Murder In Chinatown

by Victoria Thompson

  “Tell me, Sarah,” Corinne asked after a moment. “What brought you down here this evening?”

  “I wanted to learn more about the Chinese.”

  “Because of the women you met?”

  “No,” Sarah admitted sadly. “You see, a young girl was murdered a few days ago.”

  “How awful! And you knew her?”

  “Yes, she’s the daughter of a Chinese man and his Irish wife. She’d run off with a white man, someone her family didn’t even know about and would never have approved of.”

  “And he killed her?”

  “We don’t know who killed her yet. Her father had wanted her to marry an older Chinese man, and that’s why she ran away. I’ve been trying to figure out who might have killed her. I thought if I understood the Chinese better, that would help.”

  “I think I understand the Chinese very well,” Corinne said. “And I can promise you one thing: the person who killed that girl was not Chinese.”

  FRANK FOUND MRS. LEE AT HOME THE NEXT MORNING. She needed a moment to recognize him, and when she did, her face lit with hope.

  He quashed it instantly. “I don’t have any news,” he said quickly. “I have to ask you a few more questions.”

  The hope faded from her face, but she kept her composure. “Come in,” she said, stepping aside so he could enter. “But I don’t know what else I can tell you.”

  “How’s your son doing?” he asked as he took a seat on the chair she indicated.

  “Better,” she said without much enthusiasm. “He’s ashamed for what he did, scaring us like that. He didn’t mean to hurt himself. He said…” She drew a deep breath to ward off the tears. “He said he just wanted to forget what happened to Angel.”

  “That’s easy to understand,” Frank said.

  She nodded, pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve, and dabbed at her eyes. She was dressed in black, mourning her daughter. In spite of her grief, Frank noted, she was still well turned out. Her dress looked fairly new and fit her as if it had been made for her. It probably had. He noticed again the high quality of the furnishings in the room. Not as fancy as Sarah’s family, of course. Sarah’s parents were Old Money and had nothing but the very best. The Lees had it pretty good, though. Nothing old or worn. Nothing cheap or shabby. Frank felt a pang of envy. Charlie Lee had done well for himself.

  “What did you want to ask me about?” she asked, breaking into his thoughts.

  “I wanted to ask you about Angel’s friends,” he began. “In particular, the Chinese boys.”

  “The boys?” she echoed in surprise. “Why just the boys?”

  Frank made up a lie on the spot. “We think she must’ve been strangled by a male. A female wouldn’t have had the strength.”

  “Why would you think it was a Chinese boy, though?” she asked indignantly. “Ain’t it more likely to be that boy she married or one of his brothers?”

  “I questioned them, too,” Frank said. “Seems like they were all someplace else when she died, and I want to make sure we aren’t missing anybody.”

  She stared at him for a long moment, then shuddered slightly and dabbed at her eyes again. “This is so hard.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Lee,” he said quite truthfully. Her pain was difficult to witness. “Maybe I could ask your son instead. He’d know which boys Angel knew. Is he around?”

  She looked up in surprise. “I…Yes, he is. He’s been in his room since…Well, since he came to himself again, after the opium.”

  “Could I see him?”

  She silently debated his request. She didn’t know whether to trust him or not, and Frank couldn’t blame her.

  “I’m only going to ask him a few questions,” he promised. “It won’t take long.”

  She considered another minute or two and then said, “I’ll get him.”

  “I can go to him,” Frank said. “It might be better if we had some privacy anyway. He may not want you to hear what he tells me.”

  This time her tears were too quick for her, and they over-flowed before she remembered the handkerchief. “Angel was a good girl,” she insisted, scrubbing at her cheeks with the delicate scrap of linen.

  “I know she was,” Frank said. “Quinn O’Neal said he never touched her until they were married.” He hadn’t said that exactly, but it was what Mrs. Lee needed to hear.

  She made a small, tortured sound and looked away. “I’ll take you back to Harry’s room,” she said, rising to her feet.

  Frank followed her down the hallway, and he admired the pictures hanging on the walls and the carpet that muffled their footsteps. Frank had never realized there was so much money to be made in laundries.

  Mrs. Lee didn’t knock. She just opened the door to her son’s room. Looking over her shoulder, Frank could see the boy lying on a narrow bed that was pushed up against the wall. He lay on his side, his face turned toward that wall, his knees drawn up as if to protect himself from a blow.

  “Harry,” his mother said. “Detective Sergeant Malloy is here. He needs to ask you some questions about Angel.”

  Harry didn’t move, and after a few seconds, Frank felt the awful sense of dread stealing over him. If Harry was dead, too, how would his mother ever bear it?

  9

  SARAH SAT ACROSS HER KITCHEN TABLE FROM MRS. Ellsworth. They’d been drinking coffee and sampling some donuts Mrs. Ellsworth had fried up that morning. The older woman had listened intently as Sarah told her about her visit to the church last night.

  “Why is your friend so sure that it wasn’t a Chinese who killed that girl?” she asked.

  “Because the Chinese are so meek.”

  “Meek?” Mrs. Ellsworth echoed with a frown. “What does she mean by that?”

  “I think she meant it in the Biblical sense, as in turning the other cheek instead of fighting back. They’re tormented terribly, but in general, they don’t fight back.”

  “Is that because they’re meek or because they’re afraid?” Mrs. Ellsworth asked skeptically.

  “I’m sure being afraid has a lot to do with it,” Sarah said. “They’re almost always outnumbered, so if they tried to fight back, they’d certainly be killed. It’s not just about being afraid of someone stronger, though. Even children torment them.”

  “Street Arabs, you mean?” Mrs. Ellsworth asked, referring to the homeless children who lived wild in the streets.

  “I’m not sure it’s only them, although I’d hate to think children from respectable homes would harass the Chinese. They throw rocks through their windows and otherwise vandalize their property, and the police won’t do a thing about it. And if the Chinese victim tries to retaliate, the neighbors attack him.”

  “I’m no champion of the Chinese, like your friend Mrs. Adkins, but that isn’t right. If they aren’t hurting anyone, why won’t people leave them alone?”

  “For the same reason bullies will always find a victim, I suppose.”

  “So your friend thinks the Chinese are too meek—or afraid—to have murdered this girl.”

  “She also thinks they aren’t a violent people. She said they rarely even fight among themselves. They treat each other with respect.”

  “I’m sure they all behave themselves when they’re at the church, but there must be at least a few bad apples in the bunch,” Mrs. Ellsworth argued. “Nobody’s that perfect.”

  “I thought so, too. That’s something Mr. Malloy will know about. But Corinne insisted the Chinese are all devoted family men. There’s also the practical matter of not wanting to do anything that would attract the attention of the police.”

  “There’s nothing to say the killer was a member of the girl’s family, is there? He could have been another Chinese, but someone not related to her. How about the man the girl was supposed to marry? I thought we’d already decided he was the most likely suspect,” Mrs. Ellsworth reminded her.

  “I haven’t met him, so I don’t know enough to say one way or the other,” Sarah replied. “Although it would be q
uite satisfactory if he were the killer, since we don’t know him and therefore don’t care about him.”

  “Exactly,” Mrs. Ellsworth agreed.

  Sarah was getting up to pour them more coffee when she heard her front doorbell ring. This time she really was being called to a delivery. She packed her medical bag and set out.

  FRANK STARED AT HARRY’S STILL FORM, REFUSING TO believe he could be dead. Then slowly, ever so slowly, as if every movement pained him, Harry straightened his legs and turned his head to see who had disturbed him.

  His eyes—those strangely round eyes—stared hard at Frank, taking his measure. Finally, he said, “You were here the other day.”

  “When you took the opium,” Frank confirmed. “Yeah, I was here. I helped save your life.”

  A spasm of emotion flickered over his face. Frank hadn’t expected gratitude, but he hadn’t expected resentment, either. Harry looked as if he very much minded Frank’s interference.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Lee,” Frank said. “You can leave me and Harry alone now.”

  “Alone?” Harry echoed, struggling to sit up. “Why do we need to be alone?”

  “I want to ask you about your sister’s friends,” Frank said, easing past Mrs. Lee into the room and gently closing the door in her face. “I thought you might be more honest if your mother wasn’t listening.”

  “I never knew Angel was seeing that white fellow,” he insisted. “She never said a word about him to me.”

  “She wouldn’t have wanted you to know,” Frank said reasonably. “You might’ve warned her away or told your parents. She thought she was in love.”

  “Maybe she did, but he didn’t love her,” Harry insisted.

  “You sure about that?”

  “How could he? She was Chinese.”

  Frank raised his eyebrows. “You don’t think a white boy could love a Chinese girl?”

  “They hate us,” he said bitterly. “The whites all hate us. If he wanted Angel, it was because he wanted to use her and throw her away. I tried to tell her that, after we found her with him. Ma did, too, but she wouldn’t listen.”

  Frank walked the short distance to the bed and sat down on the foot of it. Harry quickly drew his legs up, pulling his knees to his chest, and scooted back until his shoulders touched the headboard. He was either being polite to make more room, or he was repulsed and didn’t want Frank touching him. Frank took a moment to look around.

  The furniture in here was also good quality, and the room was much neater than he had expected a boy’s to be. A shelf on one wall held several bowls of sand with long thin sticks stuck into them and a few small bowls that appeared to hold dried-up bits of food. A picture of a saint with slanted eyes hung on the wall above it, along with some Chinese lettering on a piece of rice paper. It looked strangely like an altar, although Frank had never seen a Chinese altar and couldn’t imagine why anyone would have one in the bedroom.

  He looked over at Harry again, noticing for the first time his odd choice of clothing. “Nice suit you’re wearing,” he remarked.

  Harry self-consciously fingered the fabric of his ratty shirt. “Sackcloth,” he said.

  It did look like a sack, or rather, like he’d made it out of sacks. The rough brown fabric couldn’t possibly be comfortable. “Doesn’t it itch?”

  “It’s supposed to itch. It’s for mourning,” Harry explained with a hint of impatience.

  “Your mother isn’t wearing it.”

  “Chinese mourning,” he clarified tersely. “Only the parents and grandparents are supposed to wear it, but I thought…” He cleared his throat. “I’m doing it for Angel.”

  “Do you usually dress like a Chinese?”

  His expression hardened. “Most of the time.”

  “What about the rest of the time?”

  “When I don’t want to attract attention, I dress like an American.”

  Frank knew what kind of attention he might want to avoid. The Chinese were always a temptation to any drunk who wanted to cause trouble. “Your father always wears American clothes,” Frank remembered. Charlie Lee wore a business suit, but like Frank, he still couldn’t hide what he was. If Frank’s attitude gave him away, Lee’s complexion and features betrayed him, no matter how he might dress.

  His son was different, though. His features weren’t noticeably Chinese. If he dressed like an American…

  “My father does what he has to,” Harry said.

  “Why does he have to dress like an American?”

  “To do business.”

  Frank nodded his understanding. Business was business, and Charlie Lee was a practical man. He’d even cut his hair in the American style. “You don’t have a pigtail, though,” Frank noted.

  The boy’s hand shot up to touch the back of his neck where it would have hung. “My mother…she made me cut it off.”

  “When was that?” Frank asked curiously.

  “A couple years ago.”

  That meant Harry wasn’t a suspect. Frank was glad. He wouldn’t have wanted Mrs. Lee to lose both her children.

  “I thought you wanted to ask me questions about Angel,” he reminded Frank irritably.

  “Tell me about the boys Angel knew.”

  “If I’d known she was sneaking around, I would’ve stopped her. She wouldn’t have married that bastard, and she’d be alive now,” he said angrily.

  “I know she didn’t tell you about Quinn O’Neal, but what about the Chinese boys she knew?”

  “What about them?”

  “Who are they? How did she know them? Did any of them pay particular attention to her?”

  Harry frowned. He looked a lot like his mother when he frowned. “What difference does that make?”

  “It makes a lot of difference if one of them wanted her for himself and couldn’t stand the thought of her being with O’Neal.”

  “Nobody was in love with her,” Harry said confidently.

  “You’re sure about that?” Frank challenged. “You said yourself, you didn’t know about O’Neal.”

  “The boys she knows…knew,” he corrected himself painfully. “The Chinese, they’re all babies. They would never…That’s a stupid idea.”

  Frank didn’t like being called stupid, but he was willing to consider the possibility. “But if a Chinese man killed her, who could it have been?”

  Harry stared at him, his dark eyes shocked at first as he absorbed the implication. Frank could almost see his mind working as he thought it through, and once again his hand shot up to the back of his neck. “A Chinese man,” he repeated, obviously remembering Frank’s question about the pigtail. “He had a queue.”

  “If that’s what you call a pigtail, then yeah, he did.”

  “Someone saw him, and he had a queue,” Harry decided. Clever boy. Frank had to admire his powers of deduction.

  “And if someone did see him, who could it have been?” Frank asked.

  He waited as Harry considered. Finally, the boy nodded his head, satisfied he’d figured it out. “There’s only one Chinese man with a queue who’d care if Angel got married to somebody else.”

  “And who would that be?” Frank asked.

  Harry’s expression hardened. “The man my father was going to marry her off to—John Wong.”

  MRS. LEE HELPFULLY TOLD FRANK THAT JOHN WONG owned several businesses in the city. In addition to some restaurants, he ran boardinghouses for single Chinese men. Mr. Wong wasn’t present at any of these legitimate businesses on this fine morning, as Frank discovered the hard way, but Frank learned Wong also ran an establishment that Mrs. Lee hadn’t known about and that no one else would explain exactly. This was because it was a combination opium den and gambling parlor.

  The Chinese didn’t play normal games of chance like dice and poker. They had their own, and their favorite was fan-tan. No one seemed to know why it was called that. Certainly, there were no fans involved. Near as Frank could figure, the players sat around a low table and bet on something to do with
how many coins would be left over from a big pile when the cashier had removed most of them. The important thing for him to know was that sometimes the players thought they got cheated and started a fight. That was about the only time the police got involved with a disturbance by the Chinese. Amazingly enough, even that didn’t happen very often. They were a quiet bunch. If a few rowdies didn’t insist on beating one up every now and then, nobody would even know they were around.

  After checking all of Wong’s other businesses and not finding him at any of them, Frank finally barged into the mystery business, causing quite a stir because, of course, everyone recognized him as a policeman. Most scattered instantly, leaving the hall deserted except for a couple of fellows enjoying their opium dreams, and a big, unhappy man who was probably the manager.

  “What you want? We pay money to Tom Lee. We no get trouble,” he insisted, convinced Frank was there to raid the place. Tom Lee, no relation to Charlie, was the Chinaman who handled the bribes from his countrymen to ensure the police wouldn’t bother them.

  “I’m looking for John Wong. Is he here?”

  “No here. No here,” he said, waving his hands excitedly. “Never here. Go away.”

  Frank looked around at the fan-tan table with its pile of coins. “I could arrest you for gambling,” he remarked, then glanced over at the dozing customers. “Or I could arrest you for selling opium. I could even say I found a bunch of underaged white girls in here that you’d kidnapped.”

  “No girl, no girl!” the man shrieked frantically. “You see, no girl.”

  “I don’t actually have to find one to say that I did,” Frank pointed out. “But if you’d tell me where to find Mr. Wong, I’ll just forget about whatever I saw here and be on my way.”

  The man was frightened. The question was, did he fear Frank more than he feared John Wong?

  “You no say I tell you,” he negotiated.

  “No, I won’t say anything about how I found him,” Frank promised.

  The fellow gave Frank an address and escorted him out the door.