Trail of Blood (6 page)

9

“It must be what Joel meant,” I said to Bill as the elevator started down. “He must have heard about the Shanghai Moon.”

“Maybe. But why would that be ‘fishy’?”

“Because Alice never told us about it?”

“She might not know. Just because it was Rosalie Gilder’s doesn’t mean it was found with this other jewelry.”

“True. But when the heirs were notified about the find, wouldn’t they have asked?”

“Maybe they never heard of it either.”

“That’s a stretch.
You’ve
heard of it.”

“It was one of those back-room legends in sailor’s bars.”

“With which you’re quite familiar, I’m sure.”

“Legends?”

“Bars. Did you ever meet anyone who saw it?”

“Not that I recall. Just guys whose buddies, captains, and pawnbrokers had. The drunker guys were, the more spectacular they claimed it was.”

“By which you mean the Shanghai Moon.”

“Don’t tell me,” he said as we issued onto Forty-seventh Street, “that besides taking up the use of four-letter words, you’ve developed a dirty mind.”

“Without you around someone had to provide the smut.” I sagged against the building, dismayed at the rush hour crowds. “God, I’m tired. I feel like my tank’s empty.”

“You’ve had a hard day.”

“No kidding.”

“You want a cup of tea?”

“Can I go home to bed?”

“Sure.”

“No, I can’t.”

We started along the block, looking for a place to try the tea option. We didn’t make it to the corner before my phone rang. I flipped it open and answered, sticking my finger in my other ear to hear better. What I heard was “Lydia? This is Alice Fairchild.”

“Alice!” I practically yelped. “Where are you? Are you all right?”

“Yes, of course.” She sounded surprised at the question. “Lydia, what’s happened? I’ve been in meetings, and I just got your messages. A police detective has been trying to reach me, too. Have they found Wong Pan? And the jewelry?”

“Oh,” I said. “No, I’m afraid not. Alice, there’s some very bad news. I’m sorry, but . . . Alice, Joel’s dead.”

I heard her quick breath. “What? Oh, my God! What happened?”

“Someone shot him. At his office, this morning.”

“
Shot
him?” Her voice rose a few notes. “This morning? But I just spoke to him this morning. Who? What happened?”

“They don’t know. That’s why the police want to talk to you.”

“To me?” A pause. “They can’t be thinking this has anything to do with the jewelry?”

“They don’t know.”

“But how? I don’t see—Had Joel located it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Had he found Wong Pan?”

“I don’t know, Alice. He called me, but he just said to come up. I don’t know why.”

“Oh, my God. What if he’d found Wong Pan, and Wong Pan—Yes, of course I’ll talk to the police, if it would help. I’ll call that detective right away. Will you come?”

“To see Mulgrew?” The idea did not fill me with delight.

“You might remember details I’ve forgotten. Of our discussion. Something that might have sent Joel off in one direction or another.”

I had to admit it was a good idea.

“I’m almost back at the Waldorf,” she said. “I’ll call him now.”

“I’m nearby. I’ll meet you there.”

I relayed this conversation to Bill, who’d steered me into a notch in a facade and planted himself between me and the surging crowds. We headed toward the Waldorf. Our steps fell into rhythm, as they often did; as it often did, that surprised me, Bill being thirteen inches taller than I am. “Hey, by the way,” I said, as we neared the hotel’s doors. “Thanks.”

“For what?”

“Showing up.”

For a moment, he didn’t speak. Then, “I was afraid it was too little, too late.”

“Almost. Not quite.”

I got no smile this time from the Waldorf’s doorman, who probably thought I shouldn’t be running around in wrinkled linen when I had that nice silk suit. Or maybe he didn’t like the looks of Bill. Bill can clean up well, but in general he’s not a Waldorf kind of guy. Nevertheless, a call from the desk to Alice’s room got us an invitation up to a floor where the corridor was plushly carpeted and the walls layered in molding. I clinked a little brass knocker; the door opened right away.

“Oh, Lydia!” Alice pressed my hands in quick sympathy. “This is so terrible. I’m so sorry about Joel.”

“Thank you. Alice, this is a colleague of mine, Bill Smith. Bill, Alice Fairchild.”

They shook hands. Alice asked Bill, “Did you know Joel?”

“Yes.”

“Then my condolences on your loss, too. Sit down, please. Coffee and tea are on the way. Or would you like something stronger?”

“Aren’t we going to the precinct?” I asked.

“The detective’s coming here.”

“Mulgrew?”

“You sound surprised.”

“At him, for being so accommodating.”

“I think he thinks I’m a delicate lady of a certain age who might get rattled in a police station. Where he got that idea, I have no clue.” Her eyes twinkled. “But I’m sure it’s more comfortable here than there.”

The room was populated by carved furniture, brass lamps with pleated shades, botanical prints on striped wallpaper. Street sounds drifted up, muffled by glass and the soft purr of air-conditioning. I sat in a flowered armchair, but Bill leaned near a window, where he could look both into the room and out over New York.

“Tell me what happened,” Alice said.

I gave as clinical an account of Joel’s death as I could manage. Her hand went to her mouth when she heard I was the one who’d found him.

“That’s horrible! Oh, Lydia, I’m so sorry.”

“He called me. He said something was fishy. He told me to rush up there.”

“Fishy? What was it?”

“I don’t know. I never found out. But if I’d done what he said—”

Bill shifted on his perch, about to break in and give me a hard time for giving myself a hard time, but Alice spoke first. “It’s so natural,” she sighed. “To blame ourselves when something terrible happens. I think it’s comforting in a way. It makes us feel there’s something we could have done if we’d been smarter, or faster, or whatever it is. Sometimes thinking we’ve failed is less frightening than admitting we were helpless.”

My face burned. I felt like I’d caught sight of myself in a mirror, and I didn’t look so good.

“But Lydia,” Alice went on gently, “you say the police think it was random, a robbery. Couldn’t that be true?”

“Yes, of course,” I sighed. “Trying to make it part of this case may just be me. An odd kind of wishful thinking.”

The door knocker clinked. Bill checked the peephole and let in a waiter rolling a room service cart. By the time Alice signed for it and sat down, I was ready to be all business again. I wasn’t at all sure she was right about failure being better than helplessness, but obviously best by far was to put up with neither.

“Alice, you said you spoke to Joel this morning. Did you call him, or did he call you?”

“He called me.” She handed me a cup of tea, milk, no sugar, and just the right amount of milk, too. She poured coffee for Bill, who took it back to his windowsill. “He knew I’d be in meetings today. He just wanted to touch base before I was unavailable.”

“Did he say anything was wrong?”

“No, nothing. He said you were both proceeding along the lines you’d started yesterday, and he’d check back later.”

“Did he mention anyone he was planning to talk to?”

“No. I’m sorry. That’s not very useful, is it?”

“Anything that fills in the gaps is useful,” I said, more to make her feel better than because it was true. “Before Mulgrew gets here I want to ask you something else, though. Have you ever heard of a piece of jewelry called the Shanghai Moon?”

“No, I don’t think so. What is it?”

“Apparently, Rosalie Gilder was married in Shanghai. To a Chinese man she’d met on the ship. Why are you smiling?”

“Chen Kai-rong? Was it he?” To my nod, she said, “Oh, how sweet! She talks about him in her letters. They’re in the museum’s archives. You can call them up on the Web site.”

“I’ve actually read the first few,” I said. “Jet lag. I couldn’t sleep last night.”

“When I read them I couldn’t tell if it was obvious to either Elke or Rosalie that Kai-rong was courting her, but it was to me. You’re telling me they married? That’s marvelous! How do you know?”

“One of the jewelers Joel left photos with recognized Rosalie’s name and knew the story.” I told her what we’d learned in Stanley Friedman’s showroom.

“The diamond necklace,” Alice said, when I was done. “That’s what happened to it!”

“What diamond necklace?”

“As nearly as my clients know, Rosalie and Paul took seven pieces of jewelry to Shanghai. Five are in this find. One was a ruby ring, which Rosalie sold—you’ll see if you read the rest of the letters. She also mentions a diamond necklace. I’ve been wondering where that was. Wondering even if Wong Pan palmed it before the contents of the box were known, though I don’t see how he could have. The Shanghai authorities would never have allowed him to open it alone. But this would answer that question.”

“That question, yes,” Bill said from across the room. “Not the question of the Shanghai Moon.”

Alice shifted to look at him. “You think that might have been in the box? But it’s the same problem. How could he have stolen it without anyone knowing it was there?”

“Maybe it wasn’t,” I said. “Maybe someone just thinks it was.”

“And that person killed Joel? But why?”

“They thought he knew something he wasn’t telling? Things were stolen from his office. That’s why Mulgrew’s thinking robbery. But what if that was just opportunistic? What if the real point was to search the place?”

“I suppose that’s possible. But to find what?”

“Whatever they thought Joel knew?”

Alice nodded thoughtfully. Bill sipped coffee thoughtfully. I wished I had a thought or two, but I had only questions. “Alice, didn’t you grow up in Shanghai? Mr. Friedman says this brooch, the Shanghai Moon, is famous. You’ve never heard of it?”

“I was born there, yes, but I was four when we were sent to the internment camp. When we were released three years later, we took the first ship home we could get.” She stirred her tea. “These aren’t memories I return to very often. As you might imagine, the camp was a bad place. Heat and mud in summer. Clammy cold in winter. Nothing was clean and there was never enough food. Everyone was sick, worse and worse as the war ground on. A lot of people died. The land was so swampy they wrapped bricks in the binding cloths—there were no coffins—so the bodies wouldn’t rise back to the surface. But sometimes it didn’t work. You’d see a hand, a leg . . .

“I was a child. That was my entire world.
Our
entire world. If outside the camp there was someone called Rosalie Gilder, and she married someone called Chen Kai-rong, and they had a brooch created to celebrate, we wouldn’t have known. Then, once we came to America, everyone tried to put Shanghai far behind.”

I said, “That sounds terrible. I’m sorry.”

“It was. But we lived, and came here, and prospered. Many didn’t. Still, you can see why Shanghai may mean something quite different to me from what it meant to Rosalie Gilder.”

“Yes, of course.”

From the window, Bill said, “What about your clients? They never told you about the Shanghai Moon?”

“No,” Alice said, frowning over that. I frowned, too; the question seemed a little insensitive right at the moment. Although I had an insensitive question of my own I’d been looking for a time to ask.

“Alice, Joel was wondering something. About you. It made me wonder, too. I don’t mean to offend you—”

“No, please. If you think it will help discover what happened to Joel.”

I didn’t see how it could, but it seemed like something I should find out, because Joel had wanted to know. “It’s this: Why do you do the work you do? Holocaust asset recovery?”

She smiled. “You mean as a gentile? Don’t worry, I’ve been asked that before. The camp . . . It was the war that sent us there. We lost so much, as so many people did. As I grew, I learned that what we’d been through, horrible as it was, wasn’t the half of it. I hated that war. But a war that’s over is an elusive enemy. My sister urged me to put it behind me, and I tried, but I couldn’t. I felt—as we were saying earlier—angry and helpless. When the asset recovery movement started to grow, I saw it as a chance to right some of those wrongs.”

“Joel said most people who do the work you do see it as a religious calling.”

“Did he? I suppose, in a way, I do. And not all my clients are Jewish, you know. Most are. But Catholics, Hungarians, Poles, homosexuals, Gypsies—that war had many victims.”

“Wouldn’t your argument really have been with the Japanese?” Bill asked. “That’s who put you in the camp.”

“There’s no reparations movement against Japan, except on behalf of ‘comfort women.’ But Germany and Japan were allies. Prying stolen treasures out of German hands is about the best I can do. For me, it’s enough.”

When there’s not much you can do, something still beats nothing. Well, I could second that.

The desk phone rang. Alice spoke and then, slipping the receiver back, told us, “Detective Mulgrew’s on his way up.”

“Maybe I’ll make myself scarce.” Bill rose from his perch.

“You’d deprive yourself of the pleasure of meeting Mulgrew?” I asked. “And the pleasure of more of the Waldorf’s coffee?”

“Good as the coffee is, from what I hear the one doesn’t begin to make up for the other. And the NYPD doesn’t like crowds.”

That was true. Also, certain elements in the NYPD don’t like Bill. Mulgrew seemed to be the type who’d check around and find some way to get on my case later about the company I keep.

Under Mulgrew’s hand even the door knocker sounded scornful. If Mulgrew was enchanted to see me, he hid it well, but he didn’t boot me out. He even tossed the occasional question at me, though the ones he asked Alice sounded less sharp in tone, less accusatory in content. Maybe that was because she poured him coffee as soon as he sat down, and put two chocolate cookies on the saucer.

Not that he had many questions. The pro forma nature of this interview couldn’t have been more obvious. What did you hire the deceased to do, did he give you any indication he was worried about anything, what did you talk about this morning, can you think of anyone who’d want to hurt him?