MANDARIN PLAID (Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series) (20 page)

Of course, the employees who were left by the time I got here were the old-timers, the ones whose loyalty was to Roland and their steady paychecks, not to some
low faan
idea of worker solidarity. They would tell me, if I really were Jillian Woo, INS agent, that conditions were fine, hours were short, pay was good, and they had no complaints.

But I wasn’t Jillian Woo. I was the daughter of a sweatshop worker. I grew up in this world, where Mr. Leng’s greed and his willingness to exploit his workers, combined with my mother’s stamina and determination, had sent my mother’s five children to college. I didn’t know what the answer to this sort of setup was, but I knew one
thing. The vanished sewing ladies were losing money every minute I was here.

I moved past the open doorway and sat behind Roland’s desk, because that was what the factory manager would expect me to do. Just a sense of what Roland was up to was all I wanted, some idea of what his life was about, what pattern in it had recently been broken in such a way that the solution seemed to be to hire Lydia Chin to chase a phantom Fujianese immigrant to Queens.

I looked around the office as though I were just taking up my own time until the factory manager sent the workers to me. I concentrated on the papers pinned to the bulletin board, hung from clipboards, and taped to the wall. Bills of lading for trucks delivering or picking up; lists of fabric, notes about future schedules. Old take-out menus, and four calendars. I let my eyes wander to the desk, where Roland had left himself scrawled memos, a crowded In box, and piled up mail, but none of that was interesting to me.

I wanted to find it, whatever it was, whatever hint or clue or idea this place could give me. Then I wanted to get out and let the ladies go back to making a living. I heard the manager out on the factory floor stopping women at their machines one by one to collect their work permits or their naturalization papers. My eyes searched the office again, walls and desk and floor. Nothing leaped out at me. The manager’s footsteps started to head my way, as he brought me what I’d asked for. On their way up to the doorway to greet him, my eyes swept past the wastebasket in the corner.

And there it was.

My hint, my clue, my idea.

My manila envelope.

The one I’d last seen in Madison Square Park two days before, nestled on the top of quite a different trash basket.

T
WENTY
-O
NE

I
lunged and snatched up the envelope and stuffed it under my jacket. Then, standing, I grabbed the phone from the corner of Roland’s desk. I had put on an impatient, angry face and was arguing with the dial tone in English when the factory manager stepped through the office door. He held in his hand a pile of cards and papers, and a stack of files. I frowned mightily at him, then went back to the phone.

“Absolutely not!” I told it. “You should have—no,
first!
” I paused. “Dammit!” I snarled, in a very un-Lydia-Chinlike way. “All right! I’m leaving now. I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

I banged the receiver down and glared at the startled factory manager. “I have to go back to my office. They have an emergency. Idiots!” I slung my bag over my shoulder. “I don’t know when we can reschedule …” I muttered, as if to myself. Then I fixed him with my beady-eyed gaze. “Things better be in order when I come back. Unlock that exit door. And open the damn windows so they can get some air!”

I stomped from the office to the elevator gate. Pounding the button to call the tea-drinking operator, I glared around the factory for good measure. Everyone was carefully not looking at me. The elevator arrived. I got in and, glaring all the way, floated down to the worn linoleum on the ground floor. I was a block and a half up Canal Street before the glare came unstuck and my face burst into the grin I felt I deserved.

I called Bill again. Well, of course I did. Sometimes you need someone to bounce things off of, someone who thinks enough the way you do and enough differently that he can see where you’re going and also where you’re going wrong.

And sometimes you need to tell someone how clever you are.

He wasn’t there. Again.

Annoyed, I called my own machine, but really just for form. I didn’t expect anything from it.

I was wrong.

“Hi,” the message went, Bill’s voice clear in the single syllable. There were noises in the background, voices, people going about their business, not quietly. Something about the noises made the hairs on my arms stand up. Then I found out why. “I’m at the Thirteenth Precinct,” Bill’s message said. “With Harry Krch. I think you should come up. Call when you get this; I’ll be here.” He left the number and hung up.

“I’ll be here.” Something gave me the feeling that what he was really saying was, “I can’t leave.” I didn’t know if that meant Bill had been arrested, but I knew it didn’t mean anything good.

I called the number. They told me I’d reached the Squad Room. I asked for Detective Krch. I heard those same noises while I waited, then the phone was picked up.

“Krch.”

“I’m Lydia Chin, Detective. My partner—”

“Hey, would you look at that, it’s Lydia Chin. Why call so fast, Miss Chin? We could’ve waited another two hours. Take your time.” Krch’s rough voice dripped sarcasm.

I swallowed a very unpolitic reply and said, “I just got my partner’s message.”

“Oh, your partner? Who, Smith? Well, ain’t that a surprise. And here I thought he was just some clazy Amellican trying to hit on you.”

Krch’s pointedly bad Chinese accent grated on me, but it had been my gag, so I supposed I deserved it.

“Is he there?” I asked.

“Smith?” Krch said innocently.

“Yes.” I forced myself to sound calm and reasonable. “Is he there?”

“Uh-huh.”

“May I speak to him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Has he been arrested?”

“Arrested? You mean somebody might want to arrest Smith? What the hell for?”

“I don’t know. If you haven’t arrested him, I’d like to speak to him.”

“Well, now, we haven’t actually booked him yet, but he’s being held on suspicion of being an asshole. But I’ll tell you what, toots. You want to talk to him, you could come up here.”

So I went up there, fuming all the way.

The Thirteenth Precinct is in a newish brick building on Twenty-first Street. That makes it very handy to the N train, and I was about half a block from the N myself, so I jumped on one. I was out of the subway and into the stationhouse ten minutes after I’d hung up the phone. No cab could have been faster.

Riding the few stops on the train, though, I thought it probably must have seemed like a long time to Bill. My machine put the time of his message to me about an hour ago, and who knew how long he’d been at the precinct before that? I didn’t know why he was there, but I didn’t think any length of time spent with Harry Krch could be classified as a fun morning.

The desk sergeant told me how to get up to the Detective Squad Room, which is always on the second floor of a stationhouse because that’s how the detectives pull rank. “Take ’em up to the Squad,” they say out of the corner of their mouths, and a suspected perp is hauled off to the elite level to sit in a holding cell until the Squad decides whether to book him. I wondered if that’s where Bill was now.

It was, and it wasn’t. When I walked through the open door past the
THIRTEENTH PRECINCT DETECTIVES
sign, I saw a roomful of cheap chrome-legged desks with fake wood tops, under a checkerboard ceiling of acoustic tiles and square fluorescent lights. The institutional-blue walls were covered with Scotch-taped wanted posters, memos, and announcements. At some of the desks detectives worked phones or poked at the keyboards of desktop computers; the Thirteenth had come into the computer age, but it looked like most of the detectives hadn’t. One of those detectives, fingers actually flying at a fairly good clip, was Harry Krch. He didn’t see me come in.

I stepped further into the room and looked to my left, guessing. I was right: hidden behind a partition was the lockup, placed out of
sight like that so witnesses who made it as far as the Squad Room wouldn’t see or be seen by alleged perps unless the detectives wanted it that way. The lockup was occupied, by Bill. He was lying on his back on the cell’s single stainless-steel bench, smoking a cigarette and staring at the ceiling. But the situation wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The cell door was standing open.

I stepped around the partition to the front of the cell. “Hi,” I said.

At the sound of my voice Bill looked up. He swung his legs off the bench and mashed his cigarette out on the floor, where it joined about fifty others. I hoped they weren’t all his. He came out of the cell, leaned and kissed me on the cheek. “Trouble,” he whispered while he was there.

“And I thought you just liked it here. I found something,” I told him quietly while I returned his kiss. “Are you okay?”

He nodded, and then Krch was upon us.

“Shit, isn’t this heartwarming?” Krch stood a little too close to us, arms shut across his chest. Bill and I moved apart.

“Nice to see you, Suzie Wong,” Krch said. I flushed hotly, angry with myself for letting that happen because I knew that’s what he’d been aiming for. “Come with me. You stay here,” he ordered Bill.

“No,” Bill objected. “That wasn’t the deal.”

“We had no deal! Your girlfriend’s here, let me see what she has to offer. If I like it, maybe we’ll make a deal.”

“What are we dealing for?” I asked. “I came to talk to Bill.”

Krch stared at me with a mean little smile. “Oh, you did? Okay. I’ll book him and send him downtown, and around midnight when they’re through processing his butt and he gets his phone call, you can talk to him. Or you can come with me now. Somebody find Rossi for me, huh?” he said, raising his voice to the rest of the room. “I’m in number three. If Smith does anything besides sit there looking stupid, lock it.”

“Krch—”

“Christ, Smith, shut up. What are you afraid of? She’ll sell you out?”

Krch grinned. Then he turned and walked through the door without looking to see whether I was following him.

I met Bill’s eyes briefly. He was close to an edge, the place where you know your anger is only getting in your way and knowing that only makes the anger worse.

“It’ll be okay.” I touched his hand lightly. “Just let me see what he wants.” He didn’t answer. As I left the room he was lighting another cigarette.

Number three turned out to be one of the interrogation rooms down the hall. Inside the room Krch dropped himself into one of the plastic chairs around the Formica-topped table and waited for me either to do the same, or not. I did.

“Hope he don’t slug anybody while we’re gone,” Krch said, in a tone of voice that told me he hoped exactly the opposite.

“He’ll be all right.”

“Got one hell of an attitude, that guy.”

“He doesn’t like to be locked up.”

“That’s right,” Krch grunted. “Bad memories, huh? Six months inside can be hard on a guy. You know what he was in for?”

“Misdemeanor assault,” I said. “Not a felony, or he wouldn’t have a license.”

“Good lawyer,” Krch grunted. “Drove a hard plea-bargain. The original charge was attempted manslaughter, you know. You might want to think about having a guy like that for a partner,” he offered, as though I’d asked. “Bad temper, bad attitude. Bad luck. Well, I guess you know what you’re doing.” He smiled a sour smile.

“Yes, I do, thanks,” I said.

But Bill was only my partner sometimes. And though he’d told me about his record the second case we’d worked together, to give me a chance to say, “No, thanks,” I’d never thought it was any business of mine to ask what it was he’d done.

Not that there was any chance I’d tell Krch that.

Krch stuck his hands in his pockets and tilted his chair back. “All right,” he said. “You’re in deep shit. Both of you, but him more than you because he’s uglier and I hate him more. Not that that means I won’t nail you to the wall, too, sweetheart, unless you cooperate.”

“With what?” I asked in as neutral a tone as I could manage.

“With me. Hey, Rossi,” he grunted as the door opened. I swung my head around to get a look at Rossi.

In a sweatshirt and baggy jeans, without makeup, with a gun on her hip and a badge on her belt, her look was completely different, and she was so out of context that it actually took me until she’d closed the door behind her and stood leaning against the wall to recognize her. It was the way she held her cigarette, between the knuckles and not the fingertips, that sent me suddenly back to the bar at Donna’s, where I was being warned away from Ed Everest by a woman named Francie whose last name I didn’t know.

T
WENTY
-T
WO

O
fficer Francesca Rossi,” said the young woman leaning on the wall. She acknowledged me with a small nod of her gamine head. “Anti-crime.” She drew the last of the smoke out of her cigarette, then dropped it to the floor and crushed it.

Anti-crime officers are not detectives, but they’re plainclothes cops, working undercover usually as decoys or in sting operations. It’s one good route to moving up in the department, if that’s what you want.

“Francie,” I said.

“Oh.” Krch widened his eyes as though he were impressed. “You and Officer Rossi have met?”

“You must know we have or you wouldn’t have wanted me to come here,” I said, trying to curb my distaste for the man and his style.

“Don’t you believe it. It wasn’t my idea for you to come here. It was Asshole’s.” He gestured vaguely in the direction of the room we’d come from, where Bill still sat in the cell I hoped was still unlocked. “I was all for just picking you up and tossing you in the can. That’s what I had in mind for him, too, except I was gonna insist on having the pleasure of tearing up his license and feeding it to him one scrap at a time.”

“What for?”

“What for? Being all over my cases like a fucking cheap suit!”

I wasn’t sure what crime that constituted, but I had a feeling I’d better get more details before I said anything else.

“But,” Krch went on, “your partner had this other idea.”

“What idea?”

“He thought maybe you should come up here and we could work something out.”

That Krch had agreed to that might mean that he didn’t feel he had enough of whatever it was he had to actually get away with arresting us. Or it might mean something else. I waited.

Krch regarded me with bitter curiosity. “I should have known when I saw you with him in the park that some shit was going on.” With a sudden jerk of his body he brought his chair forward, making a little crash as the front legs hit the floor. “But I had real shit to worry about!” he barked. “I got an investigation I’m trying to run, I got a shooter in the park—I got no time to worry about My Favorite Asshole and his new Chinese squeeze.” He shook his head and said, as though to himself, “Big mistake, Harry. Because where you got Smith, you got trouble, every time.”

He stopped and scowled at me.

“If you’re waiting for me to say something, Detective, I can’t until I know more about what’s going on.”

“Until
you
know what’s going on? How about you telling
me
what the hell’s going on?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You lied to me in the park!”

“I don’t remember that you asked me a question.”

“I asked who you were.”

“You asked Bill who I was,” I corrected him. “He said he’d been trying to get to know me. That was true. We work together sometimes, but he doesn’t know me very well.”

Krch’s color rose. “You called him a clazy Amellican!”

“Well,” I said, “that’s true, too, isn’t it?”

Officer Francesca Rossi snorted something that might have been a laugh.

“Shut up, Rossi.” Krch’s red face edged into purple. Then he relaxed. He stuck his hands back in his pockets and tilted his chair
again. “Fuck the both of you, toots. You want to play the game his way, we don’t have a lot to talk about.”

“I don’t know what we’re talking about now,” I said.

Krch opened his mouth, but Rossi was faster.

“We have an investigation going,” she said. She pushed off from the wall and moved to the table, to a place across from me. “Ed Everest and his hookers.” She pulled out a chair and sat.

“You know about that?” I looked from her to Krch.

“Citizens’ respect for the police is boundless, ain’t it, Rossi?” Krch growled. “What do you think, Miss Chin, we’re not even as sharp as you two sorry-ass P.I.s?”

“If you know,” I countered, “why is it still going on?”

“Why’s what still going on?”

“Why is Ed Everest still running hookers?”

“Is he?”

“She just said—”

“Can you prove it?”

“I—”

“No, Miss Chin, you can’t. We can’t either. That’s why they call this an investigation. And that’s why it don’t need jerks like you two screwing it up!”

“I shouldn’t even have done what I did in the bar,” Francie—Officer Rossi—told me. “Warned you away from Ed Everest. But you looked so exactly like one of the pathetic little suckers he pulls in. That was before the new haircut,” she added.

Oh, well then, I thought.

“It was my good deed for the day, trying to save you,” she said. “I didn’t know who you were. I didn’t even mention you to Krch until later, when—”

“Until later,” Krch said.

Francie stopped.

I spoke to Krch. “That’s what this is about? That you think we messed around in your Ed Everest investigation?”

“Not completely.”

“Then what?”

“First, tell me what you know about Everest.”

I thought about what to say to him, besides “who wants to
know?” or something equally mature. “Probably the same thing you do,” I settled on. “He takes girls who want to be models, gets them in a position where they owe him, and starts them turning tricks.”

“How do you know?”

“I actually don’t. I’m guessing. Rumors you hear. And because he seemed anxious to spend a lot of money jump-starting my career, and I’m not model material.”

“You went to him?”

“Just to look around.”

“Just to look around. Be a little more open with me, Miss Chin; you might find it’s a good idea. Why were you and Asshole investigating him?”

“I wish you wouldn’t call him that.”

“I don’t care.”

Well, at least we’d gotten that straight. “We weren’t investigating him, really,” I said. “We were on another case that went nowhere, but we ran across Everest in the middle of it. I got intrigued and wanted to follow it up. Just to see what would happen.”

“You’re just like him, aren’t you?” Krch asked with a weary sigh. “You can’t let things go, either. What a hot couple.”

I didn’t think there was any good answer to that.

“Go get him, huh, Rossi?” Krch said, unexpectedly. Francie stood and left the room. “What was the other case?” Krch asked me.

“It’s not connected to Ed Everest,” I said.

“Did I ask you that?”

“I was following someone. It put me at the bar. Everest came on to me, and I got interested. I don’t like the idea of his taking advantage of girls’ dreams any more than Francie does.”

“Oh? You know all about what she likes?”

“She made warning me her good deed for the day,” I said.

“She’s a fucking saint. I want to know what the other case was.”

I managed to swallow the “I don’t care.” “I’m too much like Bill,” I said. “You know I won’t tell you.”

“Was Wayne Lewis part of it?”

Uh-oh, I thought. This water might be deeper than I know about.

Saving me from having to answer right away, the door opened, and Bill and Francie entered the room.

“Sit down,” Krch told Bill peremptorily. Bill, the tight line of his jaw the only sign of what he was feeling, threw me a look as he sat. I told him with my eyes that I didn’t know, no matter what the question was. Francie took up her old chair opposite.

“Lydia and I were just discussing Wayne Lewis.” Krch said, leaning his padded forearms on the table, including everyone in his remarks, as if we were all at a seminar. “I was just asking her to explain to us why she and Ass—she and Pencil-dick here impersonated officers and broke into a crime scene.” He turned to me again with an expectant look, as though I really might answer that.

“That’s not what happened, Krch,” Bill said shortly, “I told you that.”

“Yeah,” Krch answered, speaking in reasoned tones. “But in the absence of you telling me what
did
happen, I’m assuming you’re full of crap and I’m asking your partner.” He turned back to me, his face a caricature of polite interest.

“You know what happened,” Bill said.

Krch swung back to him. “I’m not talking to you!”

“I was there. It was my idea.”

“You’re not doing yourself any favor saying that.”

“Anyway, it’s not true,” I stuck in.

Krch turned to me again. “What’s not?” he demanded.

“It was
my
idea,” I said. “But we didn’t impersonate anybody and we didn’t break in.”

“Oh, Christ, look at this, Rossi. They’re gonna be heroes and protect each other.” To me again: “I don’t really give a shit whose idea it was, and I have a witness who says you said you were cops.”

“Your witness is wrong.”

“She let you in.”

“The lady upstairs?” I asked. “I’m not surprised she didn’t understand who we were. She was scared, and she’d been drinking. She absolutely insisted that we go in and look around because the door was open and the tape was torn. I thought we were being reassuring good Samaritans. Making her feel better until the cops came.”

I thought that was pretty good, but Krch didn’t look as though he’d bought a word of it. “Love it, don’t you, Rossi? Good Samaritans. Then why didn’t you stick around until the cops got there?” he asked.

“The place wasn’t that interesting.”

“No? What would have made it interesting?”

Bill cut in. “What the hell do you want, Krch?”

“I want to know why you two are everywhere I fucking look in the last three days! And I’m talking to your partner, so shut up.” Back to me: “What were you doing in the park?”

“Having breakfast,” said Bill.

Krch’s eyes hardened. “Smith, so help me, if you fuck up my case—”

“I thought you were investigating Ed Everest,” I said, struck by a thought. “What do you care about Wayne Lewis? Why do you even know he’s dead? That wasn’t in your precinct.”

Krch looked at Francie Rossi, who hadn’t said a word since she’d come back into the room. He seemed to be weighing something. He leaned back in his chair again and tipped it backward.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s right. I was investigating Ed Everest. You know why?”

“No.”

Krch rubbed his nose with a meaty hand. “Because what he’s doing, nobody gives a shit. No, I’m serious. Couple of dolls selling a piece of ass, turning their paychecks over to Poppa, you think that’s big news in this town? And don’t give me that crap about taking advantage of their poor little dreams. They know what they’re doing. And you can’t tell me the girls in that life don’t at least halfway like it. What’s not to like?”

Francie and I exchanged glances, but he outranked her, so she held her tongue. And I thought about Dawn Jing, and held mine.

“Then why investigate?” Bill wanted to know.

“Because every now and then,” Krch told us, “some horse’s ass chews the Commissioner’s ear off about some pet peeve. Then some schmuck cop gets stuck putting in overtime to take out the Commissioner’s garbage. This Everest cocksucker was somebody’s. The word came down, shut him down. But this wasn’t any glamour case.
Hopeless. Not gonna make anybody’s career. So you stick Harry Krch with it. You know why?”

Bill said nothing. I asked, “Why?”

“ ’Cause,” Krch answered me, “Harry Krch’s got no career.” He fixed his eyes on Bill. I wouldn’t have wanted what was in his eyes directed at me. He said, “You know why?”

Nobody answered. He went on anyway. “Because an asshole P.I. who knew better than everybody else fucked up his career for him.”

The room was silent. Krch stood slowly and walked around the table to stand behind Bill. He leaned forward and put his face next to Bill’s ear. Bill drew a breath, but didn’t turn.

“See,” Krch breathed softly, “shutting down an operation like this, it’s impossible. How’re you going to do it? Everest keeps himself clean, you’ve got nothing on paper on him. But you can’t get to the girls without him. And if you get to the girls, what are you going to do? Screw ’em and try to pay? You’d get laughed out of court with something like that.” He rested his hand on Bill’s shoulder, as if they were pals discussing the ballgame in a bar. Bill didn’t move. Krch went on, in mild tones. “And the girls aren’t going to talk. They know where the paycheck comes from, the nice apartment, all that. Look what it took to shut down the Mayflower Madam. They had to set up an entire squad, just for her. This one isn’t that big, no one’s gonna do that. The Department just wants to look like it’s going through the motions in case anybody asks. So you give it to Harry, because you give all the dead-end shit to Harry. That’s what Harry’s for.”

Bill was breathing steadily, rhythmically. His eyes were fixed on the wall ahead. Under the table his right hand was curled into a fist.

“And you give Harry one fucking undercover,” Krch went on. “Some green girl. At least she’s got energy. She figures the case’ll be good experience for her, even though it’ll go nowhere.”

Francie looked at Krch. She seemed about to say something, but she didn’t.

“Wait,” I said, more to focus Krch on me, to give Bill some space, than because I wanted an answer to the question I was about to ask. “Ed Everest doesn’t use white girls. He specializes. ‘Exotics’: blacks and Asians. I saw his books of photographs. How close could Francie get?”

“Oh, no.” Krch said. He took his hand from Bill’s shoulder to wag a finger at me. I almost cheered. “I couldn’t send in some one of you people or something for him to take on. That’s entrapment, sweetie. He’d claim she was the first whore ever worked for him and he didn’t know nothing about it. I had to send someone into his world, where he lives, to listen and ask around and build a case, not to stick herself in the middle of it. See, that’s called investigating. You might not have heard of it.”

“You’re exhausting,” I said. “Did you know that?”

Krch smiled a joyless smile. Francie started a more amused one, but squelched it.

“It’s just as well this is how we did it, anyway,” Krch said. “Rossi made friends around. That’s how we got the miracle.”

Krch leaned forward again to put his face an inch from Bill’s. “The fucking miracle. See, the impossible case turned out not to be impossible. Maybe. Something that could pull a cop’s career out of the shitpile and let him at least retire as a
cop
, if he pulled it off. Maybe.” The last word was almost a whisper. As it trailed off, Krch slammed his palm on the tabletop. The sudden crash made us all jump. “And then suddenly Smith is everywhere I fucking look! I don’t know what your connection with this case is, Smith, but if you screw it up I’m gonna cut your fucking balls off! Now, talk to me!”