Serious Crimes (A Willows and Parker Mystery) (8 page)

Chapter 9

Mrs Lee lived in the Oakridge district, two blocks from the children’s hospital. Parker drove south on Oak to Thirty-third, turned right. It was a solid, middle-class neighbourhood; the houses were large and in good repair, the gardens spacious and well-tended.

“What was the address again?” said Parker.

“Eighteen twenty-seven.”

The house was a sprawling rancher with a shake roof and dark-stained cedar siding. It was on the north side of the street, near the end of the block. The snow had been shovelled from the pink-coloured concrete sidewalk that wound from the street up to the house.

Parker pulled the Ford in tight against the curb and turned off the engine.

“How’re we going to handle this?”

Willows shrugged. “I guess the main thing is, let’s try not to give her a heart attack.”

“Good thinking, Jack.”

“I’ll ask her a few questions. We’ll see how she reacts. If it doesn’t seem to be going very well, I’ll back off and you can take over.”

“And in the meantime, don’t steal the silverware, right?”

“Or grab all the cookies on the plate, or slurp your tea.”

There was a doorbell. Willows punched the button. Chimes sounded inside the house.

The door swung open immediately, as if the girl on the other side had been waiting for the knock.

Willows introduced himself, and Parker.

“Come in, please.” The child extended her hand in a curiously formal gesture. “I am Melinda Lee.”

Melinda Lee was thirteen years old, with the slim, compact body of a ballerina. She had a tiny face; her delicate bone structure set off by large brown eyes. Her thick black hair was cut very short. She wore a white blouse and a dark blue pleated skirt, shiny black patent-leather pumps. She offered Willows her hand, and after a moment’s hesitation, he took it. Melinda Lee’s palm was cold and damp. She turned to Parker, nodded and said, “My mother is waiting in the living room. Please come this way.” She offered a tentative smile. “Because her English is not very good, I will stay and translate, if you like.”

“Please,” said Parker.

The living room was to the right of the entrance hall. Mrs Lee was sitting in a reproduction antique oak rocking chair in front of the fireplace. She wore a thick, bulky black sweater, and her lower body and legs were covered by a fringed black shawl. A photograph of Kenny Lee stood on the mantel. Parker noticed that everything in the house looked new — the carpets and furniture, even the paint on the walls. Mrs Lee’s eyes were closed — she might have been sleeping. Her daughter spoke softly to her, and she raised her head and gave the two detectives a little bow.

“Sit down, please.”

Parker chose an ornately carved wooden chair by a writing desk near the window. No draft — double glazing. Willows sat in a wingback chair on the opposite side of the fireplace from the widow Lee.

Willows took out his notebook. “We’re sorry to have to bother you at a time like this, to intrude on your grief. Hopefully, this won’t take long.”

“The main thing is to find the murderer,” Melinda whispered dramatically. A bad actress delivering a bad line. Parker stared at her, and she blushed.

“Our main problem,” said Willows, diving right in, “is that we don’t have a motive. Was… Did your husband keep large quantities of cash in the bank?”

Mrs Lee hesitated. Melinda spoke softly to her in Cantonese. She shook her head, and Melinda said, “We have discussed this. Except for the money required to run the household, all the profits went back into the newspaper.”

“We understand your father gambled, is that right?”

“Mah-jong,” said Melinda promptly.

Mrs Lee burst into tears and buried her face in a linen handkerchief.

Melinda ignored her. “He belonged to a society, and he was an excellent player. I have seen him play. He won far more often than he lost. Otherwise he would not have enjoyed the game. But in any case, the stakes were not large.”

“Could you be a little more specific, please?”

“He told me that during an entire evening, it was not possible to lose more than five or ten dollars.”

“How often did he play?”

“Once a week. Wednesday nights.”

“And that was the extent of his gambling? Did he, for example, frequent the track?”

A look of confusion fluttered across Melinda’s face.

“Play the horses,” explained Parker.

“No, never. Of course not. Except for the mah-jong, father was not a gambler. Neither did he smoke, or drink alcohol. The newspaper took all his energy. He was a very hard-working man.”

Mrs Lee had stopped crying. Willows glanced at Parker. There was something going on between Melinda and her mother — he had a sense of unresolved conflict. He wanted to separate them. Parker, catching Willows’ eye, immediately realized what he wanted.

“Melinda, would you mind showing me the kitchen? I’d like a glass of water.”

Melinda stared at her. After a moment she said, “Yes, of course.” As she led Parker out of the room, she spoke briefly to her mother in Cantonese. Willows saw the old woman’s eyes narrow. He wondered what Melinda had said — a warning of some kind?

Willows moved the wingback chair a little closer to the rocker.

“The problem is motive,” said Willows bluntly. Mrs Lee watched him, her eyes bright. He said, “If someone killed your husband, it was done for a reason. A large gambling debt he couldn’t pay or refused to pay. Or something to do with his business… A partnership offer he turned down, an article he printed… Do you know what extortion is?”

Mrs Lee burst into tears, the sound of her anguish filling the living room.

Willows sat there, waiting.

Mrs Lee stood up. The black shawl puddled on the pale green carpet. She walked slowly and silently across the room to the writing desk by the window, eased open the top drawer and withdrew a plain white envelope. In a voice fragile as a paper flower, Mrs Lee said, “There was one telephone call. It came on Sunday, the tenth. My husband was on the line. He sounded as if he was in pain. He told me he’d been kidnapped, and that the people who held him wanted two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

Mrs Lee slid shut the drawer. She made her way slowly back to the rocking chair. Willows handed her the shawl. His eyes were on the envelope, but he didn’t let his impatience show.

“My husband spoke in a monotone, almost as if he had been drugged, and he spoke only for a few brief moments. He ignored my questions, and he forbade me to call the police. Then he told me I was to pay nothing, not one penny.”

She handed Willows the envelope. He held it by the edges, between his thumb and index finger.

“As he told me not to pay, there was a cry of pain, and the line went dead.” Mrs Lee stared at the envelope in Willows’ hand. “He did not want me to involve the police, but I had already done so. And that is why I telephoned Detective Wilcox and told him my husband was safe.”

Willows made a gesture of sympathy. “You didn’t hear from him again?”

“There were no more telephone calls. But two days later, in the morning, I found that someone had slipped that envelope through the mailbox.”

“What does the envelope contain?”

“As you would expect. A demand for the money. But for one hundred thousand dollars, this time.”

“Could you have afforded to pay?”

“Eventually, perhaps. At the bank there is a joint account but it never contains more than a few thousand dollars. There are other accounts, but I know nothing of them, other than that they exist. My husband was a very secretive man. He did not think there was any need for me to have access to the accounts.”

“Would you have paid, had you been able to?”

“Yes,” said Mrs Lee firmly.

“Given more time, could you have raised the money from outside sources? Friends, relatives…”

“Perhaps.”

“Would the kidnappers be aware of this?”

“It is impossible to say.”

“Were there any further attempts at communication?”

“No.”

The fireplace was gas-fed. The flames danced across the ceramic logs, radiating heat.

Willows said, “You did what you could. All that matters now is catching the man who killed your husband.”

Another burst of tears.

Parker and Melinda came back into the room. The girl sat down on the carpet next to her mother.

“The phone call,” said Willows. “When your husband was on the line, did you hear any other voices, someone in the background?”

“Yes, yes.” She stared at Willows. “How did you know of this?”

“What kind of voice was it?”

“A woman’s. Young.”

“Was she talking to your husband, or to someone else?”

“Not to my husband.”

“Could she have been Chinese? Did you notice an accent of any kind?”

“No.”

“Was it a local call?”

A look of confusion crossed Mrs Lee’s face.

“Could it have been long distance?” said Parker. “Did you hear the jingle of coins, an operator’s voice?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Was there any background noise? Traffic, some kind of machinery, music…”

“Yes, there was the woman’s voice and then there was music.”

“What kind?”

Mrs Lee turned to her daughter, spoke rapidly in Cantonese.

“Country and western,” said Melinda. “Very loud. The woman’s voice my mother mentioned? It was the voice of a radio disc-jockey.”

Willows had several more questions. He asked them one by one, and the answers he received were detailed and totally uninformative. Half an hour later, he gave Mrs Lee his card. “If you think of anything else…”

“We’ll call you,” said Melinda.

“Right away,” said Willows. “I can be reached any time during the day or night.”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Your brother, Peter, will be coming home for the funeral?”

“Of course.”

“When he arrives, would you mind asking him to give me a call?”

“Why, what do you wish to speak to him about?”

Willows smiled. “Nothing in particular. Just a few routine questions.”

Outside, a skim of frost had collected on the Ford’s windshield. Willows turned the heater on full, and then the wipers. The ice slowly turned to slush.

“Any thoughts?” said Parker.

“The girl kept butting in.”

“Protecting her mother, that’s all.”

“And Peter. You see the look on her face when I said I wanted to talk to him?”

Parker said, “She’s just a kid. Scared, doing her best to cope. Peter’s in Boston. Her mother spends all day in her rocking chair. So she’s stuck with the job of trying to be head of the family.”

“Acting a role she’s too young to play.”

“You got it.”

“You’re probably right,” said Willows.

The windshield had cleared. He turned off the wipers and put the Ford in gear.

They took the white envelope containing the ransom note down to CLEU, the Coordinated Law Enforcement Unit facilities on East Eighth that were shared by the City and neighbouring municipalities. A technician named Albert Witte pulled on a pair of disposable latex gloves and shook the letter out of the envelope and on to his desk. Witte was about five foot ten, thin. His hair was combed straight back and he had pale blue, washed-out eyes. He wore a white lab coat over wide-wale green corduroy pants and a matching vest.

“Very unusual,” he said. “Very creative.”

The ransom note consisted of words and phrases that had been cut out of magazines and newspapers and then glued to a sheet of stiff cardboard. The note was short and to the point.

Witte said, “This is the newspaper guy, body turned up in that pond in Chinatown?”

Willows nodded.

“First thing we’ll do is dust for prints. Use the laser if we can’t pick anything up. Also, we should be able to figure out what newspapers and magazines were used. The brand of glue, you want it.” Witte studied the envelope. He said, “It’ll take us a while, but we can determine who manufactured the envelopes. From the envelope flap, we might be able to figure out a blood type. Got a suspect?”

“Not yet.”

“There’s a rush on this, naturally.”

“Naturally.”

“I’ll get at it first thing in the morning.”

“Why not right now?”

“Because I go home in five minutes.”

“Put in some overtime.”

“For what, so I can pay higher taxes?”

Willows said. “What do I have to do, make a phone call?”

“It’s your quarter,” said Witte, smiling. “Do what you want with it. I got to tell you, though, it’d be less of a waste if you stuffed it up your ass.”

Back in the Ford, Willows stared moodily out the windshield at the gray slush, hunched pedestrians. He said, “When I was a kid, we had one of those old wringer washing machines, but no dryer. In the winter, mom hung our clothes out on the line on the back porch to dry. When it was really cold, below freezing, she’d bring in the laundry and everything would be stiff as a board. Sometimes I’d grab one of the towels and pretend it was a magic carpet. Sit a doll on one and run around the house…”