Chin - 01 - China Trade

by S. J. Rozan

  I stood. In a voice that sounded harsh and strained I said, “Matt, I wouldn’t go to the corner with you. But I’m going to find out what’s going on here. I just hope for Nora’s sake that what you said is true.”

  Matt stood also. I could have turned then and left, but I didn’t. I stayed still as he folded his hand slowly, tightly over mine. He leaned toward me, brushed my lips with his. Their warmth was familiar, as familiar as the scent of his cologne and his cigarettes and his own skin that filled my head.

  A tingle went through me. Before it had a chance to take me over I twisted my hand from his and stepped back.

  His small, mocking smile was still burning in my watery eyes as I pushed through the door and escaped into the icy January night.

  T W E N T Y - F O U R

  I went back on the subway. The Orient Express, New Yorkers call this line now, the Seven that goes from Manhattan into the heart of Flushing. It’s not an express, though. It’s a slow, slow train, and I stomped back and forth in the practically empty car, almost hoping that someone would try to mug me so I could beat their brains out. I knew that if that happened I would probably get killed, but it was a safe fantasy, because nobody tries to mug a wild-eyed woman stomping up and down on a moving train.

  From the Seven’s last stop in Manhattan—Times Square—I called Bill. He answered on the first ring.

  “It’s me,” I said belligerently.

  “Christ! Are you okay?” Relief rushed his words.

  “Why shouldn’t I be?”

  “I was going to give you another half-hour and then come out there myself.”

  “A lot of good that would have done.”

  “Did you see him? Bic?”

  “Yes. Yes, I saw him.” Even I heard the choking in my voice.

  “Lydia? What’s wrong?”

  “Dammit…”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I said I was!”

  “Where are you?”

  “In the subway.”

  “Come up here.”

  “Meet me downstairs,” I said. “At Shorty’s.”

  “You don’t drink.”

  “You do.”

  “I can drink up here.”

  “I don’t want to come up to your place, Bill.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want you to make a pass at me. I don’t think I can handle it right now.”

  In his silence I closed my eyes, heard the rumble of a train somewhere else in the station.

  “I won’t,” he said quietly. “I’ll meet you downstairs if you want. But if you want to come up here, you can.”

  “Bill?” I swallowed. “I’m sorry. I don’t know—I’m not sure what I’m doing. That was a terrible thing to say. I’m sorry.”

  “Come up,” he said. “We’ll talk about it.”

  The train got me to Bill’s in ten minutes. He waited in the doorway as I climbed the two flights of stairs. When I got there he smiled, took my jacket, didn’t kiss me hello.

  “Hot water’s on,” he said, settling on the sofa, where a half-finished amber drink sat on the side table.

  He lit a cigarette and waited while I brewed chamomille tea. Most of the teas in Bill’s kitchen were left there by me at one time or another so I’d have choices I liked when I came up. That had never seemed pushy to me before, but it suddenly did now.

  I took my tea to the big armchair and curled up.

  Bill said, “He really got to you, this Bic.”

  I sipped my tea, but it was too hot. I stared into it while neither of us spoke. “I really am sorry,” I told Bill finally. “I shouldn’t have said what I said to you.”

  “Did you mean it?” His words were quiet. “Am I like that?”

  “I meant it,” I said. “But not because you’re like that.”

  I lifted the steaming mug of tea to my lips. It was sweet, and it tasted like summer, but it was unconvincing.

  “I saw Bic,” I said. “I used to know him.”

  Bill said nothing, waiting.

  “He’s Matt Yin.”

  “Oh,” he said softly.

  I nodded. “It’s been ten years since I’ve seen him, and longer than that since we were … whatever we were. But it shook me, to find it was him. I know I’m reacting badly. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  “I don’t either,” he said. “Just because you run into an ex-boyfriend who’s now a major gangster on the same night as you find someone dead, which happens to be the day after you got the shit kicked out of you, you fall apart.”

  Our eyes met. His had an ironic smile in them.

  Mine, before I knew it, had tears.

  I tried to stop them, but they made hot little streams down my face. My hands smeared them around as I turned away from Bill and bit my lip to keep from sobbing.

  Bill got up and went into the bedroom. By the time he came back with a Kleenex box I’d lost the sobbing battle and was curled in the chair, crying and silently cursing myself for it. Bill set the box in my lap and perched on the edge of the seat with me, wrapping his arm around my shaking shoulders.

  “It’s okay,” he said softly. I didn’t know exactly what was okay, but he stayed where he was, not talking and not moving, and after a little while I wiped my eyes and blew my nose and soon my face was able to stop twisting up and my eyes, though I knew they were red and swollen, stopped dripping.

  Bill kissed my hot, sticky cheek and smiled.

  “How can you kiss someone who looks like this?” I demanded with a little hiccup.

  “I closed my eyes. Oh, shit. Was that making a pass?”

  “You better hope not, or I’ll have to slug you.” I got up, went into the bathroom, and did what I could. When I came back he was on the sofa again, with a fresh drink. He’d turned the fire on under the kettle, and it was happily spouting steam. I poured some hot water into my tea, thinking maybe I should be a kettle. Then I could spout off and be happy at the same time. That thought made me giggle weakly as I curled back up in the chair.

  “What’s so funny?” Bill asked.

  “Your tea kettle. It’s really silly.”

  “Remind me tomorrow, I’ll go out and buy a serious tea kettle. Now that you’ve told me who Bic is, tell me what he said.”

  “Wait. There’s something else first. Did Steve Bailey call you?”

  “He called my service before I got back. He didn’t say where he was, and he didn’t say how to find him.”

  “Damn. Me, too. He called twice. He said he had to talk to us.”

  “I don’t think we can do anything but wait and see if he calls again.”

  “I hate waiting and seeing.”

  Bill raised his eyebrows. “Is that right?”

  “All right, stop it. If I’d waited we never would have gotten to see Bic.”

  “And one of us still hasn’t. Are you going to tell me?”

  I told him: about the well-tailored suit, the gold cigarette lighter, the voice of January ice. I didn’t tell him about the kiss, or how, in the contemptuous set of Bic’s shoulders, I could still see the first arms that had held me.

  But I think he knew.

  The questions he asked me, though, were about the case.

  “Do you think it’s true that he—he and the Main Street Boys—didn’t kill Hsing?”

  “I don’t know. I got a feeling he knew something he wasn’t telling me but he wouldn’t mind if I found it out.”

  “Which means?”

  “It could mean it was something useful for us to know—useful to him, I mean; he obviously doesn’t give a damn whether it’s useful to us—but it would look bad if it came from him. Bad for his reputation, something he’d lose face for revealing.”

  “Any idea what it was?”

  “Uh-uh. But: he did say he’d ‘heard’ that Hsing had stolen the porcelains working for Lee Kuan Yue.”

  “That,” Bill said, lighting another cigarette, “is very interesting. Lee says Hsing stole porcelai
ns from him. Bic says Lee and Hsing stole porcelains from Chinatown Pride. And Lee and Franco Ciardi say Lee doesn’t deal in stolen porcelains at all.”

  “I wish I knew whether the cup Hsing gave his mother was one of ours.” I chewed on my lip with what I thought was frustration; then I realized it was hunger. “Do you have any food in this house?”

  “Never. You want me to call the take-out Chinese place?” He grinned.

  “That dump on the corner? You’re kidding, of course.”

  “Of course,” he agreed. “I could make you scrambled eggs.”

  “I can make them,” I offered dubiously.

  “I insist.”

  He made me three eggs with fresh-ground pepper, scrambled in the pan, and brought them to the table with toasted slices of sourdough bread cut from a loaf from the freezer. He had butter in a butter dish and homemade orange marmalade from a farm stand, and put everything on the table on woven straw place mats.

  “I’m impressed,” I said. “I didn’t know this about you.”

  “I do a mean peanut butter sandwich, too.”

  Starting on the eggs, I said, “Tell me about your date. Rosie the Queen of Wherever.”

  “Killarney. Actually she’s from Dublin, which is nowhere near Killarney.”

  “And I suppose you know all about her childhood and all her relatives by now, too.”

  “The Irish are like the Chinese. They have too many relatives to ever know all about them.”

  “You don’t.”

  “I’m only half Irish.”

  “Oh. So: Rosie.”

  “Rosie. Rosie says she never saw Dr. Caldwell before about two weeks ago. He came to the house, was received cordially—Rosie remembers Mrs. Blair saying it was a pleasure to meet him, which I took as a hint they didn’t know each other already—stayed for a brief visit during which Rosie was asked not to interrupt them—she thinks that was Dr. Caldwell’s idea, by the way—and then he left, on what Rosie thinks was a bad note.”

  “No kidding.” I chomped into a piece of toast, a little bit burnt on the top, just the way I like it. “Does she have any idea what the bad note was about?”

  “She says not.”

  “And she says she never saw Caldwell before, even though Mrs. Blair told us he and Mr. Blair consulted?”

  “They must have done it outside the house.”

  “Mr. Blair was a recluse, I thought.”

  “Well, according to Rosie, he did go out, though not often. He preferred the company of his porcelains to the company of most people, except his wife. Visitors rarely came to the house, and no one ever was invited to see the collection.”

  “Not even Mrs. Blair’s brother?”

  “The elusive Lee Kuan Yue. Rosie says no.”

  “Well,” I said, polishing off my eggs, “that’s great. The Main Street Boys didn’t kill Hsing Chung Wah, Lee Kuan Yue doesn’t deal in stolen porcelains, Dr. Caldwell didn’t know Mrs. Blair, and nobody ever saw the Blair collection. I suppose …” The phone rang, cutting off Bill’s chance to find out what I supposed.

  He got over to his desk before the second ring. “Smith. Yes. All right. Where are you?” He looked at me and nodded. I rose, listening to the urgency and the reassurance in his voice. “I can find it. Stay there. Don’t leave. We’ll be right there.”

  “Steve?” I said, as he hung up.

  “Steve.” He threw me my jacket, grabbed his own. “He’s at a bar in the Village. He promised not to leave until we got there.”

  He locked up. We clattered down the stairs and into the first cab we saw.

  T W E N T Y - F I V E

  The bar was Dusty’s, one of the Greenwich Village bars along West Street that would have a great view across the Hudson River if anyone were interested in looking out. What they were interested in looking at, though, when Bill and I walked in about ten minutes later, was us. It was a shadowy place, track lights concentrating on odd oil paintings with household appliances in them and not bothering much about the darkness in the corners or the veils of cigarette smoke swaying above the tables. The hour was edging up to midnight but Dusty’s was packed, techno-rock music charging out of speakers to help sweating pairs of men follow the beat on a small dance floor to the rear. I was the only woman I could see, which would have made me stand out except that my leather jacket fit right in. I thought that gave me points, but I didn’t notice that anybody cared; they all seemed to find Bill much more noteworthy.

  “Hel-lo,” a man with a carefully trimmed goatee and three gold earrings in his left ear said over the music, smiling at Bill as we made our way into the room. “You’re new here.” He didn’t look at me at all. Bill nodded noncommittally. He may have been about to say something, but a figure rose and an arm waved and Steve Bailey called, “Ms. Chin! Over here.”

  The man with the earrings looked disappointed as Bill and I crossed the room to join Steve in his booth near the dance floor. He stayed half-standing until we got there, as though he were afraid he’d lose sight of us. He had a beer in front of him, and he wore a leather jacket and an anxious expression.

  “Where have you been?” He looked from one of us to the other. “I’ve been calling all night. Jesus. I have to talk to you. I have to tell you what happened. I—oh, god, did you go up there?” His wide eyes rested on me, and I nodded. “Did you—did you see what happened?”

  “Tell us what happened, Steve,” I said.

  A waiter, a skinny young man with black daggers tattooed on his forearms, came to our booth. Bill ordered beers for himself and Steve and a club soda for me. I kept my eyes on Steve.

  “I’m scared,” he said. A thought seemed to strike him. “Did you tell anyone where I am?”

  “No,” I said. “Have you been here all night?”

  He nodded. “I come here all the time. They know me. I guess I figured I’d be safe. Oh, god. Was that stupid?”

  “Safe from what? Steve, tell us what happened. Why did you call us?”

  “Safe from him.” He spoke as if he were surprised I didn’t know that was what he meant. “I called you—well, that’s different. Wait, I don’t know, maybe it’s not. That’s what I’m afraid of, that it was him.”

  “That what was him, Steve?”

  “The man who—the man who—” He gulped, opened his mouth, closed it again. “The man who—” He seemed stuck, like a needle on a record. His eyes widened with alarm.

  “The man who killed Trish?” Bill asked calmly, as though it were a natural thing to say.

  Steve turned to him, nodded slowly. The tattooed waiter came and went, leaving our drinks. Steve looked into his, quickly gulped some of it, put it down and spoke. “He came this morning. That’s why I called you. He was looking for stolen porcelains. I mean, I guessed that was why you came, even though the Director didn’t tell us. He acted like it was confidential. Well, he should. I mean, he shouldn’t go around telling secret things if they’re secret. But you were private investigators and you were interested in porcelains and so was he and he said he was looking for stolen ones so I figured so were you probably and then after I talked to Trish I thought—I thought—”

  “Steve,” I said, “slow down.” He sounded like a train about to roar off the tracks. “Who was this man, the one who came this morning?”

  “He was a private detective. His name was Jim Johnson. He wanted to see the Director, but he was out, so he talked to me and Trish.” Steve gulped some more beer, then went on. “He said he was looking for some stolen porcelains and wanted to know if we knew of any on the market—you know, if the museum had been offered any. He described some of them. Trish is the—was the—was the porcelain person, not me, and she said no, we hadn’t been offered anything recently, but she’d look out for them. He said he’d be in touch. Then he left.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Just sort of average. A little taller than me, but not as tall as you,” nodding to Bill. “Brown hair. I guess maybe brown eyes, too. I didn’t re
ally look. I’m sorry.”

  “Did he see Dr. Caldwell?”

  “No.”

  “And that’s why you called us? Because of his visit?”

  “Almost. I mean, I might have anyway, but after I talked to Trish …,” he stalled out.

  “After you talked about what, Steve?” I asked, to keep him moving.

  “The pieces. The pieces Jim Johnson asked about. Well, one of them really.” He drank some more beer, and then blurted, as though confessing a transgression he really needed to get off his chest, “It was ours.”

  “Yours?” Bill and I exchanged glances. “It belonged to the Kurtz?”

  Steve nodded miserably. “It did. I’m sure it did. But Trish said no, I was wrong. But I thought about it, and I looked. I’m not wrong.”

  “If Trish was the Kurtz’s porcelain expert, why do you know about this piece?”

  “She wasn’t really our porcelain expert,” he corrected me, sounding distracted. “I mean, porcelains were her field, but the Director is the real expert. Oh, but anyway, that doesn’t matter,” he said, impatient with himself. “The thing is, Trish and I help each other pack and unpack. When shipments come in or go out. Gifts and loans and stuff. Things come and go from museums all the time, you know.”

  “I didn’t know. But go on.”

  “Well, anyway, we do. Help each other.” He swallowed. “Did.” He picked up his beer, then put it down without drinking any. “That piece came about a year ago. It was a covered dish, small, like for cooked fruit or something. I remember it because it had a dog’s head knob on the lid, and dogs painted on it, and they weren’t Chinese dogs. They were spotted terrier kinds of dogs, which meant they must have been copied from the customer’s sketch. They did that all the time. But I remember it because I had a dog that looked just like that when I was a kid.”

  “Could there be another dish like it?”

  “Oh, sure there could. That wouldn’t be strange. There could have been a whole set. What was strange was Trish telling me I was wrong. You know how I am. I mean, I’m not subtle. I always make too much noise. I got excited to see Spike on a museum dish, and I went on about it. She thought it was funny, and she agreed he was a cute little dog, and I told her about the tricks he used to do. But then yesterday she told me I was wrong, and we’d never had a dish like that.”