Murder In Chinatown (26 page)

“Her mother might’ve been glad to be rid of her, too,” Frank observed, “but that didn’t stop her from trying to get something out of it. Is that what they wanted, too? Did they go to see Wong to get the money their mother wanted?”

Now Iris was confused. “They never did that,” she said. “Not that I knew!”

“Where were they all day today?” Frank asked.

“I don’t know! They go out when they want, and they come back when they please. They don’t answer to no one.”

“Any idea where they’d be now?”

“No!” Mrs. O’Neal said before Iris could reply. “We got no idea at all. You want ’em, you’ll have to find ’em, but they ain’t done nothing wrong. Iris is right, I never even to Id ’em I went to see Wong. That would’ve shamed them.”

Frank sighed. He doubted a hundred dollars in cash would have caused anyone in the O’Neal family a bit of embarrassment. Now he would have to spend the better part of the night trying to find the sons.

He was already out in the hallway when he remembered something else. “Keely needs a place to live now that Wong is dead,” he told the girl’s mother.

Mrs. O’Neal glared at him. “She’ll have to find one on her own. She ain’t welcome here no more.”

So much for the power of a mother’s love, Frank thought.

A
FTER
S
ARAH HAD PUT
C
ATHERINE TO BED, SHE WENT
back downstairs to find Maeve waiting for her. Catherine had been content with Sarah’s explanation that she had taken Mrs. Lee home and found that Mr. Malloy had released her son from jail. Catherine liked stories with happy endings, but Maeve wanted a more detailed account of Sarah’s eventful day.

Sarah told her tale, leaving out nothing. Maeve had probably seen more of life than Sarah ever would, so she didn’t have to worry about shocking the girl with the description of Wong’s murder.

“You think this Keely had feelings for the Chinese man?” Maeve asked when she’d taken a few minutes to consider the bizarre story.

“If you’re asking if she was in love with him, no, she wasn’t. I don’t think she even knows what that means. She seemed fond of him, though. He treated her well, by her standards, at least, and they were very…affectionate,” Sarah added discreetly.

“Most girls would want pretty clothes,” Maeve observed wryly.

Sarah smiled. “I’m sure she would’ve started demanding things sooner or later. I think she was concentrating on getting him to marry her first.”

“And having no clothes at all would help with that, I guess.” Maeve shook her head. “What do you think happened?”

“As near as we can figure, Mr. Wong must have figured out who killed Angel. He sent his nephew to find Mr. Malloy. He must have wanted to keep Keely out of it, so he gave her some kind of drug to put her to sleep.”

“She does sound like she’d be the kind to want to horn in on everything.”

“Oh, yes,” Sarah agreed. “But for whatever reason, she drank something he gave her and was sound asleep when we got there. She said she thought she heard somebody arguing, but she might have dreamed that. I haven’t had a chance to talk to Mr. Malloy about the crime, but from what I saw, it looked like someone had hit Mr. Wong over the head with something heavy. I didn’t see any signs that he’d been struggling with the person or anything like that, though. Nothing in the room was out of place.”

“So if they was shouting, they was being polite about it,” Maeve observed.

“I guess so,” Sarah agreed.

Maeve shook her head. “Seems kind of strange. Most people, when they’re shouting, they’re fighting, too.”

Maeve’s life had been so different from Sarah’s. Her heart ached for the girl.

“So you think it’s a Chinese what killed Mr. Wong?” Maeve asked.

“If it’s the same person who killed Angel, then it would definitely be a Chinese man. Of course, the person who killed Mr. Wong could be someone else entirely. Maybe he had other enemies. And there’s the girl, Keely. Her mother wanted her back, and Wong refused. Maybe her brothers decided to have a word with him, and things got out of hand.”

“I don’t know her brothers, but from what you said…”

“What?” Sarah prodded when she hesitated.

“It’s just…I’d think they wouldn’t want her back.”

“You mean because she’d taken up with a Chinaman?” Sarah asked.

“Yes. Besides, even if she’d just run away, I expect they’d be glad to be rid of her. One less mouth to feed.”

Sarah had imagined the O’Neal boys defending their sister’s honor, but Maeve was more likely to be right in her assessment of their character. “Her mother did try to rescue her, at least.”

But Maeve shook her head. “That don’t seem right either. Did Keely really hear what her ma wanted or did she just go by what Mr. Wong told her?”

“That’s a good question,” Sarah said. “I don’t know. Keely seemed very confident her mother wanted her to come home, though. What else could she have wanted?”

Maeve shrugged a shoulder. “You said Mr. Wong was rich. People like the O’Neals, they wouldn’t mind a few extra dollars coming their way, even if it did come from a Chinaman.”

“Oh, dear,” Sarah said, realizing she hadn’t been seeing this situation as clearly as she should. “I wonder if Mr. Wong gave her some money to get rid of her and then told Keely that story about her wanting to take Keely home.”

“You said he treated her good. Maybe he didn’t want to hurt her feelings.”

Was Wong that kind of a man? Sarah had no idea.

“What did Keely think of the Mission?” Maeve asked.

“She wasn’t very happy to be there, but I’m sure she’ll get used to it.”

Maeve gave her a small grin. “Maybe,” was all she would say.

F
RANK WAS AMAZED THAT THEY’D ONLY HAD TO ROUST
half the bars in New York to round up all the O’Neals. Well, half the Irish bars, anyway. It wasn’t even midnight. He might get home to sleep yet tonight.

The boys were all drunk to varying degrees, but all three managed to protest their captivity loudly and profanely as they were hauled into Headquarters. Frank ordered them put in individual interrogation rooms again, and the officers who had helped bring them in dragged them away.

In the ensuing quiet, the desk sergeant called to him. “Donatelli’s been waiting for you.”

Frank vaguely remembered he’d assigned Donatelli to question Wong’s neighbors this afternoon to find out if they’d seen anything. It seemed like days had passed since then. “Where is he?”

“Upstairs,” he said, referring to the dormitory where members of the force could catch some sleep if it was too much trouble to go home. “I’ll send somebody to wake him.”

Frank was waiting at his desk in the detectives’ room when Donatelli found him. A day’s growth of whiskers marred his handsome face, and his eyes were puffy from lack of sleep, but he was grinning ear to ear.

“You figure out who killed Wong?” Frank asked, allowing himself a glimmer of hope.

“No, but I got some interesting information,” he said, pulling up a chair from a neighboring desk and straddling it. “Seems Charlie Lee went to see Wong yesterday.”

“Lee? Are you sure?”

“Everybody in the neighborhood knows him. A couple different people saw him, so there’s no mistake.”

“What time was he there?”

“Midmorning, seems like. He didn’t stay long, half an hour or less.”

“So somebody saw him leave?”

“The same people who saw him come, mostly. That’s how they knew how long he was there.”

“What did he look like when he left?”

“He didn’t have any blood on him, if that’s what you want to know,” Donatelli said knowingly. “At least not that anybody noticed. He wasn’t running, neither. Of course, Lee’s too smart to do something to call attention to himself if he’d just killed a man.”

“I don’t suppose anybody saw an O’Neal boy,” Frank asked sourly.

“No. Didn’t see anybody else either.”

“Nobody at all? Not even somebody sneaking around, even if they didn’t see them going into Wong’s house?”

“Not a soul doing anything suspicious. They would’ve noticed white men that didn’t belong in that neighborhood, at least.”

“They probably would,” Frank agreed wearily. “I guess I wasted the whole night gathering up the O’Neals.”

Donatelli shook his head in sympathy. “So unless the nephew killed Wong before he left that morning to find you, it looks like Charlie Lee has to be the killer.”

Frank rubbed the bridge of his nose where a headache was forming. “Let’s think about this. Why would Lee kill Wong?”

“Because Wong killed the girl,” Donatelli replied helpfully.

“Except he didn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he sent his nephew to find me. At first I thought he might be guilty and trying to pin it on somebody else, but then he turned up dead, which means the real killer got to him first. So he sent for me because he wanted to tell me something about Angel’s death.”

Donatelli thought this over for a minute. “Maybe he wanted to confess.”

Frank had to resist the urge to smack him across the head. “Do you know how many times a killer’s sent for me so he could confess?”

“No,” Donatelli replied, eager for the answer.

“Never!”
Frank shouted, making the boy jump.

Donatelli shrugged apologetically. “Then why else would Lee have killed him?”

“I don’t know,” Frank said, “and that makes me mad. You’re telling me that Lee has to be the one who killed him, but he doesn’t have any reason that we know of. In fact,” he continued, thinking aloud, “if Wong knows who killed Angel, Lee’s got a good reason to keep him alive.”

“Unless it was
Lee
who killed her,” Donatelli pointed out.

Frank didn’t believe that for a minute, but…“Maybe you were right the first time,” Frank mused. “We know Wong didn’t kill Angel, but Lee didn’t know that. Maybe he killed Wong because he
thought
Wong killed Angel.”

“That would explain everything,” Donatelli said with way too much enthusiasm.

Would Sarah try to talk him out of arresting Charlie Lee, too? He’d have to do it before she found out. Now Frank really was getting a headache. He pushed himself to his feet.

“Where are you going?”

“Upstairs to get some sleep. I’m not going to go to the Lees’ place in the middle of the night.”

“What about the O’Neals?”

“I’ll have somebody lock them up for the night. Do them good. They’re drunk, so we’ll charge them with that. Besides, I might want to ask them something later, and if I do, I don’t want to have to hunt for them all over the city again.”

S
ARAH HURRIED TO ANSWER THE DOOR BEFORE THE
frantic pounding woke the girls upstairs. Pulling her robe more tightly around her, she peered through the glass in the early morning light and saw a woman silhouetted. She opened the door and Minnie Lee practically fell into her arms.

If Minnie had looked bad the last time she’d arrived like this, she looked even worse this morning. She’d dressed in a hurry. Her buttons were done crooked, and her hair pinned up as if a madwoman had styled it.

“He took them both!” she cried, clinging to Sarah as if she needed her support to remain standing. Perhaps she did.

As she had the last time, Sarah helped Minnie into the house, but this time she led her into the kitchen. She didn’t want the girls to hear them. Minnie stumbled along with her and finally sank down into the nearest kitchen chair. Sarah set to work making a fire in the stove and putting water on to boil while Minnie sobbed quietly into her handkerchief.

While she waited for the water to heat, Sarah took a chair opposite Minnie. “Now tell me what happened.”

“He took them,” Minnie repeated.

“Mr. Malloy?”

“Yes,” Minnie said, nodding. “He came early, before it was even light. Woke us all up. I was that scared!”

“He took Charlie and Harry both?” Sarah could hardly believe it. Malloy had been so sure they were both innocent of Angel’s death. How could they be involved in Wong’s?

Minnie took a deep breath and scrubbed the tears from her face. “He come for Charlie at first. He said somebody saw Charlie going to visit John Wong right before he got killed. Did you know somebody killed John Wong?”

“Yes, I did,” Sarah said with a shudder, remembering that awful scene. “Did Charlie really visit Mr. Wong yesterday?”

“I don’t know! I guess he did, but he never killed John! I’m sure of that.”

Of course she’d defend her husband. People often refused to believe their loved ones guilty of crimes, even when confronted with the most irrefutable evidence. Still, maybe Minnie was right. “Do you know why he went?”

Minnie shook her head. “Mr. Malloy asked him, but he never…” Her voice broke and she started sobbing again.

“What?” Sarah asked urgently. “What happened?”

Minnie made a valiant effort to regain her composure. “Harry,” she managed brokenly.