MANDARIN PLAID (Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series) (26 page)

John raised his hand again to rub his eyes. After a moment he said, “Could you turn the light out?”

Bill went over by the door and did that. I didn’t move. In the room’s new twilight, the bed and the equipment cast soft, conflicting shadows from the light that drifted in through the window and through the glass in the door.

Bill came back to stand by the bed. John remained silent. Bill said, “When I knew there was no money and no phone booth, I called Dawn. I wanted someone who knew you, who might know how you’d think.” He paused, then said, “Someone you’d once shown a building you owned. She remembered that building. She led me right to it.”

Silence filled the room again. When John finally spoke, it was without anger, with great weariness. “I should tell you to go to hell,” he said. “I should tell you you’re crazy and to get the hell out of here. I could yell for a nurse. I ought to do a whole thing. But you know what?”

“What?” I asked.

He sighed, from deep within. “Screw it, that’s what. I haven’t got the energy. I can’t do this anymore.”

“Tell us what it is you can’t do,” I said gently.

“I guess my mother’s right. I’m not good at much. I’m not even good at this.”

“At what?”

“For a while,” he spoke slowly, but clearly, as though he were explaining this not only to us, but to himself, “I actually thought I was. Good at something, I mean. At what Genna needed me for, at Mandarin Plaid. Not good enough to keep my mother from pulling her shit, but I never expected to be as good as my mother. Even my father was never in her league.

“But this idea. I thought this idea was good. Great. Awesome. Not mine, of course. But I thought it was brilliant.”

“It was Roland’s?” I asked.

“Sure it was Roland’s. Roland was a genius. My mother offered him five thousand dollars to break his contract with us. He pushed her up to seventy-five hundred. He said he had this idea the minute she called.” He coughed, then closed his eyes in pain. He opened them, though, and kept going. “I liked him, too. I thought he liked me. I thought we were partners. I didn’t know he had any … I didn’t know he was even thinking … shit! Son of a bitch. He was planning to kill me all along.”

Anger flooded his drained face. With his right hand, the one that didn’t have a needle and a tube in it, he pounded the bed.

I said, “You’d been planning to split the money?”

“Right down the middle.”

“And Andi Shechter?”

“We brought her in at first just to grab the envelope in the park. She was my idea. I knew she needed cash.”

“For drugs.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, as though needing cash for drugs was the same as needing cash to pay the rent. “She was going to get to keep what was in the envelope after the whole thing was over. She got off on it.”

“Is that what you were talking about in Donna’s that night? When she looked sort of meanly happy, and you didn’t?”

“You were in Donna’s?”

I nodded.

“Shit,” John said. “You were on to us that long ago?”

“No. I just had a feeling you were up to something. Is that what that was about?”

“Yeah. And she wanted to tell me something else, too: my mother had called her to say she’d pay Andi to back out of Genna’s show. Andi thought that was pretty funny.”

Oh, yeah. Pretty funny. “And you gave her money.”

“For the information. About my mother. That’s how I knew what she was up to. I paid people to tell me.”

My god, I thought. Like mother, like son.

I had another question. “If all Andi was supposed to do was grab the money the first time, what was she doing there today?”

“When we realized you were going to be bringing the ransom money, Roland said we’d better make it look good. So we called Andi. She was up for it. You were the dark horse, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Roland was really impressed with you. At first he thought it was a great idea, having you involved. A pro—a pair of pros—would lend a lot of credibility to the thing. The bit about shooting at you in the park—that was so you’d get the idea these guys were crazy and dangerous. So when I got kidnapped everyone would be worried.

“But you two were better than he thought. He had to keep improvising to deal with what you were doing. But he said that made it exciting.”

I didn’t know how I felt about this, a compliment on my professional skills from an extortionist and would-be murderer, now dead, received secondhand from his wounded co-conspirator. “Andi Shechter,” I prompted, to cover my confused thoughts.

“We offered her another fifty thousand,” John said. “Just to
stand there with a gun, for you. Shit, I didn’t even know that gun was loaded. Roland’s guns, both of them,” he added. “So maybe I should have figured. It must have made it exciting.”

“What were you going to do with the money?”

John looked at me as though he was surprised I was even asking the question. “Mine was for Genna,” he said. “To get Mandarin Plaid going the way she needs, for a first season. Even with the investors, she hasn’t got enough. She doesn’t want to believe it, but it’s true. She’s undercapitalized. She won’t make it without more startup cash.”

Something came back to me. “That’s why you were so mad when she used her own money for the ransom?”

“Right. The whole point was for her, to get money for her, not to drain her. She should have used mine.”

Well, actually Dawn’s, I thought, but I didn’t want to go into that now. “What about Roland?” I asked.

“The money? Roland was going to use his to ditch the factory and set himself up. He wanted to open an import business—factories on the mainland, that’s the coming thing, he kept saying. Labor’s cheap and there are fortunes to be made. He just needed some capital to start. Shit, if I could have gotten my hands on my money legitimately, I’d probably have invested with him.”

“Your money?”

“My father left me that money.
Me
. But my mother got to him and made him set it up as a trust. I can’t touch a goddamn penny unless she gives it to me.”

Someone passed by the yellow square of light shining in the glass in the door. I said, “So you decided to take it this way.”

“It was
my
money.”

“And the first theft? The sketches?”

John smiled, almost as though with a fond memory. “That was Roland’s genius. He knew my mother wouldn’t buy it if I just got snatched. She’d figure I was behind it, trying to get at my money.

“So we built this elaborate thing, where it would be plausible that I’d go running off to be a hero for Genna. And look, she almost didn’t buy it anyway, did she?”

I shook my head, thinking about Mrs. Ryan in her huge white
living room, thinking about how my mother would react if someone called and demanded money for the return of Ted, Elliot, Andrew, or Tim. Or me.

“John,” I said, “why did Roland kill Wayne Lewis?”

“Can you get me some water?” John asked. Bill found a plastic cup, filled it, and held it for John to drink.

“Thanks,” John said. “Shit, my head hurts.”

“I’m sorry, John,” I said. “But—”

“No,” John said, “I’ll tell you the rest. I … None of this is what I wanted, you know. I just wanted to help Genna.”

“I know,” I said.

We waited for him to go on.

“Wayne,” John said. “Genna had this crazy idea it was Wayne. I don’t know what made her think that.”

Bill and I exchanged looks.

“She didn’t think that,” I said.

“What?”

“She thought it was Dawn. She was trying to point us at Wayne to mislead us. So we wouldn’t find out, and especially so you wouldn’t find out, that Genna has a sister who’s a hooker.”

“Oh, God.” John closed his eyes. “Is that true?” For some reason, opening his eyes again, he looked to Bill.

“Yes.” Bill confirmed it for him.

John breathed deeply. “What did she think was going to happen if I knew that? Why did she think I’d care?”

“What did you think was going to happen if you told Genna about your mother? If you admitted that you didn’t have any money, instead of trying to be her sugar daddy?” I countered. Why couldn’t any of these people have told each other the truth? “Why did Roland kill Wayne?”

“I—” John looked as though he wanted to say something else, not what I was asking him, but he set his jaw and continued. “When I found out Genna had told you about Wayne, I called Roland. I thought he ought to know, just to keep up. I didn’t know Wayne dealt drugs, but Roland did.”

“How?”

“Roland was Wayne’s connection.”

“Roland? Roland dealt drugs, too?”

“Not in a big way. I had the idea it was more to show he knew the right people, you know? You come to Roland Lum, he’ll help you out, that kind of thing.”

“Did Andi know that?”

“Sure.”

Which was why Andi didn’t have to go to Ed, after Wayne was killed. And if Krch had let Francie Rossi follow through on that, Roland might have had the narcotics cops on his tail. This whole scheme might have been aborted. And Andi Shechter might be alive, right now.

Krch, I thought. Ed Everest. Someone had called the Police Commissioner to get the Ed Everest investigation started.

“Your mother,” I said to John, who looked at me, waiting to hear the rest. “She was behind the cops looking into Ed Everest, wasn’t she?”

“Yes,” John said. He shifted his eyes away. “She’d heard rumors about Dawn, but she couldn’t prove anything. She couldn’t find her, because Dawn doesn’t use her own name. My mother thought Dawn was still working for Ed, and that if she blew that up in a big scandal that would ruin Genna.”

I was appalled into silence by the strength of Mrs. Ryan’s obsession with destroying the woman her son loved.

“I still haven’t heard why Roland killed Lewis,” Bill said, pulling me back to the hospital room, to now.

“He was afraid that when you two went to Wayne, as soon as Wayne heard ‘Mandarin Plaid’ he’d tell you about being bought off by my mother, just to get you off his back before you dug up the drug stuff. Roland thought that once you knew that, you might start wondering who else my mother was paying off. He thought you might get onto us from there. I didn’t know any of this until this afternoon,” he added. “When I went to the building to meet them, and wait.”

“That was it?” I said, feeling a little sick. “Wayne had nothing to do with any of this? Roland killed him in case?”

John gave me a long look. “You have no idea how much Roland hated that factory,” he said.

Dusk had turned to darkness now in the street outside John’s
room. In here it was not much better, lit by what the street and the corridor could spare.

“What will happen now?” John said, sounding as though he was reluctant to hear the answer.

“I don’t know,” I told him. I looked at Bill. Your play, his eyes said. I went on, thinking out loud. “Roland and Andi are dead. Dawn shot them both.”

“I thought you … ?” John turned his eyes to Bill.

Bill shook his head. “Amateurs. Andi couldn’t have seen us; the only light was in the room right in front of her. She just panicked and shot. If Dawn had kept down, she’d never have been hit. She panicked and shot back. It didn’t have to happen.” Nothing showed on his face, but if you knew what to look for and you looked in his eyes, it was there. “I didn’t know Dawn was with me,” he went on. “I told her to wait outside. She told me she would. By the time I heard her behind me, it was too late to say anything. She knew that. It was pretty dark down there, but I know I saw her grin.”

“What will happen to her?”

“There’ll be an investigation,” Bill said, “but it’s pretty clear what happened. We’ll have to testify. If her gun was licensed, she’ll probably be okay.”

“And the rest?” This question was to me, and we all knew what “the rest” was.

“From where the police stand now, this kidnapping thing is pretty straightforward,” I said. I looked at John, thinking of Genna’s hands clenching the telephone receiver in his mother’s cold apartment. “They’ll match one of Roland’s guns to the bullet that killed Wayne Lewis, and that case will be solved and they won’t care why.” I stared out the window, looking for inspiration. “We could tell the police you were involved from the beginning. Or not,” I finished. Great, Lydia, I thought. How’s that for the decisive, definite, and self-assured P.I.?

John didn’t say anything.

“If we do,” I said, “I’m not sure you won’t just worm out of it. I know your mother has a phalanx of lawyers who salivate over the prospect of a lot of billable time.” He looked away from me when I
said that, as though I’d discovered something true but shameful about his family.

“If we don’t, though, it won’t be to do you a favor. I think you’re a lot like your mother. I can’t believe you would do this to Genna.”

“To Genna?” In the dimness of his room John appeared genuinely puzzled. “I did it
for
Genna.”

“For Genna? Do you have any idea what a wreck she is by now?” I exploded. “The sketches, and waiting for another phone call, and then this happening to you? What she’s been through? And so close to her first big show! You did it
for
her? God, men are such idiots!”

John looked to Bill, maybe for support, but Bill was looking at me. “What she needed was for you to be there helping her!” I ranted on. “Everybody has money problems. Those could have been worked out. She needed you
there!
But you had to be the mighty hunter. You had to go out and drag some goddamn woolly mammoth into the cave, when all she wanted was for you to help her build the fire. And the damn mammoth wasn’t even dead, and it stomped all over her, and now you have no dinner
and
Genna’s a wreck!”

John’s face was a confusion of emotions. Bill’s was more obvious: surprise and smothered laughter, an attempt to look as serious as the situation demanded, in the face of woolly mammoths.

“I’ll have to think about it,” I concluded, maybe a little feeble in content but strong in delivery.

John seemed to be about to make an answer to that, but the door swung open and Genna stepped into the room.

Holding the door to let the light in, she stopped and looked around. “What’s wrong?” Her voice was quick with worry.