I stood. She walked over to me.
“Mrs. Wu,” I said.
“Where’s Susan?”
“She had an emergency with a patient,” I said.
I held Rikki Wu’s chair for her. She seemed puzzled.
“So it’s just the two of us?” she said.
“Yes, but I’ll be twice as lively and amusing to make up,” I said.
Rikki Wu looked uneasy, but she sat.
The restaurant had begun, in another time, before it was a pizzeria, as a store with glass windows facing the street. The windows were half curtained in some sort of accordion-pleated white paper. Above the curtains, the glass was fogged by the wet weather. A waiter brought us tea, and stood quietly beside us. He was as close to prostrating himself as he could get while standing. Without looking at him, Rikki Wu spoke in rapid Chinese. He bowed and backed away and disappeared.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Rikki Wu said in a voice that sounded like she didn’t care if I minded or not. “I took the liberty of ordering for us.”
“I don’t mind,” I said.
I watched her accept the fact that she was alone with me, and watched as her persona adjusted to the fact. She smiled at me. There was a touch of conspiratorial intimacy in the smile. Rikki Wu was sex. I was pretty sure she was spoiled and self-centered and shallow. Maybe cruel. Certainly careless about other people. But she was sex. She would like sex, she would need it, she would want more of it than most people were prepared to give her, and she would be totally self-absorbed during it. I’d spent too many years looking for it, and occasionally at it, not to know it when I saw it. And I was seeing it. She would be a hell of a good time once a month.
“Well,” she said, “here we are.”
“Sleepy-eyed and yawning,” I said. “See how late it gets.”
“You’re sleepy?”
“It’s a song lyric. I have these momentary flights now and then.”
“Oh, how interesting.”
The waiter arrived, placed a large platter of assorted dim sum before us, and bowed himself away. Rikki Wu put several items on my plate.
“Thank you,” I said. “Did you know Craig Sampson very well?”
“Oh, no.”
“You seemed very protective of him the other night.”
“I admired him, his work,” Rikki Wu said. “He was a fine actor. And I did not like the innuendo of your questions.”
Her English was perfect, and formal-sounding. Her Chinese had sounded fluent too, though I had no way to judge that, except that it had been rapid.
“Yeah. I’m sorry I had to ask. Were you born here?”
“In Port City?”
“In the United States.”
“No. In T’ai-pei.”
“So your English is acquired.”
She smiled.
“Yes. It’s interesting that you should notice.”
“It sounds like your native language,” I said.
“Yes. It is. So is Cantonese, which I just spoke to the waiter. And Mandarin.”
“You speak the Chinese dialects as well as you speak English?”
“Oh, certainly.”
“What do you think in?” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“When you’re alone, thinking about things, what language do you think in?”
She hesitated, and drank some tea. Maybe she never thought about anything when she was alone.
“I don’t know . . . I guess it depends what I’m thinking about.” She smiled. “Or who.”
“Do you think much about Craig Sampson?”
“Yes, it’s so tragic. Such a brilliant young man, his life cut short so suddenly.”
“Did you think about him much before he died.”
Her eyes widened. She sipped some more tea. Then her eyes narrowed a little and she looked sternly at me over the tea cup.
“What are you trying to imply?” she said coldly.
“Mrs. Wu, I’m just talking. I’m just looking for a handhold. I mean no innuendo.”
“There was nothing between Craig and me. I barely knew him off stage.”
“You live here in Port City?”
“On the hill,” she said.
“Of course. Did he have any relationship with any of the women in town that you know of?”
“Why did he have to have a relationship? I know of no relationships he had in town or anywhere else. Why do you keep asking that?”
“Because most people have one, even if only of a fleeting sexual nature. And he seems to have had none. That’s maybe a little unusual. If you don’t know anything, you pay attention to the unusual.”
“Well, why do you keep asking me?”
“I keep asking everyone. You’re just the one that’s here.”
“Well, I find it very boring,” Rikki Wu said.
“Okay. We’ll turn our attention to more exciting stuff,” I said. “Would you like to see me do a one-armed pushup?”
“Can you really do that?” she said.
“As many as you’d like.”
She relaxed. We were back in the realm of the physical. This was her turf.
“You must be very strong,” she said.
“But pure,” I said. “And kind-hearted.”
“Perhaps you will show me sometime, when we are not in so public a place.”
“I could meet you at the gym,” I said.
She frowned. Maybe I wasn’t as funny as I thought I was. Or maybe she didn’t have much sense of humor. Probably a Chinese thing. I ate some dim sum. She drank some tea. The dim sum wasn’t very good. But there was plenty of it.
“Do you work out?” she said.
“Sure,” I said.
“I do too. Do you have a trainer?”
“No, I muddle through on my own.”
“I have two,” she said. “My CV specialist, and Ronny, my strength and conditioning coach.”
“CV?”
“Cardiovascular,” she said. “I train with them every day.”
“Well, it seems to be working,” I said.
“Yes. You should see my body,” she said.
“Yes, I should.”
She laughed. It wasn’t an embarrassed laugh. But it was an uneasy one, as if she feared her own sexuality and where it might lead her. She stood. For lunch she had consumed two cups of green tea. I stood.
“I have to go to my body-sculpting class,” she said. “Sometime you must show me that pushup.”
“One arm,” I said. “Ask Ronny if he can do that.”
She laughed. I gave her my card.
“You think of anything useful, call me,” I said.
“Perhaps I will,” she said.
The waiter appeared with her coat and held it while she put it on.
“Lunch is taken care of,” she said.
She turned and walked to the door. The waiter followed her, and when she got to the door, he opened it, and popped her umbrella open and held it over her head until she took the handle from him and walked out. I’m not sure she ever saw the waiter.
•12•
It was a bright day in Concord. The sky above the old house was the kind of bright blue that you see in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. The sun was strong and pleasant and the foliage was turning color.
The grounds around the house seemed to have been landscaped by Tarzan of the apes. Bushes, vines, saplings, weeds, decorative plantings run amok, all looped and sagged around the house, clustered in front of it, clung to it, and concealed far too much of it.
“This is ugly,” Susan said. She had on jeans, and sneakers, and a lavender tee shirt with the sleeves cut off. Sweat had darkened the tee shirt. Sweat ra
n down her face under the long billed Postrio baseball cap. A sheen of sweat defined the small, hard muscles in her forearms.
“They’d never recognize you at Bergdorf’s,” I said.
She paid no attention, focusing as she always did on the question before her. She was wearing tan leather work gloves and carrying an axe.
“We need a chain saw,” Susan said.
“Jesus,” I said.
“You don’t think I can handle a chain saw?”
“They’re sort of dangerous,” I said. “If I weren’t totally fearless, I’d be a little afraid of chain saws.”
“Well, it would speed things up,” she said.
“What’s the hurry? We have the rest of our life to do this.”
“You know perfectly well that I am always in a hurry.”
“Almost always,” I said.
“Except then.”
Pearl came galloping up the slope from the stream, and jumped up with both feet on Susan’s chest. Susan leaned forward so that Pearl could lap her face, which Pearl did vigorously. Susan squinched and endured the lapping until Pearl spotted a squirrel and dropped down and stalked it.
“God, wasn’t that awful,” Susan said.
“You might tell her not to do that,” I said.
“She likes to do that,” Susan said.
The squirrel zipped up a tree, and when it was safely out of reach, Pearl dashed at it and jumped up with her forepaws against the tree gazing after it.
“You think she’d actually eat the squirrel?” Susan said.
“She eats everything else she finds,” I said.
Susan took a big swing with her axe at the base of a tree-sized shrub. What she lacked in technique, she made up in vigor, and I decided not to mention that she swung like a girl. I went back inside and worked on demolishing the back stairs with a three-pound sledge and a crowbar.
I had a radio playing jazz in the kitchen. Pearl moseyed around in the fenced-in fields finding disgusting things to roll in. She came back periodically to show off her new smell, negotiating the debris with easy dignity. I could see Susan through the front windows. She had her axe, her long-handled clippers, her bow saw, and her machete. She hacked and cut and clipped and sawed and stopped periodically to haul the cuttings into a big pile for pickup. Her tee shirt was dark with sweat. But, she was, I knew, tireless. For all of her self-mocking parody of the Jewish American Princess, she loved to work. And was rarely more happy than when she was fully engaged.
I got the crowbar under one edge of the lath and plaster wall and pried away a big chunk, exposing one of the stair stringers. With the three-pound sledge I knocked the stringer loose and the stairs canted slowly and then came down with a satisfying crash.
This is a lot better, I thought, than trying to find who killed Craig Sampson.
•13•
I was in my office with my feet up, drinking coffee from a paper cup and reading “Doonesbury.” Behind me, two stories down, on Berkeley Street, tourists, brightly lit by the October sun, were posing with the teddy bear sculpture outside F. A. O. Schwarz. I finished “Doonesbury” and watched the photography for a moment, speculating on the tendency of tourists to be larger than their wardrobes. I was able to reach no conclusion about that, so I gave up and turned to the sports page to read “Tank McNamara.” I was rereading it to make sure I’d missed no hidden meaning when my door opened and in came three Asian guys. The door opened straight onto the corridor. I had no waiting room. I’d had one once in another location and no one had ever waited in it. One Private Eye. No Waiting. I folded the paper and put it down on the desk and said hello.
The tallest one did the talking.
“You’re Mister Spenser?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“My name is Lonnie Wu,” he said. “I believe you know my wife.”
“Rikki,” I said.
“Yes.”
Lonnie Wu was maybe 5’ 10” and slim. He had polished black hair combed straight back, and a small, neat black moustache. He was wearing a gray cashmere jacket with a big red picture frame plaid in it that fitted him as if they had grown up together, and probably cost more than my whole wardrobe. He wore a black silk shirt buttoned to the neck, and black slacks, and black loafers that were shinier than his hair.
“Have a seat,” I said.
He coiled fluently into my client chair. There was only one. He said something to the two guys who’d come with him, and they stood against the wall on either side of my office door. I opened the right-hand top drawer of my desk a little.
“Couple of waiters from the restaurant?” I said.
“No.”
“They from the north?”
“They are from Vietnam.”
Wu smiled. The companions seemed to be barely out of their teens. They were both shorter than Wu, small-boned and lank-haired. One of them had a horizontal scar maybe two inches long under his left eye. They both wore jeans and sneakers and maroon satin jackets. The guy without the scar wore a blue bandana on his head.
“You are a detective,” Wu said.
I nodded.
“And you are investigating the murder of an actor in Port City.”
I nodded again.
“You had lunch recently with my wife.”
“Sure,” I said. “In your restaurant.”
“And you questioned her.”
“I question everybody,” I said. “While you’re here, I’ll probably question you.”
“I wish to know why you are questioning my wife.”
“See previous answer,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“Like I said, I question everybody. Your wife is simply one of the people involved with the theater.”
“My wife,” Wu said calmly, “is not ‘simply’ anything. She is Mrs. Lonnie Wu. And I would prefer that you not speak to her again.”
“How come?” I said.
“It is unseemly.”
“Mrs. Wu didn’t seem to think so,” I said.
“What Mrs. Wu thinks is not of consequence. It is unseemly for her to be having lunch with a low faan.”
“Is low faan a term of racial endearment?”
“It is an abbreviated form of guey low faan, which means barbarian,” Wu said. “Though many people use it merely to indicate someone who is not Chinese.”
I nodded.
“You don’t fully subscribe, then, to the melting pot theory,” I said.
“Nor do I wish to stand here and make small talk,” Wu said. “I think it would be best if you stayed out of Port City.”
“Is it okay if I retain my U.S. citizenship?” I said.
“What you do outside of Port City is your business. But if you come back . . .” he moved his head in such a way as to include the two Vietnamese kids against the wall . . . “we will make it our business.”
The kids were silent. As far as I could tell, they understood nothing of what was being said. But they didn’t seem to care. They seemed relaxed against the wall. Their dark eyes were empty of everything but energy.
“So that’s what the teeny boppers are for,” I said.
“I don’t know teeny bopper,” Wu said.
“Adolescents,” I said.
Wu nodded. I could see him file the phrase away. He’d know it next time.
“Don’t be misled,” Wu said. “They are boat people. They are older than their age.”
“And empty,” I said.
Wu smiled.
“Entirely,” he said. “They will do whatever I tell them to.”
I looked at the kids for a moment. They were not something new. They were something very old, without family, or culture; prehistoric, deracinated, vicious, with no more sense of another�
�s pain than a snake would have when it swallowed a rat. I’d seen atavistic kids like this before: homegrown black kids so brutalized by life that they had no feelings except anger. It was what made them so hard. They weren’t even bad. Good and bad were meaningless to them. Everything had been taken from them. They had only rage. And it was the rage that sustained them, that animated their black eyes, and energized the slender, empty place intended for their souls. The kids saw me looking at them and looked back at me without discomfort, without, in fact, anything at all. I looked back at Wu. He had crossed his legs and was lighting a cigarette.
“We got a problem here, Mr. Wu.”
“You have a problem,” Wu said.
I shrugged.
“Let me tell you my problem,” I said. “I am a sort of professional tough guy. I’m kind of smart, and I’ve got a lot of experience. But mainly I get hired to do things other people can’t do, or won’t do, or don’t dare do. You know?”
Wu inhaled, enjoyed it, and let it out slowly, through his nose. He didn’t say anything.
“So,” I said, “how would it look if I let two juvenile delinquents and a Chinese guy half my size come in here and frighten me.”
“It would not look good,” Wu said. “But you would be alive.”
My hand was resting on my desk top just above the half-open drawer.
“All this because I had lunch with your wife.”
“You will stay away from Port City,” Wu said. “Or you will be killed.”
I dropped my hand to the open drawer and came out with a revolver, which I cocked as I took it out. At the first movement both the Vietnamese kids went under their coats, but I had about a two-second lead on them and was aimed at the tip of Wu’s nose by the time they got their guns out. Both had nines.
“If I hear the hammer go back on either of those guns,” I said to Wu, “you’re dead.”
Wu spoke to the boys. Peripherally I could see both kids crouching, holding the gun in both hands.
“Perhaps they are already cocked,” Wu said.
He hadn’t moved, nor had his expression changed.
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