I
was most curious about the empty apartment. I hadn’t thought to ask. And, too, my most ready access to information would come from Ray, ever eager to exchange gossip.
Ray found his way to me before I found my way to him.
“You find what you are looking for?” he asked. His face looked like those drawings of a happy sun.
“Bits and pieces,” I said. “What about 3B? Who lived there?”
“Old Chinese woman.”
“She moved?”
“She die.”
“Here?”
He grinned again. “Accident. Fall down elevator shaft.”
“And everyone believes it was an accident?” I wondered why Mr. Lehr hadn’t told me about this. A death preceding a death, no matter how unrelated it might seem, ought to have been on his mind. Perhaps it was.
“Oh, Mr. Detective, honorable Mr. Chan, this is an old building. Elevator door work, elevator do not. Boom!” Ray clapped his hands together once.
“I think
splat
was the word you were searching for,” I said, impatient with and unappreciative of Ray’s gallows humor.
“That is why there is a sign on the elevator,” he said, suggesting I had been more than remiss not to have figured it all out earlier.
“Thanks. When did she die?”
“About a month or so ago?”
“Ted Zheng was still alive then?”
“Yes. You think he did it?”
“That’s not why I was asking. Did he know her?”
“Sure, he ran errands for her.”
That evening I set out my clothes for the next day, realizing that it might be better if I fit into the neighborhood. My standard dress was not casual. But there were few western-style suits on streets dominated by working-class Chinese and tourists.
I also called my client, Mr. Lehr, and asked him why he hadn’t bothered to tell me about the woman who fell down the elevator shaft.
“Not related,” he said.
I didn’t tell him that maybe that was why his tenants—actually, only Mr. Emmerich,
as far as I could tell—were so upset. An elderly tenant lands at the bottom of an elevator shaft, and another is bludgeoned to death.
I wanted to know more about the so-called accidental death. And I was pretty sure I could find out.
When I pressed, Mr. Lehr told me more. The dead woman was Mrs. Ho. She’d been seventy-two and was becoming increasingly senile.
“She acted crazy,” Mr. Lehr said. “I got calls from everybody about her. She was a problem.”
“The problem was solved when she fell.” Perhaps I was becoming too invested in this case. After all, I wasn’t expected to solve crimes.
“There was a barricade in front of the door,” Mr. Lehr fired back. “Not a big one, but big enough that no one but an idiot—”
“Or someone suffering from severe mental illness.”
“—could miss it. Listen, safety inspectors and the police investigated. The elevator car was on four. The elevator technicians were working underneath and using the third-floor doors to move in and out. They took a break or something. She was just crazy. She belonged in a home.”
“Wasn’t anyone watching after her?”
“Toward the end, one of the Siu sisters helped her—helped with the groceries, paying the bills, that sort of thing. That kid, the dead kid, helped her.”
That evening I kept a vigil outside the Blue Dragon. At ten thirty Norman Chinn came out. He was dressed casually. He walked down to California Street and hailed a taxi. Fortunately, it wasn’t raining, and there were other cabs hanging around the gates to Chinatown. I calmly asked the driver to follow the other cab. I expected some kind
of comment but got only silence until we arrived at a bar on Polk Street. Norman went inside. I counted to ten slowly before going in.
Not a woman in sight. On the dance floor was a mix of Asian and Caucasian men. Norman Chinn got a drink and went to the back of the bar, where a scantily clad young Asian boy danced for tips. I’d lived long enough in San Francisco to know there wasn’t anything shocking about all this—but it was telling.
W
hen I came back the next morning to stake out the apartment building, Sandy Ferris was bringing boxes out to the street. I stayed back. She was far too rushed and flustered to notice. In and out. The last few trips, she bore suitcases.
Seemed to me that if she had her entire life with her, it was a small life, materially speaking. She hadn’t been too lucky in love either. In a few minutes she was done. She sat on the stack of boxes, looking tired, dejected.
Ray came out and talked with her briefly. It seemed to be a friendly chat.
If she was skipping out on the rent, he didn’t care. If she was being tossed out because she didn’t have the rent, she didn’t put up much of a fight. My guess was that she was leaving of her own accord. It would be hard for a social worker to afford an apartment by herself in Chinatown—or anywhere in the city, for that matter. And it was coming up to the first of the month.
A big yellow taxi found its way through the buildings like a big ship in a narrow harbor. The driver complained but helped her load her belongings. Should I follow? I couldn’t, actually. Would she vanish?
Didn’t matter. I couldn’t do anything about it.
I moved down the street and sat on a step, waiting—for what, I wasn’t sure. The question was, would I recognize it when it came? At one point, after an hour or so of waiting, I saw Mrs. Zheng and the little boy emerge. I couldn’t imagine what I would
learn from following them. But sometimes it’s the seemingly ordinary act that reveals something important. She walked him to the park. And he wandered about from ladder to swing and from swing to slide.
Mrs. Zheng talked with another elderly Chinese lady. There were no smiles and no pauses in the conversation. There was nodding and frequent glances at the children. Afraid I’d be suspected of being a loitering pedophile, I went back to the Blue Dragon.
I wondered if Ted’s things were still in the apartment. I would have loved to take a look through his belongings. However, I didn’t want Ray to know I was outside the building, watching, staking it out, so I decided I’d wait until evening to check out Ted’s apartment, now that his girlfriend was gone. I would come back dressed in my usual natty manner.
I must have missed those who went off to work early—Mr. Zheng, the Wens.
At nearly eleven, as the sun climbed down the brick walls of the buildings, Mr. Emmerich came out. He had a canvas bag in his hand and headed toward Stockton Street and its produce markets. I followed him.
He went to one of the larger markets. I watched as he haggled in Chinese with the woman behind the counter over the price of the oranges and later a twisted ginger-root. He was not a pleasant man. Voices were raised. A few people turned to look, but most didn’t, and those who did turned away quickly. I assumed they knew him.
He made two more stops. He went inside a shop that appeared to specialize in herbs and teas. He picked up a Chinese newspaper. Then he headed back to the apartment.
If someone had come or gone in the interim, I had missed it. I waited and waited. At noon the narrow and comparatively quiet street was fully lit. Traffic had increased, and the plastic clicking of mahjong had begun.
A homeless man sat down beside me.
“You want to know how the universe began?” he asked.
“How?” I asked.
“A speck of sand.” He was very brown, but beneath the dirt and tan, he was Caucasian. He had a dusty look—his face, his beard, his jacket, his pants and shoes. He looked like a large speck of sand himself.
“That’s quite possible,” I said.
Norman Chinn passed by. He had his briefcase and was heading toward the building. He looked bedraggled.
My new philosophical friend continued. “It was a perfect place, perfectly balanced in such a way that it didn’t exist. And there came a speck of sand. And it disrupted the harmony of nothing and this”—he waved his hands broadly to encompass all of the world they could—“is the result.”
I nodded.
“Do you believe that?” he asked.
“I believe that’s possible,” I said. “It’s called the vacuum theory.”
“What?”
“The world exists in a pristine state. Everything is symmetrical. And the introduction of a single particle—your grain of sand, for example—causes reality to come tumbling out.”
“True?” he exclaimed in disbelief.
“I don’t know. It’s a theory.”
“I’ll be damned,” he said. He stood up, shook his head and walked away, saying, “Crazy, crazy, crazy.”
Mrs. Zheng came back with the little boy and a large bag of what I presumed to be food. She stopped in front of the door to get her keys. She dropped them. When she stooped down, she kissed the boy on the cheek, dabbed her thumb on her tongue and wiped away something above the boy’s eye. She smiled. The boy smiled back. He
reached out his arms, pulled her down so low she almost fell, and hugged her.
I stopped in at a small noodle joint. How out of touch I felt. When I’d finished eating I walked back out into the Chinatown street and its constant river of people, feeling that sense of not belonging more intensely than ever.
Norman Chinn was coming toward me. I brought the brim of my hat and my head down. I was sure he didn’t notice me. A quick glance indicated that he had freshened up. He’d changed shirts and walked more briskly than before.
About four, as I began thinking about giving up, Steven Broder came out of the building. He was wearing a white shirt, black pants and shiny black shoes. Again, he carried a black jacket over his arm. I followed, but it was a long walk to a building that housed a catering firm. Others dressed like Steven
entered or lounged around the doorway, smoking cigarettes.
Before he went inside, Steven turned in such a way that I could see him more clearly. The harsh light of the sun revealed a face more ravaged by time than I had realized when I’d seen him earlier in the hallway at the apartment building. He was even younger in the framed photograph in his and his lover’s apartment.
Should I go back to the Blue Dragon or go home? Who else should I watch out for? The Wens would come home from work sometime after six. I decided to go see Ray in the evening and ask to go through—as ghoulish as it sounded to me—Ted Zheng’s possessions or what was left of them.
Ray was there. When wasn’t he? Initially, he pondered my request with consternation. But his obsession with participating in
the investigation eventually won out in his quandary about the ethics of showing me Ted’s things.
“I promised to box this stuff up for his parents,” he said, still wary.
“Then I’ll help,” I said.
He smiled. Nodded. “Nothing wrong with that.”
We went inside. Apartment 1B was in shambles. What else could anyone expect? Sandy Ferris had just extracted her life. That’s what it looked like. There were empty spaces now, the physical manifestation of the emotion of leaving.
“Did Sandy Ferris leave you with an address?” I asked him.
“Oh yes. Forward mail. Phone number.”
She wasn’t running—or if she was, she certainly wasn’t running smart.
“Why did she leave?”
“Couldn’t pay rent alone. Have friend to stay with.”
Ray went to find boxes. I went to the small battered desk and rummaged through the drawers. The first thing I found of interest was a bunch of old ledger sheets. These words were scrawled at the top:
Debt, parents
.
Underneath were dozens of entries, dating back several years. Simple addition and subtraction. It didn’t take a professional accountant to make sense of them. Ted Zheng was more than fifty thousand dollars in debt to his parents. There were entries showing payments to them. But there were more frequent entries of larger amounts that only added to an ever-increasing debt.
I put these pages aside for later, more serious evaluation. I looked for letters. None. No diaries. I found a jewelry box. It had a velvet interior with specific places for cuff links and tie clasps and a space for other jewelry or mementos. The box was old and of European tradition, not Asian.
Inside the box were a couple of cuff links that didn’t match, from a era that probably predated Ted Zheng. A plastic tortoiseshell ring, some rhinestones and two pins, one the shape of California. I found two keys as well. One still had its shine. The number 314 was etched in the shiny metal. It didn’t look like a key to a serious lock. The other could have been a key to just about anything. Perhaps it was a spare to his apartment or to the front door. Or to another apartment.
At any rate, I wasn’t sure I had found anything of value. Yet, since these items were in a lower drawer and in the back of that drawer, it seemed they were intentionally hidden.
I looked at the box more carefully. Not enough room for a hidden compartment. But I did notice that the velvet on the top was loose. I peeled away the corner and found a white envelope.
Inside was a photograph of Ted Zheng. I didn’t know how recent it was. It seemed fairly recent, judging by the photo of him and Sandy I’d seen earlier. The only difference was that in this one Ted Zheng was as naked as can be, smiling big for the camera.
This perplexed me. The background of the photo was pretty nondescript. No telling where it had been taken. No telling why. But I was getting nervous. I was worried Ray might come in at any moment, so I put the photo back in the envelope and stuffed it and the ledger sheets into my jacket pocket. Then I remembered the keys. Might as well take them too. I had no idea what they unlocked, but if I came upon locks without keys, these might be what I’d need. I put the keys in my pocket.
When Ray came in, I was searching through Ted’s clothing.
“Find anything?” Ray asked.
“People keep the strangest things, don’t they?” I asked, to avoid having to lie.
I stayed an hour longer than I needed to, to help Ray feel his compromise was legitimate.
Once at home, I dumped out the contents of my search on the table in the dining room.
I took the photograph from the envelope. Yellow paint on the back of it. The room in which Ted Zheng was photographed looked a little more familiar now. The molding on the side of a door. Judging by the background, the photo had been taken in the empty apartment, the one Ted Zheng had been painting. But he was painting the apartment white, not yellow.