Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine Presents Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense (52 page)

“Is it nasty-sounding?”

“Of course not.”

“I didn't think so.”

Out on the crowded sidewalk the November air was cold. High thin clouds diluted the sunlight, and a breeze herded papers this way and that in the gutter, practicing for winter.

Walking north, we maneuvered around old Chinese ladies with short gray hair and padded jackets, picking over vegetables shoulder to shoulder with uptown shoppers who didn't know the names of the greens they were buying. A group of camera-hung tourists peered into guidebooks at the streets I grew up in. Vendors hawked cotton socks and radio-controlled toy cars, calling in broken English, “Three, five dollar!” and, “See it goes!” The street vendors are often the newest immigrants; sometimes those are the only English words they yet know.

“I think Mrs. Lee speaks better English than she lets on, too,” I said to Bill as we crossed Canal. “Or at least understands more.”

“Her English wasn't good?”

“It was snooty and condescending, but her grammar was terrible. I think she refuses to learn it better, or to speak it as well as she already knows how. It would be giving in.”

We single-filed past the sidewalk tables of a cafe in what used to be Little Italy and is still called that, though every other storefront sign now is in Chinese. “So,” Bill said, “what now?”

“Now we go lurk outside Jill Moore's afternoon class and see how far we can tail her without getting spotted.”

“Together? About a foot and a half.”

Bill's thirteen inches taller, eighty pounds heavier, and twelve years older than I am, with big hands and a face that sort of shows he's been a P.I. for twenty years. I'm small, though I'm always saying I'm quicker and he's always saying I'm in better shape than he is. And we both know I'm a better shot, though it was him who taught me to shoot. I practice a lot.

And besides all that, of course, I'm Chinese. And he's not. We do make a weird-looking pair.

“No,” I said. “Not together. We lurk in different places.”

It's a technique he taught me, and we use it often. It's good to have two people on a tail, because subjects can be surprisingly sneaky about losing you, even when they don't know you're there. The only reason not to do it is if the client can't afford it. When I'd quoted rates to Mrs. Lee, she'd balked—“Too much. Inexperience child. I pay half.”—and we'd had to haggle, but I'd expected that, so I'd started high. Now, for what she thought she was paying for me, she was getting both me and Bill.

I considered that a bargain.

Jill Moore's afternoon class met in an old white big-windowed NYU building on the east side of Washington Square. Tracking her down had taken me most of the hour between the time Mrs. Lee had sniffed her disdainful way out of my office and the time I'd met Bill for lunch. I'd had to use two different voices on the phone. For the Student Life office I was a confused clerk from the bursar's office who'd gotten Jill Moore hopelessly mixed up with Joe Moore, or Joan Moore, or God knows who. The other voice, when I'd gotten Jill Moore's address and schedule, was for Asian studies.

“Herro,” I'd said, blurring the distinction between L's and R's the way we're all supposed to. “I am Chin Ling Wan-ju—” that was the true part “—ah, guest lecturer in Flowering of Ming Dynasty Art, today. Supposed speak on ‘Spirit Scrolls of Ming Emperors.' So foolish, lose all direction. Tell me, please, where to meet?”

They were glad to.

Bill pointed out, when I told him about it, that they might have been glad to if I'd just called up like a regular person and asked. But I always like to try out my moves when I get a chance.

Armed with the photograph Mrs. Lee had given me from the afternoon with her daughter-in-law-elect, Bill settled on a bench at the edge of the park with the other bums. I felt his eyes on me as I crossed the street to the classroom building.

I entered the building along with a group of four NYU women, one in jeans, one in sixties daisy-patterned leggings, two in short skirts. I made three in short skirts. The guard at the security desk, who would have stopped Bill in a second, hardly even looked at me, except to evaluate my legs relative to the other legs sticking out of the skirts.

We all got on the elevator, but I got off first, on the third floor. I went around the corner to the room where someone was lecturing to a hall full of students on the Flowering of Ming Dynasty Art. Not on Spirit Scrolls, presumably, even if there really were such things, which I doubted.

I settled myself on the floor at the other end of the hall where I'd have a good view of the classroom door and took
The Catcher in the Rye
out of my leather knapsack. I'd read it when I was fourteen and it hadn't done a thing for me, but I thought maybe, in this setting, I'd give it another chance.

After fifteen minutes of giving it another chance, a bell clanged and all hell broke loose. Doors burst open everywhere. The advance guard—students whose next class was all the way across campus—charged out of the classrooms and were in the elevator or bouncing down the stairs before the profs had finished giving the reading assignments. Then came the slower ones, juggling books, notebooks, backpacks, and handbags the size of carryons. Textbooks thumped closed and zippers zipped and kids called to each other down the hall in exuberant voices and lots of different accents.

I stood, slipped my knapsack on, searched the faces pouring out of the lecture hall for the one in Mrs. Lee's photograph.

Jill Moore was not hard to spot. She wore a white shirt and bluejeans, dangling brass earrings, and, I noticed, a small diamond ring on her left hand. That encouraged me. A woman who was cheating wouldn't wear her engagement ring while she did it, would she?

Of course, rings are easy to take off.

As Jill Moore made room in her canvas carryall for her notebook, a handsome Asian man worked his way through the throng. He called her name. She turned, spotted him, smiled playfully. He reached her, seemed to be asking a question, but they were speaking low; I couldn't hear them. Still smiling, she shook her head, then looked around quickly. She leaned close and whispered something. He nodded. Then she squeezed his arm, twinkled her eyes, and was gone down the stairs.

I clumped down after her, thinking damn, damn, damn. I didn't know who that guy was, but he wasn't Kuan Cheng Lee.

I followed Jill Moore for the rest of the afternoon, through Washington Square Park, where the fallen leaves were restless on the asphalt paths, to the NYU library where she studied for two hours, and I decided to give away my copy of
The Catcher in the Rye
. After that we shopped a little along Sixth Avenue, had cappuccino at the Caffee Lucca—she indoors, I out—and then, around seven, we wandered back to an old brick building on MacDougal Street. The whole time I could feel Bill nearby, always down the block or across the street from us, a figure at the corner of my eye who wasn't there when I looked.

The MacDougal Street building was what I'd been given as Jill Moore's address by the helpful secretary at the Student Life office. I watched her go in, and I watched the lights come on in a fourth-floor front apartment a minute later.

Across the street and down a little was another cafe. That's what I love about New York. I don't know how P. I.'s do this in the suburbs.

I settled at a table by the window in time to see Bill stroll around the corner and disappear. If the apartment building had a rear exit into an alley, I wouldn't see him again for a while. He'd plant himself there, waiting until Jill Moore came out that way, or until I found him to say we were knocking off for the evening. This case was mine, so that decision was mine to make.

There must have been no alley, because he was back in a few minutes, lighting a cigarette on the street corner. I stuck my head out the cafe door, waved for him to come in.

He joined me at my round wooden table, ordered espresso and a Napoleon. I got peppermint tea.

“Thanks, chief,” Bill grinned when the waiter was gone. “It was getting cold out there.”

“Well, she may be in for the evening,” I said. “If she's not, we can leave here separately.”

But it turned out she was. As we sipped our drinks I told Bill about the man Jill Moore had huddled with outside of class. He said that seemed innocent enough to him, and I said the same thing, but I wasn't so sure, and neither was he, although he didn't say that. After about an hour we ordered an antipasto and shared it, dividing up chewy pepperoni, vinegared hot peppers, creamy rounds of provolone.

“How can you eat this after pastry?” I demanded.

“It's the white trash way of life.”

“See,” I said glumly. “The fact is we will never understand each other.”

“And if we don't,” Bill said, unearthing an anchovy and depositing it on my plate, because they're my favorite, “is that necessarily because I'm white and you're Chinese?”

“Yes,” I said. “It necessarily is.”

When we'd come in, there had been opera in the air, dramatic voices crashing together or lamenting separately in ways I was sure would break my heart if I understood them. After that there had been silence softened by murmured conversations. Now the elegant mahogany-skinned waiter clicked a new tape into the tape deck, and the swift notes of a piano tinkled around us. Bill's face grew distracted, just for a moment; maybe someone else wouldn't have noticed.

“Do you play this?” I asked him.

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

“Beethoven. The Waldstein Sonata. I don't play it this well.”

“Do you—” I began. Bill put a sudden hand on my arm.

“Look,” he said, nodding toward the window. “Is that the guy you saw this afternoon?”

The outer door to Jill Moore's building stood open. As we watched, a young Asian man took the stoop steps two at a time, then unlocked the inner door and let himself in. He was carrying a knapsack and a bag of groceries.

“No,” I said. “That's Kuan Cheng Lee.”

Nothing else happened that evening. Kuan Cheng, according to his mother, had an apartment on East Ninth Street. “Good for son,” she'd informed me. “Live by own self, learn manage household. Later will able treat mother proper way.” I didn't know what sort of household Kuan Cheng would learn to manage in a Ninth Street walkup, nor had I been sure that this wasn't just Mrs. Lee saving face by pretending to approve of her son's moving out. What was clear was that she intended, eventually, to establish herself in whatever household he set up. Well, as a Chinese mother, that was her right.

Kuan Cheng didn't come out, and no one else we cared about—meaning no Asian men—went in, and around ten I called it off. I paid the check, took the receipt for Mrs. Lee, and left a big tip. Bill and I walked south on Sixth to Canal in the chilly, blue New York night. Traffic rushed up Sixth in a hurry to get someplace, it wasn't clear where.

At Canal we arranged to meet the next morning and start all over again. We kissed good-night lightly, the way we always do, and I felt a little guilty and confused, the way I always do. Bill wants more than that from me, but he understands how I feel, and though he comes on a lot in a kidding sort of way, he never pushes it. Somehow that makes me feel guilty and confused.

Then we parted. Bill turned right to his Laight Street apartment and I turned left, to Chinatown.

T
HE MORNING WAS
overcast and chillier than the day before had been. Jill Moore had a nine o'clock class; at a quarter to nine Bill and I watched from separate corners as she and Kuan Cheng Lee came out of her building and walked up MacDougal Street. They were smiling and talking, Jill Moore's eyes twinkling as they had the day before, with the other Asian man.

The day was pretty boring, and I began to feel bad for Bill, who spent most of it on park benches. He doesn't like to be cold. I was fine, sitting in the hallway of the white building, in the student cafeteria (which was noisier than I ever remember my college cafeteria being), in the library, and then back in the white building. I had ditched
The Catcher in the Rye
and wrapped
Surveillance and Undercover Operations: A Manual
in brown paper so I had something to read in the long stretches between clanging bells.

Jill Moore's afternoon class let out at three-thirty. I was sitting on the windowsill at the end of the corridor when her lecture hall door opened. She was among the first out, hefting her bag, hurrying to the stairs. She galloped down them, and I followed her in a crowd of rushing people. I didn't get a chance to shove
Surveillance and Undercover Operations
back in my knapsack until we were striding across Washington Square Park. Jill Moore had much longer legs than I do—well, who doesn't?—and I began to wish for my Rollerblades, except that I had no idea where we were going. I also had Bill, who was keeping up with her pretty well, strolling along in a bum sort of way.

My idea about where we were going was right, and as Jill Moore unlocked the door to her building, Bill and I converged on the cafe across the street. The window tables were taken, but it was a small cafe; we could see the old brick building from the table we chose.

“Jesus Christ,” Bill said, breathing on his hands to warm them. “I ought to charge you double for freezing.”

“You ought to wear silk underwear.”

“Will you buy it for me? I'll model it.”

The thought of Bill's striking model's poses in silk underwear almost made me spray my peppermint tea all over the table. “Go ahead,” he said. “Laugh at me. I—” He stopped. I followed his gaze out the window, and we saw what I'd been hoping we wouldn't.

The handsome young Asian man Jill Moore had twinkled her eyes at yesterday came quickly down MacDougal from the direction of NYU. He looked around, entered her vestibule, rang an apartment bell. He was buzzed in.