MANDARIN PLAID (Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series) (25 page)

“I guess you’re right,” Roland said. “I’m sorry, Lydia. Sorry for old Elliot. But I guess it’s time to go.”

Roland’s partner lifted a gun, too, and pointed it at me, too. Left or right? I wondered. Which way to dive?

But I didn’t have to decide. “Lum!” a male voice roared. A loud, resonant male voice. A beautiful voice. Bill’s voice. “Both of you! Drop the guns!”

Roland started like a rabbit. I hit the ground, left, away from him. I yanked my .38 from its holster as Roland’s shot howled through the basement air. Another answered. Roland ducked behind John, making him a shield. Roland’s partner, left alone and exposed, fired
through the doorway. From the hall I heard a yelp, then another shot. The ninja-masked head snapped backward and the figure slammed against the rusting boiler, crumpling slowly to the floor.

The force of the crash loosened the ninja mask; it had slipped partway off by the time the figure hit the floor. Askew, it revealed full, pouty lips, and high, delicate cheekbones. At the temples, drifting out from the blackness of the hood, were wisps of glossy hair the white-gold color of morning light.

Andi Shechter.

“Lum!” Bill yelled, bursting into the thousand questions I was asking myself. “Give it up! The place is crawling with cops!” I knew that wasn’t true. If the cops were here, they’d never have let Bill in. There were no cops.

“Screw you!” Roland screamed. “Drop your guns or I’ll blow his fucking head off! Do it! What do I have to lose?” He raised his gun and fired a wild shot into the ceiling. Plaster splashed down around us as Roland cocked the hammer and pressed the gun to John’s head.

“All right,” I said. “All right!” I threw my gun across the floor, and stood.

“Whoever the hell you are!” Roland yelled into the hallway. “You do it, too! Do it!”

Bill said nothing, but stepped from the shadows into the light of the room, tossing his gun before him.

“Hands on your heads!” Roland barked, and Bill and I did that, standing helpless in the dusty room where Andi Shechter bled on the floor.

Roland switched the gun to his left hand and kept it hard against John’s temple while his right pulled at the rope holding John’s wrists. John’s arms flopped down to his sides. He moved them vaguely, lifting one to hold his head. Roland hauled him out of the chair.

John in front of him, Roland began to edge out of the room. John moved clumsily, tripping.

“Lydia!” Roland ordered. “Pick that up and give it to me.” He nodded at the brown paper package bursting with green stacks of bills that Andi had dropped. I knelt slowly, gathered it up, and passed it
to him. He squeezed it under the arm he was gripping John with and started to move toward the door again.

I was closest to Roland. I waited for Bill to make the move, to create the distraction that would draw Roland’s attention so I could tackle him. I knew that’s what was coming next.

But it wasn’t.

From the darkness of the hall a woman’s voice yelled, “Hey!” Not Roland’s name, not a command, just “hey!”

It was enough for Roland. He shoved John back into the room, spun and fired two blasting shots in the direction of the sound.

John tripped and clutched at me for balance as I flew toward Roland. He made me trip, too, my knee crashing on the concrete before I righted myself.

A shot rang from the dark, from where the voice was. Roland made a sound of surprise. He staggered forward, then he fell.

A deafening silence filled the basement. For a second everyone, everything, was frozen.

Then I grabbed up my gun and pushed past John, who was pulling weakly at the tape around his mouth. I held my gun on Roland as Bill leaned over him, feeling his throat for a pulse. Bill shook his head and stood.

Eyes shining, smiling a strange smile, left arm bloody, Dawn Jing stepped out of the basement shadows.

T
HIRTY

I
n the life of East Third Street, police cars and ambulances were clearly not unusual enough to cause a lot of alarm, even on a beautiful spring afternoon. The small crowd that collected watched with mild interest, the way you’d watch a children’s game from your front stoop, as the Crime Scene cops disappeared inside
the building and, eventually, the paramedics brought Roland’s body out, and then Andi Shechter’s. They were covered, and then strapped down, as though even in death they might still be looking for a ticket out.

The Crime Scene cops came out after a while, too, with the spent shells Dawn and Andi and Roland had fired, and the ninja masks and the rope from John’s wrists and the filthy towel and the million dollars, all bagged neatly in clear plastic bags. Roland’s and Andi’s personal effects were in other bags, just the small things everyone carries with them in the course of a regular day—wallets, tissues, combs, and keys, the things that are supposed to help you make your way from one day into the next.

John was already gone, semiconscious with a concussion, carried off with sirens and flashing lights to St. Vincent’s Hospital. I’d called Genna right after I’d called the police, to tell her he was hurt but alive. I’d said to stay where she was, and that I’d call her as soon as I knew which hospital they were taking him to.

I hadn’t told her Dawn was here. In the dusty air of the basement, Roland motionless as the concrete at my feet, I’d waited, looking from Bill to Dawn, for someone to explain this to me. Bill, crouching down to examine the gash in John’s temple, had said simply, “Dawn knew where to come.” I didn’t consider that much of an explanation, but John was holding his head and moaning, Dawn was bleeding, and Bill said, “Later.” That usually meant, “In private,” and that was okay with me. So I ran upstairs, found a street corner phone, and called it in. Then I called Genna; by the time I was off the phone with her and headed back down the block, the howl of the sirens was getting close and the action had started.

Andi’s bullet had sliced through Dawn’s left arm. Once out on the street, she winced, then grinned as the paramedics sat her on a gurney and worked on her. “Doesn’t hurt much,” she said, in answer to someone’s question. Then, to Bill, who’d given her the cigarette she was smoking while they wrapped her arm, she added, “And some of my dates are really into scars.”

Bill smiled past his own cigarette. He was hanging out at the front of the building, strolling around, sitting on the stoop, rising again, strolling, but not far. He couldn’t go far. He was waiting for
the Ninth Precinct detectives who were grilling me to finish so they could start on him.

As soon as they’d come, we told them what had happened and why, but they seemed to be having a hard time believing us. “You mean to tell me,” one of them, a thin man with jerky movements, kept asking, “We got three Chinese in the same shootout here and it’s got nothing to do with gangs, tongs, like that?”

“Yes,” I said wearily, for what seemed like the fifteenth time. “It was kidnapping. I told you. Talk to John. Talk to Genna. Talk to John’s mother—she can tell you all about Chinese people.”

“No reason to get snappy, miss,” his heavier, slower partner said, although I could think of a few. “Tell us again what you have to do with it.” He smiled reasonably and offered me a Life Saver. I couldn’t decide which of them I disliked more.

I told them again, and then again. Finally they gave up, took my gun to be tested though anyone could tell it hadn’t been fired, and converged on Bill.

They’d told me not to leave. I sat on the steps. As the ambulance took Dawn Jing away, I heard Bill say that he was working for me, that he’d come here in response to the message I’d left with his service, that he’d never met or seen Roland before but he knew I’d been suspicious of him for a while. They asked Bill about the Chinese gang angle, too, and they asked him a lot of other things while I sat, felt the breeze against my skin, and tried to think of nothing.

In the end they took us over to the Ninth Precinct and went through the whole thing again. They waited for the cops talking to John at the hospital to call in, and they compared Dawn’s statement to Bill’s, and Bill’s to mine, and they left us each in different rooms for a while. Then they told me I could go, so I left the station house, crossed the street, sat on the curb, and waited.

It was another ten minutes before Bill came out. As the light blazed gold on the faces of the buildings, picking out windowsills and cornices, throwing barred, slanted shadows from fire escapes, he crossed the street to join me.

Crouching next to me, he took my hand. I hadn’t realized how chilly the spring air had gotten until I felt the rough warmth of Bill’s hand.

“You okay?” he asked.

I nodded. “You?”

“Never better.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

He smiled and dropped himself onto the curb beside me.

“Mrs. Ryan made Genna sign a contract,” I said, watching the late sun glint off the windows across the street.

“A contract?”

“That was the only reason she gave us the money. It says that Genna borrowed a million dollars from her. If she never sees John again, she doesn’t have to return it. If she does, she does. Mrs. Ryan says she’ll take Genna to court and ruin her if she tries to get out of it.”

“She made her sign that for the ransom money?” I could hear in Bill’s voice that even he, Mr. Cynicism, had trouble with that.

“She didn’t believe it was a ransom. She thought Genna and I had cooked the whole thing up. The kind of thing the Chinese do, you know.”

Bill didn’t answer. I hugged my knees to my chest and rested my chin on them. “You know,” I said, “I didn’t leave the address of that place with your service.”

“I know.”

“On purpose. So you wouldn’t go racing down there before me, without the ransom money, and get yourself killed.”

“I know.”

“But you told the cops that’s why you went there. Because of the message I left you. You couldn’t have.”

“I didn’t,” he said. “When I got there I wasn’t even sure it was the right place.”

“Why did you say that, then? And why did you come?”

“Dawn brought me. If I’d told them that, I’d have had to tell them how she knew where to go. And why I called her.”

“Why did you?”

He looked across the street, too, to where the top floors of the buildings glowed in the dying light and the bottom floors were already in shadow. He said, “There’s no phone booth at Thirty-fifth and Third.”

Late afternoon light can play strange tricks. The buildings across the street suddenly took on an alien aspect, an unfamiliar and sinister quality I hadn’t noticed before. “But …” I said. “Then … ?”

Bill looked at me and I looked at him, and we stood up and headed for St. Vincent’s.

We talked it out while we walked across town into the red-striped sunset, and finished as we sat over espresso and perfumey Earl Grey tea in the Peacock Cafe, around the corner from St. Vincent’s. In spindly metal-backed cafe chairs, listening to old recordings of an achingly beautiful operatic soprano, we went back and forth. Bill told me what he’d thought and what he’d done, the calls he’d made. I told him what Roland had said as we stood under the swinging light. We discussed what we didn’t know and what we thought, now, that we did. We fell quiet, only the singer filling the space around us with music that, to me, was beautiful but meaningless, just as the tea I was drinking was warm and sweet but didn’t reach the chill I felt inside.

We went on, to the hospital. They told us John Ryan was in stable condition and could have visitors, and they gave us the passes. We glided up to the third floor in the big, smooth elevator. The air smelled like Lysol, the floors were shiny, and conversations were hushed. Down the hall to the left we found John’s room.

John was in the first bed, the one by the door. The other bed was empty. John had a drip in his arm, a bandage around his head, and a swollen purple bruise with a Band-Aid riding the crest of it on his cheek. He looked like hell, but he wasn’t asleep. He turned slowly to the door as we came in.

“Lydia,” he smiled weakly. “Smith. Hey, thanks.” He closed his eyes, but opened them again right away. “God, how stupid does that sound?” he asked. His words were slow and soft, either from medication or from the concussion. “You saved my life, and I’m saying ‘thanks.’ ”

“How do you feel?” I asked.

“Headache. I’ll be all right. Run-of-the-mill concussion, they tell me. That guy was really crazy, wasn’t he?”

“Roland? I guess he was.”

“And Andi. Jesus, Andi. Poor kid. Is she—?”

“She’s dead,” I told him.

“God.” He was quiet for a moment. Then he asked, “How’s Genna? Is she okay with all this? Is she coming down?”

“I spoke to her a few hours ago, but not since. She was upset, but all right.”

“Could you call her? Tell her I’m okay? I don’t know what they’re giving me here, I’m pretty sleepy, but I’d love it if she got here before I really go under.”

He smiled again, and his blue eyes smiled, too. I wondered if his mother’s blue eyes had ever smiled like that.

“Genna has a problem, John.”

The smile faded. “What problem?”

“Your mother made her sign a contract agreeing to never see you again.” I told him the story, the deckle-edged paper, his mother’s coldness and her accusations.

“My God,” he breathed. “My God. But,” he stopped, creasing his brow, “now she’ll get the money back, won’t she? So the contract is void. If it ever was good.”

“It doesn’t matter if it’s void or if it ever was good. Your mother can tie Genna up in court for years trying to get out of it, even though everyone knows Genna will win in the end. You can count on that being the end of Mandarin Plaid if she does.”

John swore softly, under his breath.

“But that would make your mother happy,” I said. “To destroy Mandarin Plaid. Because she thinks you’re with Genna for the glitz and the glamour, and that if Genna’s a failure you’ll dump her.”

John sighed. “I know she does. All that glitz and glamour. But it’s not true.”

“I know it isn’t. And I know you know she thinks so.”

John lifted his hand tentatively to rub his eyes. Then, realizing we were waiting for him to speak, he said, “You lost me. Who knows what?”

“You knew your mother was trying to destroy Mandarin Plaid. That she was behind all the things that went wrong—the vendors dropping out, Wayne Lewis quitting. She didn’t want you to know, and you never told Genna, but you knew.”

John waited a moment. Then, looking up at me, he said, “You’re right. I knew what she was up to. She thought she was so smart, but it’s her style, that knife-in-the-back stuff. I couldn’t tell Genna. What I did was to run all around the city, trying to fix things.” He laughed weakly. “My mother’s always been disgusted with me because I’ve never worked. Her definition of work, you know, nine-to-five in a suit in a big glass building. Maybe up till I met Genna she was right. All I know is, I’ve never worked as hard as I did to try to keep her from destroying Genna.”

“She was why Roland backed out after you had the factory lined up?”

John started to nod, but winced and thought better, apparently, of movement. “Right,” he said. He added, “I thought I just about had him convinced to come back with us. I spent a lot of time talking to that guy. Shows you what I know, right? God, what some people will do for money.”

“Let’s talk about money, John,” I said.

He looked up at me again. “Money?”

“Well, not that money. Not the million dollars, yet. The fifty thousand dollars for the sketches that you got from your bank.”

“What about it?” He frowned again. “Where is it?”

“That’s the question. Or it would be, if there were any such money.”

He squeezed his eyes shut and then opened them again, as though he were having difficulty focusing. “What do you mean, if there were?”

“You had Genna wait in the lobby when you went to talk to the bank officer. You came back with an envelope, told Genna to go back to her office, and got in a cab. To go leave the money at Thirty-fifth and Third. Where there’s no phone booth.”

“No—? Sure there is. Where I left the envelope. And then, like an idiot, I stayed to see what would happen. Duh.” He smiled again, weakly, engagingly. “Look, I don’t think I can hold it together much longer. Thanks for—”

“No, there’s not,” Bill said, speaking for the first time since we’d come in here. His tone was mild, friendly even, but his words wove themselves together like a net settling over John. “I went there
to try to pick up your trail. There’s no phone booth on Third at Thirty-fifth, or at Thirty-sixth. There’s one at Thirty-fourth, but it’s on a heavy-traffic corner, the kind of place you wouldn’t tell someone to leave an envelope full of cash because it would be gone before you could get to it. There’s a phone between Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth, but there was a drug dealer hanging out at it waiting for a call. The neighborhood says he uses it most afternoons. Not a good bet, either. And,” he added, “neither of those two is anywhere near a dry cleaner.”

“Third?” John frowned. “No, not Third. It was Second.”

“Third,” Bill said. “Genna was positive about that. I don’t think that’s the kind of mistake she makes. So—” John opened his mouth to speak, but Bill wouldn’t let him get started “—so I called Citibank. I told them I was from Chemical and we suspected someone had been fraudulently accessing your account with us. I asked if there had been any large withdrawals in the last few days from any of your accounts with them. Not the amounts, so they didn’t have to break a confidence, just any large cash movements. They told me no.”

“I—”

“It wasn’t there, John,” I said. “I saw everything come up out of that basement in plastic evidence bags. I know what an envelope full of fifty thousand dollars looks like: I’d just put one down when someone shot at me, remember? Was that Andi? Or was it Roland? That’s more his style, to do the cowboy stuff while someone else grabs and runs. Am I right?”