Trail of Blood (7 page)

“Well, only Wong Pan. If Joel had found him.”

“The Shanghai guy? What about it, had Pilarsky found him?”

“He didn’t say he had,” Alice admitted, “but maybe after I spoke to him—”

“He didn’t get any calls or e-mails. He made three calls: his college roommate, you, and you.” Mulgrew turned to me. “Did he say anything about finding this guy?”

“I’d have told you before if he had, Detective.”

“I’m sure.” Back to Alice: “Any idea where I can find this Wong Pan?”

“If I had,” Alice said with a small smile, “I wouldn’t have hired Joel and Lydia. You do have his photo?” She started for her briefcase, but Mulgrew waved her back to her chair.

“Yeah, she gave it to me,” he said. I sincerely hate being referred to as “she” when I’m sitting right there. “But unless he also pulled the other three jobs in that neighborhood, my money’s not on him.”

“You will look for him, though?”

“Sure.” Mulgrew reached for a lemon bar, devouring it, as he had the other cookies, in a single bite. This was not a detail man. “Thanks for your time.” He stood. “Call me if you think of anything else.” He started toward the door.

“The Shanghai Moon,” I said.

“What?”

“A legendary lost gem. It belonged to the same woman the rest of this jewelry belonged to.”

He stared at me. “A legendary lost gem.”

“It’s famous.”

“Oh, a
famous
legendary lost gem. And it was part of this find?”

“No.” I was already regretting opening my mouth. But he irked me, his dismissiveness, his put-upon air. “Or, maybe. We don’t know.”

“You don’t know. So why are you bringing it up?”

“Someone may have thought it was.”

“And the connection between that thought and Pilarsky’s murder would be?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did Pilarsky have it? Or know where it was?”

“I don’t know.”

A pause. “All right, I’ll check it out.”

Hah. I could just bet what that meant. Mulgrew barking across the squad room:
Hey, any of you ever heard of some jewel called the Shanghai Moon? What about this mutt Wong Pan, from China, where they stole all our jobs?

Alice walked to the door and opened it for him. “Thank you for being willing to come to the hotel, Detective.”

“My pleasure, ma’am. Not often I get to see how the other half lives.”

When we were alone again, I said, “Well, you won his heart.”

“He’s not so bad.”

“Yes, he is.”

“Just overworked, I think. Most policemen are overworked. Not that you seem exactly fresh as a daisy, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“I’m exhausted.”

“You’ve had a terrible day. Why don’t you go home? Take a long hot bath. Something relaxing, maybe lavender. It’ll do you a world of good.”

“You know, that sounds great.” I stood. “We can talk in the morning.”

“Yes, but I think not professionally.”

“What do you mean?”

“Until they catch whoever killed Joel, or until we can be sure his death had nothing to do with Rosalie Gilder’s jewelry, I can’t think of letting you go on.”

My jaw dropped. “You can’t think of stopping me! Joel would hate that, giving up!”

“I’m not talking about giving up, but until we know it’s safe, we have to let the police take over. I’ll call my clients. I’m sure they’ll agree.”

“But that’s just wrong! Mulgrew’s not really looking for Wong Pan, and he didn’t care at all about the Shanghai Moon!”

“He may be right.”

“He’s not right.”

“All the more reason to back off, then, and let his investigation lead him to that conclusion. Really, Lydia, I can’t allow to you endanger yourself. Recovering this jewelry isn’t worth that. I’m sorry, but it’s my decision.”

“But to just give up—”

“Oh, Lydia, please don’t make me say it.”

“Say what?”

Her sympathetic look didn’t alter her unambiguous words. “You’re fired.”

10

I called Bill the the second I disembarked from the Waldorf. “We’re fired!”

“What you mean ‘we,’ Chinese woman?”

“Be serious! This is bad!” I told him about the interview with Mulgrew, and its aftermath.

He asked, “What are you going to do?”

“Are you kidding? If you think there’s any
possible
way I’m going to forget it and let Mulgrew just go through the motions, you’re every bit as—”

“I didn’t say, ‘Are you going to forget it?’ ” he broke in. “I said, ‘What are you going to do?’ ”

“Oh. Well, when you put it that way.” I rubbed my eyes. “I apologize. I shouldn’t be taking it out on you.”

“That’s what I’m here for. Though I’d be curious to know what I’m every bit as.”

“I’ll never tell. But I’m curious to know something, too. Why did you do that thing you do, sitting off to the side so you can observe someone?”

“I do that?”

“You know, when I play innocent with you, it’s silly. When you do it with me, it’s absurd. Yes, you do that. When you don’t trust someone. Do you have a problem with Alice?”

For a moment he was silent. “There’s something peculiar about her. Joel said so, too.”

“ ‘Off’ is the word he used, and that was because she does this work and she’s not Jewish.”

“And she explained that. But there’s still something.”

“Any idea what?”

“No.”

“Have you eaten yet?” my mother called from the living room as I slipped off my shoes in the vestibule. It’s a standard Chinese greeting, the hospitable inquiry of a famine-prone land. It’s no more looking for a real answer than “How are you?” is in English. But the thought of food right now was enough to curdle my stomach.

“I’m not hungry. Ma, I need to tell you something.” I sat on the couch next to her.

“Ling Wan-ju? What’s wrong?” She shut her Hong Kong fashion magazine, which she studies for ideas for outfits for my sisters-in-law and me.

“It’s Joel, Ma.”

“The one who sings.”

“Ma, he’s dead.”

Her lips compressed into a thin line. She patted my hand. Then, hands back in her own lap, she asked, “What happened to him?”

“Someone shot him.”

“Who did that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was it because of your case?”

Nothing like the head-on approach.

“I don’t know that either. The police don’t think so.” She nodded and minutely relaxed. I could have left it at that, but I didn’t want to lie to her. “I do, though.”

“Do you?”

“Yes. The client does, too. She wants me to stop.”

A few moments of silence. “Are you in danger, Ling Wan-ju?”

“I don’t know.”

“But it wouldn’t matter, would it?”

“Ma—”

“No, it would not. And what the client wants will not matter either. You will do what you think is the right thing for your friend, even if you must do it all alone.”

I wasn’t going to be alone, but this would have been a particularly bad time to bring up Bill.

“No, you will continue. You will not consider the consequences until they happen.”

“I have no choice, Ma.”

She looked across the room to the cabinet holding my father’s collection of mud figurines: fishermen, farmers, a young woman weaving. People living the lives their parents had lived, and their parents’ parents, unchanging, peaceful, and unsurprising. She stood. “You have a choice, Ling Wan-ju: whether to eat dinner or not. I have
jyu sam tong
.”

Pig’s heart soup, for reviving the fainthearted. As I followed my mother into the kitchen, I wondered, how had she known?

My mother and I watched a Cantonese soap opera while we ate, a costume drama full of drums and cymbals, Tang dynasty outfits, and complicated hairdos. Trying to follow the story absorbed my attention, as had the running around I’d done all day. It wasn’t until I was alone in my room that the image of Joel open-eyed in his chair flooded back into my brain.

I stood in the middle of the floor, feeling my breath knocked out the same way it had been by the actual sight. I closed my eyes, didn’t try to muscle the picture away, but let it rush in like a tide until, like a tide, it could ebb again.

It did. But tired as I was, there was no way, after that, I was going to be able to sleep.

So I turned my computer on and Googled “Shanghai Moon.”

I didn’t learn much more than I had from Mr. Friedman’s book. No Web site had photos, or even a good description. All agreed the Shanghai Moon’s whereabouts were unknown; few agreed on its last known location. In a chat room I found a breathless account of a brooch seen at an audience with some Bhutanese royals; could this be the Shanghai Moon? Two curt responses: no, and no way. The jade described was apple green. The setting included sapphires. The poster, someone scoffed, must be a newbie even to ask. On another site someone calling himself MoonHunter reported on a private jewelry auction at a swank hotel in Kuala Lumpur, which he’d been invited to by a collector friend. He dwelled a little long, I thought, on the VIP status of the attendees, the lapis fountain, the free Moët, and the stunning waitresses, but that was probably because he had to admit that in the end he’d caught no sniff of the Shanghai Moon. Now that he was in the private auction world, though, he just knew he was on the right track. I didn’t know much about private jewelry auctions, but it rather uncharitably occurred to me that anyone so impressed with celebrities, fountains, and waitresses—and who had to be invited into their presence by someone else—was, just possibly, a gasbag.

After an hour of surfing, I got tired of rehashes of the same rumors. Also, the aroma of greed, the focus on the guessed-at value of the brooch, began to bother me. Where was Rosalie in all this, these discussions of colors of jade? Where was Chen Kai-rong, where was the reason the Shanghai Moon had come into existence in the first place?

I logged off. It was possible this was nothing but a big waste of time anyway. Strictly speaking, only Stanley Friedman’s book even suggested a connection between Joel’s death and the Shanghai Moon. Fingering the jade pendant my parents gave me when I was born, I crawled into bed and fell asleep.

11

The
Wonder Woman
theme song jarred me out of an indistinct, menacing dream. “Oh ho,” I mumbled, finding the phone and sinking back into the pillow. “Hi, Benedict Arnold.”

Mary said, “Sorry to call so late.”

I checked the clock: not quite midnight. “I’m surprised you have the nerve to call me at all.”

“You’re mad I told Bill about Joel.”

“Good guess.”

“But that means you know I told him, which means he must have called you.”

“No wonder you have that gold shield.”

“So what happened?”

“He wormed his way into my office and into the case.”

“And into your heart?”

“Not so fast, sister.”

“Okay, but you’re working together again?”

“Until we find out who killed Joel. Then I’ll see how he’s behaving.”

“So I did the right thing.”

“You think I’d admit that?”

“I wouldn’t, in your position. Anyway, I really hope it works out. But Lydia, that’s not why I called.”

“If you’re checking up on me because of Joel, I’m okay, truly.”

“I still don’t believe that, but I’m glad to hear it. But that’s not why either.”

There was a tone in her voice I was finally awake enough to hear, and I didn’t like it. “Mary? Is something else wrong?”

“It sort of is. We identified my John Doe.”

“Hey, if I weren’t mad at you I’d say, ‘Great’! Did it make you look smart? Who is he?”

“Not that smart. He’s Chinese, but not an illegal. Not an immigrant at all. Lydia, he’s a cop.”

“A cop? You mean from another department, or from like the FBI?”

“I mean from China. From Shanghai.”

“A cop from
China
?”

“They’d made contact a few days ago, brass to brass, to say he was coming, but that kind of thing doesn’t trickle down to precinct level until the out-of-town cop gets here. This guy never got that far. Shanghai got in touch when he missed a check-in call home.”

“What was he doing here?”

“Chasing a fugitive.”

“And you’re calling me in the middle of the night to tell me this. Wait—the light is dawning. It was my fugitive? He was after Wong Pan?”

“Yes.”

“Oh boy.”

“Oh boy, what?”

“Probably nothing. But there may be more going on than you know about.” I told Mary what Stanley Friedman had told us.

When I was done she was silent for moment. “You’re kidding. A mysterious lost fabulous jewel?”

“Just keep an open mind.”

“If you say so. But you don’t know if Wong Pan has this jewel.”

“No.”

“Or if he does, if Joel knew that.”

“No.”

“Or if it has anything to do with this at all.”

“What happened to that open mind?”

“It’s still ajar. Right now I need to speak to Alice Fairchild. She doesn’t answer her phone at the Waldorf or her cell. How do I find her?”

“Mary, it’s midnight! Maybe she sleeps with earplugs. If you want her, go over there and bang on the door. That’s what Mulgrew would do. Speaking of Mulgrew, did you tell him about the Chinese cop? That’s his case, too, isn’t it?”

“Teed him off. He told me I should have figured it out sooner.”

“
You
should have?”

“And he’s still clinging to his messenger theory on Joel.”

“He thinks this can possibly be coincidence?”

“More like hopes. He did promise they’ll check the forensics at Joel’s office and the cop’s hotel room.”

“Well, I guess that’s all we can hope for. Mary? What was his name?”

“The Chinese cop?”

“Yes.”

“Sheng Yue. Why?”

“I don’t know. He’s dead. We should at least be calling him by his name.”

After we hung up I stared at the ceiling for a while. I thought about Joel, drinking coffee at the Waldorf; about Alice, remembering how I took my tea; about Rosalie and Kai-rong on the deck of an ocean liner. I thought about calling Bill, and while I was thinking, I suddenly found the room bright with sun. And though I hadn’t noticed myself sleeping, I’d woken with an inspiration. I groped for my phone and speed-dialed Mary. “The cop from Shanghai. Sheng Yue. His hotel room’s the one that was registered to Wu Ming? ‘Anonymous?’ ”

“Good morning to you, too. Yes, that’s right.”

“Why would a cop do that?”

“I wondered that. Probably, Wong Pan knew the Shanghai police were on his trail. Wong Pan’s a civil servant, he might even know Sheng Yue personally. So just in case.”

“Right,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Lydia! Do
not
hang up! It sounds lame to me, too. What are you thinking?”

“I’ll tell you if it works out.”

“No.”

“Then come with me.”

“It’s a quarter to seven!”

“So what? Your shift starts at eight. Think of it as overtime.”

Twenty minutes later we were at the Midtown Suites, Mary knew what I was thinking, she’d made this official business, and she was telling me I was lucky she was letting me tag along.

“It was my idea!”

“You’re lucky you have good ideas.”

At the desk, Mary showed the pudgy, bleary-eyed clerk her gold shield. “You had a homicide here a few days ago.”

He nodded. “Five twenty-five. A Chinese cop, I hear.” His look said he was savvy enough to know that’s why two more Chinese cops were in his face right now.

“Were you on duty when the man who took that room checked in?”

“Of course. This is my shift. Midnight to ten.”

“Is this him?”

He peered at the photo. “Of course. Why?”

Of course. The photo was Wong Pan’s.

Out on the sidewalk, Mary called Mulgrew and read him the riot act. I was impressed; my regret was that I couldn’t hear Mulgrew’s end. When Mary lowered the still-smoking phone, she told me, “He says Sheng Yue answered the description of the registered guest.”

“Meaning he was Chinese.”

“This desk clerk who checked him in lives out in Jersey and was off by the time they found the body. Mulgrew asked if anyone still on duty had seen the registered guest. A room service waiter brought him a burger the night before.”

“He made the ID?”

“Yes. But guess what? He’s a Mexican illegal himself. Mulgrew said don’t worry, they weren’t INS, just was this the guy with the burger or not?”

“He said it was?”

“Maybe he even thought it was. Mulgrew never should have bought it without corroboration. An illegal ID-ing a bloody corpse in a roomful of cops? What kind of police work is that?” Mary’s face was flushed with both anger at, and embarrassment for, her department. “So you were right. The room was Wong Pan’s. Sheng Yue must have traced him to it. I’m going to need that photo.”

I handed her the envelope. “Mary, what about phone calls from the room? If it was Wong Pan’s, they may mean something.”

“They might have, but there weren’t any. Maybe he didn’t make any. Or maybe he has a cell.”

I thought about that. “What are the chances of a midlevel Shanghai bureaucrat on the lam having a cell that works in the U.S.?”

She looked at me. “You know, it’s a shame you picked such a sleazy profession. You wouldn’t have made a bad cop.” She called Mulgrew again. A few crisp sentences and she was off the phone.

“That was fast.”

“Right now he’s so afraid of how bad I can make him look that he’d run over and paint my apartment. I told him to check the records for all the pay phones two blocks in every direction. That’ll take a while, though. Do you want me to call you when I hear?”

“Why did that sound like a question?”

“I’m going to the Waldorf now, to talk to your client. No, you can’t come.”

She was all set for an argument, but I couldn’t see any point in explaining I no longer had a client. “Okay,” I said. “Let me know what happens.” I waved and walked off before her curious brow-furrow turned into a suspicious frown.

In the absence of any brighter ideas, I headed back to Chinatown. I needed to think, so I decided to walk. While I was walking, I decided, the way I used to when I was thinking, to call Bill.

“Smith,” he mumbled, his voice raspy.

“Chin.”

“Hey! Like old times.”

“Yes, me up and in action early and you waking from a sound sleep only because the phone rang.”

“It’s a good thing we’re working together again. I almost had to buy an alarm clock.”

“You remember I told you Mary was working a homicide?”

“I thought if you found Mary she was going to
be
a homicide.”

“Get serious. Her victim’s a Chinese cop. From China. Sent over here to find Wong Pan.”

Bill was silent for a moment. “I’d guess he found him.”

“Better, or worse. The hotel room he was killed in? It was Wong Pan’s.” I gave Bill the story. “They’re checking the pay phones in the area. And I—hold on, a call’s coming in.” I switched lines and answered, in both languages. The caller replied in English.

“Good morning, Ms. Chin. This is Chen Lao-li speaking. From Bright Hopes Jewelry. If it is convenient, please come to my shop this morning.”

I stopped short.
Oh, Lydia!
I’d forgotten all about the jeweler, sweeping my photos off his counter. “Mr. Chen! Do you—”

“We open at ten. I look forward to our meeting.” He hung up.

I clicked back to the other line and was surprised to find Bill still there. “Why didn’t you hang up the way you always do when I put you on hold? I’d have called you back.”

“I’m trying to behave.”

“This is unnerving.”

“That call?”

“No, you. But the call, too. It was Mr. Chen.”

“Chen . . . The jeweler? Who knew the photos?”

“That’s the guy. I forgot about him. How stupid is that?”

“Right. After all, you had nothing on your mind yesterday.”

“Don’t try to talk me out of it. Anyway, he wants me to come there. He opens at ten.”

“It’s not ten yet?”

“It’s not even nine. And you’re up. Imagine that.”

“Well, in celebration of this miracle, want me to come with you?”

I considered. “I think not, thanks. Whatever he wants, he might be willing to open up to a nice Chinese girl, but it would probably be better if you weren’t there.”

“It usually is.”

Chances were I was right and Bill shouldn’t come along. And this was our SOP, to work separately when it seemed like the results would be better. And Bill was a four-letter word who hadn’t called me in months.

So it was surprising, the little pang of loneliness I felt after we said good-bye.