MANDARIN PLAID (Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series) (6 page)

“Because,” I said, “because there’s something else here besides what we’re seeing.”

He nodded. “Go on.”

“They’re hiding something.” Until I heard myself say that I hadn’t been sure I was thinking it. “They were anxious to pay up yesterday,” I went on, thinking out loud, “and so nervous they hired us to handle the drop. Today I’ve been shot at and someone’s been killed. That ought to be even scarier, but they’re not nervous anymore, except about the idea that this will come out and ruin Genna’s big chance. The thieves haven’t called again, but no one seems to be worried about what they’ll do with the sketches. Obviously there’s been a change from then to now, something we don’t know about.”

“And what’s your inclination?”

“To look into it.”

“Rather than going to the police.”

“Maybe not rather than. Maybe before. Just to make sure.”

“Of … ?”

“Of whether there’s any faint chance John could be right. That going to them could ruin Genna without helping anybody.”

“Because you don’t want to ruin her.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Because you like her.”

“Shouldn’t I?” I said defensively. “Just because she’s hiding something and she fired us and her boyfriend threatened us, is that any reason to dislike a person?”

“Not for one Chinese woman to dislike another.”

I looked out the window and sighed. “You’re right. I’m being ridiculous.”

“I didn’t say that.”

I turned back to him. “You like her, too?”

“No,” he said. “I like you.”

I felt my cheeks grow hot again.

“You want to know why?” he asked.

“No.”

“Okay, I’ll tell you. Because you’re beautiful. Wait, don’t throw that,” he said quickly as I hefted my teacup. “The real reason is, because
you have two reasons not to go to the police and you were going to do it anyway. For me.”

“Well, really for me,” I said.

He gave me a skeptical look.

“So I wouldn’t feel guilty when you lost your license and ended up on the street corner with a cup and I never put a quarter in it.”

“You wouldn’t put a quarter in my cup?”

“My mother needs them for the laundry. So if I look into this on my own—just a day or two—will you lie low until then?”

“No.”

“Bill—”

“
We
look into it. On
our
own. That’s my last offer.”

“I don’t want you to be messed up in this any deeper.”

“You should have thought of that before you met me. Now,” he said, standing, “I’ll go get us a refill so we can make a plan.”

He threaded his way through the crowded cafe. I watched him, his familiar, fluid walk, the easy set of his shoulders, the way his eyes covered the room as he moved through it, looking everywhere without seeming to look anywhere in particular. Deep-set eyes in a worn face, a face even I couldn’t call handsome.

Even I? What’s that supposed to mean, Lydia? I demanded. Why should you, as opposed to anybody else, expect to think of Bill as handsome?

Of course, there wasn’t any reason, and I turned my thoughts stubbornly back to the case while I waited for my new cup of tea.

F
IVE

W
hile I thought, I stared through the window and watched the parade of people on Fifth Avenue. This far downtown, in Chelsea, Fifth Avenue isn’t the glamour-and-glitz address it is uptown; but it’s taken on a new identity in the past few years, a cutting-edge,
creative-professions sense: architects, ad agencies, designers, photographers. Like my brother Andrew, I thought guiltily. I really had to call Andrew.

Later.

The people walking by my window were dressed for the neighborhood. I saw a lot of black, a lot of heavy boots; short, mussed-up hair on women, long flowing hair on men. A smudgily made-up young woman with hair the white-gold color of morning light leaned against a lamppost. She wore a leather jacket open to reveal a cropped, ribbed top above painted-on black pants. Smoke would come out of my mother’s ears if I ever tried to leave the house looking like that, but it was the height of fashion.

“You know,” I said, as Bill handed me my fresh cup of tea, “there’s something we’d better put out on the table.”

“You mean,” he said, sliding back onto his stool, “the fact that our ex-clients may well have killed Lewis themselves?”

“So you do think it’s possible?”

“Sure it is. Objectively I’d say it’s likely.”

“Objectively,” I agreed. “But I don’t think so, and you don’t either. Why not?”

“You, because of the ancient mystical solidarity of Chinese womanhood. Me, because I saw her face when you told them.”

I ignored his first remark, as I usually try to do when he talks about Chinese womanhood. I said, “And
his
face.”

“And his,” Bill agreed. “Peculiar reactions.”

“I thought so, too. But why?”

“I’ve seen guilty people trying to fake it,” Bill said. “And innocent people stunned by that kind of news. This was neither.”

I nodded. I haven’t seen as much as Bill, don’t have as much experience to go on. But my gut feeling was the same as his.

“But it’s still possible,” I said, “that they killed him.”

“Or one of them did.”

I didn’t ask the next question. But Bill answered it anyway.

“Let’s wait,” he said, “and see how things look.” He sipped his espresso. “So? Have you decided what we’re going to do?”

“How come I have to decide?” I complained. “As the considerably more experienced member of this team—in addition to being
considerably older, I might add—don’t you have to at least advise me?”

“Nope.”

“Oh.” I squeezed some lemon into my tea. “Well, to start with I’d like to know more about Wayne Lewis.”

“And I’d like to know what killed him.”

“Three gunshots,” I said. “Pow pow pow.”

“From what gun?”

I clinked my cup back into my saucer. “I’m behind, aren’t I? You want to know if it was the same gun that shot at me this morning.”

“If it wasn’t, it doesn’t prove anything. If it was, it knocks the unrelated-crimes theory out of the box.”

“Okay,” I said. “Can you look into that while I look into Wayne?”

“Sure. There must be somebody on the Department who’s still speaking to me. Or maybe I’ll just call Krch and discuss it with him.” He grinned.

“What is it between you and him?” I asked. “I thought you got along with most cops.”

“Most cops are decent people.”

“Not Krch?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe he was once. Maybe he still is.” He lit a cigarette, toyed with the burnt-out match. “The case we met on, he framed a kid in a homicide. He was sure the kid had done it but he couldn’t prove it, so he set him up. The kid was a trash-talking jerk, but he wasn’t a killer. I worked for the kid’s lawyer. We had a face-off, the kid was released and Krch was transferred. He wasn’t busted back to patrol, but he’ll never make Second Grade.”

“You were able to prove Krch had set the kid up?” I asked.

“No,” Bill said. “I framed him.”

Bill went back to his apartment, which is also his office, to make phone calls. My plan was to head off to Wayne Lewis’s old neighborhood, to see what I could see, but first I needed to call my mother.

My mother and I have a deal. I live at home, in the Chinatown apartment where Andrew, Tim, and I were born. Ted and Elliot were
born in Hong Kong while our parents waited to come here, which gives them some sort of special status in my mother’s eyes, though I’ve never been sure why. My mother’s allowed not to admit that I live there because she needs help carrying groceries up the four flights of stairs and changing light bulbs and washing windows. Until she’s ready to move in with Ted’s family in Flushing, someone needs to keep an eye on her. We’ve proposed the move, my brothers and I. It’ll take her a few years to get used to the idea. Then one day she’ll announce, as though she’d just thought of it, “Chinatown is so crowded now, it’s hard for you children to come visit me. I’ll move to Flushing. Ted and Ling-an can fix up the basement. Make what they call a mother-in-law apartment,” she’ll add, nodding sagely, to show her children that there are certain things you need to know to get along in America, and she knows them.

Meanwhile, while she adjusts to the idea, Ma gets to claim I’m still at home only because I can’t make a decent living at my unsuitable profession.

For my part of the deal, I get to keep whatever hours I need to keep, and I have a right to not answer any of her questions I don’t want to answer.

As a Chinese mother, though, she has the eternal, inalienable right to keep asking them.

I went to the pay phone by the cafe’s front door and dialed home. I stared out the window and idly watched the pedestrians weaving the fabric of the evening, crossing in front and behind, warp and weft, interlocking, becoming parts of each other’s lives, permanently but in ways they would never know about.

“Hi, Ma,” I said when my mother answered the phone. With my mother, of course, I spoke Chinese. “Anything up?”

“Up,” she grumbled. “What could be up? The sky, the clouds? The sun was up, but it’s down now. It will be dinnertime soon.”

“I know,” I said. “I won’t be home for dinner, that’s why I’m calling. I’ll be a while, but is there anything I should pick up?”

“No,” she said. “Nothing I need. Unless you want oranges, or water spinach with the fish tomorrow.”

That meant: buy oranges and water spinach.

“The stands will be closed by the time I get downtown,” I said.
Outside the window, a bus swooped down, scooped up some passengers, and took off again. “I’ll go out in the morning.”

“All right.” Her voice hinted that if she died before morning from lack of water spinach, the whole world would know why. “But call your brother.”

“Which brother, Ma?” I asked, thinking, Come on, Lydia, if you read your mother’s mind like a good Chinese daughter you’d
know
. Which is what my mother thinks, too.

“An Zhong.”

Oh. Andrew.

“He’s anxious to speak to you, Ling Wan-ju. He called here and he called your office, in case you were working.”

I bit my lip to keep from saying, I
am
working, Ma. “Did he say what he wanted?”

“He wanted to speak to you,” she said, sounding amazed that I needed any more than that before I’d jump to fulfill an elder brother’s wish.

“Okay,” I said. “Listen, Ma, I may be late tonight, so …”

I stopped. Outside the window, the woman in the cropped top pushed herself off her lamppost to grab the arm of a man who had just rounded the corner. He was startled, then seemed to relax as he recognized her, though he didn’t look pleased. She murmured something to him, then waited to see how he would react.

She was familiar to me somehow.

He was John Ryan.

He glanced around him, then at his watch. He took her arm and they hurried down the street together.

“Ling Wan-ju?” My mother’s voice jumped in my ear. I’d almost forgotten her. “What were you trying to say?”

“I’ve got to go, Ma,” I said. “Don’t wait up. I’ll call An Zhong,” I added quickly, without saying, Someday.

I hung up and scurried out, catching sight of John and the woman waiting for the light at the next corner. I stayed about half a block behind them, threading through the moving pattern of the night. I was thinking, I knew it, John. I knew you had something to hide.

They went two blocks, then headed west another two, not seeming
to say much as they strode along together. In the middle of the next block, they ducked into a club called Donna’s.

I knew about Donna’s, though I’d never been there. You see the name in the paper, on that page in the Sunday
Times
where they tell you the coolest newest thing going on. A lot of the time it’s going on at Donna’s, and it’s fashion people, models and designers and, I supposed now, outside men and show producers, who are doing it.

John had nodded to the wide, unsmiling doorman, who seemed to know him. The doorman had inclined his polished bald head and pulled open the door, and John and his cropped-top friend had disappeared inside. I wondered how I, your basic nobody, unknown to any doorman anywhere on earth, was going to get in. Well, Lydia, I suggested, the truth never hurts.

But first, a little quick change.

Not that there was much I could change. I stepped into a doorway up the block, leaned over and ran my fingers through my hair, trying to disturb its normal stick-straight, blunt-edged look as much as possible. I felt my gun in its waist clip poke me in the ribs when I did that. Maybe I should keep lipstick in a holster, too, for occasions like these. Hair thoroughly mussed, I unzipped my leather jacket, unbuttoned my shirt one button past where decency would suggest, and made the collars of both stand up. Then I put on my sunglasses and marched forward.

“Herro,” I said to the doorman in a breathy, Chinese-accented voice. “Mr. John Lyan, is he here yet? I am Chin Ling Wan-ju.” That was the part where the truth came in.

“Mr. Ryan’s here.” The doorman said suspiciously, “Who did you say you were?”

“Chin Ling Wan-ju. From Hangchow.” I smiled so he’d know I wasn’t offended at not being recognized. “He is with the beautiful blonde American woman? She is here also?”

“Andi Shechter? Yes, she’s here.”

Andi Shechter. That’s why she was familiar. The you-can’t-touch-this model who was going to wear Genna’s crinkly gold dress.

“Good,” I said to the doorman, trying to sound much relieved at this news. “I may enter? I am not too late?”

“Too late?”

“My plane, so late from Bali, I almost missed connection at Milan. Then circling your Kennedy one hour before landing! Mr. Lyan asked to meet him here at six. I am late, afraid he will be gone.”

“No, they just got here.”

“Oh, so lucky! Thank you so much, I will light incense for you, for your plane never to be late.” I smiled and stepped around him as he moved, scowling slightly, aside. He opened the door almost automatically. I felt him watch me for a few seconds, then turn back to the street and let the door close.

Now I was inside Donna’s, and a smoky dark place it was, too. I thought everyone except Bill had given up smoking, but I could see I was wrong. Very thin young women stood at the bar or sat on big soft armchairs holding cigarettes in one hand and glasses of clear sparkly water in the other. Some of the men were smoking too, though not as many. The music was the Rolling Stones, loud enough to cordon off the conversation at the next table but not loud enough to pound.

I looked around for Ryan and Andi Shechter. I thought I spotted her, but when I moved a few steps closer, it turned out to be another blonde woman in a cropped top and tight pants. I scanned the room again, and finally there they were, beyond the bar, deep in conversation beside a low table.

Well, Lydia, I thought, I’ll bet this is one place where you can order a Perrier and no one will think you’re a wimp. So I sidled up to the bar and ordered, positioning myself on a bar stool from which I could see John Ryan and Andi Shechter but where they weren’t likely to spot me.

The bar stool next to me had been empty when I sat down but it didn’t stay that way. Wavy dark hair, teak-wood tan, collarless white shirt buttoned to the neck, no tie, linen jacket: very au courant, totally up to the minute, and all he could think of to say was, “You’re new here, aren’t you?”

What
I
thought of to say was,
Oh, please
, but it occurred to me that I’d be even less likely to be spotted if I were in conversation with someone than if I were moping at the bar by myself.

I gave him an impersonal smile. “Yes, this is my first time here.”

“Who’re you with?”

Boy, I thought, they don’t waste time around here, do they? I shrugged.

“Well,” he said, “if you don’t have anyone yet, I’m always looking for a new face.”

I sipped my drink to keep from laughing out loud.

Then he handed me a business card.

Oh, Lydia, you really are an idiot, I told myself, as I read, “Everest Models, The Peak of Perfection.”

“Ed Everest,” he said, offering me his hand. His handshake was limp, so I made mine that way, too. Maybe that’s how they do it in this business. “It’s a small agency, only top-quality girls. On the way up. You’re a little short,” he said, looking me over the way you would something you were about to buy, “but I handle a lot of exotics, I could probably do something with you. You have a different look, could be good. What’s your name, sweetheart?”

“Mishika Yamamoto,” I told him.

“Mishika,” he said, nodding approvingly. “That’s good. We’ll drop the rest. What’ve you done? Any runway?”

I shook my head, trying hard to think of modeling jargon I could use in this ridiculous conversation.

“Doesn’t matter,” Everest said. “I can teach you to walk. I can teach you the outfits, anything you need. You have a great head.” He reached out, traced a finger lightly through my hair from my brow to the back of my skull, lingering on the bluntness of the hair at the nape of my neck.

“Thank you,” I said, shrugging my shoulders, shifting in my seat.

Everest smiled and watched me move. “A great head,” he repeated. “Any tattoos?”