Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine Presents Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense

by Linda Landrigan

  “It was your dad, wasn’t it? Your dad was a sailor. And he left you, you and your mother.”

  It was an old story and didn’t take a great leap of imagination. An illegitimate kid from Norfolk, growing up to hate the navy, joining the army as an MP, finding his opportunity to take his revenge. A few bumps, a few bruises, a few dollars, and a sailor would get over it. It was the least they owed him for what his dad had done to him and his mother. Until he went too far. And killed.

  I heard Budusky talking. It was choking out of his throat.

  “He left us, like you said. That’s why they owed me.”

  “And when you last heard from him …”

  “Yeah.” The tears seemed to be squeezed out of his eyes. “When the last letter came, he was on the Kitty Hawk.”

  ERNIE AND I left the next day with the date for Budusky’s courtmartial set for next month.

  Back in Seoul the first sergeant requested that the venue be changed about a hundred miles north, to Camp Henry in Taegu. Ernie and I had to appear in court as witnesses, and it wouldn’t be smart to give the MPs in Pusan a chance to get at us.

  I could understand their feelings. They saw us as traitors to the Military Police Corps. Maybe we were.

  But none of those MPs ever sat down to write a letter to the parents of the late Petty Officer Third Class Gerald R. Lockworth.

  I did.

  S. J. ROZAN

  BODY ENGLISH

  December 1992

  A FORMER ARCHITECT, S. J. Rozan has won a wide following and garnered numerous awards for her series featuring Chinatown detective Lydia Chin and her sometime partner, Bill Smith. Herself a resident of lower Manhattan, Rozan has also written a stand-alone novel about the attack on the World Trade Center, Absent Friends. This early story features her popular series characters Chin and Smith before they made their first appearances in a novel.

  It was the first case I took that I didn’t want. My instincts were right, too, because it also turned out to be the first case that made me wonder whether I wanted to be a private investigator for the rest of my life.

  “And she doesn’t really even want me, either,” I fumed. I was ranting to my sometime partner, Bill Smith, at the Peacock Rice Shop on Mott Street. “Because I don’t know Mandarin. She almost stomped out when she found that out. Stuck-up Taiwan lady! And she absolutely refused to speak Cantonese. She insisted we speak English. Can you believe that?”

  “I always insist you speak English,” Bill pointed out. He lifted sauteed squid from the serving dish into his rice bowl.

  “Don’t start!” I speared my chopsticks into a mass of deep green watercress in glistening sauce. “You big coarse clumsy foreign characters are exactly what the problem is, anyway.”

  Bill stopped a piece of squid just short of his mouth. “Foreign?”

  I was feeling argumentative and crabby. “I grew up in this country. Some people spent their childhoods trotting around the world.”

  “That was my adolescence, and you grew up in Chinatown, which you’ve always said is another planet. Listen, Lydia, how about we talk about the case before you stab me with a chopstick?”

  “Let me eat first,” I said sulkily. I tried the squid; it was pungent and tender. It cheered me up a little, and the smoky, jasmine-scented tea cheered me more. Maybe my blood sugar was just low. “Actually,” I said aloud, “maybe I was just nervous.”

  “Mrs. Lee made you nervous?”

  I hated to admit it, but it was true. “She’s a very powerful woman in Chinatown. She owns four big factories here.”

  “Factory” was Chinatown for “sweatshop,” but Bill knew that. “My mother was terrified I’d offend her. It would have humiliated my mother if Mrs. Lee hadn’t approved of me.”

  “But you say she didn’t.”

  “No, but she hired me. She won’t criticize me publicly while I’m working for her. That would make her look foolish, you see. Hiring someone as obviously inadequate as I am.”

  “I think you’re adequate. I think you’re way beyond adequate. Don’t glare at me, tell me about the case. You’re hiring me. What are we doing?”

  “Following a woman. I figured you’d be good at that.”

  “Only if she’s gorgeous and small and Chinese and furious like you.”

  He drank some beer, and I glared at him.

  “I know why you’re mad.” He put the bottle down. “You hate this woman for making you nervous. You wanted to turn her down, but you had to take her case so your mother wouldn’t lose face, and now you’re stuck. Boy, you really hate being told what to do, don’t you?”

  “You should know.” I finished the squid. The stainless steel teapot wasn’t empty yet, so I poured another cup.

  Bill waited until I’d finished before he took out his cigarettes. “Is it all right?”

  I didn’t know if he was asking me if he could smoke now, or if I felt better. “Go ahead.” Then I sighed, ran my hand through my hair. “I guess you’re right.”

  “Well, that’s rare enough.” He dropped a match in the white ashtray with the red peacock on it. “Then the case is okay, it’s the client who bothers you?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t like this case.”

  “Why? What’s it about?”

  “Mrs. Lee wants us to follow her son’s fiancée. A woman named Jill Moore.”

  “She doesn’t sound Chinese.”

  “That’s sort of the point. She’s tall and blonde and according to Mrs. Lee completely untrustworthy. Mrs. Lee thinks she’s cheating on her son.”

  “Does her son think so?”

  “No, and Mrs. Lee doesn’t want him to know what we’re doing until we have proof.”

  “Do you know him? The son?”

  I nodded. “Lee Kuan Cheng. Kuan Cheng Lee to you. He’s a few years younger than me, but when you grow up around here, you sort of know everybody.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “When he was twelve he took on my twin cousins in the schoolyard because they beat him out on a math test. He’s very competitive. They fought like weasels in a sack; I had to separate them. I think I still have a scar.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Sounds like your cousins were sort of competitive, too.”

  “In my family? Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Bill tipped the ash off his cigarette. “So what don’t you like about it?”

  “She wants it to be true.”

  “Mrs. Lee does?”

  “Yes. She was sitting there with an I-told-you-so smile, as though she’d already proved it. ‘Jill Moore like rice,’ she said. She looked like—what is it you people say? The cat that ate the canary?”

  “That’s what we people say. What does that mean, to like rice?”

  “Yellow fever. Whites who are attracted to Asians just because we’re exotic, or whatever it is your people think we are.”

  “Paranoid.”

  “Is that attractive?”

  “On you it is. Go on.”

  I sighed, but I went on. “Jill Moore and Kuan Cheng are both NYU students. Kuan Cheng is getting an MBA so he can go into his mother’s business. Jill Moore’s in Asian studies.”

  “That’s suspicious.”

  “Mrs. Lee thinks so. Kuan Cheng took Jill over to Mrs. Lee’s apartment about six weeks ago, trying to make a good impression on the future mother-in-law. It was the first and only time they’ve ever met. She got Jill alone for twenty minutes, and based on that conversation, she’s sure Jill Moore is only interested in Kuan Cheng for some perverse white-creature sexual reason.”

  “Don’t knock white-creature sexual perversions until you’ve tried them.”

  “Oh, drop it, will you?” Sometimes I’m in the mood for that sort of stuff from Bill, but not always. “Anyhow, when I asked Mrs. Lee what made her suspect that, she gave me this superior look and said, ‘Just, mother know. You follow, you see.’ I wanted to sock her.”

 
“Sounds to me like she wants to break up what she considers an unsuitable match for her baby. That’s not admirable, but it’s not unusual.”

  “Yeah, but I like happy endings. If Jill Moore and Kuan Cheng Lee love each other, what business is it of his mother’s? I mean, who asked her? But if I can’t get proof that he’s being cheated on, she won’t believe it’s because she was wrong. She’ll go around telling all of Chinatown what an incompetent detective I am. That would be terrible for my mother.”

  “So,” Bill said, “you can’t win either way. If she’s right, you’ll be disillusioned. If she’s wrong, you’ll be in trouble.”

  “That’s it,” I sighed. “Exactly.”

  The waiter appeared, smiling shyly. He brought us the check and two glass bowls of quivering maroon gelatin, each crowned with an almond cookie.

  “What’s that?” Bill eyed his bowl suspiciously.

  I looked over to the door where Mr. Han, the proprietor, smiled broadly at me. I called to him in Chinese; he answered.

  “It’s a bean paste jelly his new chef makes,” I told Bill. “He says even white people like it.”

  “At least he admits I’m a person.”

  “Well, he didn’t exactly say that.” He put his cigarette out, and we tried the jelly. It was sweet, tasting delicately of lychee and orange.

  “Tell him I like it,” Bill said.

  I called to Mr. Han again. From his post by the door he smiled and bowed.

  “What you’re speaking with him,” Bill said, “that’s Cantonese?”

  “Uh-huh. Only spoken by peasants like Uncle Hun-jo and me. I’m sure Mrs. Lee understands it, since she’s lived in Chinatown twenty years, but she wouldn’t stoop to speak such a harsh, nasty-sounding language.”

  “Is it nasty-sounding?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  Out on the crowded sidewalk the November air was cold. High thin clouds diluted the sunlight, and a breeze herded papers this way and that in the gutter, practicing for winter.

  Walking north, we maneuvered around old Chinese ladies with short gray hair and padded jackets, picking over vegetables shoulder to shoulder with uptown shoppers who didn’t know the names of the greens they were buying. A group of camera-hung tourists peered into guidebooks at the streets I grew up in. Vendors hawked cotton socks and radio-controlled toy cars, calling in broken English, “Three, five dollar!” and, “See it goes!” The street vendors are often the newest immigrants; sometimes those are the only English words they yet know.

  “I think Mrs. Lee speaks better English than she lets on, too,” I said to Bill as we crossed Canal. “Or at least understands more.”

  “Her English wasn’t good?”

  “It was snooty and condescending, but her grammar was terrible. I think she refuses to learn it better, or to speak it as well as she already knows how. It would be giving in.”

  We single-filed past the sidewalk tables of a cafe in what used to be Little Italy and is still called that, though every other storefront sign now is in Chinese. “So,” Bill said, “what now?”

  “Now we go lurk outside Jill Moore’s afternoon class and see how far we can tail her without getting spotted.”

  “Together? About a foot and a half.”

  Bill’s thirteen inches taller, eighty pounds heavier, and twelve years older than I am, with big hands and a face that sort of shows he’s been a P.I. for twenty years. I’m small, though I’m always saying I’m quicker and he’s always saying I’m in better shape than he is. And we both know I’m a better shot, though it was him who taught me to shoot. I practice a lot.

  And besides all that, of course, I’m Chinese. And he’s not. We do make a weird-looking pair.

  “No,” I said. “Not together. We lurk in different places.”

  It’s a technique he taught me, and we use it often. It’s good to have two people on a tail, because subjects can be surprisingly sneaky about losing you, even when they don’t know you’re there. The only reason not to do it is if the client can’t afford it. When I’d quoted rates to Mrs. Lee, she’d balked—“Too much. Inexperience child. I pay half.”—and we’d had to haggle, but I’d expected that, so I’d started high. Now, for what she thought she was paying for me, she was getting both me and Bill.

  I considered that a bargain.

  Jill Moore’s afternoon class met in an old white big-windowed NYU building on the east side of Washington Square. Tracking her down had taken me most of the hour between the time Mrs. Lee had sniffed her disdainful way out of my office and the time I’d met Bill for lunch. I’d had to use two different voices on the phone. For the Student Life office I was a confused clerk from the bursar’s office who’d gotten Jill Moore hopelessly mixed up with Joe Moore, or Joan Moore, or God knows who. The other voice, when I’d gotten Jill Moore’s address and schedule, was for Asian studies.

  “Herro,” I’d said, blurring the distinction between L’s and R’s the way we’re all supposed to. “I am Chin Ling Wan-ju—” that was the true part “—ah, guest lecturer in Flowering of Ming Dynasty Art, today. Supposed speak on ‘Spirit Scrolls of Ming Emperors.’ So foolish, lose all direction. Tell me, please, where to meet?”

  They were glad to.

  Bill pointed out, when I told him about it, that they might have been glad to if I’d just called up like a regular person and asked. But I always like to try out my moves when I get a chance.

  Armed with the photograph Mrs. Lee had given me from the afternoon with her daughter-in-law-elect, Bill settled on a bench at the edge of the park with the other bums. I felt his eyes on me as I crossed the street to the classroom building.

  I entered the building along with a group of four NYU women, one in jeans, one in sixties daisy-patterned leggings, two in short skirts. I made three in short skirts. The guard at the security desk, who would have stopped Bill in a second, hardly even looked at me, except to evaluate my legs relative to the other legs sticking out of the skirts.

  We all got on the elevator, but I got off first, on the third floor. I went around the corner to the room where someone was lecturing to a hall full of students on the Flowering of Ming Dynasty Art. Not on Spirit Scrolls, presumably, even if there really were such things, which I doubted.

  I settled myself on the floor at the other end of the hall where I’d have a good view of the classroom door and took The Catcher in the Rye out of my leather knapsack. I’d read it when I was fourteen and it hadn’t done a thing for me, but I thought maybe, in this setting, I’d give it another chance.

  After fifteen minutes of giving it another chance, a bell clanged and all hell broke loose. Doors burst open everywhere. The advance guard—students whose next class was all the way across campus—charged out of the classrooms and were in the elevator or bouncing down the stairs before the profs had finished giving the reading assignments. Then came the slower ones, juggling books, notebooks, backpacks, and handbags the size of carryons. Textbooks thumped closed and zippers zipped and kids called to each other down the hall in exuberant voices and lots of different accents.

  I stood, slipped my knapsack on, searched the faces pouring out of the lecture hall for the one in Mrs. Lee’s photograph.

  Jill Moore was not hard to spot. She wore a white shirt and bluejeans, dangling brass earrings, and, I noticed, a small diamond ring on her left hand. That encouraged me. A woman who was cheating wouldn’t wear her engagement ring while she did it, would she?

  Of course, rings are easy to take off.

  As Jill Moore made room in her canvas carryall for her notebook, a handsome Asian man worked his way through the throng. He called her name. She turned, spotted him, smiled playfully. He reached her, seemed to be asking a question, but they were speaking low; I couldn’t hear them. Still smiling, she shook her head, then looked around quickly. She leaned close and whispered something. He nodded. Then she squeezed his arm, twinkled her eyes, and was gone down the stairs.

  I
clumped down after her, thinking damn, damn, damn. I didn’t know who that guy was, but he wasn’t Kuan Cheng Lee.

  I followed Jill Moore for the rest of the afternoon, through Washington Square Park, where the fallen leaves were restless on the asphalt paths, to the NYU library where she studied for two hours, and I decided to give away my copy of The Catcher in the Rye. After that we shopped a little along Sixth Avenue, had cappuccino at the Caffee Lucca—she indoors, I out—and then, around seven, we wandered back to an old brick building on MacDougal Street. The whole time I could feel Bill nearby, always down the block or across the street from us, a figure at the corner of my eye who wasn’t there when I looked.

  The MacDougal Street building was what I’d been given as Jill Moore’s address by the helpful secretary at the Student Life office. I watched her go in, and I watched the lights come on in a fourth-floor front apartment a minute later.

  Across the street and down a little was another cafe. That’s what I love about New York. I don’t know how P. I.’s do this in the suburbs.

  I settled at a table by the window in time to see Bill stroll around the corner and disappear. If the apartment building had a rear exit into an alley, I wouldn’t see him again for a while. He’d plant himself there, waiting until Jill Moore came out that way, or until I found him to say we were knocking off for the evening. This case was mine, so that decision was mine to make.

  There must have been no alley, because he was back in a few minutes, lighting a cigarette on the street corner. I stuck my head out the cafe door, waved for him to come in.

  He joined me at my round wooden table, ordered espresso and a Napoleon. I got peppermint tea.

  “Thanks, chief,” Bill grinned when the waiter was gone. “It was getting cold out there.”

  “Well, she may be in for the evening,” I said. “If she’s not, we can leave here separately.”

  But it turned out she was. As we sipped our drinks I told Bill about the man Jill Moore had huddled with outside of class. He said that seemed innocent enough to him, and I said the same thing, but I wasn’t so sure, and neither was he, although he didn’t say that. After about an hour we ordered an antipasto and shared it, dividing up chewy pepperoni, vinegared hot peppers, creamy rounds of provolone.