by S. J. Rozan
When I’d called her mother’s, on the chance she’d drop by there on her way to work, Mary had told me to come on over. The Fifth Precinct station house is a quick walk from Madison Street—one of the reasons Mary had requested assignment there. Sometimes, she told me, it’s hard for cops to get the precinct assignment they want, but the NYPD is so desperate for Asian cops in Chinatown, Flushing, and now, Sunset Park, that they sent her here right out of the academy. She made detective here, and she’s planning to stay.
Nice for me. And I try not to be too annoying.
I crossed Madison Street from the subway as the wind, pushing its way up the hill from the East River, draped plastic bags on the bare trees and redistributed cigarette butts and candy wrappers around the desolate lawns. The downstairs door to the boring slab of brick building where Mary’s mother lives is always locked, but I’ve always had a key. I had it out, but I didn’t need it; Mary was waiting, sheltered in the doorway, when I got there.
We greeted each other with a quick hug. “Hi,” Mary said. “I’m running late. I didn’t want my mother to start trying to feed you and all that.”
“Late? You don’t have to be in until four, do you?”
“I’m heading in early to finish some paperwork. Also,” she admitted, “I get the feeling this is business.” She didn’t elaborate, but I knew what she meant: She also didn’t want her mother to hear us talking investigating. Unlike my mother, Mrs. Kee speaks English. Just like my mother, she has this idea that if everyone totally ignores this detective foolishness her daughter will get tired of it and find something respectable to do.
“Except,” I said, because it had just occurred to me, “I’m hungry. I’ll walk you part way to work if we can go along Henry by the turnip-cake man.”
“Sure. So,” she said, tucking her arm into mine as we started into the wind, “I understand you have a favor to ask me that will involve risking my badge, my career, and possibly my life.”
“Absolutely not,” I said indignantly. “Who told you that?”
“You said ‘favor’ on the phone, Lydia.”
“Maybe I want your mother’s recipe for sticky rice balls.”
“Take two pounds of rice—”
“Oh, never mind. Do you know a Flushing gang called the Main Street Boys?”
She cut me a sideways look from beneath her flat-brimmed toreador hat. A hat like that won’t keep your ears warm, but I guess it’s better than nothing. “I’ve heard of them. Why?”
“What have you heard?”
She sighed. “They’re new, probably less than a year. It’s all still shifting out there, the territories, not like Chinatown, but the Main Street Boys seem to be established. I think their dai lo is from somewhere out west, but I don’t know if they’re connected to a West Coast gang. Why?”
She’d answered my question, in a cop sort of way, so I had to answer hers. “I need to talk to their dai lo. A guy called Bic. Bic,” I added, “like the lighter.”
That was a p.i. sort of answer.
Mary’s reply wasn’t unexpected. “Don’t do that, Lydia.”
“Why not?”
“Every time you get near a gang member I get ulcers. If a gang is involved it’s a police matter. Tell us and we’ll deal with it.”
I avoided the question of why, if the police could deal with it, there were so many gangs running their brutal operations in this small neighborhood. I knew the answer: That will continue as long as honest citizens like me refuse to come forward to talk to the police.
I also avoided telling her I’d had tea with one dai lo this week already.
“They may not be involved, Mary. That’s why I want to talk to them. To find out.”
“We can find things out.”
“This is for a client.”
“Oh, no kidding. Who?”
“I can’t tell you.”
We had reached the turnip-cake man’s stand on Henry Street. Our conversation stopped while I bought two of the soft, salty, chewy squares he had sizzling on the wok. He slipped them into a wax-paper envelope for me. I offered a bite to Mary, who nibbled on a corner of one; then, as I was munching, she said, “So you can’t tell me who the client is, and he doesn’t want to report the crime, but he wants it solved anyway. So you have to mess with a gang. Do I have that right?”
“The client has a good reason for—”
“They always do, Lydia. The gangs and the tongs count on that.”
“I don’t think this is that kind of crime. I really don’t know. If I could talk to this Bic I’d have a better idea.”
We both stopped, without discussion, at the corner of the next block. It isn’t good for either of us to be seen together in the heart of Chinatown, except at family association banquets or other social events where we might be expected to appear, regardless of what we do for a living.
Mary looked at me closely for a long time, long enough for me to finish both my turnip cakes. “Well,” she finally said, “I can’t run him, because nothing I’m working on could remotely involve him, and someone would pick it up.” I understood that. The NYPD frowns on cops using the computer system for personal reasons, and helping out a p.i. who won’t even tell you what the case is about is definitely a personal reason. “But I’ll ask around.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“I still think you shouldn’t go near him, or any of them. But if I don’t check him out for you you’ll probably go over to Flushing with a sandwich board that says, ‘For a good time call Lydia Chin but only if your name is Bic.’ ”
“Not a good time. A hot time.”
“Matchless.”
“He could be my new flame.”
“You could carry a torch for him.”
“Have a torrid affair.”
We both collapsed in giggles. Mary recovered first.
“Will you promise me,” she asked, “that if it looks like trouble, you’ll call me? Before, not from the hospital?”
“I’ve never ended up in the hospital,” I said, my professional dignity affronted.
“Upstate, that time—”
“That wasn’t my case! That was Bill’s case, so it was his fault.”
“Oh. If it’s somebody else’s fault it doesn’t count? What if this time it’s Bic’s fault?”
I winced. “I see what you mean. I’ll be careful, Mary. I really will.”
“That’s not what I asked you. But I guess it’ll have to do. I’ve got to go. If I get anything I’ll call you.”
“Thanks.”
She turned, walked a few steps, turned back. “I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you to do something less dangerous and more respectable for a living?”
“Sure.” I grinned. “But police work is so boring.”
Mary made a face, turned again. I watched her toreador hat and her long swinging braid disappear into the currents of people flowing through Chinatown.
There were a couple of things I could profitably do now. I could go over to Mulberry Street and talk to Nora, or I could go uptown and try to catch Dr. Mead Browning, who was, as it were, the last person to see the Blair porcelains alive.
Nora was closer. Besides, my head was about as full of talk about porcelain as I could take for one day.
I called CP from the phone on the corner, the one in the little enclosure that replaced the pagoda-shaped booth that stood there for years and years. I always found that booth sort of offensive, but my mother liked it, so maybe I’m just touchy.
Nora was there and said she’d be glad to see me.
“Is Tim there, by any chance?” I asked her.
“No, I think he’s at his office. Do you want to talk to him?”
“No, I want to not talk to him. Unless you think he knows something I should know about, in which case I would reluctantly interview him. As a hostile witness.”
“I don’t suppose he does. What is it between you two, Lydia? Tim’s a good guy, just a little stiff. You never give him a chance.”
>
“What is it between you and Matt? And Tim’s the one who never gives me a chance. Nora, I’m freezing. I’m going to hang up and come over, okay?”
She said okay, so I hung up.
The streetcorner astrologer was squatting, in five layers of jackets, in his usual spot as I rounded the corner at Mulberry Street. His hand-lettered charts—magic marker on squares of cardboard box—waited patiently, like him, for customers. His sticks and coins in their little silk pouches were just ready, I could tell, to jump out and reveal to some anxious soul the nature of the luck he could expect in the coming year. Or she could expect.
Or I could expect. But I didn’t stop.
The cranky downstairs door at the CP building was unlocked because the museum was open. I let myself in and up. Nora, looking tired, smiled when I poked my head through her office door.
“Come on in,” she said, dropping her pen onto a neat pile of papers. “Save me.”
“You’re sure it’s an okay time?”
“I’m drowning in paperwork. Didn’t you take an EMS training course?”
“Paperwork rescue isn’t covered until the advanced session.”
Nora’s office wasn’t as warm and cozy as Roger Caldwell’s had been. The furniture was older, the decoration more sparse. The view out her window was of the building across the street, not the broad sky over Central Park. Seating myself in the chair across the desk from her, watching her fold her files and paperclip her papers, I realized with a quick gulp of guilt that, in spite of what I’d said to Roger Caldwell, of course I had met a museum director before.
“Did you find out anything?” she asked. Then, “Wait, I’m sorry. Do you want some tea?”
“Yes, thanks.” I unbuttoned my coat but kept it on. “And I don’t think I found out anything, but I might have some leads. Can I ask you some questions?”
“Sure.” Nora handed me a steaming cup. I cradled it against me, then lifted it to drink. It was chrysanthemum this time, sweet and light like morning sunshine in summer.
Lowering the cup, I asked, “You pay your lucky money to the Main Street Boys?”
Everyone in Chinatown knows what “lucky money” is. Nora picked at something on her spotless desk, shook her head. “We don’t pay.”
I stared at her in disbelief. “You don’t pay?” I felt hot blood surge into my face. “You’re sending me out there asking questions like an idiot, sniffing around gangsters, and you don’t pay?”
Nora blinked involuntarily, as though my anger was something I’d thrown at her. “Wait, Lydia, I don’t get it. What’s one thing got to do with the other?”
“Oh, come on, Nora! You don’t pay, they steal your porcelains. You start to pay, you get them back. Probably tomorrow some gangster will come up here with a bagful of broken pieces. ‘Got some nice porcelain for sale. Like this, but not broken—yet.’ Nora, I don’t believe this.”
“Oh, no, Lydia!” Her voice was shocked. “That’s not what I meant.”
“What’s not?”
“Lydia, I wouldn’t do that to you! The Main Street Boys didn’t do this. Or, I mean, I don’t know, maybe they did, but not to keep us in line or anything like that. We don’t pay because they don’t come around.”
“What do you mean, they don’t come around? Trouble from the Golden Dragons said this is their corner now.”
“You talked to Trouble? How could you do that? Lydia, if I thought this had anything to do with gangs I would never have hired you. I don’t want you going near those guys—”
“You want your porcelains back? What did you expect me to do?”
She stopped short. “I don’t know. But not that.” She picked up her pen, watched it turn in her fingers. Then she put it down, poured herself a cup of golden tea. “You really think the gangs are involved?”
“I don’t know. But I think it would be crazy not to check it out.”
Nora sipped her tea. Without looking at me, she said, “I heard rumors these Main Street Boys had taken over this corner from the Golden Dragons. I waited for them to come selling orange trees,”—which means the same as “lucky money”—“but they never did. We don’t pay because no one asks us.”
Now it was me who was confused. “How can that be? They’re paying the Golden Dragons good money for this corner. Like rent. Why would they do that if they’re not making anything on it?”
“Rent? That’s how it works?”
I gave her a brief rundown of Trouble’s entrepreneurialism.
“Unbelievable.” She shook her head slowly. “They’re not stupid, you know, those kids. God, it’s such a loss. We lose twice, the community: by what they do, and by never having what they could have contributed.”
“Trouble’s not a kid. And he’s not from the community.”
“He was a kid once. And we’re all immigrants here, Lydia.”
“Is that why you wouldn’t talk about this yesterday in front of the low faan?”
Her look was blank; then she said, “Oh, Dr. Browning? No, not entirely. It’s not just that he’s low faan. He’s also …” She tapped the pen on the desk, searching for words. “Well, he’s sort of…innocent. He’s in his own world. Porcelains are what he cares about; otherwise he doesn’t exactly know what’s going on. You should see him down there opening boxes with this little smile.” She smiled gently herself.
“You were protecting him?”
“Is that a bad thing?” she asked defensively.
“No, but Nora, it’s not your job to protect the whole world from reality. Anyway, I’m going to have to talk to Dr. Browning.”
She nodded. “I expected that, and I told him. And maybe I was being silly yesterday. Anyway, I wish I’d answered you about the gangs, because then you wouldn’t have gone and gotten involved with the Golden Dragons.”
“I might have anyway. It’s also not your job to protect me.”
“It’s not your job to be tougher than everyone else, Lydia.”
“My job is to get your porcelains back.” And be tougher than everyone else. “Nora, I have to ask you this. Is there any way Dr. Browning could be involved?”
“Oh, Lydia! Oh, I don’t think so. He’s so …”
“I know. Innocent. But just sort of logistically, Nora. Could he have actually done it? Did he have a key, for example?”
“No. He loses keys. I let him in in the morning and lock up after him at night. We leave together, in fact.” She smiled. “And he wasn’t carrying any crates the evening this happened.”
“Very funny. And the alarm code? Does he have that?”
“No. There’d be no point in giving him that. He can’t remember his own phone number.”
“Okay. But I had to check. You understand?”
“Of course. I’m glad you’re being thorough. I just wish you didn’t have to go near gangsters.”
I reached forward and poured myself more of the sweet tea. “And I wish I knew why the Main Street Boys took over this corner and aren’t hitting you up.”
Nora leaned back in her chair, frowned in thought. “Well, we’re not the only people here,” she reasoned. “And it’s obvious we don’t have much. Maybe they’re only bothering with people who can pay worthwhile amounts.”
“If that’s true, it would be news. But the Main Street Boys are new in town, and their dai lo is from the West Coast, I hear. Maybe they do things differently out there.”
“Maybe.” Nora looked uneasy. “Lydia, maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Hiring you, I mean. If these gangs are involved—either one of them—then maybe we should go to the police.”
Tim would love that, I thought. You’re fired, baby sister. This case was too big for you. It was too hard.
“Your reputation,” I said. “Face. Your other donors.”
“Well, maybe that’s not so important.”
“Your porcelains. You said yesterday that I had a better chance of getting them back than the police have. Dr. Browning said so.”
“Yes,”
she said reluctantly. “That’s true. But Lydia …”
“Give me a few days.” I cut her off before she could talk herself into the idea that she was being irresponsible by letting me go on putting myself in danger for her. “If I don’t get anywhere, you can go to the police. But maybe I’ll be lucky, and you won’t have to do that.”
“Well…”
“Thanks,” I said, standing quickly. “Good seeing you. Great working for you. Gotta go.”
And before she could change her mind, or even speak it, I went.
E I G H T
I Went home.
It was late, it was dark, it was dinnertime. The streets of Chinatown weren’t any less crowded, but the crowd was different: fewer families and older Chinese, because everyone was home eating. More young people in groups now, and more couples, some Chinese, some white or black—low faan of different kinds—and a few mixed. In front of me, a young Chinese man squired his long-haired blond girlfriend through the streets of the old neighborhood. Two white men in camel-hair topcoats, their wives in furs behind them, headed down the stairs to a famous restaurant where I’d never eaten. I maneuvered around a mixed group of young teenage boys pawing through a sidewalk vendor’s tray of watches.
The salty smell of soy sauce and herbs washed out the door of a restaurant I passed. I hurried along, hungry for my mother’s cooking. The air was bitterly cold now that the sun had gone down. Everyone, low faan and Chinese and me, wore our hats pulled down to our ears and hunched our shoulders as deeply as we could into our coats.
Except for the hatless white guy in the open jacket in the doorway across the street.
I scurried down the block, turned right at the corner, toward home. At the first building, which wasn’t mine, I slipped into the shadow of an alley, and waited.
A figure sauntered around the corner, didn’t even look in the direction of the shadow I was hiding in. He crossed the street, ambled down the block to the old brick building I live in, stood in front of it for a moment. He looked at his watch, scratched his hatless head, and wandered on.
