Tears of the Dragon

by Holly Baxter

  There had to be another way.

  There was always another way.

  ***

  Elodie’s peace was short-lived. The next day, at lunch, Bernice was full of the excitement on the tenth floor. The rumors had finally penetrated even the seclusion of Mr. Lee Chang’s offices.

  “The police are all over the place,” she said, unwrapping her sandwiches and taking a big gulp of hot coffee. “It’s Mr. Webster who’s missing, you know. Did I ever mention him?”

  “I don’t think so.” Elodie wasn’t sure she wanted to hear this.

  Bernice spoke around a mouthful of baloney and mustard. “He’s in import/export. Mr. Lee did business with him, sometimes. He was a funny little man. His hair was curly—what there was of it—and he had the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen.” She pondered again. “They were the only attractive thing about him, those eyes.”

  “What was he like?”

  Bernice shrugged. Today her dress was a deep pink silk crepe patterned with green leaves and little red cherries, under a draped collar with a big floppy Windsor bow. Elodie didn’t know how she got away with such fancy clothes at work. Maybe Mr. Lee liked cheery girls. Or maybe Bernice didn’t care what Mr. Lee thought. Elodie herself was in black, as usual, but had a fresh lace collar over it, and a red enamel brooch that Maybelle had loaned her.

  Bernice considered her neatly polished nails before taking another bite of her sandwich. “Webster was just ordinary—except for the eyes. I know Mr. Lee didn’t like him much, but apparently he could get things out of China that Mr. Lee wanted.” She leaned forward. “Things are very difficult in China right now.”

  “Oh, really?” Elodie stirred her coffee, round and round.

  Bernice waved a hand. “The Russians, apparently. But from what Mr. Lee says, things are always difficult in China.”

  “Things are difficult here, too.” Elodie reminded her.

  “Oh, not money. Politics.”

  “Is there a difference?” Elodie asked.

  Bernice frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing, nothing.” If she went on stirring her coffee any longer it would be stone cold, Elodie thought. “So Mr. Lee didn’t like this…Webster, was it?”

  “Well, sometimes they had words over something Mr. Webster had gotten for Mr. Lee. Mr. Lee is a very honest man, you see. And I don’t think Mr. Webster was.”

  Elodie had her doubts about the honesty of Mr. Lee. No man could be that rich in these times and be entirely above board. But Bernice, for all her air of pretended sophistication, was not very observant. Nor was she what anyone would call a deep thinker. She leaned forward, and spoke in a dramatic whisper.

  “Anyway, there was blood, you know. On the floor of Webster’s office. And the desk was turned over, and all the drawers were pulled out and papers scattered everywhere. It was only when the cleaners went in and saw it all that they called security and they called the police. They didn’t want a fuss, so all the policemen had to wear suits and pretend to be on business. It was all pretty silly, because it was bound to come out. It always does.”

  “What always does?”

  “Murder.” Bernice’s voice was full of enjoyable horror. “So you were right—and you heard it all. I guess you should talk to the police, shouldn’t you?”

  Elodie went cold. She reached forward and grasped Bernice’s wrist, causing Bernice to wince. “No! Listen, did you tell anyone what I told you? About being up there that night?”

  “No—I don’t think so.” Bernice looked a little frightened at Elodie’s intensity. “Don’t you want to be part of it? You could find out all the details…”

  “No, I don’t want to be part of it.” Elodie sat back and released her friend’s arm. Bernice rubbed her wrist and looked reproachful. “I couldn’t really help the police,” Elodie continued. “And I wasn’t supposed to be there, remember? They might think I know more than I do, they might even think I was involved.”

  “Gee, I never thought of that, Ellie. I guess we should keep it quiet after all,” Bernice said, looking a little less puzzled. “I mean, if Mr. Herschel found out, you could lose your job.”

  “Exactly.” It wasn’t Mr. Herschel Elodie was afraid of. It was the person who had been dragging what now seemed likely was the dead body of the missing Mr. Webster.

  Bernice was thinking things over. “I’m sure I didn’t mention it, Ellie. At least…I don’t think I did.” She drank more coffee, and then stood up to get a refill. “Do you want some more?” she asked, holding up her cup. Elodie handed over her own cup of now-cold coffee.

  “Yes, please.” She watched her friend go over to the urn and refill their cups, adding cream and sugar, coming back slowly so as not to spill any on her dress. Had Bernice said anything to anyone? She was such a flighty girl, so apt to speak without thinking, so eager in her love of gossip and “being involved.” Having been left out of the story the day before, she had no doubt been eager for details, and could easily have said…well…almost anything.

  “Listen, Bernice…” Elodie began.

  “No, I’m sure I didn’t say anything, Ellie.” Bernice spoke with rather more firmness than was necessary. “And I won’t say anything. Gee, what would I do if you lost your job? I wouldn’t have anyone so nice to have lunch with, would I?” Bernice smiled brightly. Too brightly.

  She did say something, Elodie thought in despair.

  But to whom?

  ***

  Captain Brett shook his head. “Beats me,” he said to Archie Deacon. “No reports of a body anywhere in the city. They usually leave them out to make their point.”

  “Maybe this isn’t anything to do with our usual customers.” Archie had been assigned that morning to the case, hours too late, in his opinion, but the original investigating officer had been hurt in a car accident on the way home from work. He’d read the first reports and was now catching up at the scene. “The guy wasn’t in the liquor business, was he? Imports, the secretary said. Mostly from China.”

  “She was pretty hysterical.” Captain Brett looked around the office that had belonged to the missing man. It was neither fancy nor particularly clean. It was obvious that Webster, and perhaps the secretary, were smokers, for the window was heavily filmed and the walls, originally white, were now a dirty tan. The secretary’s desk had a small plant on it, but it was bent from landing on the floor, and most of the dirt was missing from its pot. The laboratory people had finished their fingerprintings and photographs the afternoon before. The overturned furniture had been righted again and the floor swept. All the papers that had been scattered on the floor were gathered into a pile on the larger desk, waiting for the secretary to recover from her nerves long enough to see if anything was missing. At present she was in the care of an older woman in another office, still upset—either at the thought of losing her boss or her job. She had come in, but “couldn’t face” the office. Archie wondered how much of the fuss she was making was genuine.

  “Do you think she knows more than she’s saying?” Brett asked. He was not the sharpest of men, but apparently he, too, felt the secretary was being either foolish or clever.

  Archie shrugged. “She didn’t strike me as being particularly bright,” he said, slowly. “I think she’s straight. Whether Webster was straight is another question. She did manage to say he mostly dealt in small stuff—silk cloth, small objects, sometimes special foods for the Chinese community that they couldn’t get over here.”

  “Like birds’ nests?” Captain Brett grimaced.

  Deacon smiled to himself. Like most Americans, the Captain believed the Chinese only existed on bird’s nest soup, sharks’ fins, and cats and dogs. Deacon knew better. He had met a few members of the Chinese community through his love of their food, which he knew to be healthy, simple, and quite free of both cats and dogs. True there were unusual spices, but that only added to the wonderful flavors. He’d grown up quite close to the area of the city wh
ere most Chinese lived, and had had a great friend in school named Lee Concetti, whose mother was Chinese and his father Italian. He had often been to Lee’s home and eaten with them. His smile faded. Lee was dead, now. Another victim of the friction between the two ethnic neighborhoods that rubbed against one another. In that area you were either Italian or Chinese, but Lee had been both and therefore equally shunned. Archie remembered attending the homicide and seeing the face of his childhood friend as he lay dead in an alley with four others, all machine-gunned to permanent silence.

  Lee had taken one route, Archie another. They had lost touch, but he had recognized him instantly. Just one more reason to hate the city that was greedily devouring itself.

  “Well, as soon as the girl gets ahold of herself, we’ll know a bit more,” Captain Brett said. “Meanwhile we’ve got other fish to fry. Have you set someone to question folks on this floor, see if they knew Webster, anything about him?”

  “In the works.” Archie lit a cigarette. “Bosco and Higgins should get anything that’s going. They’re good at it.”

  The Captain grunted. “I’ve got a meeting, now. I’ll leave you to deal with this mess.”

  “Fine with me.” When the Captain had left, Archie sat behind the desk and began looking through Webster’s papers. A nice clean puzzle. It made a change from boozer hunts, hooker raids, and finding old friends cut into pieces by tommy guns.

  Chapter Three

  Leo Herschel looked rather like a bloodhound that had been stretched tall and thin. Balding, brisk, and very demanding, he was the Creative Director of Adcock and Ash advertising agency. Everybody would have been terrified of him if, under his overtly fierce demeanor, he was not utterly fair in all his judgments and actions.

  Nevertheless, dealing with him was never easy, as he had both high standards and a low tolerance for fools.

  He had summoned the creative department into the main conference room to discuss the competition for the proposed Leatherlux show. Not everyone in the agency had entered ideas. Of the eleven people present, two were artists, and seven were copywriters. There were even a couple of young “client hacks,” which was how the creative department described the men who represented various advertising accounts. To be “creative” was to be somehow different from everyone else. Or so they told themselves. In fact, they were as aware of the business aspects of agency work as were the “client hacks,” but the mock war between them was entertaining. And a way of working off frustration when an ad was turned down by a recalcitrant client.

  Elodie slipped in at the back and took a seat near the door. She had never been in the main conference room before, and she was impressed with the richness of the decor. This is what the clients saw when they visited the agency. Glossy wood panelling, a deep blue carpet with a faint design, translucent pink light sconces on the walls, and a vast expanse of mahogany table running down the center of the room. Ranged alongside it were chairs with seats upholstered in gold velvet. There were notepads and pencils at each place, and several pitchers of water and glasses spaced along the table. Her mouth was dry and she longed to pour herself a drink.

  She didn’t have much hope that her idea would be adopted, but at least she had made the final cut, and she was interested to hear what others had come up with. The proposal was for a weekly hour-long radio show—an expensive undertaking for any business. A lot depended, therefore, on keeping the client happy by showing a correlating rise in sales.

  Mr. Herschel waited until everybody seemed to be present, then stood up and surveyed his people. “I’m glad to see you all so interested in this project,” he began. His voice was deep and resonant, surprisingly so for emanating from such a thin chest. “As you know, Leatherlux is one of our most valued clients, and we want to do well for them.” He looked down at a sheaf of papers before him on the table. “There were twenty-three ideas offered for the program, some unfortunately rather frivolous. These were weeded out. In the interests of fairness we asked that no names were attached, simply a code of any four letters. That was in keeping with our policy that a good idea doesn’t care who has it.” He harrumphed, slightly. That slogan was his own, and he used it whenever possible.

  “I admit I have been surprised by the range of imagination shown—but many of the ideas were more suited to the theater than to radio, which is a very specific medium, both new and difficult. I was not the only judge of these ideas, of course, but was joined by the client and the two experienced radio writers who will be working on the programs along with whoever’s idea is chosen. It will mean losing a member of staff because we will want the winner to be wholly committed to the project. In some cases this will be quite a sacrifice.” He beamed at the one or two top copywriters in the group, then picked up the sheaf of papers. “At any rate, the winner is the author of ‘MMEA’.” He looked up. “Who might that be?”

  There was a silence as everyone looked around.

  Elodie was stunned. It was her entry, marked with the initials of the four Browne sisters. She raised her hand. “It’s me.”

  Mr. Herschel looked at her with a slightly puzzled expression, then his face cleared. “Miss Browne?”

  “Yes, sir.” Elodie looked at all the faces around her—every one of them as startled as hers must have seemed. She stood up. “Me.”

  “Well, well,” Mr. Herschel said. He looked both pleased and definitely relieved. He wouldn’t be losing any of his best copywriters after all, but a lowly beginner who happened to have a good idea. Perfect example of his philosophy. And an excellent solution to what might have been a difficult situation. Anybody could take over Elodie’s work. He might even promote a secretary to fill the vacancy.

  “What’s your idea, then?” asked one of the other copywriters, looking a bit put out. Mr. Herschel might be pleased that the good idea hadn’t cared who had it, but he obviously wasn’t.

  Elodie cleared her throat and looked at Mr. Herschel. “It’s called Imp…”

  “Now, now, no need to give it away,” Mr. Herschel said, quickly. “Suffice it to say it is an excellent way to integrate the client’s interests with a good story every week. I think we should all look forward to hearing the show when it is actually broadcast.”

  “But we could help,” protested the copywriter whose creative amour propre had been seriously offended. He was a plump young man with thinning hair, the son of a client, and not particularly well-liked at the agency. He knew his idea had been magnificent, and here was this little upstart getting the prize. It was so unfair!

  “No, no,” said Mr. Herschel, rather grandly. “This idea is good enough to stand on its own feet, and Miss Browne and the two professional radio writers she will be working with must have full responsibility.” He paused. “Full creative control,” he amended. In other words, Elodie immediately realized, if it failed it would be entirely her fault, and not that of the agency.

  Slowly the room cleared, with not a few resentful glances cast her way. Elodie felt herself blushing, knowing they all thought she had gotten above herself and stolen their thunder. It was a competitive world, she knew that. But she was disappointed that none of them stopped to congratulate her, not even one or two she had thought quite liked her. Finally only she and Mr. Herschel remained. He came down the room and smiled at her.

  “Well done, Miss Browne,” he said. “I think ‘Imperial Hotel’ will be a great success.”

  “I hope so.” Elodie recollected her sister Maybelle’s admonition to always seem positive and sure of herself in every situation and to never show fear of a superior. Respect, yes, but fear—never. “I mean, I know it will be,” she added, firmly. “I’m very excited. Who will I be working with? When do I start? Where?”

  Mr. Herschel now displayed avuncular interest along with a certain detachment. Leatherlux Luggage was a very, very difficult client to please, and they had made the final decision on the concept of “Imperial Hotel,” not he. He was a little worried that Miss Browne was not up t
o the job, but took comfort from the fact that the two experienced radio writers would be in charge. He could liaise with them from time to time—she needn’t know about that. It would have been too big a risk to take, otherwise. He believed firmly in encouraging young talent, as long as it didn’t become a threat to him or the agency. And Miss Browne was a very pretty girl—she hid her intelligence rather well, he thought.

  “You will start immediately, my dear. Time is of the essence as the client is eager to get on the air as soon as possible. You will be working with two professionals, as I said earlier. You do understand why that is necessary?”

  “Oh, of course. I will need to learn so much.”

  “Exactly. But both of the writers were enthusiastic about your idea, and said it was perfectly suited to radio, so that is very encouraging. They thought it showed you understood the medium much better than many of the others.”

  “I listen to the radio a good deal,” Elodie said.

  “Yes, well, that’s fine.” He was guiding her toward the door, neither touching her nor saying anything, but making it clear he, at least, was now finished with the situation. “My secretary will supply you with all details—it will mean a raise in your salary of course…”

  “Oh,” Elodie gasped. So that was why the others had been so cross. “I didn’t realize that.”

  He looked at her, surprised. “You didn’t?”

  “No.” She longed to ask how much, but restrained herself in the interest of appearing “professional.” He, in his turn, looked momentarily regretful, apparently realizing he could have gotten away with giving her no raise at all. He allowed himself a small sigh. “You will not be working here at the agency, in fact, although we will be paying your salary as before. I believe an office has been reserved down on the tenth floor.”

  Elodie went cold.