of you to come. Such a sad occurrence. She seemed so much better, so much more cheerful, but then I’ve seen it before, haven’t you—that people seem to rally right before they die.”
“How long ago did it happen?” I asked.
“We’re not quite sure,” she said. “I got here around ten o’clock. I was asked to go and collect Annie’s breakfast tray. We took her meals up to her so that she didn’t eat with the other house residents and risk contaminating them. I went up and tapped on her door, then I let myself into the room. At first I thought she was sleeping and tiptoed across to retrieve her tray. Then something looked strange about her and I took another look. Her eyes were open and she was staring at the ceiling. I touched her and she was cool to the touch—not quite cold, but cool. And I realized she was dead.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That must have been a shock for you.”
She nodded agreement. “I’ve worked here long enough now that I’ve seen a dead body or two, but one never gets used to it, does one?”
“I agree,” I said. “I’ve seen quite a few dead bodies, but it’s always a shock, especially when you had grown fond of the girl and had hopes for her recovery.”
“I don’t know about that,” she said. “One does not normally recover from consumption, but she had seemed so much brighter since the other Chinese girl arrived. Poor thing—I expect it was a shock for Bo Kei, having found a cousin only to lose her again.”
I nodded. “She was very upset. She begged me to come and see Annie for a last time and she was emphatic about knowing where Annie will be buried so that her bones can be taken home to China one day.”
Sarah sighed. “I don’t think we have much control over where she’ll be buried. Paupers’ graves are—well, paupers’ graves. But I’ll see what I can do. We have several resident volunteers whose families have clout in this city. Maybe we can bend the rules.”
“You’re very kind,” I said. “Could I possibly go up and see her? Bo Kei will want to know how she looked.”
“Of course.” Sarah turned back up the stairs. “Please follow me.”
Up the stairs we went, one flight, then two. Annie’s body was lying covered by a sheet. I tiptoed across as if I were afraid of waking her and gently pulled back the sheet. I looked down at her, then frowned. I had expected her to look pale and translucent, the way people were always described when dying of consumption. Instead of that her face and neck had a purplish hue.
“Was her face that color when you found her?” I asked.
“Yes, it was. I wonder if it was the disease coming out. It’s not very pleasant, is it?”
As I continued to stare at her, a thought was nagging at the back of my brain—something Daniel had told me once. He had mentioned skin turning purple when … the word
suffocation
popped into my head.
“How was she lying when you found her?” I asked.
“Just like this. Very peaceful, except for the purple skin and the red eyes.”
Fighting back my abhorrence, I lifted one of her eyelids. What would normally be the white of her eye was full of little red dots. I released her eyelid and shuddered.
“Sarah, who has been here today? Did anybody from outside go up to see her?”
She looked puzzled. “Nobody. Nobody’s been here at all. It’s a holiday, you see. It’s been especially quiet.”
“Who took up the breakfast tray? Was she alive then?”
“Yes, but she was sleeping, so the worker who took up the tray let her sleep. The food hadn’t been touched, so she must have just passed away in her sleep.”
“How many people are working in the house at present?” I asked. “Do you know them all? Can you vouch for all of them?”
Sarah looked puzzled. “What is this all about? Why the questions?”
I moved closer to her, glancing back at the open door. “I think she may not have died naturally. She may have been suffocated,” I said in a whisper.
“You mean she was murdered?” Sarah put a hand to her mouth in horror.
“I’m not sure, but I have been told that red dots on the eye are a sure sign of suffocation and she has them. Has a doctor seen her and signed her death certificate?”
“No, not yet,” she said. “But no one in the house could have done it. I know all these people well. We were all fond of Annie. None of them would have any reason to kill her.”
“But you said yourself that the door is always open. It would be relatively simple for an outsider to sneak in and out without being seen.”
“I suppose so.” Then she shook her head. “Not so easy in the mornings. There is always housework going on—floors being swept, bed linens changed. Someone would have to have taken a terrible risk.”
I went across to the window. It was open about four inches. I pushed it up and leaned out. Even the normal clatter of Elizabeth Street was subdued today. Only a few pushcarts and an ice cream vendor. From the far end of the street came the sounds of an organ grinder playing a lively Italian tune.
“Well nobody could have climbed in this way,” I said, pulling my head back in and closing the window. “It’s sheer brick wall, without even a drainpipe or fire escape.”
“I know. This is madness. You must be wrong, Molly. Perhaps her strange color has something to do with her disease.”
“We’ll know when the doctor comes,” I said.
“We may not find a doctor today. It is a holiday, after all.”
“Then I must ask Daniel to take a look at her. If what I suspect is true, then her death may have something to do with the murder of Mr. Lee.”
“What could it have to do with his death?” Sarah demanded. “Annie was here for a good week before he was killed. And no outsiders knew she was here. What connection could there possibly be?”
“As to that, there was a connection, wasn’t there? She had been Mr. Lee’s concubine, several years ago, brought from China just like Bo Kei.”
“But who could have found out she was here? And why kill a girl who was bound to die soon anyway?”
I couldn’t come up with a good answer to this. “Perhaps the murderer thought he was killing Bo Kei. But then nobody knew that she had been brought here either, did they?” I shook my head. “It doesn’t make sense, unless…”
“Unless what?”
“Unless Bo Kei knows more than she’s told me.” I drew the cover back over Annie’s dead face. “I’m going to find Daniel and have him question Bo Kei. Perhaps a policeman will get the truth out of her.”
“What do you think she could be hiding?”
“That she was the one who killed Mr. Lee. Again it’s only a theory and I can’t prove it. And she’s claiming she’s innocent, but I get the feeling that she knows things that she’s not telling me.”
I touched Sarah’s arm. “Don’t mention any of this to anyone else yet. Not until Daniel has confirmed my suspicions. If the murderer works here or is observing us, I don’t want him alerted.”
“You think the murderer could work here or be watching us?” Sarah looked around nervously.
“We can’t be too careful at the moment. This is someone who was prepared to take a risk, killing a girl in broad daylight in a house full of people.”
“I wish Monty hadn’t gone now,” Sarah said. “I’d feel safer with a man in the house. We’re all women volunteers on today.”
“I think you’re quite safe. Annie was only killed because someone suspected she knew something they didn’t want made public. We’ll know more when Daniel speaks with Bo Kei.”
I tiptoed out of the room with a backward glance at the form of Annie under the sheet.
Twenty-nine
I left the house and started toward police headquarters on Mulberry Street. As I walked, I thought through what I was going to say to Daniel and I realized that I wasn’t ready to face him yet. I had too many unanswered questions and I wanted to speak to Bo Kei first. I changed course and continued toward the Broadway trolley. Even if I was going to incur Daniel’s displeasure, I didn’t want to give up on this investigation now when I could sense that I was onto something. I had no idea what I was onto, but it had been my experience that if a second murder happens, it is usually linked to the first. I already had potential links—Annie had been in Bo Kei’s position once as Mr. Lee’s concubine. She had been cast out and sent to the ultimate disgrace and degradation of working in a brothel. But that was five years ago. She had already been punished for not having a son, and cast out—so why would somebody want to kill her now?
And yet Bo Kei had feared for her. I remembered how pitifully she had begged me to take Annie with her. She must have suspected that Annie’s life was in danger. Which might indicate that she hadn’t killed Lee Sing Tai herself. She certainly couldn’t have killed Annie since she was helping me clear up the debris of the party when Annie died. It was all quite baffling and I just hoped I might be able to persuade Bo Kei to tell me the truth. At least I’d be able to observe her reaction when I told her that Annie had not died of natural means.
I strode out with determination after I alighted from the trolley. I suppose also at the back of my mind was the desire to present Daniel with a case that I had solved and thus to justify my actions. I entered the house and took Sid and Gus aside to tell them what I had discovered. Then I went upstairs to confront Bo Kei. She was standing at the top of the second flight peering down to see what was going on.
“You saw her, Missie Molly?” she called, her voice quivering with distress. “She is really dead?”
“Yes, I did and—” I stopped short. I was staring at her bare feet.
“Bo Kei,” I blurted out, “you have big feet.”
“I know.” She sounded surprised at this observation. “Big disgrace to my family. Small feet are good. Many girls in China have bound feet, but the missionaries say to my family this is wrong and bad. So my feet were not bound, and they are extra big. My mother say no man want to marry me.”
Then whose footprints had made those little indentations at the edge of the roof?
“Bo Kei,” I said severely, “it’s about time you told me everything that you know. You have lied to me and kept things from me, and if you don’t tell me the truth, I’ll have the police take you to an American jail.”
“But I tell you truth,” she wailed. “I say that I do not kill Lee Sing Tai and I do not know who kills him. This is truth.”
“Not the whole truth, obviously. You didn’t want to leave Annie behind at the house. You were frightened for her—why?”
“She is family and she is sick. I no want to leave her alone among strangers.”
“No, it was more than that,” I said. A strange idea was forming in my head—a picture of the two girls dancing around together, Annie looking livelier than I’d ever have believed possible. “You thought she might be in danger. Well, it turned out she was in danger. Somebody killed her, Bo Kei.”
“Kill her?”
“Put a pillow over her face and suffocated her. Made her stop breathing.” I stepped closer, staring her right in the eye, hoping that my greater height would be intimidating. “Why do you think that was? Do you want to tell me the truth now, or are you going to let Annie’s killer walk free?”
She looked at me with frightened eyes. “I do not know who might have killed her,” she said.
“Then let me ask you this—why do you think someone killed her? Was it someone from the brothel who came after her? Someone who worked for Lee Sing Tai or Bobby Lee? Was someone afraid she would divulge something she knew?”
She shook her head.
“She’s dead, Bo. There’s nothing you can do to bring her back, but you can help us find her killer. So let me ask you this—I saw small footprints on the roof. A tiny, dainty foot. Were they possibly Annie’s footprints? Was she on that roof? Did she go to kill Lee Sing Tai?”
She hung her head. “She make me promise I never tell anyone,” she said.
“But she’s dead now. Tell me. In this country we punish people for being an accessory to a crime.”
“What does this mean?”
“That you knew about a crime and you helped the criminal in some way, even if you didn’t commit the crime yourself. Did she kill Lee Sing Tai? Did she?”
“No!” She yelled out the word. “No, she did not kill him.” Then she sank onto the top stair and put her head in her hands. “She wanted to. She went to the rooftop with that purpose.”
“She was well and strong enough to climb up to a rooftop and then leap from one roof to the next?”
She nodded. “She was not as sick as she acted. She knew if she was sick they would throw her out of the bad-women house—not want her to make their customers sick.”
“You’re saying she was only acting? She didn’t have consumption?”
“Yes, she knew that she had this disease, but not as bad as she wanted everyone to think. She knew she would die from it one day, but right now she was strong enough to climb up and jump across from one roof to the next. It is not such a big leap if one has no fear. And she had no fear, only anger. She said to me, ‘This man must not be allowed to put more girls through shame and misery. He must be stopped now.’ And when I tried to tell her not to go, she said, ‘My life is over. I will die some day soon. But I make sure this man pays before I die.’”
“She went to kill him—but she didn’t go through with it?”
“No,” she said. “Because of the ghost.”
“What ghost?”
Bo Kei looked up at me as if she didn’t want to go on. “When she reached the roof of Lee Sing Tai’s house, he was not there but the door that led to the stairs was open. She plucked up courage and started to go down the stairs to his bedroom. As she stood at the top of the stairs she looked down and what do you think she saw? She saw a ghost floating up toward her. That’s when she knew that Lee Sing Tai was already dead.”
“So what did she do then?”
“Everyone is afraid of angry ghosts. She ran. She jumped across to the next roof and almost didn’t make it. When she came back to me she was crying and couldn’t breathe. She made me promise that I would tell nobody what she had done.”