Sleuthing Women

by Lois Winston

  “I have to go, sweetheart, but I’ll be back later on this afternoon. By the way, just so you know, I’m finding I enjoy having someone else around the house. It’s less lonely. I think Mateo and I are going to do just fine.” Mom retrieved her coat from the bed and started for the door.

  “Mom,” I called to her. Lila stopped in the doorway and turned back to me. “If I haven’t said it before, thanks for saving my life.” She blew me a kiss and closed the door.

  ~*~

  After lunch, I decided to wear the blue bed jacket my mother selected, admitting to myself it was pretty and did make me look healthier. I eschewed wrapping the scarf over the bandage.

  After trying it out and viewing the results in a mirror, all I needed was some fruit on top for a nifty imitation of Carmen Miranda. Even though I’ll watch her every time That Night in Rio is on—a great film classic—I don’t particularly want to look like her.

  I put on a touch of lipstick and leaned back, ready for visitors, should anyone come. Most everyone I knew had already called or sent cards. I reviewed the recent phone calls in my mind, smiling. There’s nothing like feeling loved.

  Aside from the usual friends and loved ones, there had also been the young man, Grant, from the concert of several weeks ago. The newspaper listed the name of the hospital I was in, and he called to wish me well. Naturally, there had been Frank, who managed to stave off his “I told you so” speech for at least five minutes into the call.

  As Captain of the PAPD, he wanted to use his pull to have me transferred to Stanford General, so I could be taken care of by the ‘best doctor in the world,’ his daughter, Faith. Putting aside she is a pediatrician, I wanted to stay right where I was, the Pacific Coast Hospital.

  Tío usually called or came around nine a.m., starting with an account of the kitten, but always anxious to know how I had done the night before. Richard generally called when he could and dropped by every evening.

  Mom is right, I reflected. My family has spent a lot of time here. And, they’re yawning a lot, too. I need to think more about them and less about me. I am a spoiled brat.

  Victoria came first, dropping by for a chat about everything and nothing. Vicki’s an auburn-haired sweetie, mid- to late-twenties, with intelligent green eyes and a slight overbite.

  “Hello there, you,” she said brightly, as she strutted into the room carrying a stack of magazines and a small vase of flowers. Vicki struts very well. She has a distinctive fashion style, in that she likes flowing shawls, short skirts over colored, textured stockings, and the highest platform shoes or spike heels known to man.

  I have never seen her without some sort of hat, and that day, she topped off her look with a red felt beret encrusted with small, colored glass replicas of different types of dinosaurs.

  “Hello, yourself,” I answered. “How about a hug?” She rushed over, put down the flowers and kissed me on the cheek with gusto. All the while, I studied the assortment of terrible lizards on her cranium. “Wow, what a hat!”

  “Oh, you like?” she asked, as she shook her head and about one hundred tiny dinosaurs noisily came to life. “I designed this myself,” she actually admitted.

  Vicki owns a millinery shop, a thriving establishment called “The Obsessive Chapeau,” where similar lids sell for something slightly less than the national deficit. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, it’s amazing what people will pay good money for.

  “I can order you one, wholesale,” she offered. I managed not to shiver in repulsion.

  “You know, Vicki,” I said, as sincerely as I could. “I’m really not a hat person, but thank you so much, anyway.”

  “Aw,” she said with disappointment. “Well, not everyone is. It’s a question of pizzazz.”

  “I think it is.”

  “If you ever change your mind, just let me know.”

  “I’ll do that.” I smiled.

  “Look what I’ve brought you, Lee,” she said, as she thrust the magazines in my hand. “I just bought every magazine they had in the gift shop. I wasn’t sure what you’d like.”

  “I like that you came to visit me,” I said, throwing the magazines to the foot of the bed. “Sit down and tell me everything in your life that’s new and different.”

  She did and for over a half an hour we laughed, told secrets, and I marveled once again at what a perfect match she was for my brother. Both were weird but wonderful.

  After she left, I had just settled down with an article on money management in one of the magazines when John Savarese walked in, bold as brass, and said hello. I was shocked.

  He was wearing solid black and looked good enough to eat, but I was on a diet. I stared at him with what I hoped passed for mild disdain, when all the while I couldn’t wait to let him have it. Maybe I would even call the police and have him arrested for something, anything, after I told him off.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked in as civil a tone as I could muster.

  He was surprised by my tone of voice and raised an eyebrow. “Well, I thought I would drive down and see how you’re doing. How are you doing?”

  “Listen, you,” I blurted out. “Just who the hell are you? You’re not a policeman because I called Homicide, and you’ve got a lot of nerve passing yourself off as one. I’ve got a good mind to report you. It’s against the law to impersonate a police officer!”

  With that I threw my Time magazine at him. So much for mild disdain.

  “What?” he stared at me, baffled then the realization hit him right after the magazine did. “Ow! Oh, that!”

  “‘Oh, that?’ That’s all you have to say, ‘Oh, that?’”

  He came to edge of the bed and smiled at me. “Look, I really am a policeman.”

  “Oh, yeah? Where’s your ID, Bub?”

  “Here’s my identification.” He reached inside his pocket and pulled out his wallet. Attached to it was a badge. He flipped the wallet open and pointed to the ID.

  “I’m with the Department of Immigration and Naturalization.” I snatched the wallet out of his hand and scrutinized the official document, as he continued speaking.

  “If you remember, I never actually said I was with Homicide. You jumped to that conclusion at the warehouse, and I let you think it. I figured it would carry more weight if you thought I was investigating Wyler’s murder instead of his illegal activities. Besides, I didn’t want to tip my hand. At that time, we didn’t want anyone to know we were dealing with a ring of illegal immigration. I’m sorry I had to deceive you.”

  “So am I,” I said, calming down a bit. “For a while there, I thought you were one of the bad guys.”

  “Well, I’m not. I’m a good guy.”

  He stared at me with his intense blue eyes, and I suddenly felt uncomfortable. I started babbling, as I am wont to do when I’m embarrassed.

  “So Wyler was smuggling illegal immigrants into the country! All this time, we thought he made his money in real estate. How long had he been doing it? How did Grace Wong get involved with him? What has she got to do with it?”

  “Wait. I’ll tell you everything from the beginning.” He smiled. “Since you helped break the case and found one of the drop off points, I owe you that much.” He went over to a chair and settled himself comfortably.

  “Several months ago, we heard a rumor of a fairly sophisticated operation of illegal immigration in the Bay Area.” He looked at me questioningly and asked, “How much do you know about this problem?”

  “Nada,” I answered quickly, anxious for him to get on with it.

  “Well, to sum it up, the United States has a quota saying no one country can send more than seven percent of the total worldwide immigration each year, translating to roughly twenty-five thousand allotments per country, per year. You can see this system puts large countries at a disadvantage; the quota is the same for India and China with a billion people each, as it is for some place like Nauru, with approximately ten thousand people. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands
apply every year from Mainland China and many of the surrounding islands. Most will wait a lifetime and never make it.”

  “That’s terrible,” I remarked. “I had no idea.”

  “Many are willing to pay upwards of twenty thousand dollars to get into the country any way they can, legally or illegally. Do you have any idea how long it takes some of these people to save that kind of money?”

  I shook my head numbly.

  “An entire village of people will work, steal, sell whatever they possess, for years so just one member of the community can get to the States. Once a person is here, he or she works and saves money, sending it back home for the next person to come over. Then those two work and save for the next person and so on until everyone is here.”

  His voice took on a harder edge.

  “That’s their plan, anyway. But once they’re able to scrape together the required money, then they’re at the mercy of coyotes like Portor Wyler or his partner, David Chen. They herd people into ships that travel from one remote village to another drumming up business. When they get enough, sometimes as many as sixty or seventy on a vessel meant to hold only ten or twelve passengers, they cross the Pacific, forcing these people to endure hideous living conditions, for ten days to two weeks. A few don’t even live through the ordeal.”

  “That’s the most horrendous thing I’ve ever...wait a minute,” I interrupted myself.

  “At twenty thousand dollars a pop, that’s…” Pausing to get a pencil, I added up all the zeros on the back of the magazine. “That’s over a million dollars a crossing!”

  “At least.”

  “And you say it was done twice a month for years?”

  “Illegal immigration can be a very lucrative business, if you have the stomach for it.”

  “I don’t know many people who do,” I said quietly. I lay there for a minute, hardly able to wrap my mind around it all. “But once they were here, how did Wyler and Chen get them into the states?”

  “The San Francisco warehouse, which was owned by those two jointly, was the first stop. Ready-made women’s clothing was unloaded and stored in the warehouse for one or two days until it could be shipped by land to a small chain of low-end department stores. That part was completely above board.

  “What Chen and Wyler would do, however, was disguise the illegals, one by one, as workers already ‘green carded’ and on the payroll. At the right time, the substitute would carry a bundle of clothing from the ship to the warehouse. When instructed, he or she would hide in the concealed room in back of the office, waiting until the dead of night when the pier was deserted. Then they would be trucked off to wherever.”

  “Unbelievable! This was going on under everyone’s noses?”

  “Yes. By the way, Watch Line played a part in this, too. That was one of Wyler’s other businesses, we just found out. He paid a couple of the guards to look the other way or even help out from time to time.”

  “How many people were in on this?”

  “About a dozen or so, but they were only paid chump change. Once they got to the states, Wyler needed people to drive the ‘new arrivals’ to other drop sites via cars or trucks. Some drivers were no more than indentured slaves to Wyler and Chen. People like Grace Wong did as they were told.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “As we now know, San Francisco was only phase one,” John said, grimly. “After dark, the ship would begin its journey back to China hugging the coastline and pausing, for lack of a better word, for an hour or so in the waters off Princeton-by-the-Sea. Remember, the Feng Shen had no legitimate reason for being there. If the Coast Guard stumbled on them, Chen could say they were having engine trouble or some such. They had compartments in the floorboards, where they could hide people in such an event,” he added.

  “That’s where they kept me, I’m told.” I involuntarily shuddered.

  “I know,” he said, leaning forward and touching my cheek with his hand. He went on, “They would drop off the second group and shuttle them by dinghy to that abandoned restaurant.”

  “Wyler owned that, too, didn’t he?” I broke in.

  “He and Chen, yes. They thought by breaking this up into two separate operations, they would increase their chances of going undetected, which it did for years.”

  “But Chen had to unload everyone in Princeton last time, didn’t he?”

  “The entire group, all fifty-four of them. Chen was afraid to go near the warehouse because of Wyler’s murder. The extra time it took to unload everybody is probably what saved your life. That, plus he felt he needed to get far enough out to sea to feel safe enough to throw you overboard, so your body wouldn’t be found right away, if ever. We think he was within minutes of doing just that when the Coast Guard got to him.”

  “I guess I was pretty lucky.”

  “You were damned lucky,” John said. “After having the warehouse in San Francisco become off-limits, he would really have been out of business if you had blown it wide open for him down the coast. He was a desperate man.”

  “Is the man who helped find me going to go to jail?” I asked, suddenly thinking of the small, unhappy man.

  “Yes, but by turning State’s evidence, it will probably be for much less time. Why, are you interested in being his character witness?” He asked wryly.

  “Maybe; I can’t help feeling sorry for him. What happens to the other people who were on Chen’s ship?”

  “Most of them have already been flown back to China, courtesy of the United States government. No charges have been brought against them.”

  “Grace Wong,” I murmured. “How was she involved in this, and why did you refer to her as one of the indentured slaves?”

  “Grace Wong has a lot of family still in China.”

  “That’s right!” I burst in, slapping the bed with my hand for emphasis. “She has six brothers still in China,” I said, remembering Richard’s report.

  “And that’s not counting her sisters, her cousins, and her aunts, as Gilbert and Sullivan would say. Anyway, you ask about Miss Wong’s affiliation with this. Wyler was forcing her to have sex with him in exchange for bringing members of her family over to the states.”

  I was stunned. Of all the answers I anticipated hearing, this was not one of them. “What?”

  “You may look shocked, but the kind of scum that’s into this business certainly wouldn’t stop at blackmailing a woman into sleeping with him.”

  I thought for a moment. “But she was a successful dancer. I don’t understand.”

  “Even for well paid dancers, twenty-thousand dollars per person is a lot of money. We believe she’s brought two of her brothers illegally into the country just this year. We checked with our sources in China, and they’re having trouble locating those two. They’re probably here.”

  “Poor Grace Wong.”

  I shook my head. What would I be willing to do for Richard, given the same situation?

  “I’d save my sympathy, if I were you. She’s been arrested for killing Portor Wyler.”

  I was so taken aback I could not utter a word. Finally, after several seconds, I found speech and sputtered,

  “I don’t believe it. Why do they think it was she? What possible reason could she have? He was helping to bring her family into the country. Why kill him?” I demanded.

  “Whoa,” he said. “I don’t know any of the details on the murder, and it’s not any of my business. I only know we’ve got Captain Chen, his men, and the Feng Shen. Their smuggling days are over, largely due to your efforts. You know, we hadn’t connected Grace Wong with any of this.” He looked at me for a moment. “May I ask you a question?”

  “Naturalmente,” I said with panache, greatly pleased he acknowledged the work I had done.

  “What made you focus on her? What singled her out?”

  “Well,” I began reluctantly, not wanting to drag Richard into it. “I just got lucky. Remember the day you asked me if I had been in the warehouse a half an hour earlier?
Well, I hadn’t, but I got Grace on tape getting into her car just beforehand. I had a hunch it was she who had been inside the warehouse, so I went with it.” I smiled.

  When he saw I would say no more, he stood up, ready to leave.

  “Whatever you say, Lee. I’m glad you’re going to be all right. You had us all worried there for a time.” He looked down at his feet and then back up at me, a little flushed. “Maybe I can call you sometime, and we can get together. You know, have a cup of coffee.”

  “I’d like that,” I said, forgetting about my vow to stay as far away from him as possible. After all, he did have those Paul Newman eyes.

  “You’re not married, are you?” I asked.

  “No, I’m not, but I do have a dog, so I’m somewhat committed. What about you?”

  “I have a cat, so I’m somewhat committed, too.”

  “Well, then I’ll see you.”

  “Right. You’ll see me.”

  “I’ll see you soon.”

  “You’ll see me soon,” I answered, laughing.

  As he walked out of the room, I was very glad I had worn the blue bed jacket with the bright flowers, although I’d never admit it to Mom. I sunk into a kind of depression within minutes of his departure, though.

  Grace Wong arrested for Portor Wyler’s murder! I had no idea what was going on in the world and was going to remedy that.

  Phoning the hospital gift store, I asked for the two major Bay Area newspapers, and any back issues, to be sent up. I also asked a passing candy striper to have the television turned on in the room, realizing I would have known all of these things days ago if I had been watching TV like most of the other patients.

  The San Francisco Chronicle still headlined the arrest of Grace Wong for the murder of Portor Wyler, I discovered. The San Jose Mercury gave a very sordid description of the beautiful dancer, the older man, and the illegal immigration ring on pages two and three.

  My name was sprinkled about, as well as D.I.’s. Both papers gave little in the way of real information but offered a great deal of juicy speculation. Yellow journalism at its best.

  I felt a pang of sadness for Yvette Wyler. What a way to find out about your husband’s secret life! I wondered if she’d regretted asking D.I. to investigate her husband’s indiscretions. It had become a real Pandora’s Box.