MANDARIN PLAID (Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series) (10 page)

“Anytime.”

I signaled for the waiter. Bill ordered coffee and I ordered a pot of orange pekoe tea, something uncomplicated and calm. While the
waiter cleared away the decimated remains of my dinner and brought the tea and coffee, Bill lit a cigarette. “Did it work?”

“You mean, did he scare me off?” I was amazed that Bill would even ask that; you could hear it in my voice.

He grinned. “I knew it wouldn’t.”

“Why, because I’m courageous and unfrightenable?” I straightened my shoulders.

“No, because you’re willful and disobedient and you hate to be told what to do. Isn’t that what your mother always says?”

“Only because I won’t stop working with you. Of course, being willful and disobedient, if she suddenly changed her mind about you, I’d drop you like a hot potato.”

“Sure you would,” Bill said, in tones of confident unbelief.

His sureness irked me.

“Oh?” I queried. “You think you know me all that well?”

He shook his head and said in quite a different voice, “Not well enough.”

Feeling my cheeks suddenly hot, I looked into my tea, bronze in a creamy white cup. There’s something about Bill, about how he feels about me and what he wants, that makes him take risks sometimes, lets him make himself vulnerable in a way that confuses and upsets me. And frightens me, too: it gives me a power I’m not sure I want.

I swallowed some tea, simple and bracing. Get back to the case, Lydia. Logic and deductive reasoning and work, that’ll clear all this messy emotion out of your head.

“Who would want to scare me off the case?” I asked, staring across the room, trying to think.

To my relief—and as I knew he would—Bill took my cue. He put away what just had or hadn’t passed between us and went back to work.

“I don’t know,” he said. “We don’t even really know what this case is.”

“It’s a theft,” I said. “Extortion. And a murder.”

“Is it? Maybe the murder’s not involved. That’s what John Ryan said. Maybe, based on what Andrew said, it’s true.”

“That Dawn stole the sketches? And Genna put us onto Wayne
Lewis to throw us off Dawn? And Wayne just coincidentally happened to be dead when we went to see him?”

“I don’t like that, either,” Bill admitted. “But don’t you think we should talk to Dawn?”

“I certainly do. I wonder where we find her?”

“Well,” he said, grinning, “you could call Andrew and ask.”

“And you could go jump in the lake. But I do have another idea.”

“What?”

“Andi Shechter. And Francie Whatever-her-name-is. They might know how to track her down, if she’s really a model.”

“And she must really be a model, because your Honorable Elder Brother said so.”

“You tread on thin ice sometimes, white man.” I stood up to leave, suddenly weary, feeling the soreness in my muscles from the fight.

“You’re going to walk out and stick me with the bill?”

“Your kind owns the world. Pay the bills.”

I did walk out. It was close to eleven; it had been a very long day. On Bank Street I found a cab, and it wasn’t until I was halfway home in it that it occurred to me Bill had not pointed out that I’d offered to buy him a drink.

E
IGHT

I
woke about nine the next morning, bright sunlight streaming into the room I’ve always lived in. On my first birthday my parents moved me out of their bedroom into this one, a room of my own. Andrew and Tim, who had shared this room until then, got piled in with Ted and Elliot across the hall. My brothers were always jealous of my space; I was jealous of their illicit late-night laughter, their sharing clothes and their being able to wake from a scary dream and
have other people breathing peacefully right next to them.

The night before, I’d gotten home too late to do anything besides take a hot bath and go to bed. My mother, who was sitting fully dressed in the living room watching the Cantonese cable channel when I came in, noticed the bruise on my cheek when I bent to kiss her. My mother notices everything.

“Karate class?” she asked me, frowning disapprovingly.

“Umm,” I said. Saying it that way wasn’t really lying.

“You shouldn’t go,” my mother started. “Too many rough men at that school.”

“Ba-ba wanted me to,” I cut her off. That was unfair but accurate, although I’d been eight then, twenty years ago, when my father started my brothers at a Chinatown Kung Fu school and me at a Tae Kwon Do dojo uptown, where they would take girls. It was unfair because one of my mother’s favorite weapons is, “Your father would have wanted it.” It’s a cheap trick to turn that weapon back on her, but I get the chance so rarely that I use it when I can.

“Humph,” she sniffed. She tried again. “You should call your brother.”

“An Zhong? We just had a drink together.”

One-upped twice. This was too much for her. She reached for something else, but not too far; for my mother, finding something to criticize is never a stretch. She put a shocked look on her face. “Ling Wan-ju, you’ve been drinking?” She sounded scandalized, even in Chinese.

“Orange juice, Ma. Full of vitamin C. I’m going to bed. I’ll get the groceries in the morning.”

Now it was morning.

My plan was to dress, get the groceries, and see if I could find someone who could help me find Dawn Jing.

It had occurred to me as I was falling asleep the night before that there was one person who could shortcut that search, and that was Genna. I’d toyed with the idea of just giving her a call and repeating what Andrew had said. “Come clean, Genna!” I’d demand. “Who’s who and what’s what around here?”

What stopped me was the bruise on my cheek, and the soreness in my hip where I’d hit the pavement. Someone was willing to go
some distance to chase us off this case. Since I didn’t know who or why, maybe the best thing was to let as few people as possible know what I was doing.

That, of course, didn’t include Bill. I called him as soon as I was showered, dressed, and breakfasted.

“Still speaking to me?” I asked.

“Till the cows come home. Hold on a minute. Be right with you, Bossie!” he shouted.

“Very funny.”

“Are you okay?”

“Sore. As soon as I get up and move I’ll be fine.”

“Ah, youth. What’s your plan?”

“I’m going hunting for Dawn Jing, after I come home with the water spinach.”

“Dawn Jing on a bed of water spinach. Sounds irresistible.”

“You’re in a jolly mood.”

“Want to know why?”

“Of course.”

“I just got off the phone with Visa, MasterCard, and American Express. I don’t think they believed I was mit der Deutsche Bank in Zurich, but I was so Teutonically pushy they gave me rundowns of Genna’s accounts anyway.”

“Where’d you get her card numbers?”

“Velez got them for me from TRW.”

Antonio Velez was a skip-tracer Bill and I often used to hunt up the kind of data that’s most easily gotten from computers.

“How come you called them yourself?” I asked. “Why didn’t you just let Velez finish it up?”

“I wasn’t sure where it would lead, and I wanted to be able to improvise if I had to.”

“And because it’s fun,” I suggested.

“And because it’s fun.”

It is fun: the exhilaration of convincing someone you’re someone you’re not, for a particular purpose; the switch of identities, making up one, assuming it totally, then dropping it; the bearing away of the prize by virtue of your own wits, guts, and fast-stepping.

It’s exciting, it’s a victory, and sometimes, when maybe you
should be wondering about whether it’s okay to be doing this, you go with the rush and the thrill and leave that uncomfortable idea behind.

“What did you find out?” I asked.

“John Ryan was right. She maxed out her credit to get the ransom money. She pulled about forty-three thousand out of her credit lines on the cards yesterday. The rest she probably had in the bank; I didn’t look. And it’s a good thing, too.”

“What is, that you didn’t look at the bank?”

“No, that she maxed out her credit.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” he said, triumph shining in his voice, “that she wasn’t about to get it anywhere else. John Ryan has not a cent.”

“
What?
”

“Negative moolah. One-way cash flow. The guy is maxed to his eyebrows on his credit cards and has been for months.”

“You checked him out, too?”

“You bet. He’s had two credit cards canceled in the last couple of years. His BMW was practically repossessed last summer. His bank account is periodically overdrawn, this being one of those periods. According to Citibank, they only keep him because his mother is such an outstanding customer.”

“No kidding,” I said slowly. “So John Ryan isn’t what he seems to be?”

“Well, he is a chip off the gold-buillion block. But he’s not flush.”

“Not flush,” I said slowly, emphasizing both words, ruminating.

“Not flush,” Bill repeated, “right now.”

“Right now?” I perked up. “As opposed to when?”

“Those periods when he’s not overdrawn.”

“When are those?”

“Random. His account gets infusions of cash, six in the last eighteen months.”

“From where?”

“I don’t know. It comes in as cash, literally. In ten to thirty thousand dollar lumps.”

“Cash? Could it be from his mother?”

“Not from the action I’ve seen in her accounts.”

“God, you’ve been busy.”

“She was crappy to you. That puts her high on my hit list.”

He said that lightly, as though he didn’t mean it, or if he did, it didn’t matter much.

But he meant it. And it mattered.

But I didn’t want to talk about that, now. “What happens to all this money?” I asked.

“Some of it he uses as a life preserver to beat the wolf from the door.”

“I can’t believe you mixed a metaphor like that.”

“You wouldn’t beat a wolf with a life preserver?”

“No. A shark, maybe.”

“You’d beat a wolf with a shark?”

“Oh, stop. What does he do with the rest of the cash?”

“Not entirely clear. But, interestingly enough, his account takes a major drop at just about those times Genna’s gets an infusion of its own.”

“Is this true?”

“Would I lie?”

“A fruitless line of inquiry if I ever heard one. Well, he said he’d given her money; that’s not a surprise. What’s his situation right now?”

“Bustola.”

“Right. You said that, didn’t you? But then what about the big scene at Andrew’s about Genna getting the ransom money from him?”

“Exactly: what about it?”

“I don’t know.” I bit my lip in thought. “Is it possible he has some source of funds you didn’t find, and he was planning to give her the ransom money from that?”

“Sure it is. I haven’t had a chance to rummage through his whole life yet. He could have a lot of stuff I haven’t found. But if he did, don’t you suppose he would have rescued his credit rating with it?”

“I’d think so. Bill?” I asked, with a thought that I wasn’t sure of the end of. “Does his mother make good his overdrafts at the bank?”

“No, according to them.”

“Does she know about them?”

“Yes.”

So much for that thought. “So what was he trying to do?” I asked. “Impress Genna because he knew she wouldn’t take his money, so it was a no-risk way to look like a generous bigshot? But she’s taken it before. How could he be that sure?”

“I don’t know,” Bill said. “I’m never that sure of anything.”

“You hide your insecurities well, though.”

“Kind of you to say so. Maybe he was trying to impress you and Andrew.”

“Why would he want to do that?”

“I don’t know,” he said again. “Mine not to reason why.”

“God, you’re almost unbearable when you’re cheery. What are you going to do now?”

“I’m on a roll. I think I’ll stay on the phone and see what I can find out about the gun that killed Wayne Lewis. I can’t lose.”

“How do you figure that?”

“If I find out something, that’s good. If I don’t, I’ll get depressed. Then I won’t be cheery and you’ll like me better.”

“You know,” I said, sweetly and ambiguously, “I don’t think I could like you any better.”

I hung up and went out in search of water spinach.

Water spinach, in Chinatown on a bright weekday morning, is not hard to find. Fruit and vegetable sellers weight their sidewalk stands down with shiny oranges and ugly misshapen jackfruit, crowded beside bundles of foot-long beans as thin as a shoelace and surrounded by bunches of deep green leaves, some rounded, some serrated, all glistening with water sprinkled enthusiastically over them by the sharp-eyed merchants and their fresh-off-the-boat assistants.

I was swinging my string bag down Mulberry Street, past the blue crabs and fish displayed on ice in their cardboard boxes—unless it’s a dire emergency I don’t buy the fish; my mother is convinced I’m going to pick out a spoiled one and poison us all—heading for the newsstand to buy Ma a copy of the
China Post
, when I heard my name.

“Lydia? Lydia Chin!” It was a handsome man, older than me but not by a lot, wearing a smile, his voice full of surprise and delight. I tried to place him; it took a moment, and then I knew who he was.

“Roland Lum?”

“Absolutely!” He grinned. He wore ironed jeans and a pale silk shirt with no tie under a double-breasted gray raw silk jacket. His fine black hair was brushed straight back from his high-cheekboned face. Hands on his hips, he looked me up and down and said, “Boy, I haven’t seen you in years. You look great! How’s Elliot, and your mom and everyone?”

“They’re all fine,” I said. “It has been a long time, hasn’t it? Elliot’s a doctor. An orthopedist at Mt. Sinai. He’s married, you know, with two children, a boy and a girl.”

“No way! Elliot? Someone finally hooked Chin Ai Liang, the Don Juan of Chinatown?” He lowered his voice confidentially. “Some Shanghai aristocrat? Or a Swedish masseuse?”

“Janie Ling,” I said. “From Bayard Street.”

Roland Lum threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, Elliot.” He shook his head. “Elliot. Well, more power to him. I really should call him, find out how he did it. Hasn’t happened for me yet. But that’s cool. How about you? Married, kids, anything? God, I can’t get over how great you look.”

“Not yet,” I said. Then: “I heard about your father, Roland. I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “He was old,” he said. “He always thought there’d be more for him someday than that stupid factory, but he bugged out before he found it. Look, you have time for a cup of coffee?” He grinned again. “Come on, let me buy you one, catch up on old times.”

I checked my watch, although I didn’t really need to. None of the fruits or vegetables in my string bag were urgently needed at home, and my search for Dawn Jing could wait another twenty minutes before it began. It was more to give me a brief moment to think, and to keep me from looking too eager.

Because this was one cup of coffee I definitely wanted to have.

Roland Lum, who had only ever been peripherally in my life as a not-particularly-close friend of my six-years-older brother, and had not been thought of by me since then, had reappeared as a name mentioned
by a now ex-client and suddenly, the next day, as a grinning face on the street. Chinatown’s crowded and small, and you do keep running into people from your past. Sometimes they even offer to buy you a cup of coffee.

Usually it doesn’t mean a thing, except when they sandbag you with a request for a donation to your village burial society or an invitation to invest in a can’t-miss real estate deal. But my mother, who believes the entire concept of coincidence is a Western idea invented out of abysmal ignorance of the workings of the world, and is also an evil
low faan
scheme to trick the Chinese—that is, that it’s something Westerners are simultaneously subtle enough to manufacture and stupid enough to believe—would, throw up her hands in hopeless disgust if I even for a minute entertained the thought that Roland Lum’s materialization on Mulberry Street on a sunny Wednesday morning was not, in some way, connected to this case.

Roland and I strolled to the Maria’s on Canal Street, discussing our families and the paths everyone had taken over the years. I caught him up on my brothers, and he told me about his brother Henry, who was a surgeon now in California, and his baby sister Megan, an intern with a public television station.

“She expects me to bankroll her when she’s ready to produce her first Bruce Willis film,” Roland said with a laugh. “From the factory. I’m running it now, you know.”

“Yes, I’d heard that,” I said. “Do you enjoy it?”

Roland made a face as he held open the door to Maria’s for me. “One of the great privileges of being Eldest Son,” he said in a voice heavy with irony. “Proves that an MBA from U. of P. can lead straight to s-h-i-t. I told Megan not to hold her breath.”

We found a table, which I held down for us while Roland went up to the counter. Maria’s is a Hong Kong bakery chain that, in the past few years, has been hedging its bets against the future like almost every business in Hong Kong by opening overseas branches. Being Hong Kong based, Maria’s baking is heavily influenced by British taste, and the three New York stores have introduced the butter-creme horn and the jam tart to Chinatown. They serve strong high-quality black tea with milk, the English way, and the lighting is bright and the tables are brass-edged Formica, the Hong Kong way. All three
stores are always crowded, almost entirely with Asian faces. White tourists, in search of the Authentic Chinese Experience, just don’t know what to make of Maria’s.