by Holly Baxter
It was a few minutes before she realized they were not going in the direction of her home. She felt sudden panic. “Where are you taking me? You said you’d take me home.”
He kept his eyes on the road. “You missed your dinner. The least I can do is get you something decent to eat.”
Trapped, she thought. Trapped like a rat in a trap.
The man was impossible.
And he was much bigger than she was.
Chapter Eight
Archie Deacon took Elodie to a small Chinese restaurant in an area of the city she had never seen. It was very different from the places Hugh had taken her—they had all been sophisticated and fairly pricey as he was on an expense account. This one was small, the tables and floor were rough and unpolished, and it was full of Chinese people, mostly families as far as she could tell. The walls were plain except for a large calendar with a gaudy picture of a dragon.
“If you want the best Chinese food, go where the Chinese themselves eat,” Archie said. He seemed easy and familiar with the place, and indeed they were greeted with great friendliness—he was obviously a regular customer.
When they were seated, she challenged him. “Why did you bring me here?”
He seemed surprised. “I like it,” he said. “I thought you would, too.”
“I do, but that isn’t the point.”
He raised an eyebrow. “What is the point, then?”
“Mr. Lee. The killing. All Chinese.”
“And?”
“Well…maybe you thought I would be intimidated by more Chinese things…” Even as she said it she knew that wasn’t exactly what she meant. “I mean, that it would make it more…” She faltered.
He grinned. “More familiar?”
“I don’t know.” She didn’t want to like him, she was determined not to like him, he was a terrible horrible smart-alecky cop and he had no business treating her to a meal. “I don’t know anything about China,” she confessed.
“Neither do I, except that I like the food.” He shrugged. “I grew up near here, and I like the few Chinese people I’ve met. I think that’s why Brett put me on this case. He heard me talking about Chinese cooking to one of the secretaries once and so now he thinks I’m some kind of oriental expert, but I’m not.”
She had to be satisfied with that, because he was obviously not going to say anything more. When the waiter came up, Deacon looked at her. “Do you have any favorites?”
“I’ve only ever had chop suey,” she admitted.
He glanced at the waiter, who rolled his eyes, and Deacon laughed. “Chop suey isn’t Chinese at all. It’s American. Would you trust me to order for you?”
“Well—I don’t want anything…weird.”
“Like what?”
She glanced at the waiter, embarrassed. “You know what people say…” She lowered her voice. “About dogs and cats.”
He laughed aloud, making both Elodie and the waiter jump. “All right,” Deacon said. He ordered several things, which the waiter wrote down quickly; then he bowed, and left them. In a moment he returned carrying a teapot and two small cups, bowed again, and departed for the kitchen.
“Do you speak Chinese?” Elodie asked, in amazement, for she had recognized none of the words Deacon had used to order the food.
“Menu Chinese only,” Deacon said, pouring tea into her cup. She assumed it was tea, but it had no color at all. “This is jasmine tea. Try it.”
She picked up the little cup and sipped. It had more taste than she expected, flowery and refreshing. “It’s nice.”
“Best thing to drink with Chinese food. Except beer—but of course, no beer here.”
“Are you sure?” she asked. There was beer everywhere else, or so it seemed these days.
“Would you prefer beer?”
“No! No, not at all, this tea is fine,” Elodie assured him. He made her very nervous. And all the Chinese people seemed to be looking at them—they were the only Caucasians in the place. She hoped they could get through the meal quickly. She didn’t want to be here at all.
Except something smelled wonderful.
She hoped it wasn’t octopus. She’d noticed on Saturday night that Bernice had had something on her tray that Mrs. Logie said was octopus. Elodie had only ever seen an octopus in an Aquarium, and it was definitely not something she wanted to see again—or eat. She shivered involuntarily at the memory of those writhing arms.
“Cold?”
“No.” If anything it was too warm in the little room. “What did you order?” she asked suspiciously.
“Chicken, beef, crab, pork and rice,” he told her. “No cats, no dogs.”
“All of that?” she said, still wary.
“You’ll just have to trust me, won’t you?” He drank some of his tea. “Tell me about your new job.”
She didn’t want to tell him about anything, but after a few false starts, she found herself going on about Sal and Drew. “They pretend to dislike one another,” she concluded. “But somehow—it works. I’ve never worked with other people before. Not like that, anyway. They talk and talk and argue and argue and then some dialogue comes out. I write it down, and then it all starts again. It’s very strange.”
“Don’t you like it?”
She thought about that for a moment, then decided. “Yes, I do. It’s exciting. It’s…fun.”
“Do you like them?”
“I like Sal, she’s fine, but she wants to work and work and work. Drew…” She paused. “He doesn’t seem to want to be there, but she makes him stay.”
“Where does he want to be?”
Elodie smiled. “At a speakeasy. I get the feeling any one would do. But he probably needs the money, like I do.”
“Do you?”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“Is that why you took the job at Mr. Lee’s?”
She knew it, she knew right from the start that was why he had taken her for a meal, and especially why he had taken her here. He wanted to question her about Saturday night again. Well, he wasn’t going to get away with anything. She had almost begun to like him, too.
“Of course. We’re all trying to save enough to get my little sister into college,” Elodie said, quickly. “I have three sisters, you see, and Mumma is a teacher so she doesn’t earn much, and there is the house and clothes and—”
“What are your sister’s names?”
“Marie, Maybelle, and Alyce. Alyce is the youngest—she’s still in high school.”
“Where did the name Elodie come from?”
“It was my grandmother’s name.” Good, she thought, stick to the family, forget Saturday night.
“My sister’s name is Louise,” Deacon said.
Elodie was caught off-guard. She hadn’t thought of him as having a sister, or family of any kind. He was a policeman, policemen didn’t have families, they were just…cops.
“You have a sister?”
“I just said so. And a brother named Mike. My father was a cop, and my mother is a piano teacher.”
“Oh.” She considered this. “And what’s your name?”
The green eyes crinkled at the corners. “It’s Archie.” He suddenly went a little red across his cheekbones. “Archibald, heaven help me. After my least favorite uncle. The sins of the father…”
She had to laugh. But it suited him.
The waiter arrived with a large tray and proceeded to cover the table with small dishes filled with exotic and quite unrecognizable things. “Oh, my,” Elodie said. “All this food.”
“The Chinese enjoy small amounts of lots of different flavors. We share it out,” Deacon explained, as the waiter gave them each an empty bowl of their own. He also put down two sticks beside the bowls. “Do you know how to use chopsticks?”
“I’ve never seen them,” Elodie admitted. Deacon said something to the waiter, who disappeared and returned with a fork which he laid beside Elodie’s bowl with
obvious disapproval. When he left, she leaned forward. “He doesn’t like me.”
“They think forks are barbaric,” Deacon said. “Would you like to learn to use the chopsticks?”
“I don’t know…”
“Here, let me show you.” He proceeded with what seemed like simple instructions, but no matter how hard Elodie tried, most of the food ended up on the table outside her bowl. Deacon sighed. “It takes practice,” he conceded. “I understand really skilled users can pick up the yolk of a raw egg without breaking it. Stick to the fork for now or you’ll starve to death.”
To Elodie’s amazement and delight, the food was delicious, full of flavors she had never encountered before. She was a fairly adventurous eater—Marie like to experiment—but she had never encountered food like this except at Mr. Lee’s. And, of course, she hadn’t eaten any of that, just served it.
“If you’re going to eat late at night, Chinese food is ideal,” Deacon told her when most of the bowls between them were empty. “It’s light and easy to digest.”
Was it late at night? Elodie looked down at her watch. It was almost ten!
“I need to know more about what happened Saturday night,” Archie Deacon said, abruptly, again catching her off-guard in her surprise at the hour. She had been lulled by the food and the innocent conversation about families and other topics. Now here it was again, all of a sudden. It wasn’t fair.
“I told you everything.”
“You didn’t, you know. That feeling you had when coming through the downstairs lobby at the station—that you felt like a criminal? That’s guilt, Elodie.”
“But…”
“Look.” He leaned forward. “Miss Hutton and the other guests are too much Mr. Lee’s people, they would never do anything to upset him because they all want something from him. Mr. Ryan is interesting, but he knows very well the less he says the better. About anything. The other girls who were serving there were hopeless, not a brain between them. Even your friend Bernice was useless because she works for Mr. Lee and is loyal to him. But you—you’re different than the others. You have an education, you have a brain, and if you’re a writer you must be observant. You can help me, Elodie. And I need help. There is more to all this. As complicated as it seems now, there is more behind it. I think you might know what it is.”
“But I don’t,” Elodie protested. “Really, I don’t.”
Archie Deacon said nothing, just kept looking at her, waiting and waiting and waiting. She suddenly realized he wasn’t going to go away. If not here, then somewhere else, he would keep at her until he got what he wanted. She took a deep breath.
“Mingdow,” she said, in a low voice.
The waiter, who had been clearing the table, gave a start and dropped his tray. Bowls smashed and scattered in all directions and he stared at her in horror, then quickly knelt down, apologizing, gathering up the shards of china with shaking hands.
“Wow,” Archie Deacon said, eyeing the mess on the floor. “When you know something, you really know something, don’t you?” Without saying anything else, he asked the waiter for the bill, paid it, and hurried her out. She could feel the waiter’s eyes following them. Once back in the car, Deacon put his keys in the ignition, but didn’t start the engine. He turned to face her.
“Explain.”
Already sorry she had spoken, she shook her head. “That’s it,” she said. “Webster said ‘mingdow—got me’—and so on. It was only the one word. Or maybe two words—it was hard to tell, he said it so fast and his mouth was all…that’s what it sounded like.”
“You said it right enough to scare the hell out of the waiter,” Archie said. “What does it mean?”
Elodie stared at him. “How on earth should I know?”
“Sorry—just thought you might.”
“I’d like to go home, now, please.” Elodie spoke stiffly. “There isn’t really anything else to say.”
He sat in silence for a long while, and she could feel him watching her, but she pressed her lips together, angry at herself for giving in so easily. It wasn’t that it was such a big, terrible secret, it was…what? As he started the engine and drove away from the little restaurant, she considered her emotions. All right, she resented being dragged down to the police station and being made to feel like a criminal. She was cross at Lieutenant Deacon—Archie—because she didn’t want to like him and she did, which was of course all his fault. And then, she wanted to talk to her cousin Hugh about it. She frowned slightly. Why did she want to talk to Hugh?
Because she was curious. Because she was intrigued. Because she wanted to find out for herself what it was all about. Good heavens! Involuntarily her hand went to her mouth.
“What’s wrong?” Deacon asked, looking at her sideways.
“Nothing. Indigestion.” She sat back. What on earth was she thinking? A man had been kidnapped, and then killed. A man who had been very afraid of something, but more afraid for Mr. Lee, and yet was killed by a guard who was trying to protect him. Ah—that was it. That was what had been bothering her ever since Saturday night. She didn’t think the guard had been protecting Mr. Lee at all. He had come running down the glass passage with his gun already out before Webster had picked up the knife from the table. And Webster had picked up the knife as soon as he saw the guard coming.
Webster had been afraid of the guard.
Which meant the guard had killed him deliberately.
She opened her mouth to say something, but shut it again. If Deacon saw it, he didn’t comment. After a while, she asked about the guard. “Are they going to put him in jail?”
“I have no idea. He was doing his job, but it turns out he wasn’t licensed to carry that gun. However, they let him out on bail.”
“There are an awful lot of unlicensed guns around this city at the moment,” Elodie said, pointedly. “I think even Mr. Ryan was carrying one under his dinner jacket.”
“Oh, he was, he was. But, being Arnold Ryan, he had a license for it, all above board.”
“Is he really as dangerous as they say?”
“Depends on what you call dangerous. He works for Capone. Capone gives orders, people get killed. Some people excuse that by saying most of the people who get killed deserve it because they are criminals. But sometimes innocent people die, and sometimes law enforcement officers, too.”
“The way my cousin tells it, a lot of those so-called enforcement officers are criminals, too.” She saw his fingers tighten on the wheel. Good, she was distracting him.
“I admit there is a lot of corruption in the police at the moment. There is a lot of corruption everywhere. But not all of us go along with it, you know.”
“People are broke, people are hungry. Desperate people do desperate things. And greedy people do, too,” Elodie said. “I think Prohibition is a…poisoned chalice.”
He took his eyes from the road for a moment. “Wow. Is that your phrase or this cousin of yours?”
“I’m a writer, I have a way with words.” Elodie could be prim.
“Your cousin’s, then. Who is this cousin who knows so much?”
“His name is Hugh. He’s a newspaper reporter.”
“Not Hugh Murphy at the Tribune?”
She turned to look at him in surprise. “Yes. Do you know him?”
“Yes, I do.” Deacon smiled to himself. “Yes, I certainly do.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I like him although a lot of my friends would like to knock his block off.”
“Why?”
Deacon kept smiling as he turned into her street. “Because he mostly tells the truth, unusual in a journalist in my experience. That can get a guy enemies in this town, you know.”
“Hugh is very brave.”
Deacon pulled up to the curb in front of her house, turned off the engine, and turned again to look at her. “And you have a crush on him.”
It was her turn to smile. “From a
bout the age of seven.”
He leaned across to open her door, putting his face close to hers. His breath smelled of Chinese spices. “Then when you’ve talked to him about whatever it is you’ve been thinking all the way home, maybe he’ll advise you to tell me, too.” He moved back behind the wheel and met her astonished face with grave eyes. “Good night, Miss Browne. Sleep well.”
***
Wei Ching wanted very badly to become an American citizen. So much so that he had gambled with his brother for which of them would be the one to make the crossing and earn money to bring the rest of the family over in turn. Wei Ching had won. He knew his brother, who was older, was bitter about being usurped by his younger sibling, but he had managed to be graceful about it. One must always honor gambling debts, after all.
Wei Ching was a very practical person and he knew the streets of America would not be paved with gold. After all, gold is a soft metal and would never withstand the many wheels that would go to and fro on such a great nation’s highways. But he had not been prepared for the ugliness of Chicago, nor, to be fair, for the beauty of the Great Lake by which it stood. It was not so much the city that was unattractive, but the people in it. So much greed and grime and trouble, so many terrible men doing terrible things, so unlike the small town from which he had come. And this thing they called The Depression—a word he could hardly get his mouth around—was truly awful for all. He thought he might have been happier in other cities, but he had accepted his fate was to be in Chicago because his uncle’s cousin employed him in the family restaurant, and he could quickly begin to save.
