Skulduggery

by Carolyn Hart

  I saw him write the name and felt a flutter of excitement and shock but, somehow, no surprise. We should have known, we really should have known.

  Jimmy paused after a moment, then looked up at our stocky captor, “What’s your name?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Look,” Jimmy said, “I have to put down a name, some name.”

  The young man hesitated then said, “Ted. Ted Wong.”

  It wouldn’t, of course, be his real name. But it was a name. Jimmy wrote some more, then read it over, signed it, handed it up to ‘Ted’.

  ‘Ted’ read it aloud in his light feathery voice, “Dear Miss Chow, Please give the container with the fossils to Ted Wong, the bearer of this note. He is to be trusted. I will be in touch with you shortly. Your faithful friend, Jimmy Lee.” He looked down at Jimmy. “It sounds okay. And it will save her some trouble if she thinks we’re friends and hands them over.” He smiled, a little thin smile. “You better hope she antes up, Jimmy boy.”

  Before leaving, they took another cord, slipped it through the cord that bound our wrists and tethered us, like whipped dogs, to a central post. So the tools in the alcove might as well have been on the moon for all the good they could do us.

  And I turned out not to be too proud to ask a favor. They were at the door, the stocky one reaching out for the light switch.

  “Please,” I said, “will you leave the light on?”

  He looked back, shrugged, left it on. That was something. Not a lot, but something.

  The door clicked shut. What would they do now? Wait until morning to go to the Green Door? I thought they might. They could slip in early tomorrow, knock, show her the letter and hope to get the fossils without any trouble. If they went tonight, they would have to knock loud enough to awaken her. She might not answer her door at night and too much noise would immediately attract all kinds of attention in the crowded hotel.

  So we were likely to be left alone until morning. Surely we could get loose. Or, if not free, maybe we could make noise. But that would draw our captors. I wasn’t making much sense, even to myself. I turned to ask Jimmy what he thought and was stricken by the way he slumped, resting his arms and face on his knees.

  “Jimmy, does it hurt dreadfully!”

  I thought at first he hadn’t heard, but, finally, he lifted his head and it was desolation I saw in his face, not suffering. “I should have known anybody greedy enough to kick forty-three old people out into the gutter was no goddam good at all.” He stopped and his mouth quivered. “Dan told me I was a chump when I quit school. Well, I guess he was right. Dumb Jimmy. Jimmy the cluck. But I never thought he would try to take the bones for nothing! It was a good deal for him, the fossils for the Green Door.”

  I tried to make some sense out of his bitter words.

  “Who, Jimmy? And what does the Green Door have to do with any of it?”

  “The Green Door,” he repeated. “Oh God, what’s going to happen to all of them! Old and alone and no place to go and nobody to give a damn! Nobody. And I was so sure it would work out. But I should have known that nothing’s ever easy if a lot of money is involved because somebody always gets greedy. If he weren’t a greedy bastard to begin with, he wouldn’t be trying to sell the Green Door.”

  “Who, Jimmy?”

  “Wilkie Lee.”

  Everything shifted then, came clear and sharp and coldly logical. Wilkie Lee owned the Green Door Hotel and the Middle Kingdom Gallery and it must have made perfect sense to Jimmy to try and trade the fossils for the hotel. But Jimmy didn’t know just how badly Wilkie Lee needed money.

  When I told him, he shook his head back and forth. “I could have gone a dozen different ways,” and his voice was heartsick. “I took just the one skull from Miss Chow and went back to Trouble, Inc. It was late afternoon and Lily was out making calls. I sat there at my desk and typed up the places I’d been, I’d forgotten to put it down before I left in the morning . . .”

  I interrupted. “So that’s why the list showed the Middle Kingdom Gallery last.” I told him how we’d found Trouble, Inc. a shambles, Lee’s thugs must have broken in Wednesday night searching for the bones, and how Lily had found the list for us and we had followed Jimmy’s trail through Chinatown.

  “We didn’t understand why you would go from the East Wind to the Green Door then back to the Middle Kingdom Gallery. But, the answer, of course, is that you didn’t decide to visit the Gallery until after you had been to the hotel, which also meant you must have returned to the office Thursday evening and listed the places you had visited that day.”

  At least my insistence that Dan and I follow the list had kept Miss Chow safe until now for Lee’s thugs must have followed Dan and me after we left the Gallery. They would have followed us to Dan’s office and then again when he took me home and decided, perhaps, that it would be easier to grab a woman than Dan.

  Dan and I should have known that it was Miss Chow who had the fossils. She and Buddy Wu were the only ones in charge of their lives—and Buddy wouldn’t need help to sell anything.

  “Miss Chow,” Jimmy said softly, “she’s really something else! She still works part-time, at one of the sewing factories, then spends her afternoons doing volunteer work at the Chinese Hospital—and she’s seventy-two.” His mouth twisted. “She should have called somebody besides me. I screwed it up good!”

  “Don’t say that, Jimmy!” I said sharply. “That’s self-pity. And it doesn’t help anybody.”

  His head jerked up at that. It was cruel, but it brought a flush to his face and that was better than the dull look of despair.

  “Tell me how you found out about the fossils, what you did,” I said briskly. It was better to talk and to listen. Silence compounds fear.

  Miss Chow had called him the week before and asked him to come by. It was true enough that she had finally received an answer to Dr. Tang’s fate, but it wasn’t a question of advertising for the son or disposing of the daughter’s ashes that had made her call Jimmy.

  It was to ask what she should do with a ‘treasure’ that had been entrusted to her by the doctor, to be kept safe until he found them in America.

  Miss Chow had not described the ‘treasure’. Jimmy had looked around the tiny room at the Green Door, at the narrow bed and orange-crate cabinets, and had been sure that whatever memento she had managed to bring the long way from China had grown in value in her mind over the years.

  “I had told her that obviously whatever she had was now hers alone to do with as she pleased. That she had in every way fulfilled her obligations to the Tang family.”

  She had nodded and thanked him gravely, said she wished to think about her decision and asked him to return the coming Thursday.

  “That was yesterday.” He said it almost uncertainly, then nodded to himself. Yes, it had been only yesterday.

  She welcomed him with green tea and only when he held the handleless cup in both his hands and had taken several sips and they had spoken of many things, his family, her work at the hospital, the lovely February weather, had she come to the point.

  Jimmy looked a little embarrassed. “She told me she thought I had a good heart. Then she got up and went to her bed and stooped down to pull out this metal container.”

  She put the container on the bed and motioned for him to come close. At his first sight of the bones, he was more puzzled than excited. He poked them with a hesitant finger, handfuls of teeth, pieces of jaw, skull fragments, four thighbones and three almost complete skulls. But he began to understand when she said, “It’s Peking Man.”

  “How did Dr. Tang get the fossils?” I asked. “Did she know?”

  “Toward the end of the war, Dr. Tang operated on a general in one of the guerilla camps. He did it under fire and stayed and helped nurse the general back to strength. The day before he left the camp, the general called him to his tent, gave him a heavy khaki backpack. The bones were in it. Dr. Tang knew what they were the minute he saw them. The general felt h
is luck was out and he wanted to repay Dr. Tang. He told the doctor that he’d bought them from a Japanese colonel. There was a lot of dealing between the Chinese and Japanese for oil and guns, that sort of thing. Not a lot of honor on either side. The general said he got the best of the deal because he paid the colonel in Chinese paper money and, by 1945, a bushel of it wasn’t worth much. The colonel tried to bargain for gold but he didn’t try too hard. He was nervous, said too many people were looking for the bones and he’d take his chances on the paper money.”

  If the colonel had been in charge of the soldiers who rifled Camp Holcomb and he had held onto the bones and then heard that the Japanese Army secret police were quizzing the American prisoners about the bones, he might well have been nervous.

  From a Japanese colonel to a Chinese general to a battlefield surgeon to a children’s nurse—to Jimmy Lee. Oh yes, that could well have been the way of it.

  And now, to a greedy desperate man?

  “Miss Chow wanted you to sell the bones?”

  Jimmy nodded.

  “But what does the Green Door Hotel have to do with selling the bones?”

  “Everything. She knew, you see, that the Green Door was up for sale. All of them knew it, I think. That’s the kind of secret that can’t be kept. And Bobby might have told her. Anyway, she knew the Green Door was going to be sold and she knew it belonged to Wilkie Lee. She had heard he was going to sell it for $145,000.”

  She told him that, then looked expectantly at Jimmy. He hadn’t understood. He stared at the brownish yellow bones then back at Miss Chow.

  “She said, ‘The bones are worth more than that’. She knew to a penny what the bones were worth!” Jimmy almost laughed except that he hurt too much to laugh and nothing was funny now. “She had a damn scrapbook, would you believe? It was full of clippings about Peking Man. Lots of stories on Christopher Janus, the man in Chicago who’s offered cash on the hoof. She pointed out the figures to me and, in one story, somebody estimated the fossils could bring as much as $250,000.

  “Then she asked me very anxiously if I thought that would be a proper thing to do, to sell the bones and buy the Green Door. Her eyes blinked very quickly and she said some of them, the people who lived there, some of them were so frightened.”

  He looked at me and there was heartbreak in his eyes because now there was no longer any way to save their world, to keep forty-three old and poor and frightened people from being thrown out on the street. No place to go. No one to care.

  “I thought it was going to be so easy,” Jimmy said bitterly. He was sure it would work out. He took the skull and went to the Middle Kingdom Gallery. “I thought he would snap it up, but then he hemmed and hawed around, said he’d think about it, that he’d be in touch with me. But I saw him reach under his desk and I wondered. It was too much like a croupier’s buzzer. That’s when I began to get nervous and it came to me that if somebody hijacked the lot, well, I didn’t have a Bill of Sale, you know. So I told him he’d better think fast ‘cause I was leaving. He tried to keep me but I was on my way. I hit the street and heard the door slam behind me and it was those guys.” I didn’t have to ask which guys.

  He began to run then, darting and twisting down Grant then dodging up Sacramento and hiding behind the children’s playground as the two of them loped on up to Stockton. Then Jimmy ran across to the YM and stuck the skull in his locker.

  That was when he had decided to check the bones out himself and, remembering the bone lady story, had come to my museum and followed me home.

  My mind had gone on ahead, to Dan bursting into the basement and demanding to know what Jimmy was up to.

  “When they lost you, they must have decided to watch Dan, hoping he would lead them to you. It’s a small enough town that they could figure out who your brother was. And it worked.”

  Jimmy nodded.

  “How did you get away from them?” I asked.

  “They tangled with you and Dan long enough to give me a head start. And believe me, I didn’t wait around for them once I got outside. I got my cycle and rode out to Berkeley and spent the night with, uh, with a friend. And sh . . . my friend let me stay all day today.”

  I wondered briefly who she was but that wasn’t any business of mine.

  “How did they catch you tonight?”

  “I had to come back to Chinatown to get the rest of the fossils,” Jimmy said wearily. “Miss Chow doesn’t have a phone and I was afraid to call the hotel number and ask for her. I didn’t know who might listen. I was so close to working everything out that I didn’t want to take any chances.” He twisted his wrist to look at his watch. “Eleven o’clock. Oh goddam, eleven o’clock!”

  Eleven o’clock. 5am. Noon. What possible difference could it make? I asked him.

  He looked at me wildly, began to pull on his ropes even though he knew it was hopeless. “Oh damn, don’t you see! The parade is tomorrow night! Everything’s set and here we sit.”

  “What parade?”

  He looked at me as if I were the crazy one. “Oh hell Dr. Christie.”

  “Ellen.” I interrupted automatically.

  “. . . Ellen, it’s the big Chinese New Year parade. At seven tomorrow night. It starts at Pine and the Battery and winds through the financial district then up Grant to Bush and down Bush. It’s spectacular, forty-fifty-sixty foot dragons, held by hand, you know. They have lights along the spines and they curl and curve up and downhill. It draws the biggest crowd of anything that happens all year. Two-three hundred thousand people jam the streets. That’s why I thought it would be safe.”

  “Safe for what?”

  “To meet the guy who’s going to buy the fossils.”

  And Jimmy pulled again on his ropes.

  SEVENTEEN

  But no matter how Jimmy strained, those ropes weren’t going to give. Tied up we were and tied up we were going to stay.

  No matter how bad something is, no matter how scared you are, you still get tired and we both finally drifted into uneasy restless sleep. But not a deep sleep.

  I woke first, heard the noise first, a muffled thumping chipping sound.

  “Jimmy!”

  It is terrible to be afraid. And we were both afraid. We looked toward the door but it was still closed. We looked around the dimly-lit room. Furniture crowded the walls, broken chairs and tables, rattan work of all kinds. We looked and listened.

  It was a scratchy picky sound.

  We had not, until now, heard any noise at all in this cellar room. No street sounds, nothing. So this odd continuing noise had to mean something.

  Hope can be a terrible thing, too. Neither of us put it into words but our eyes searched the walls, the floor, strained to see in shadowy corners.

  I saw the flicker of movement near the cabinet I had used to remove my blindfold. A dull flash, gone as soon as I saw it. But I did see it.

  “Jimmy, look!”

  A dry skittery crumbling sound now as fragments of mortar were pushed free to slither and fall down the wall. There had been a door there once, years ago, and it had been taken out and the space bricked up, a thick oblong whitish-grey band of mortar marking its place.

  Behind me, I heard the soft coo of a pigeon. Startled, I swung around. It was Jimmy. He made the sound twice more then leaned forward, listening, and I saw the hope on his face.

  Dimly, just audible, came an answering coo, once, twice, three times. He didn’t have to tell me. It was Dan. Somehow, some miraculous way, it was Dan.

  But it was taking so long. Time was running out. It was morning now, just past nine o’clock. Had they been to the Green Door yet, talked to Miss Chow? If they had, they might come back at any time. Although, if they now had the fossils, they might not be in any hurry to get to us, might, in fact, want to wait until dark to spirit us away from here.

  Jimmy and I didn’t have to talk that one over, either. We both began to study the objects stacked and balanced near the door. A narrow seven-shelfed bookcase sat to the left
of the door and a huge dining room table of rosewood to the right.

  “Hey, Ellen, if we could reach that bookcase with our feet and give it a hard shove, tip it to the right, we might be able to wedge it behind the table and block the door.”

  If, if. And, if we did it wrong, brought the bookcase over on us, we’d be in lousier shape than we were already.

  Our hands and feet were tied separately then a cord looped from our wrists to a central post, giving us several feet of leeway. We stretched out full-length. It hurt my back so much I wondered how Jimmy bore it. I studied his face then looked quickly away.

  Stretched out, our hands above our heads, our feet easily reached the bookcase.

  We tugged at it, gingerly at first, then more vigorously when we realized it was well balanced. Slowly, our backs aflame, Jimmy’s face a sickly white, we cupped our feet around the legs of the bookcase and pulled and teased it closer to us, then more to the right.

  All the while, we could hear the soft slithery crackle of falling mortar, the occasional thunk as a chunk dropped free, the beautiful sounds of rescue.

  “Okay,” Jimmy grunted. He rested for a moment. I left the final heave to him. He half-rolled onto his side, swung his feet together and shoved the bookcase so that it toppled at an angle. Sweet success. It thudded heavily into the space between the table and the wall, as nice a barricade as one could wish. Any push from outside would only jam it tighter against the table.

  They might never get into this damn cellar again. Slowly but surely our friends were coming. But it takes a while to remove a part of a brick wall. A long while. Nine-thirty. Ten. Ten-thirty. Eleven.

  Finally the mortar was poked out all around the space of the door and we could hear the murmur of voices. Buddy Wu’s voice carried best, an excited nonstop exhortation. A rope slithered over the door-shaped stand of bricks, dropped halfway down and was pulled taut.

  “Out of the way,” Buddy ordered. “Stand clear there. Okay, one, two, three, let’s all pull together . . .”

  The stand of bricks teetered, wavered unsteadily for a long moment then, abruptly, it toppled, crashing thunderously away from us. Dust swirled, masking the opening, then Dan plunged through the curtain of dust, moving like a fighter, ready for anything.