A Deadly Business (A Mia Quinn Mystery)

by Lis Wiehl

  “Exactly. I’m guessing it’s just easier to take the information they give you and prepare the books and the returns from that. And if they don’t give you everything, well, that’s on them.”

  Kenny Zhong, owner of the four Jade Kitchen restaurants, turned out to be no bigger than Mia’s son, Gabe. In fact, Charlie thought as he shook the other man’s hand, staring down at the top of his head, he might even be smaller.

  “I really appreciate you coming out here to meet with me and my friend Charlie,” Mia told Zhong. They were standing in the lobby. The restaurant was crowded. Only a few of the customers were Asian.

  “I am honored.” Zhong clasped his hands and made a little bow. If he was wondering who Charlie was, his face did not betray it. “Have you eaten?”

  When Mia hesitated, he said, “Please, please, you must eat.” He barked an order in Chinese at a young waitress in a high-collared silver blouse. She wore her long hair pinned up, her bangs falling slantwise over her eyes.

  She led them to a table in the back. Charlie automatically took a seat on the banquette so that he faced the door. His cop habits were so ingrained in him that they were second nature. Whenever he encountered someone he looked at their hands first even before he looked at their faces. His first partner had drilled it into his head, saying over and over, “They can only hurt you with their hands.”

  Mia sat on the other end of the upholstered bench, and Zhong took a chair opposite. The waitress scurried over with three menus, but he waved them away. “I order for you, okay? Specialties of the house.”

  After they both nodded, he rattled off orders in rapid-fire Chinese. Then he turned back to them. “America is a great country. I came here seven years ago with nothing, and now I own four restaurants.”

  Hard work would get you a lot of things, but would it really get you four restaurants in seven years? Was Zhong in debt? Or was he cheating the tax man, as Scott’s letter had suggested, and plowing it back into his business? Or maybe the Chinese community had all pulled together to make one of their own successful.

  “Is the food you serve here like what you ate at home?” Mia asked.

  “No.” His tone was amused. “Not at all. I am from the Guangdong Province. Here they call it Canton. Everything at home is so fresh. You walk into a restaurant, you pick out what you want to eat from a cage or tank or bucket.”

  Charlie did not want to think about what might be kept in a bucket.

  “You mean it’s still alive?” Mia asked, wrinkling her nose.

  Zhong laughed. “The rest of China say we will eat anything with legs that is not a table and anything with wings that is not a plane. No one here really wants to eat like that. Americans won’t eat snake, except as a joke, and they would never eat dog or rat. Even if they say they appreciate authentic cuisine. Even though eating snake make you stronger and rat keep you from going bald.” He must have seen their expressions. “No worries. Chicken, beef, pork, shrimp—that’s all we have on the menu here.”

  Charlie was pretty sure that only shrimp looked like shrimp. He resolved to stick with that.

  Mia cut to the chase. “I should have come to you earlier,” she said, “but I only recently learned that this restaurant is where Scott ate his last meal. But I don’t know who he was with. Did he eat here with you that night?”

  “Oh no, no.” Zhong frowned and shook his head. “We meet many times in our main restaurant, which is on Queen Anne in Seattle. And of course we always eat there. But I never met him here.”

  “Do you have any surveillance tapes we could look at?” Charlie asked. “To maybe see who he was with that night?” After seven months it was a long shot, but sometimes if you took enough of them, one hit a target.

  “No, I don’t,” Zhong said. “Sorry.”

  “Would you mind if we asked the staff after we talk?” Mia asked. “Just in case one of them remembers who he was with that night?”

  “Of course,” the other man said. With his unlined face, it was impossible to guess how old Kenny Zhong was. He might be thirty, he might be fifty. The only thing Charlie was sure of was that his name probably wasn’t Kenny. “That is not a problem.”

  The waitress came up with three tall glasses filled with a pale yellow frothy concoction. She set them down, and Charlie saw that faint marks braceleted her right wrist. They were the size and shape of fingerprints. He was careful not to stare.

  “This was Scott’s favorite drink when we met in Seattle,” Zhong told them. “Our honey ginger latte. All high quality—the best ginger and honey, and a superior grade of creamer.” He lifted his glass to them.

  It was sweet and smooth, rich and creamy, with an underlying bite from the ginger. It was strange to think that Scott might have sat at this very table about seven months ago, drinking this same drink, not knowing he only had an hour or so to live.

  “Did you ever see him drink alcohol?” Mia asked in a steady voice.

  Zhong furrowed his brow. “Your husband did not drink. He was very clear about that.”

  Charlie wondered what was more important to Kenny: to tell a widow the truth, or to keep the secrets of his dead friend?

  Next came a selection of dim sum. One came with a dipping sauce that tasted of soy and honey, ginger and garlic. Charlie resisted the urge to double-dip. He also tried to get a second look at the waitress’s wrist, but she moved too fast. When the main courses came, some of the dishes were spicy and some were sweet, but whatever they were, it was all good. Charlie flung caution to the wind and even ate some smooth white meat that looked like chicken and some of the pale and more fibrous meat that certainly seemed to be pork.

  As he chewed, he tried very hard not to think about what rat would look like.

  “The other thing I wanted to ask you about was my husband’s services as your accountant. I, um, found a note that he wrote you about your business.” Mia lowered her eyes to her lap, as if overcome by shyness, but Charlie kept his eyes on Zhong.

  Who didn’t blink.

  “Scott is always working with me, explaining how it is not like China here.”

  “How is it different?” Charlie said.

  “In China, we have guanxi.” He pronounced it gwan-she. “You want to get anything done in China, you need guanxi. It’s all about relationships. We have a saying, ‘No guanxi? No good!’ ”

  “What is guanxi exactly?” Mia asked.

  “In China, guanxi means you should give your customers a box of moon cakes during the Mid-August Festival. It’s just something nice you do, to be friendly. Or maybe it is a meal or a spa treatment or a ticket to a basketball game. It smooths the way.” He flattened the air with his hands. “It is absolutely key to getting things done in China.”

  Mia said carefully, “In some cases in the United States, we would call that a bribe.”

  He reared back. “It is not a bribe. It is a relationship. For example, Scott introduced me to Oleg Popov. And now I buy the jewelry I use for gifts from him. To thank Scott, I gave him free meals at our restaurant.”

  “One hand washes the other,” Charlie said blandly.

  He nodded at Charlie. “Yes. Exactly.”

  “I found a note where Scott told you that you didn’t have enough cash receipts,” Mia persisted. “What happened after he told you that?”

  “Scott knew how to give face,” Zhong said. “He never embarrassed me. He never made me feel like a stupid person who did not understand numbers. It made me take a closer look at how my business was being run. To make sure everything accurate, everything matching up.” He brought the fingers of his two hands together.

  Charlie was willing to bet that he had just gotten better at hiding things. And that Scott had probably helped.

  Mia asked one last question. “Did you know Betty Eastman?”

  Now it was her face that was blank and Zhong who looked away. Looking at him, Charlie was sure Zhong knew the truth.

  “She came with him to the other restaurant a few times. She helped
him with his business, I believe. I did not know her well.”

  When their meal was over, both Charlie and Mia took out their wallets. But Zhong refused to accept any payment, saying he owed it to Scott’s memory. Charlie whispered into Mia’s ear, “It looks like we’ve got a Mexican standoff,” but she didn’t smile. She also didn’t succeed in paying.

  Then Zhong gathered the five waitresses and two busboys that he thought might have been working that night and spoke to them in Chinese. They all nodded, and then Mia found a photo of Scott on her phone and handed it to the nearest one. Charlie found himself wondering how often Mia looked at that photo and what she thought when she did.

  The first girl took a quick look at Mia’s phone and then passed it to the waitress next to her. And so it went, hand to hand. Charlie watched closely, but no one’s expression changed.

  When they were finished, Zhong barked a question. They all shook their heads. “I am so sorry,” he said, turning to them. “No one remembers Scott being here. Of course, why should they remember one person out of many seven months ago?”

  The thing was, the waitress with the bruised wrist—Charlie thought he had seen the faintest shiver run through her.

  CHAPTER 43

  As Charlie walked briskly back to the car, Mia trailed a bit behind him. She was in no hurry to go to the place where Scott had drawn his last breath. She didn’t believe in ghosts, but it still seemed like it might hold an echo of his last desperate struggle.

  She just hoped he had been unconscious when the blows had come.

  “Lady!” An urgent whisper broke the silence.

  She turned.

  “Lady!” It was an Asian man dressed in a stained and wrinkled white uniform. Standing between a side door and two big black trash receptacles, he beckoned her closer.

  Mia turned back to look for Charlie, but he had his back to her. He was talking on his cell phone, one foot up on the frame of the open door of his car.

  “Lady!” Cringing, the man beckoned her with both hands.

  She did not want to venture into that shadowed space with a stranger. Shaking her head, Mia motioned for him to come to her.

  He shook his head even more violently than she had. Then he pointed at a spot high above the entrance doors. She followed his finger to something tucked up in the eaves.

  It was painted the same color as the restaurant’s exterior, but it looked like a small video camera. A video camera that must have a good view of most of the parking lot.

  But hadn’t Kenny Zhong just told them that he didn’t have any video footage? Or maybe he had thought Mia meant just of the inside of the restaurant? Or just of that night, months earlier?

  She tore her eyes away. If someone was currently monitoring or later reviewed this tape and saw her stare, they might also realize who had shown it to her. If this cowering man was so afraid, she didn’t want to get him into trouble.

  Mia hurried over to him. He was dancing on his tiptoes, looking ready to break into a run. The air stank of fryer grease that had been used and reused and re-reused. She thought of the pot stickers that had begun the meal and her stomach roiled.

  “You Mrs. Scott?” he asked.

  “Yes?” This guy wasn’t one of the people who had looked at Scott’s photo. He must work in the back of the restaurant. Judging by his damp, dirty apron, Mia thought it likely that he was a dishwasher rather than a cook. At least she hoped he wasn’t a cook.

  “He . . . he . . .”

  As the man searched for a word, Mia found herself wanting to fill in the blank. Only she had no idea what it was.

  Finally his face lightened as he found what he was looking for. “He help.” He nodded, watching her expectantly.

  “Help who? With what?” Mia didn’t understand what this man was trying to say, but she did understand his body language, his nervous darting glances. He was afraid someone would see them together. Terrified.

  His mouth opened, but then he suddenly jerked his head to look over his shoulder. His head whipped back to her. “Go,” he whispered urgently, his hands now flapping at her to get away. “Go!”

  His fear was now hers. She turned and hurried back toward Charlie. When she looked back, the man had disappeared.

  Charlie was still holding his phone, but he wasn’t talking on it anymore. Instead, he was watching her. “Who were you talking to?”

  “I don’t know. A dishwasher, I guess. And I don’t know if talking’s the right word. All he did was ask me if I was Mrs. Scott. And when I said I was, he told me, and I quote, ‘He help.’ He seemed to think that was enough for me to understand.”

  “Do you think he meant Scott was helping someone? Helping him? Helping someone to do what?”

  “I started to ask those questions, but he must have heard somebody coming. He freaked out and told me to go, and then he went back inside.”

  “So much for no one knowing anything about Scott.”

  Something more than old fryer grease smelled bad here. But even though Mia was angry, she also had to think things through.

  “Yeah, but if I go storming back in the door and demand to speak to that guy, whoever he is, I’ll bet that he would pretend to speak even less English than he does. Plus, by the way he was acting, he was worried about getting caught. So it wouldn’t do me any good, but it might end up costing him his job.” She remembered what he had shown her. “Oh, and you’ll love this, Charlie.”

  “What?”

  “He pointed at something, and I’m pretty sure it’s a video camera mounted up in the eaves. I’d say it has a good view of the entrance and most of the parking lot.”

  Charlie snorted. “So that’s another thing Kenny lied to us about.”

  “Well, it might not be a lie, but it’s not all the truth either. He didn’t say they didn’t have a video camera. He just said they didn’t have footage from that night.”

  “Something about this place bugs me.” With narrowed eyes Charlie looked past Mia and at the restaurant. “Did you notice our waitress’s wrists?”

  Mia was embarrassed to think she had only had eyes for the food. “No. What about them?”

  “They were bruised.” He circled one wrist with the other hand. “And the bruises were shaped like fingerprints.”

  “That doesn’t mean she got them here,” Mia pointed out. “She could be being abused at home.”

  “Maybe.” Charlie looked dubious. “And maybe not. I wish I spoke Cantonese or whatever Kenny was speaking. I’d really like to know what he told them about Scott’s photo. Maybe he didn’t ask if anyone had seen him. Maybe he told them all they would be up the creek without a paddle if they admitted to knowing him.”

  “So do you think Kenny did meet Scott here that night?”

  “I’m not sure what’s true and what’s not.” He shook his head. “All I can tell you is this: I am sure that at least some of what he told us tonight was lies.”

  CHAPTER 44

  As Charlie started the car, Mia kept thinking about the frightened man and what he had said—or tried to say—to her. How desperate he had been to communicate. If Kenny figured out they’d been talking, would the poor guy end up losing his job—or worse?

  The sky was growing dark. She wished they didn’t have to go to the accident site. Wished Charlie had asked to meet Alvin Turner some other place.

  “Okay, we already know that Scott warned Kenny that he was not showing enough income,” Charlie said. “Maybe Kenny killed Scott because he was threatening to turn him in to the IRS?”

  “Would Scott really put himself on the side of the angels like that? He didn’t say one word about the IRS in that note,” Mia pointed out. These days it was easy to believe that Scott had been capable of anything. “Maybe it’s more likely that Scott was blackmailing him. Only maybe he called it guanxi.”

  “Either way it would give Kenny a reason to want him dead.” Charlie began to construct a scenario out loud. “So say Scott came out here that night, met with Kenny, had a few
drinks, they argued, he left, and Kenny followed him. Maybe the reason that guy saw Scott speeding was because Kenny was chasing him. Then Scott crashed the car and Kenny thought, Aha, here’s my chance. I’ll finish him off. And he got a golf club or something out of his car.”

  Mia’s shoulders hunched as she wondered how close they were to the accident site. She made herself think back to the report Charlie had given her. “Yeah, but the witness only reported one car passing him at a high rate of speed. Not two.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Charlie said. “Probably the patrol officer only asked about Scott’s car. It’s not like he had any reason to believe this was anything but what it seemed—a one-car accident. Too bad Scott was in a loaner and not the Suburban. I checked on the make and model he was driving. It didn’t have a black box. If it did, we’d know exactly how fast he was going, whether he braked, and whether he was wearing a seat belt. Plus any vehicle fault codes.”

  With each passing second Mia’s tension grew. By the time Charlie turned onto Vollhanger Road, her left leg was jiggling and her hands were twisting together.

  The road rose ahead of them, curving sharply to the left. A line of evergreens bordered the right side. That must be the place. Mia’s stomach bottomed out.

  Charlie nosed the car onto the narrow shoulder. Just ahead of them, one of the trees bore a white scar, an ugly slash about knee-high. Or bumper high. It no longer bled sap, but the bark hadn’t grown back either. It was like Mia. The wound was still there, it still gaped, but it no longer hemorrhaged.

  “Breathe, Mia.” Charlie’s voice interrupted her thoughts.

  “What?” She didn’t turn her head, her eyes still fastened on the scar.

  “Don’t forget to breathe. Breathe deep.”

  She did. For a moment she saw stars, but then they flickered and faded.

  Mia pushed open her door. It was absolutely silent. The sun was setting. There was still enough light to see, but the colors were shifting and darkness waited on the edges. They had stopped at the pivot point of the curve. She looked back the way they had come, then ahead to where Scott should have gone if he hadn’t been drinking, if he hadn’t been speeding. There wasn’t much to see around them. Just land. Some of it farmed, some of it filled with nothing in particular, as far as she could tell. No houses holding potential witnesses. Theirs was the only car in sight.