Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves (17 page)

“You didn't exactly let me be the aggressor,” he said. He was gingerly working his shoulder to make sure it was still functioning. “Don't tell me that was just luck.”

“Trust me,” Langston said. “It was just luck.”

Rule #68: Once the first body shows up, it all becomes a little more complicated.

 

I was sitting in the window seat at Langston's apartment, which was now kind of my apartment too. I was looking for a crow I'd seen in the sycamore branches across the street. I didn't see him. Or her. I'm not sure how you tell a boy crow from a girl crow. Unless you are a crow, I suppose it isn't important to be able to do so. Looking for the crow made me realize I'd been here, living with Langston and working at the Eastern Palace and doing with Corinne whatever it was I was doing with her, for long enough I was expecting some reliable familiarity. I didn't see the crow, though. I did see some buds swelling out on the sycamore, little buttons of light, watered-down green. It had been slightly more than a week since Corinne had been mugged at the door of her apartment.

I went over the sequence of that night. I wondered if I could have done anything different. Corinne didn't get hurt. I didn't, either. So I figured all in all I'd done okay. I'd taken on two guys and put both on the ground. There weren't a lot of people who could do that. Even so, when I'd told Mr. Cataldi that luck had played some role in it, I was being honest. Then I thought about being with Corinne after the cops had left that evening. About being on her bed. About the aroma of her hair. Her hand resting on my stomach. It would have been easy. It would have been, I was willing to bet, thinking about it now, pretty great. I hadn't, and for the reason I'd given her. When I'd told her it was about timing, I was being honest with her. Somehow it just didn't seem right, not on the same night she'd been mugged. And maybe, I told myself, as much as I wanted it, there was something inside me that even more didn't want to be cliché. Doing what we'd both contemplated, right then? Too cliché.

I was still thinking about that when my phone rang. It was Ms. Masterson.

“Are you at work?” she asked.

“Nope.”

“You know where Corinne is?”

“She's gone for a few days. To Seattle,” I added because I knew if I didn't Ms. Masterson would ask.

I'd driven Corinne to the airport. She said she needed to see some family there.

“You still have family in Seattle?” I'd asked her.

“No,” she said.

“Oh. Then . . .”

“I'll tell you about it later.”

I hadn't pushed it past that. I was beginning to get a sense when Corinne wanted to talk about something and when she didn't. On the subject of Seattle, right at that moment, anyway, I got the distinct impression it was one that fit into the “Didn't Want to Talk About It” column.

“I'm going to come by to pick you up,” Ms. Masterson said. In twenty minutes we were in her car, driving toward a complex of buildings that bordered part of the St. Louis Airport, where I'd recently delivered Corinne. This was the back side of the airport, though, away from the terminal. There were lots of rows of buildings, single story, that all looked like warehouses.

“Have you ever seen a body?” she asked.

“That seems a bit forward,” I said. “I hardly know you.”

“A dead body, Tucker,” she said, still looking at the road. “Ever seen one?”

“Both my grandfathers'. At their funerals.”

“This will be a little different,” she told me. We pulled into the lot of the St. Louis County Medical Examiner's Office. It looked more like the front office for a business in an industrial park than a morgue. As we entered, Ms. Masterson introduced herself to a man in a lab coat. He nodded at me, and she explained, “He's here to assist in identification.”

“Have you ever seen a body?” he asked me.

I didn't think my line would be as funny with him. I just told him I had. I was starting to wonder what the deal was. If I'd told Ms. Masterson or him that I hadn't, were they going to send me to a class on Viewing the Dead before they let me have a look at whoever this was supposed to be?

We followed him into the back, through doors that closed behind us tightly with a
whoosh.
It smelled like cleaning chemicals. The morgue looked about what I thought a morgue would look like, although I hadn't really given much thought as to what a morgue would look like, it occurred to me, until we were on the drive over. So my expectations weren't particularly specific.

He was definitely dead. His skin was the same color as chalk. Other than that, he looked like he was sleeping. Although I'd never seen anyone asleep whose chin was touching what looked like uncomfortably near his left shoulder blade. I assumed his neck was broken. Or that he'd been very, very flexible. I could see some bruises. One eye was puffy and swollen.

“Ever seen him before?” she asked.

I nodded. “I ran into him in Buffalo.”

“Let's go talk,” Ms. Masterson said. I followed her out of the room and into an open area in the lobby, where some plastic chairs looked like they'd been rescued from an airport lounge. I wondered why a morgue needed chairs. You came here, you saw the body, you left. Did a lot of people come here to sit and wait for something? I didn't see any magazines.

“Where is Ms. Chang?” she asked me.

“She went to Seattle for a couple of days,” I said. “I told you.”

“You're sure that's where she is?”

“I'm sure I took her to the airport and stood beside her while she checked in for a nonstop flight to Seattle, and I'm sure I walked with her to the security line, and I'm sure she went through the line and turned around and waved to me before she went down the concourse.”

“So you're pretty sure,” Ms. Masterson said.

“Pretty sure,” I said. “Why are you asking?”

“I just want to be certain she's all right.”

“I can call her and check.”

I thought about her cryptic explanation for going. Going to Seattle to see family, although telling me she didn't have any family there. I decided not to mention it to Ms. Masterson.

“Maybe later,” Ms. Masterson said. “Right now I want you to tell me about your contact with the late person we just saw.”

I told her about my encounter with the guy, that he'd asked me about Corinne but had used her Chinese name, which I hadn't known at the time, and that he'd taken off when I said I didn't know anyone by that name, and that, coincidentally, he seemed not to want to be around when a cop car started down the street. Ms. Masterson didn't ask if I'd punched him. I didn't say I had. I figured I was already in deep enough.

“But this isn't one of the guys who attacked Corinne?” she asked.

I shook my head, then nodded when she asked if I was sure.

“So here in St. Louis, we have a dead Chinese male with whom you had a previous encounter, in Buffalo, New York. A male who shows up dead, who looks like he got that way after being beaten into it. We'll have to wait for the coroner's report, but it's a fair chance that he didn't expire from a heart attack, I think.”

I bit my lip. It didn't seem appropriate to grin. I guessed being flippant was Ms. Masterson's way of dealing with these sorts of situations. I could understand that.

“But this dead Chinese male is not one of the Chinese males with whom you had an encounter just last week, right here in St. Louis.”

“No,” I said.

Ms. Masterson crossed her arms. She sat back in the plastic chair and stretched her legs out in front, examining her shoes. They were black, with low heels. Sensible shoes.

“So there may be no connection.”

“Possible,” I said. “But unlikely.”

“Now it gets a little more complicated,” Ms. Masterson said.

“I bet.”

Rule #54: Being honest is vastly overrated.

 

When I wasn't looking at corpses or wondering what Corinne was doing in Seattle, I was thinking about which dish I was going to present in the “Best Chinese Chef in St. Louis” contest. I thought, too, about my reaction when Mr. Leong told me about the contest. Excited? That would be a little much. Worried? Not really. When he'd asked me about entering the contest—or, to be more exact, telling me that he had entered me—more than anything else I thought it would be fun. Fun in the same way it was fun to be close to Chinese conversations, particularly when the conversations were about stuff they probably didn't particularly want to be overheard. And overhearing them and letting them go on and on, and then casually breaking in to offer some comment. The looks of surprise—incredulity sometimes—that brought on were fun. In a similar way, it was going to be fun to get into this contest.

It was fair to say there wouldn't exactly be a lot of contenders for St. Louis's best Chinese chef. On the other hand, there were a lot of Chinese restaurants in town. Most had Chinese cooks in the kitchen. There was a good-size Chinese and Chinese American population in St. Louis. The fact that I had a job working in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant and turning out dishes that appealed to Chinese diners who knew what good Chinese food was meant something. I had my doubts that being named the best Chinese chef in the city was going to be the highlight of my cooking career. Still, it was more than jack squat. I had to admit to myself, too, that I kind of liked the idea of being a non-Chinese guy who was at least in the running for the best Chinese chef in the city. So I gave my dish some consideration. Langston and I had talked about it, every morning, at breakfast ever since Mr. Leong had told me about the contest a week before.

“The secret to winning any contest like this is knowing who's judging it,” Langston said. He'd been told that the judging panel would consist of some business people in the Chinese American community in St. Louis. “There aren't going to be a lot of
meishijia
there. No gourmets who really know Chinese food. We're going to have to cater to their tastes. You could make something spectacular, something that would have a true
meishijia
sobbing tears of happiness, and it might not impress these judges. That makes it tough.”

I agreed. There are some classics of Chinese cooking. Whatever Langston was planning for his own entry, he wasn't saying. We were friends. We trusted one another well enough to punch and kick within fractions of an inch the places where we could really do some damage. Langston had told me about his first crush, Mindy Collingswood, way back when we were in fifth grade. He knew about my mother's youngest brother, who got caught trying to pass bad checks in Laramie, Wyoming, and spent some time in prison there. For guys barely out of our teens, we had a lot of history. A lot of shared secrets. But for chefs, even chefs who are good friends, there's still some ego involved when it comes to cooking. He didn't tell me what he was planning; I didn't ask. He'd done the same. Which wouldn't have made much difference for me because I still didn't have any idea.

I was standing in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil for tea and mulling it over a day after Langston and I had our talk about the contest when there was a knock on the door of the apartment. Corinne was on the other side. She was wearing jeans and a dark red sweater that fit very nicely. She'd returned from Seattle a couple of days earlier. She gave me a call from the airport when she got back; I drove over and picked her up. I told her about the body and how it had once belonged to the guy who was looking for her in Buffalo. I tried to glance at her face when I gave her the news. It was already evening, though, and dark. I couldn't see any reaction.

“How bad was it to look at the guy?” she asked.

“Better for me than for him,” I said.

“You're being flippant,” she said. “You're trying to sound casual to hide the fact it must have been pretty gross.”

“Partially. It wouldn't look good for me to break into racking sobs in front of you. I'm supposed to be tough and stoic.”

“Says who?”

“It was in the
Boys' Manual
we all got issued at birth.”

She made a snorting sound and said
“Chee,”
drawing it out, a sound that from a Mandarin speaker meant she thought I was full of crap.

“What kind of reaction do you want me to show?” I said. “Would it help if I became hysterical?”

“You could just be honest,” she said, “tell me what you are really feeling.”

“Being honest is vastly overrated.”

“Which rule is that?”

“Rule Number Fifty-Four.” Then I added, “I was scared to go into that morgue. I was worried I'd get sick and heave all over the floor at the sight of a body that got that way by being beaten to death. I didn't,” I said. “Just for the record. And, yeah, it looked pretty bad,” I went on. “And I wonder if somehow I'm not in some way responsible, indirectly, for that happening to the guy. I don't know how. I do know I'm not going to spend a lot of time fretting over it. Still, I run into the guy a couple of months ago, I punch him—and now he's followed us to St. Louis and somebody beat him to death. It's reasonable to think we're connected in some way.”

“So why couldn't you just have said that?” she asked.

“One,” I said, “because it's obvious. No need to. Two, because getting all caught up in my feelings might make me less objective and less able to figure out what the hell's going on.”

“And three?”

“And three,” I said. “Because tough guys have an image of being stoical and it must be maintained at all times.”

“Rule number?”

“That's number twenty-six.”

She didn't say anything on the ride back to the apartment. We hadn't mentioned it since.

Now, I opened the door and she came in. The sweater, I noted again—and this time more in detail now that she was inside—fit very nicely. I noticed too, as she walked into the kitchen to take the kettle off the stove now that it was at full, steamy whistle, that the jeans fit every bit as well.