MANDARIN PLAID (Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series) (16 page)

This conversation so far hadn’t gone at all the way I’d expected it to, and I could see it wasn’t changing now. I kept on anyway.

“She has a problem. I wanted to talk to you about it.”

“Genna has lots of problems. I’m never the one she wants to talk to about them.”

“She doesn’t. I do.”

“And remind again just who you are?”

“Lydia Chin,” I said.

That didn’t seem to be exactly what she wanted, but I wasn’t ready to give her any more yet.

“And the problem is—?”

“Stolen sketches,” I said.

“Stolen—why, you enterprising little bitch.” Her tone was full of wonder and admiration; it took me a moment to get past it to her words. When I did, they didn’t make a lot of sense to me. “Maybe I ought to reconsider helping you leave Ed,” she said thoughtfully. “We might work well together. But meanwhile—” She took a sharp step forward, caught my shoulders, and jammed me back against the sink. Face up close to mine, she snarled, “You made one big mistake, honey. Don’t make it worse!”

Twenty years of Tae Kwon Do wanted to chop into her ribs, then throw her over my hip to the cold, tiled floor as she crumbled. But I didn’t. She had me pinned but she wasn’t hurting me, and I didn’t want to hurt her.

I also wanted to know what was going on here.

“Let me go,” I demanded.

Her response was to push me harder against the wet porcelain
sink. I felt a damp puddle seep through my vest. “I don’t know how you knew,” she growled, “but you’ve got some balls coming to me. I suggest—”

Loud music flooded the room as two young women, one black, one white, both thin and bony, came laughing through the door. Dawn yanked herself back away from me. One of the bony women entered a stall and the other leaned over the sink to inspect her makeup.

Dawn shot a look at the woman at the mirror, then back to me. “In the hall.” She pushed through the door, leaving it to swing behind her.

I washed my hands, repaired my own lipstick, straightened my vest and followed her out of the ladies’ room, glad to get away from the scented soap. Her eyes were burning where she waited for me in the arched corridor. She had lit a cigarette; it stayed between her lips as she talked. She squinted an eye against the smoke.

“I think you have this wrong,” I said.

“No, rookie,
you
have it wrong. Stealing Genna’s sketches was shitty. Letting someone grab the money from you was stupid. Oh, yeah, I heard what happened in the park. Someone came and snatched it after those idiot P.I.s dropped it off, before you could get near it, right? Well, too bad, kiddo. That’s your problem. But coming to me, here, for more money—shit, that’s dangerous, honey.”

The menace in her voice made that believable, but I wasn’t focused on that right now.

“You think I stole the sketches?” I asked.

“Of
course
not,” she assured me, with a broad wave of her hand. “And you’re not a hooker, either, are you? You’re the Queen of fucking Sheba. What you really are, Mishika or Lydia or whatever, is too stupid to live. Go back home, honey. New York’ll eat you alive.”

“If you didn’t take them, how do you even know about the sketches?”

“If I didn’t—? What’s that supposed to mean? And how do
you
know where the money comes from?”

She glared at me, I stared at her, and I almost had to laugh. Here we were, two short Chinese women in silk and velvet and fabulous haircuts, facing off in a hallway to the pounding of a rock band, tension
between us so thick you could slice it and make sandwiches, and both of us so confused that there might be nothing to do at this point but tell the truth.

“I’m a private investigator,” I said. “I don’t know anything about the money. I came looking for you because I thought you stole the sketches.”

The angry set of her shoulders didn’t change, but she blinked. “You’re a—You thought—Wait. I … Who
are
you?”

“Lydia Chin,” I repeated patiently. “I’m a private investigator. The men I’m with, one’s my partner. The Chinese one is my brother. Maybe you should come have a drink with us. I think we need to talk.”

S
EVENTEEN

I
t was practically worth having been shoved back against a cold wet sink to see the expression on Andrew’s face when I came back to the table with Dawn Jing in tow. Bill stood when he saw us approach; Andrew and Tony, a little belatedly, did the same. Andrew looked in confusion from Dawn to me, and Tony looked the same way from me to Andrew. Only Bill looked unperturbed as we shuffled the chairs around and sat.

The fact that Bill was saying nothing was probably what kept Andrew and Tony from blurting out the questions on their faces. With Bill it was because he didn’t know what the gag was and was waiting for a cue from me. But there was no gag. I hadn’t gone in straight with Dawn Jing, but she and I had come out that way.

“This is Dawn Jing, everybody,” I said. “Sometimes known as Pearl Moon. My partner, Bill Smith,” I said to Dawn, pointing as I went. “Andrew Chin. Tony D’Angelo.” They all shook Dawn’s hand.

Up on the stage, the band finished a number with a screech of guitars and a crash of drums, and prepared to take a break.

“So,” Dawn said, turning back to me. “What’s going on? I don’t have all night. I need to make a living. My date’s waiting.”

Andrew, it seemed to me, blushed. No one else reacted.

“I want to talk about the stolen sketches,” I said. “We came to find you because we thought you stole them.”

“Why the hell would you think that?”

“You and Genna have had trouble before.”

“Oh, not really what you’d call ‘trouble,’ ” she said sarcastically. Music from an unidentifiable rock album started up with a howl, as the DJ started mixing cuts to fill the silence left by the band. Dawn raised her voice, not quite a shout. “She just pretends I don’t exist. I changed my name to make it easier for her.”

“To make it easier for her to pretend you don’t exist?”

She shrugged. “I thought if she could deny it in public, maybe she’d admit it in private. But that’s none of your business,” she added suddenly. “Aren’t you people going to at least offer me a drink?”

Her eyes swept the table and settled on Tony. “Martini,” she said. “Two olives, no onion.”

Tony glanced at Andrew and realized he was elected. He rose and went off to the bar to get Dawn’s drink.

“But,” I said, for the benefit of Andrew and Bill, “before I got the chance to accuse Dawn of stealing the sketches, she accused me. She thought I was here to shake her down.”

Bill pulled a cigarette out of the pack in his pocket. Before he’d gotten his match lit, Dawn had snapped a Virginia Slim out of her purse and was holding it airily in front of her. Bill reached over with the match; Dawn put her hand gently on his to guide it to the right place on her cigarette. I guess it’s easy to miss the right place if you don’t have help. She smiled her thanks into his eyes.

“All right,” Bill said, his hands back on his own side of the table again. “I’ll bite. Why would you try to shake Dawn down over Genna’s sketches?”

The question was addressed to me, but he was looking at Dawn. She held his eyes for a moment, then leaned back in her chair and blew out a puff of smoke. “Who are you guys working for?”

“Genna hired us,” I said. “To make the payoff.”

A light came into Dawn’s eyes. “That was you? The idiots in the park?” She met Bill’s look again with a scornful smile. He gave her back a c’est-la-vie one.

“Unforeseen circumstances,” I said.

“Oh, don’t sweat it, honey,” she told me, streaming out smoke. “If someone shot at me over someone else’s money, I’d hide
my
butt under a rock until it was over.”

Tony returned, martini in hand. Two olives, no onion. He’d brought a fresh bourbon for Bill, and a Budweiser for himself. Andrew and I were still nursing the last round of mineral water.

Dawn raised her glass to Bill before she drank.

“Wait,” Andrew said. “Wait. If you didn’t steal the sketches—and how do we know she didn’t, Lydia? —and if you didn’t, how do you know what’s going on? I thought we were the only people besides Genna and John who knew about this.”

“Big shot,” Dawn murmured to her cigarette. Andrew flushed.

“But it’s a good question,” I said. “John and Genna insisted we keep this quiet. It doesn’t sound to me like you and Genna are particularly close.” That got me a roll of the eyes. “How
do
you know?”

Dawn tapped her cigarette into a pink cupid ashtray. “The people who made the payoff—” she gave Bill the contemptuous look again “—and lost the money, were fired. So you don’t work for Genna anymore.” She turned her hard eyes on me again. “Why are you here?”

“This case has gotten complicated,” I answered. “And dangerous. If you stole the sketches, we need to talk to you.”

“And if I didn’t?”

“We still need to know how you’re connected.”

“Why? How come you still give a damn, if you were fired?”

“Someone shot at me. That gives me an interest. And I don’t like to be fired.”

Dawn gave me a long, silent look. I met it. Something passed between us, I thought, of recognition, and of acknowledgment. She tamped out her cigarette and spoke. “And I don’t like to be accused of things I didn’t do. Whose stupid idea was it that I stole the sketches?”

“Mine,” Bill said.

Andrew, who had been about to speak, covered himself with a pull on his Perrier.

Dawn looked at Bill, and gave a brief snort. “That figures. What did Genna say?”

“We didn’t talk to her about it,” I said. “But I think the thought may have crossed her mind, too. Or I thought so, until you started talking about the money and where it comes from. I want to hear about that.”

“And I want to hear about why you think Genna thinks I stole the fucking sketches.”

“Deal?” I suggested.

“Maybe. What did you mean when you said
dangerous?
”

“People are shooting. Killing. Wayne Lewis is dead.”

“Wayne?” A vertical line marred her perfect porcelain brow. “What does Wayne have to do with it?”

“We think he might have been the thief.”

“
Wayne?
” She stared at me. “You’re crazy. Everybody in the industry knows Wayne. Knew him. Shit.” She sipped some martini. I thought I saw a shudder run through her, but maybe she was cold. “Who would he have sold them to? And why bother? He wasn’t hard up. He had other fish to fry. Whose dumb idea was that? Yours, again?” She threw a look at Bill. He smiled back, and shrugged.

“Genna’s,” I said.

“Genna’s?” Dawn looked swiftly at me. “She told you that?”

“Not at first,” I said. “First she said she couldn’t think who might have done it, and just wanted the payoff made. Then later she called me, when John wasn’t there. She said she thought it was Wayne but John didn’t. We went to check him out and he was dead.”

Dawn shifted in her chair, sliding her thumb along one of her rhinestone straps to adjust it. “Wayne,” she said dismissively, “was a dumb idea. Just about as dumb as Wayne was, so I guess it’s justice.”

“Someone killed him.”

“Someone kills everybody, sooner or later.” She shrugged. “Or some thing. Or some time.”

I wasn’t having any of her Hallmark-card-in-a-cracked-mirror philosophy. “Why would someone do that, if he weren’t involved in this?”

“Because he was involved in other shit! God, most of us can do more than one thing at a time.” She rolled her eyes again, this time at Bill, about me.

“You worked with him.”

“Oh, what? And that means I killed him?” Her retort was impatient but not surprised, or, it seemed to me, insulted.

“You don’t seem very upset that he’s dead.”

She gave me a cold smile. “Have you met anyone who was?”

“Did you kill him?” I asked the question without a change in the straightforward tone I’d been trying to use for this whole conversation, but I held my breath for the answer.

“Oh, shit,” she said. “Of course I didn’t. Why the hell would I? He was dumb, but he was mean. That was the combination I needed.”

“For what?”

“For what do you think?”

“Protection?”

“No, honey.” She sounded resigned, the graduate student forced to deal with the know-it-all freshman in Life 101. “In my business you work alone. When there’s trouble, you take care of it yourself or you find other work. I don’t need anyone to protect me.” She crossed one leg over the other. Her skirt rode even further up her thigh.

“Then what?”

“What the hell made my life your business?” she snapped.

“The police,” I answered calmly, “are interested in the murder of Wayne Lewis.”

“So?”

“They must not know you were connected with him, or they’d be all over you already. But they could find out. Then they might get interested in you, whether you had anything to do with his death or not.”

“You’d call the police on me? I’m your client’s sister.”

“We were fired, as you pointed out. We don’t have a client.”

“Shit.”

“Am I right thinking a police investigation would be a problem?”

She sighed. “Depends. It could be a real pain in the ass.”

“Then maybe answering my questions could be less of a pain in the ass.”

Bill raised an eyebrow. I never use that kind of language.

“Maybe,” Dawn conceded, grudgingly. “What the hell is it you want to know?”

“Your relationship with Wayne.”

“That asshole.” She took another cigarette from her purse. Bill had a match out before her purse clicked shut. “He was the gatekeeper.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not so easy to find,” she said. No kidding, I thought to myself. “I keep it that way on purpose. You wanted me, you called Wayne. He weeded out some of the real lunatics and losers.” Oh, I thought to myself some more. So he was protecting you in a way, wasn’t he? “I paid him,” she said, as though I’d spoken out loud. “It wasn’t the usual arrangement, where some pimp takes it all and gives you nickels and dimes. He kept the books, fielded the calls, and I paid him.”

“Books?”

“Who likes what, that kind of thing. None of them are that damn original that it sticks in your mind, honey.” She took a long draw on her cigarette. “Wayne also was mean enough that when he did negotiations, they stuck. It was just too much trouble to have him screaming at you over the phone.”

“Negotiations? Like with Ed?”

She gave me a nod. “Yeah. Like with Ed.”

“That’s why Ed’s girls don’t work this club?”

“That’s exactly why. I like to bring my dates here. My dates are into me being Chinese.” She threw Bill a pointed look. “Ed’s girls are all exotics,” she went on. “They’re also a bunch of cheap hookers. They’re way below me on the food chain. I don’t like them strutting their pathetic stuff in front of my dates.”

“Didn’t you used to work for Ed?”

Dawn bristled. “What makes you think that?”

“Andi Shechter said you were with Everest Models.”

“Oh, God. Andi. What the hell made you ask her?”

“I asked a lot of people. I told you, I was looking for you.”

“Genna?” Surprisingly, she sounded worried.

“No. I don’t think she knows we know you exist. Did you work for Ed?”

She let out a breath. “Yeah, years ago. For a little while, I actually wanted to be a model.” She smiled. “No, that’s not true. I never really did. I just wanted to be doing something like what Genna did. I thought she’d like me better. I spent years, boys and girls, trying to prove something to Genna. Then I just gave up.” She looked around the table at us. “I guess you could say Ed gave me my start in this business. And I found out two things. One, that I liked it. Two, that Ed was dead weight. I ditched him and went into business for myself.” She tamped out her cigarette. “So that’s enough about my life,” she said. “Now you tell me why you thought I stole Genna’s sketches.”

Fair’s fair; I answered that. “You aren’t the only person who thought Wayne was a dumb idea. So it occurred to us that, if Wayne really weren’t involved, he might be a red herring. Genna might be deliberately steering us away from someone. We thought that might be you.”

“And just why the hell would she do that?”

“To protect you.” That came, quietly, from Bill.

Dawn stared at Bill while the music howled to a crescendo. As the DJ edged one track into another, she smiled and shook her head.

“To protect me,” she repeated, then chuckled, still shaking her head, as though Bill had said something really funny. “It’s a good thing Genna fired you people. You’re clueless.” She lifted the tiny arrow stuck through her olives and with a delicate tongue licked martini from them. “If Genna really was protecting anybody,” she said, re-dunking the olives, “I guarantee you it was herself.”

“From what?” I asked.

She smiled, licking the olives again. “From the rest of the world, and especially John, finding out about me. Finding out that Genna Jing’s sister is a whore.”

Andrew flinched. Dawn caught that. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said solicitously. “Are you sensitive, too, like Genna? Not a whore. That’s a bad word. An escort. A worker in the sex industry. I heard that one the other day. Like it?” She flashed a radiant grin at Bill. “A whore,” she announced. “The best goddamn whore in New York.”

Bill grinned back. Her smile grew, if anything, wider, and she threw back the rest of her drink. “I have to get to work, boys and girls.
It’s been a pleasure.” She pressed out her cigarette and started to collect herself.

“Wait,” I said. “We had a deal. We’d tell you about Genna, you’d tell us about the money.”

“Oh, the money?” Dawn’s eyes widened innocently. “Well, the money’s the funny part. Genna’s so completely paranoid that John will find out about me and dump her that I had to change my goddamn name. And all this time, who do you think’s been bankrolling John?”