MANDARIN PLAID (Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series) (22 page)

Bill lowered the front of his chair to the floor. He stood. I did, too.

“So that’s it, Harry,” Bill said. “We’re even.”

Krch, jaw tight and eyes bulging, glared wildly at Bill. For a moment, nothing; then a sweep of his meaty hand threw over a chair. “Motherfucker!” he roared as it clattered against the table. He charged past Francie and out of the room.

The three of us left looked at one another. Everything Bill had said I was sure was true, except one thing.

I didn’t think they would ever be even.

T
WENTY
-F
OUR

I
kept up with Bill for blocks as, pulling on the cigarette he’d lit the moment we left the station house, he stalked rapidly down Third Avenue. His legs are much longer, so mine worked much harder to move that fast. By Seventeenth Street, I’d had enough.

I clutched at his arm as he was about to step into the street with barely enough time to beat the light. “You have to slow down,” I told him.

He snapped his head around with a startled look, as though he were surprised to find me there. He looked up and down the street, a man getting his bearings, finding his location in the world. Traffic started to move in front of us. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“You don’t have to be sorry. You just have to slow down.”

“Okay.” He threw the cigarette butt, which was nothing except filter now, into the gutter as the light changed. “Buy you lunch?” he offered, as we started legitimately—and more slowly—across the street.

“Sure.”

“Anyplace you like around here?”

“You know what? Can we eat in Union Square?”

Four times a week the city runs a Greenmarket in Union Square. Farmers and bakers and cheesemakers come from all around to sell their vegetables and fruits and bread and herbed goat cheese rolled in ash. It’s fun to go to, and the food’s really good.

And it’s outdoors.

Bill smiled, giving me a sideways look while we walked. “That must have been tough for you, all of us puffing like chimneys in there,” he said.

“It wasn’t tough,” I answered airily. “Easy as pie. Just revolting.”

We wandered through the market, picking this and that, and
then found an empty bench in Union Square Park. Squirrels who’d either already eaten the nuts they’d buried last fall or couldn’t remember where they’d put them sat on their winter-skinny haunches waiting for us to drop crumbs from our crusty sourdough loaf or our extra-sharp New York State cheddar. Bill, with the pocket knife he always carries, sliced the bread, spread it with grainy mustard, and topped it with slabs of cheese. I opened our jar of pickled green beans and took one out to munch.

It was a perfect day for an early-spring picnic, the sun spreading yellow warmth under a sky of cloudless blue. Couples leaning against each other meandered by past secretaries briskly shopping in the Greenmarket on their lunch hour. Funny, I thought, extracting another tart and dripping bean from the jar, that this glorious sky color was called blue, the same as the muddy, dull color on the station house walls, in that windowless and smoky room we’d sat in for too long.

“What color were the walls in Nebraska?” I asked Bill.

He looked up from cutting a sandwich. “What?”

“When you were in jail. What color were the walls?”

He cleaned his pocket knife with a napkin and put it away. “Tan.” His voice was almost normal; maybe someone who hadn’t known him as long as I had wouldn’t have heard the strange note in it. “In a certain light,” he said, “right before it rained, the ground outside was exactly the same color.”

He unfolded a napkin next to me and put a sandwich on it.

“I don’t know what made me think it was okay to ask that,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

He shook his head. “It is okay.”

“It bothers you to talk about it.”

“No. It bothers me to have been there.”

“Did you do what they said you did?”

“You know what I was there for,” he said.

“I know what the charge was,” I answered. “That’s not the same.”

A squirrel bounced up and sat practically on Bill’s foot. Bill broke off a sandwich crumb for him.

“I beat the shit out of a guy in a bar,” he said. “Do you really want to hear this?”

“Yes.”

He looked around the park. Shadows of tree branches swept the paths. “I was set up,” he said. “An investigation I was working was getting too close, so the guy I had my eye on hired some good old boys to start a fight. The point was to get me arrested, to keep me on ice for a while.”

He threw another piece of crust to the squirrel. “I knew that. I goddamn knew it, but the little bastards pissed me off so much I couldn’t keep a lid on it. There were two of them, dirty fighters, young, and I just had to prove I was better. To them it was just a Saturday night bar fight they were getting paid for. They’d probably have done it for free, and then bought me a beer when I got out of jail. To me it was something else.”

I took a bite of my sandwich and waited.

“I
was
better,” he said. “I messed up one of them so badly that when the sheriff finally came, the charge was felony assault. It took just about everything my lawyer had to bargain it down to a misdemeanor, and I had to agree to serve the whole thing.”

The squirrel was back at Bill’s feet now, with a friend. Bill tossed each of them a piece of cheese.

“Was he all right?” I asked.

“The guy? He was out the hospital in a week. I heard he got paid double.”

“What happened to your investigation?”

“Vaporized. The suspect disappeared. The Cayman Islands, or something. Took all the money with him. My client couldn’t prove a thing.”

He took a swig of apple cider from the jar we’d bought. “Some partner, huh?” He didn’t look at me.

“The best,” I said, taking the cider and taking a swig myself.

Looking at the squirrels, he lit a cigarette. I expected a wise-guy answer, but I didn’t get one.

What I got was a sudden thought. “Hey!” I yelped.

“What?”

“Me, too! Krch got
me
so mad that
I
forgot what I was there for.”

“At the precinct? I thought you were there to save my butt.”

“Only incidentally. I was there because that’s where you were, and I needed to talk to you. We couldn’t talk until I’d saved your, excuse me, butt.”

“Talk about what?”

“This.” I pulled my manila envelope, the one I’d found in Roland Lum’s trash, out of my shoulder bag and handed it to Bill.

He took it the way I’d held it, handling it only along the edges so he wouldn’t smudge any prints, although who was going to run prints on this for us, and where we would get prints to compare them to, I had no idea.

“I told you I found something,” I said.

He turned the envelope over, scrutinizing the back, then the front again. “Where?” he asked.

“Roland Lum’s.” I told him my story, my visit to Mrs. Chan and how I invaded Roland’s factory. “You’re not the only one who gets set up,” I finished. “I fell for Peng Hui Liang.”

He turned the envelope over again, digesting what I’d told him. “You never really did,” he said.

“I never really believed he wanted her for the reason he said he did. But I believed he was looking for her.”

“And now?”

“Now I think she never existed. He was sending me on a wild-goose chase. He wanted me out of the way.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because of this.”

“What does this mean, though?” Bill mused.

“What does it mean?” I frowned at him. Maybe he was still too distracted by the memory of Krch, or of jail, to get with the program. “It means Roland stole the ransom. It means he either was the shooter or was working with him.”

“And he knew about the ransom how?”

“John told him they were having a problem, and John told him about hiring me. Maybe John tells a lot more than he means to.”

“Possible. But why set you up?”

“Because I was getting close.”

“But you weren’t.”

That stopped me. “I wasn’t?”

“You wouldn’t have been, if Roland hadn’t reappeared in your life with a drumroll.”

“That first time, on the street? He probably wanted to know how much I knew. To see how close I was.”

“Did you give him any idea then that you suspected him?”

“I didn’t suspect him, then.”

“Then why did he feel he had to invent this Peng Hui Liang thing?”

I squinted into the sunshine. “I see what you mean.”

“You’re obviously right about the money: Roland took it, one way or another. But there’s more to this than that. You’d—we’d—never have even suspected that if Roland had just laid low. Something made it worth the risk for him to come out into the open. There’s some reason Roland wanted you distracted and running around Flushing
now
.”

“You mean,” I asked slowly, catching on, “you think something else is going to happen?”

“It has to be that. Something he doesn’t want you in the middle of.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh,” I said. “Great.” I crumpled our napkins and swept our crumbs into a paper bag. I screwed the top back on the green beans. “Roland set me up and shot at me and stole our client’s money and now he’s got something else up his sleeve and we don’t know what it is. This is great.”

“Could be worse,” Bill said. “At least we know it’s coming.”

“Terrific. Like a tidal wave. Come on.”

I stood and jammed our lunch garbage into a trash can. Hah, I thought, trash cans. Sitting there on the path like innocent urban conveniences. You don’t fool me.

Standing, Bill saluted me. “Okay, boss. Where to?”

“I left Roland stranded and probably steaming on the Upper West Side. Let’s go call my machine and see if he had anything to say about it.”

Bill took our leftover bread and cheese and beans over to the next bench where a bum was stretched out and snoring. He settled them under the guy’s hand; the guy stirred but didn’t wake.

We found a pay phone at the Fourteenth Street end of the park, a new and generous brick plaza where exuberant teenage boys shot the steps on their skateboards and did fancy spinning tricks for groups of teenage girls who ignored them. Blocking out the teenage-boy and traffic noises, I listened to the messages on my machine.

There were two. Neither was from Roland.

The first, almost predictably, was from Andrew. “Lydia,” it said, “call me. I have something important for you.” Uh-huh, I thought. Sure you do. Some new crackpot theory about little sisters, no doubt. I pressed the button for the next message.

“Lydia?” The woman’s voice was hesitant, and hearing it made me grab for Bill’s arm, so he’d pay attention, too. “It’s Genna. They called again. They want more money, and—oh, God, could you call me? I really need you.”

T
WENTY
-F
IVE

B
ill looked at me, his eyebrows raised; while I was fishing for another quarter I told him who it was and what she’d said.

“This could be it,” I said.

“Roland?”

“Don’t you think so?”

“Yes.” He handed me a quarter; I gave up the search of my own pockets and dropped it in the phone.

“Mandarin Plaid,” came a female voice I didn’t recognize. Maybe it was the young assistant with the thick red lips. I wondered where Brad was, but I had more important things on my mind.

“Genna Jing, please.”

“She’s out of the office. Can I take a message?”

“This is Lydia Chin. I’m returning her call. She said it was important.”

“Yes. She said if you called I should ask you to keep trying, and to find out if there’s anyplace she can reach you.”

“I’ll be back in my office in fifteen minutes. I’ll wait for her to call. Do you know where she is?”

“No, I’m sorry. But I’ll tell her you’re waiting.”

As I hung up, Bill said, “She’s not there?”

“No. She wanted to know where to find us. Let’s go back to my office. But let me call Andrew back first.”

“This is new.”

“What?”

“Returning Andrew’s calls,” he said, handing me another quarter.

“He says it’s important.” I tapped in the number.

“He’s said that before.”

“I know, and it’s never true. I’m going to nip whatever it is in the bud and then we’ll head to my office.”

We didn’t, though.

“Lyd? Where’ve you been?”

“Don’t start that, Andrew. I’ve been working, at what I do.”

“Don’t get huffy. Where are you? Can you come over?”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“This will help you, Lyd.”

“The last time you said that—”

“Oh, come on, Lyd. I made a mistake, I was wrong. Give me a chance, will you? This one is real.”

“Help me do what?”

“I don’t know. But it’s about Genna and John. You’ll want to hear it.”

“Tell me now.”

“No. It’s not me who has to tell it,” he added, probably getting zapped by my impatience vibes through the phone. “Come over.”

“If it has to do with the phone call Genna got this morning, I already know.”

“What phone call?”

“You mean that? You don’t know?”

“Know what?”

I considered, and then sighed. “Okay, brother dear. We’re in Union Square anyway. We’ll be there in five minutes.”

I pushed down the tongue on the phone, keeping the receiver to my ear. “We’re going to Andrew’s,” I told Bill.

“We are?”

“Uh-huh. You have another quarter?”

“You’re a pricey hobby.” He handed me one.

“Put it on your expense report.”

“You think the boss will pay?”

“No. She’s too cheap. But you can take it off your taxes that way.”

I called Genna’s office back to leave Andrew’s number instead of mine. Then we headed over.

It was literally a five-minute walk to Andrew’s Twentieth Street loft, and another thirty seconds in the elevator. Regardless, Andrew was waiting impatiently at the elevator door when it opened on his floor.

“How come you called now?” was his first question to me.

“Now? Meaning five minutes ago?”

“Right.”

“I just got your message. When should I have called?”

“That’s not what I meant. I just wondered if you knew Brad was here.”

I looked past Andrew to the angular sofa. Brad was there.

He gave me a half-smile, but the rest of his freckled face didn’t buy into it.

“I had no idea,” I told Andrew. “I called Genna’s, but I didn’t ask where Brad was. What’s going on?”

Bill and I crossed the polished floor to the end of the room where the chairs and the sofa surrounded the white shag rug. Brad stood.

“Hi,” he said, sounding uneasy. He wore a band-collared white shirt and suspenders with rocketships and asteroids on them. His muscular arms didn’t seem to know what to do with themselves, whether to shake hands with us, or just hang there.

We said “hi” back, and there conversation stopped.

Andrew the social lion stepped in. “Brad had a situation,” Andrew said firmly, looking at me and at Bill. “He handled it the way I probably would have. But given what’s going on, I wanted you to know about it. He’s willing to tell you, but only as long as it doesn’t go any further than this room. Agreed?”

For some reason, both Andrew and Brad gave Bill a longer and, it seemed to me, more hostile look than they gave me.

“Okay,” I said, answering for both of us. “If we can.”

“No, really, Lyd.”

“Andrew, how can I promise that?” I was uncomfortably aware that I was echoing Harry Krch. “What if you tell me that he killed Wayne Lewis? I have to know what it is before I promise.”

“Oh, hey.” Brad dismissed my admittedly overblown conjecture. “It’s not anything like that. It’s not a crime. At least, my part isn’t.”

“It may not even help us figure out what’s going on,” Andrew said, slipping an “us” in there the way my brothers all used to talk to me about “our” New Year’s sweets, after they’d eaten theirs up. “But it sounded like something you’d want to know about.”

“Okay.” I gave in, after a glance at Bill, who didn’t seem to object. “I like to know about things. And if it’s really not a crime, I won’t spread it.”

We all sat, arranging ourselves on the sofa and chairs, making a nice square pattern of people around the kidney-shaped coffee table. Everyone waited for Brad to start.

“I’m from Washington,” Brad said, looking at me and Bill as if to see how we were taking this. “State, not D.C. A small town, Timothy, two hours east of Seattle. Major Bible country, totally farmers and loggers. I’m the first person in my family in three generations to go farther than Seattle, and most of them won’t even go there.”

No one said anything. He went on, his words getting a little sharp.

“The piont is, I’m not out at home.”

Andrew glanced at me. It seemed like I was supposed to say something.

“Okay,” I said to Brad. “I’m not surprised you’re not. Andrew’s not out in Chinatown, and that’s a lot closer. But I don’t get why you’re telling us this.”

“All this stuff that’s going on,” Brad said. “It doesn’t make sense to me that it’s connected to my problem. But Andrew said you two were the experts at this, not him or me, so I should just tell you and you’d know if it mattered.”

My eyebrows shot up. “Andrew said that?”

“Well, sure.” Something in my look must have made him want to elaborate. “I mean,” he said, “he says stuff like that about you all the time. He’s always telling me about your cases and all the cool stuff you do. That business at the museum? He dined out on that for weeks. Don’t you know that?”

I looked at all the men in the room. Andrew was concentrating on a very important cuticle on his manicured fingernail. Brad was smiling uncertainly, waiting to go on. Bill was smiling, too, a tiny smile I’d have to talk to him about later.

“Amazing,” I sighed. “What an amazing world. So,” I said to Brad. “Do go on.”

Brad touched the tips of his fingers together. “I don’t go back home often,” he said. “Not even once a year. But when I do, I leave the earrings home. I grow the beard in, put on a flannel shirt and do macho northwoods boy. I did it the whole time I was growing up. Mostly because of my mom.”

Bill reached into his jacket for a cigarette and then stopped. He knows how Andrew feels about smoke in the loft.

“It would be a problem for your mom?” I asked.

“My mom …” Brad trailed off, then started up again. “My mom has the best plots in the garden set aside just for the altar flowers for the Mount Hope Evangelical Bible Church. Yeah, it would be a problem for my mom.” His fingers smoothed his goatee. “It’s not cool these days not to be out. But Andrew’s not out to your mom, either.”

“So you felt okay telling him about this, whatever it is?”

“Well, I didn’t until he started asking me questions. Before that
I was telling myself that what was going on had nothing to do with me.”

“What was going on?” I echoed.

“The stolen sketches,” Brad said. “And the rest.”

I shot a glance at Bill, then back to Brad. “How do you know about the sketches?”

“Please,” he said. “Do you know how hard it is to hide anything from your secretary?”

Bill grinned at that. I decided to never get a secretary.

“Actually, that’s why Genna called you,” Brad said. “Or I guess she asked Andrew to. I discreetly reminded her that if she had a problem that had to do with the robbery—I didn’t tell her I knew what the problem was—that Andrew’s sister was a P.I. Because I hear about you so much.” I looked at Andrew, but his fingernail must have been really absorbing. “What the rest of it is, besides the sketches, I don’t really know—at least Andrew tells me I don’t,” Brad went on. “But he says it’s bad. And everyone knows about Wayne. Though really, I don’t see how that could be connected. But I thought it was time to come clean. Andrew said you’d be okay with it.” He included both me and Bill in his look.

“With what?” I asked. “With your being gay?” I glanced at Andrew, surprised that that was even an issue.

“No,” Brad said. “With how I dealt with the problem.”

“What problem?” I asked. Then, genius that I am, I finally got it. “Someone was threatening to out you?”

He nodded.

“Blackmail?” I said.

He said, “John’s mother.”

Part of me was scandalized. The other part wasn’t even surprised. “Mrs. Ryan?” I asked, redundantly.

“She wanted reports on what John was up to,” Andrew said, unable to hold it in any longer. “Can you believe it?”

“I’ve met her,” I said shortly. “She told me she paid for information about John, she just didn’t tell me who. Was that how she knew about me?”

“That’s right,” Brad said. “I had to tell her things. That was the deal.”

I shook my head. “What a creep she is.” I looked at Bill. He didn’t seem even a little bit surprised. But creepy things going on in families rarely surprise him.

Brad went on, “I did it, because I had to. My mom … But that didn’t mean I had to actually
do
it.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, I had to tell her some things. Like about Genna hiring you. Things she could have found out some other way, and then I’d be in deep shit. But I didn’t tell her why you’d been hired. I pretended I didn’t know.”

“Why does she want to know these things?” Bill asked, speaking for the first time since we’d sat down.

“It’s Genna,” Brad said. “She hates her.” He shrugged uncomfortably, looking at Andrew.

“Because she’s Chinese,” I finished, so he wouldn’t have to say it.

Brad nodded. “It would ruin her bloodlines,” he said. “Blond hair, blue eyes—what a loss to the world, if that were to go.”

“And getting the scoop on John?” I asked. “How would that help?”

“Not just John. Genna’s business.” Brad took a breath. “I saw what was going on. I put it together, and I stopped giving her everything.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’d tell Mrs. Ryan something, and something would happen. She never told me she was doing it, and the one time I confronted her she told me to mind my own business. Can you imagine? Spy for me and mind your own business.” He ran his hand up and down his goatee.

“Something would happen? What?”

“Different things. Always bad for Genna. The supplier who was suddenly out of the little silver buttons? I was the one who gave Mrs. Ryan his name. And the factory that got another, bigger client? There was no client, just Mrs. Ryan.”

“Roland,” I said quietly to Bill. He nodded, eyes still on Brad.

From the corner of my eye I saw the inquisitive look Andrew was giving me, but I pretended I didn’t.

“There were other things,” Brad said. “But like I said, as soon as I caught on, I started being selective. I gave her things to keep her busy, but nothing Genna couldn’t handle.”

“How do you mean?”

“Other people make silver buttons. I found a new supplier two days after that one backed out. There are other factories, too. I knew that wasn’t really a problem. You see, she was trying to ruin Genna. She thinks John just likes the glamour and glitz of this fabulous life—” he and Andrew exchanged sardonic looks “—and if Genna’s business fails and there’s no more glamour he’ll dump her.”

“Will he?”

“No way! He’s put everything into this. He’s in it for the long haul.”

“Why? What does he get out of it?”

“Get out of it?” Brad’s eyebrows creased together. “Nothing. He just loves her.”

It seemed to me that was heartfelt, and I was surprised at how glad I was to hear it.

“So you gave Mrs. Ryan things that would make her feel as though she was making headway, but wouldn’t really hurt Genna’s business?” I asked.

“You got it. Just to keep her occupied until after Genna’s show. Once Genna’s a hit—and you have to know she’s going to be—there won’t be much of anything Mrs. Ryan can do to stop her. Then outing me won’t buy her anything and she’ll go away. Until then, it’s busywork for Mrs. R.”

I looked hard at my brother. “How long have you known about this?”

“Oh, Lyd, give me some credit! I only just found out.”

“How? Brad just got an attack of conscience and told you? I’m sorry, guys, but I have to know.”

Brad, touching the tips of his fingers together under his chin, said, “I didn’t just tell him. He called and asked.”

“Excuse me?”

Andrew said, “I did. I thought about it, and I realized no one had talked to Brad, and it seemed to me that in his position he might
know something. I really meant information, facts, not something like this. So I called. And I was right. Not in the way I thought, but I was.”

I looked at Andrew, and he at me. It seemed to me those looks were different from any we’d ever given each other before.

Bill said, “Tell us about Wayne Lewis.”

Brad’s index fingers tapped the coffee table. “I told Mrs. Ryan that John and Genna had hired Wayne as show producer. A few weeks later he quit. She must have paid him off.”