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

by Linda Landrigan

  “How can you eat this after pastry?” I demanded.

  “It’s the white trash way of life.”

  “See,” I said glumly. “The fact is we will never understand each other.”

  “And if we don’t,” Bill said, unearthing an anchovy and depositing it on my plate, because they’re my favorite, “is that necessarily because I’m white and you’re Chinese?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It necessarily is.”

  When we’d come in, there had been opera in the air, dramatic voices crashing together or lamenting separately in ways I was sure would break my heart if I understood them. After that there had been silence softened by murmured conversations. Now the elegant mahogany-skinned waiter clicked a new tape into the tape deck, and the swift notes of a piano tinkled around us. Bill’s face grew distracted, just for a moment; maybe someone else wouldn’t have noticed.

  “Do you play this?” I asked him.

  “Yes.”

  “What is it?”

  “Beethoven. The Waldstein Sonata. I don’t play it this well.”

  “Do you—” I began. Bill put a sudden hand on my arm.

  “Look,” he said, nodding toward the window. “Is that the guy you saw this afternoon?”

  The outer door to Jill Moore’s building stood open. As we watched, a young Asian man took the stoop steps two at a time, then unlocked the inner door and let himself in. He was carrying a knapsack and a bag of groceries.

  “No,” I said. “That’s Kuan Cheng Lee.”

  Nothing else happened that evening. Kuan Cheng, according to his mother, had an apartment on East Ninth Street. “Good for son,” she’d informed me. “Live by own self, learn manage household. Later will able treat mother proper way.” I didn’t know what sort of household Kuan Cheng would learn to manage in a Ninth Street walkup, nor had I been sure that this wasn’t just Mrs. Lee saving face by pretending to approve of her son’s moving out. What was clear was that she intended, eventually, to establish herself in whatever household he set up. Well, as a Chinese mother, that was her right.

  Kuan Cheng didn’t come out, and no one else we cared about—meaning no Asian men—went in, and around ten I called it off. I paid the check, took the receipt for Mrs. Lee, and left a big tip. Bill and I walked south on Sixth to Canal in the chilly, blue New York night. Traffic rushed up Sixth in a hurry to get someplace, it wasn’t clear where.

  At Canal we arranged to meet the next morning and start all over again. We kissed good-night lightly, the way we always do, and I felt a little guilty and confused, the way I always do. Bill wants more than that from me, but he understands how I feel, and though he comes on a lot in a kidding sort of way, he never pushes it. Somehow that makes me feel guilty and confused.

  Then we parted. Bill turned right to his Laight Street apartment and I turned left, to Chinatown.

  THE MORNING WAS overcast and chillier than the day before had been. Jill Moore had a nine o’clock class; at a quarter to nine Bill and I watched from separate corners as she and Kuan Cheng Lee came out of her building and walked up MacDougal Street. They were smiling and talking, Jill Moore’s eyes twinkling as they had the day before, with the other Asian man.

  The day was pretty boring, and I began to feel bad for Bill, who spent most of it on park benches. He doesn’t like to be cold. I was fine, sitting in the hallway of the white building, in the student cafeteria (which was noisier than I ever remember my college cafeteria being), in the library, and then back in the white building. I had ditched The Catcher in the Rye and wrapped Surveillance and Undercover Operations: A Manual in brown paper so I had something to read in the long stretches between clanging bells.

  Jill Moore’s afternoon class let out at three-thirty. I was sitting on the windowsill at the end of the corridor when her lecture hall door opened. She was among the first out, hefting her bag, hurrying to the stairs. She galloped down them, and I followed her in a crowd of rushing people. I didn’t get a chance to shove Surveillance and Undercover Operations back in my knapsack until we were striding across Washington Square Park. Jill Moore had much longer legs than I do—well, who doesn’t?—and I began to wish for my Rollerblades, except that I had no idea where we were going. I also had Bill, who was keeping up with her pretty well, strolling along in a bum sort of way.

  My idea about where we were going was right, and as Jill Moore unlocked the door to her building, Bill and I converged on the cafe across the street. The window tables were taken, but it was a small cafe; we could see the old brick building from the table we chose.

  “Jesus Christ,” Bill said, breathing on his hands to warm them. “I ought to charge you double for freezing.”

  “You ought to wear silk underwear.”

  “Will you buy it for me? I’ll model it.”

  The thought of Bill’s striking model’s poses in silk underwear almost made me spray my peppermint tea all over the table. “Go ahead,” he said. “Laugh at me. I—” He stopped. I followed his gaze out the window, and we saw what I’d been hoping we wouldn’t.

  The handsome young Asian man Jill Moore had twinkled her eyes at yesterday came quickly down MacDougal from the direction of NYU. He looked around, entered her vestibule, rang an apartment bell. He was buzzed in.

  “Oh, damn,” I said, in a little voice.

  We watched; nothing else happened; we drank a little. With a lift of his eyebrows Bill offered me some apricot tart. I turned it down. The guy didn’t come out. “Kuan Cheng has an afternoon class,” I told Bill. “A seminar. His mother told me. Tuesdays and Thursdays until six.”

  “Otherwise his schedule coincides pretty much with hers?”

  I nodded.

  “So this is the only time she can be sure of being alone.”

  “I guess.”

  Bill sipped his cocoa. “Listen,” he said. “This isn’t your problem. You were hired to find out what’s going on. Now your job is to take the client proof. How people behave isn’t your problem.”

  “I know,” I said. “But I like happy endings.”

  We discussed the fact that it might not be what it looked like, and of course that was true. We also discussed more practical things, like how to get photographs of whatever it was. This is where investigating in the suburbs has its advantages. You can’t slink through the shrubbery and shinny up the drainpipe when the subject’s in a fourth-floor walkup on MacDougal Street.

  You can, however, climb to the opposite roof.

  Bill zipped his jacket and left. I watched Jill Moore’s window. The shade, which she had pulled last night after she’d switched on the lights, was still lifted, and the lights were off. We had reached that time of year when it begins to get dark by four-thirty. I was hoping we’d have time to find a place to look into the window before Jill Moore felt she needed lights and drawn shades.

  Or, maybe, for what she was doing, she wouldn’t need lights at all.

  Bill was back in ten minutes. “Okay,” he said, sitting down. “The building directly across from her, where the laundromat is. I talked to the super.”

  “And he just said go ahead?”

  “I gave him fifty dollars.”

  “Fifty?” I was aghast.

  “The guy could get in trouble. The guy could lose his job. The guy could smell a quick buck when it came his way.”

  “Well, I guess it’s okay. I guess Mrs. Lee won’t mind paying that to get the goods.” I knew she wouldn’t. I paid the check, went out the door Bill held open for me.

  At the laundromat building we rang the super’s bell. An unshaven man emerged from a rear apartment, led us wordlessly up slanted stairs to the roof. He unlocked the bulkhead door for us.

  “You be sure to close the damn thing tight, you come in,” he growled at Bill.

  “Sure,” Bill said. “Thanks.”

  The super grunted, looked once at me, turned and shuffled downstairs.

  The building was lower than Jill Moore’s building across the street; the roof was about half a
story higher than her window. The asphalt roofing slanted up to the top of the cornice at the front.

  I lay on my belly on the asphalt and took the binoculars out of my knapsack. Peering through them over the cornice, I had a perfect view into Jill Moore’s window.

  “What’s happening?” Bill was low beside me.

  “It’s a living room. They’re drinking tea and talking.” I crawled back down a little and passed him the binoculars.

  He peered over the top of the cornice.

  “The light’s fading. If you’re going to take pictures, you’d better do it soon.”

  “This isn’t very juicy stuff to take pictures of,” I grumbled, but I got out the camera, attached the telephoto lens, and clicked away. I took half a roll, then waited in case Jill Moore and the unknown Asian did something more dramatic. Instead, Jill Moore got up, turned on a lamp in the living room, and drew the shades.

  “Fooey,” I said.

  “We can come back Thursday if you want,” Bill said.

  “Personally I don’t want. But Mrs. Lee might want.”

  We went back in the bulkhead door—closing it tight—and down the street. We trudged south on Sixth Avenue; the air was cold and the car horns blared at each other ill-temperedly.

  “I don’t understand white people,” I said. “I really don’t. You saw her this morning with Kuan Cheng. She was happy. She’s enjoying this. She’s having a great time. You white people.”

  “Hey,” Bill said. “I didn’t do it.”

  “Yeah, but I’ll bet you understand it. Romantic love isn’t even a Chinese concept. Your people invented it. How come you mess around with it like this?”

  I knew I was being unfair to him, and he knew not to answer.

  I called Mrs. Lee as soon as I got back to my office. “I have something I think you’ll want to see,” I said. “I left some film to be developed. They say I can pick it up at six.” I didn’t ask her to meet me. That would be too forward, not respectful. If what I said was of interest, she would tell me what she wanted me to do.

  “I come your office,” Mrs. Lee told me. “Six thirty. You there. On time.”

  “Yes,” I said, controlling my temper. “I’ll be there. On time. Thank you, Mrs. Lee.” I hung up the phone furious with myself. Thank you? Thank you?

  I went home, kissed my mother, and told her Mrs. Lee and I were getting along fine. I grabbed my Rollerblades before she could ask me any questions and speedskated through the spookily empty downtown streets to Battery Park. I worked out hard, until it was time to skate back to Chinatown and give Mrs. Lee proof that there are no happy endings.

  I called Bill early the next morning. “I gave her the pictures,” I said.

  “How did she like them?”

  “She loved them. She gave me this horrible smile—all hard around the edges, you know?—and said, ‘Mother know. Mother always know best for son.’ I said they weren’t doing anything interesting in the picture, just talking, and that usually in this sort of situation I’d recommend keeping the surveillance going another few days.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “She sort of smirked. ‘Oh-ho, greedy girl. Not need, not pay. Plenty here. How much bill?’ I worked it out and she paid, right there, in cash.”

  “So that’s it.”

  “Well,” I said, “well, no.”

  “Oh-ho,” Bill said. “Masochist girl. You want follow Jill Moore more.”

  “That’s right.” I ignored his phony Chinese accent, which was really pretty good. “I know it’s none of my business—”

  “I’ll meet you in half an hour outside her building.”

  I hesitated. “I’m not sure I can pay you,” I said. “I mean, the case is over.”

  “There are other ways you could pay me.”

  “Yes, but I won’t.”

  “I know. But just think of the debt you’re racking up.”

  “Junk bonds,” I said.

  We followed Jill Moore for the next two days. She was taking her classes: Ming Dynasty Art; Admiral Perry and the Opening of Japan; Topics in South Asian Political History; and Women in Chinese Culture. You’d better study harder in that one, I thought. I hung around all her classrooms, and even sat in on the Ming Dynasty Art lecture. It was pretty interesting, nice slides of glazed bowls and sumptuous silk robes. I tailed her to lunch, to the bookstore, and to the library, where she hauled a thick green book and a spiral notebook out of her bag and was so deep in concentration when I walked by her that she didn’t even look up. I walked by the other way, too. I just wanted to see what she was doing.

  “That was a little risky,” Bill said later that afternoon, in the cafe I’d come to think of as ours. It was Thursday by now, the day Kuan Cheng Lee had a seminar until seven.

  “I know,” I said. “I shouldn’t have. I was bad.”

  “So what was she doing?”

  “Nothing interesting. Translating very, very elementary Mandarin. Filling a notebook full of clumsy characters.”

  “Like me? Big coarse clumsy foreign characters?”

  “Is that still bothering you? I’m sorry I said that. I didn’t mean it.”

  “It doesn’t bother me. I just wanted to make you feel guilty.”

  “It’s a cheap shot, making a Chinese daughter feel guilty. Anybody can do it. Oh, Bill. Oh, damn. Look.”

  Bill turned where I was pointing. Hurrying up MacDougal Street was the handsome Asian fellow. He had three textbooks under his arm, and he was in such a rush to get to Jill Moore’s doorbell that he dropped one of them on his toe as he leapt up the stoop.

  “Serves him right,” I announced, as we watched him hop around for a minute, then scoop up the thick green book and hit the bell. He was buzzed, limping, in.

  “That’s unworthy,” Bill reprimanded me. I didn’t listen, because I’d just had a thought. I wanted to tell Bill about it—god, I hoped I was right!—but I didn’t get the chance. As I opened my mouth, Kuan Cheng Lee raced down the sidewalk and up the same stoop. He let himself in the vestibule door, but not before his jacket blew open in a gust of wind.

  He had a gun.

  Bill must have seen it, too, because he jumped from the table at the same time I did. We charged out the cafe door, leaving the elegant waiter open-mouthed.

  By the time we got to the vestibule the door was closed, and we lost seconds trying to be buzzed in. You always can in New York and eventually we did, but not before my heart was pounding crazily and I’d caught such an adrenaline rush that I wanted to kick the door in myself.

  Bill went first because he can take stairs two at a time. I dashed up straight flights and around landings after him. A baby howled behind a door. Bill’s footsteps thumped over my lighter, faster ones: then the sound of his changed as he hit the fourth floor and ran down the hall. He was almost at the front apartment’s door when we heard a shot.

  If you hadn’t known, it could have been carpentry, hammer hitting wood. But he knew. Bill pounded on the door. “Police! Open up!” Crude, but effective. All sound stopped within.

  I reached the door. “Lee Kuan Cheng!” I called. “It’s Lydia Chin. Let me in. Don’t shoot again.”

  Bill and I flattened ourselves on either side of the door, guns drawn, backs against the wall. Down the hall a door cracked, a face peered out. “Police!” Bill barked. “Get back inside!”

  The face retreated hastily.

  “Someday you’ll get in trouble for that,” I whispered.

  “I always do.”

  “Can you break it in?”

  He looked at the door, nodded.

  “Kuan Cheng!” I called again. “Let me in! Let me talk to you. Don’t hurt anyone, Kuan Cheng.”

  Nothing happened. Bill’s eyes met mine. He backed a little, then threw himself against the unsuspecting door. It shuddered; he did it again, harder, and the door flew open, hinges shrieking. Bill went in low with it. I dived in even lower, so that any bullets Kuan Cheng fired would have a chance to miss us
in the empty doorway. But he didn’t fire any. He stood in the kitchen, maybe eight feet from us, face twisted in anger and fear. His skin was shiny with sweat. He held his elbows locked, his gun gripped in both shaking hands. Bill and I held guns on him, too, which meant if we were lucky, one of us would survive this.

  Great.

  “Kuan Cheng, don’t,” I said. “Put it down.” I wasn’t sure he could hear me over the beating of my heart.

  He spoke. “She took a lover!” His voice was loud and hoarse. “Not even married yet, and she took a lover. Humiliated me everywhere! My mother knows! I’ll kill her. I’ll kill them both!”

  “No,” I said.

  “No,” a woman’s cracked voice came from the shadowed room behind Kuan Cheng. “No!”

  I peered down the hallway to the living room. In the fading light from the windows I saw Jill Moore kneeling, her arms wrapped protectively around the other man, the handsome Asian, whose white shirt showed a dark stain at the shoulder. His eyes were wide open with fear.

  “Please!” Jill Moore’s high, quavering voice was close to hysterical. “Kuan Cheng! It’s not what you think!”

  “Oh, no?” He whipped the gun in their direction, and his skin flushed darker.

  “No,” I said, grabbing for his attention. He was close to hysterical, too, and the sight of the other man in Jill Moore’s arms wouldn’t do him any good. “Kuan Cheng, he’s not her lover.”

  He spun back to me. “Not her lover?” he sneered. “What, her younger brother?”

  “No,” I said. “He’s her Mandarin teacher.”

  Disbelief, confusion, and anger chased each other across his face.

  “Jill!” I yelled. “Am I right?”

  “Yes!” she called. Her voice cracked again. “Kuan Cheng, I was going to surprise you. I didn’t want you to know until I could speak it well.” She made a small sobbing sound.

  Kuan Cheng, his gun still trained on me, his body rigid and tense, glanced quickly into the living room, then back to me. He said nothing.