S Hockensmith - H03 - The Black Dove

by Steve Hockensmith

  Old Red gaped at her. “Well, I’ll be . . . .”

  “And I will be, too . . . .” I muttered once I’d picked my jaw up off my chest.

  “I brushed up on my Watson before coming to see you yesterday,” the lady explained. “You can understand why that line stuck in my head, I’m sure. It’s so patently ludicrous. Men keep just as many secrets as women . . . wouldn’t you say, Gustav?”

  “Well, miss,” my brother drawled, “I’d say that depends on the man and depends on the woman. Take yourself, for—”

  Before he could finish, the younger Chinaman returned.

  “Follow me, please.”

  Diana flashed me a triumphant smirk, and I conceded with a bow and an arm outstretched toward the doorway.

  “Ladies first.”

  “And sometimes best,” Diana said.

  She sauntered off after the Chinaman.

  The young man ushered us back to an oaken office door so dark and heavy-looking I imagined it would take a team of Clydesdales to pull it open. It was the kind of door that told you not just anybody was allowed to walk through it—though that’s precisely what we did.

  Chun Ti Chu smiled at us pleasantly as we walked in. Half the man’s grin was hidden, though—he was pressing some kind of silver doohickey against the side of his head. It almost looked like he was trying to iron his round face flat.

  After a couple blinks, I recognized the thingamabob as the businessend of a telephone. Chu said a few words into it in his native tongue, then returned it to its cradle on a desk so large it would need but a little scaffolding and a rope to make do as a gallows. He nodded at the young man, who backed out of the room quickly, closing the door as he went.

  “Ahhh,” Chu began, pushing back from his desk and coming to his feet. He wasn’t tall, but the straightness of his spine created the illusion of a height he didn’t have. He was broad-chested, too, but not big or fat. Overall, he seemed exceptionally solid, as if beneath the shiny, soft silk of his tunic he was pure granite. He was wearing a brimless, beanielike black cap, and the close-cropped hair around it was granite-gray, too.

  It was no wonder Chu had come to be yin to the tong’s yang. He was like one of those town-square local-hero statues come to life.

  “Dr. Gee Woo Chan is dead,” Diana shot at him before he could bow or hold out his hand or offer us cigars or kick us in the shin or whatever it was he customarily did when greeting reporters. “Any comment?”

  All three of us whipped up our notebooks and pencils (freshly purchased from a stationer’s around the corner) and held them at the ready. We probably looked like a firing squad lined up before Chu as we were, but the man wasn’t any more fazed than that statue would’ve been.

  “Gee Woo Chan was a good man,” he said, speaking slowly. He had a strong accent, but the words came out with just enough space in between to let you decipher one before he moved on to the next. “An important member of the community. His passing brings much sorrow.”

  “And what of the rumors that he was murdered?”

  Chu pressed his lips together and tilted his head ever so slightly to one side, giving Diana the exact same look of weary disappointment my dear old Mutter used to throw my way whenever I slacked off on my chores.

  “There are always rumors,” he said.

  We dutifully scribbled this down (even Old Red, who truly was just scribbling). Then we stared at Chu over our notebooks, waiting for more—which didn’t come.

  “So you’re satisfied it was suicide?” Diana pressed.

  “Gee Woo Chan recently suffered a great loss of mien tzu,” Chu replied. “He ‘lost face,’ as we Chinese say. He borrowed certain valuables that he could not return—”

  “The Chinese antiquities he took to Chicago for the Columbian Exposition,” Diana said. “The ones that were destroyed when the Pacific Express crashed.”

  Chu nodded. “That is right. It was in the newspapers, wasn’t it?” The nod abruptly gave way to a doleful shake. “That only added to Gee Woo Chan’s shame. He had guaranteed the items’ safe return with his own money. He was forced to forfeit everything he had built over the last nine years.”

  Old Red cleared his throat—his prearranged signal to Diana to follow up on what had just been said. Of course, Chu had just said plenty, so the lady had to do a little guesswork as to what had caught my brother’s ear.

  “The last nine years?” she ventured.

  Gustav pretended to jot something down in his notebook—another signal. Diana had guessed right.

  “Yes,” Chu said. “Gee Woo Chan first came to America in 1884, part of a commission dispatched by the emperor himself to survey the World’s Fair in New Orleans. When the time came to leave, Gee Woo Chan refused to go. He had fallen in love with this country, and he sacrificed much to remain here, but he worked hard and invested wisely and did well.”

  Chu took a thoughtful pause. When he continued, he spoke with the tone certain men get when talking about missionaries, reformers, suffragettes, or the merely cheerful—folks they consider unrealistic fools.

  “That is why the Exposition in Chicago meant so much to him . . . why he made such efforts to make the Chinese exhibition a success. Anti-Chinese feeling is on the rise again. Gee Woo Chan thought he could help Americans learn to respect our culture and traditions as much as he respected theirs.”

  Chu offered us a tight-lipped smile that seemed more rueful than amused. Thinking you could convince people to shed their prejudices might be a joke, but it’s surely not a funny one.

  “The artifacts Dr. Chan took to Chicago—who did he get them from?” Diana asked.

  Chu’s smile, small to begin with, vanished fast. “A local collector.”

  My brother hacked out another signal-cough.

  “Would you like a glass of water?” Chu asked him. “Or some tea, perhaps?”

  Old Red shook his head and waved off the offer with a flustered grunt.

  “And this collector’s name would be . . . ?” Diana said.

  Gustav put pencil to paper for more bogus note-taking.

  “Fung Jing Toy,” Chu said.

  The name rang a bell, but one so far off and muffled I couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from. To be honest, what with “Gee Woo Chan,” “Chun Ti Chu,” “Hok Gup,” “Fat Choy,” “Ah Gum,” and “Wong Woon” to keep straight—not to mention “fan kwei,” “boo how doy,” “chun hung,” etc.—I’d just about reached my limit for sing-song foreign names and phrases. I would’ve been a lot happier if that “local collector” had been named Bill Jones.

  “This Mr. Toy must be quite a cold-blooded man to ruin Dr. Chan the way he did,” Diana said.

  Chu shrugged. “He is a businessman.”

  “And this was just business—so you did nothing?” Diana replied sharply. “We’ve heard Chan was a friend of yours . . . or the Six Companies, anyway. Why didn’t you help him?”

  Chu’s eyes narrowed, the lids dropping like blinds he was drawing down on something he didn’t want seen.

  “He was a friend, and he was helped—but he could only be helped so much. Not everyone agreed that borrowing such valuable items from Fung Jing Toy was wise. Gee Woo Chan undertook that himself. It was his decision. His responsibility.”

  Before Diana could fire off another question/accusation, Chu turned to me and Old Red.

  “Gentlemen? There is nothing you would like to ask?”

  It was hard to imagine your average news hawk responding to such an invitation with a silent shrug. And as you’ve no doubt noticed—and my brother is partial to pointing out—I lack “the grand gift of silence” for which Sherlock Holmes once praised Dr. Watson.

  No, my grand gift is a big mouth, and I used it.

  “Were . . . you . . . and . . . Chan . . . still . . . on . . . good . . . terms?” I said, trying to squelch any trace of twang by speaking as slowly and carefully as Chu himself. “He . . . must . . . have . . . been . . . dis-. . . a-. . . ppointed . . . that . . .
you . . . could . . . not . . . help . . . him . . . out . . . more . . . hmmm?”

  Chu glowered at me as if I’d just announced myself to be the Chinatown correspondent of the Daily Imbecile—which perhaps I had.

  “Gee Woo Chan understood his obligations—and mine. He bore no bitterness toward me or the Six Companies. In fact, I spoke to him just yesterday here in my office.”

  Old Red didn’t say it, but I swear I could hear him think it.

  Hel-lo.

  Another cough, though, and Chu would be slapping my brother on the back and offering him a lozenge. So Gustav finally dared to speak—though he managed to squeeze his question into one small but infinitely evocative word.

  “Oh?”

  Chu took on the tense, sheepish look of a fellow trying to take back a bad bet.

  “It was purely a social visit. We discussed nothing of importance.”

  “So . . . Chan . . . just . . . dropped . . . by . . . to . . . chit . . . chat?” I asked, still struggling to keep the cowpoke out of my voice. (To judge by the look Chu gave me, however, I only managed to put in a big bunch of cretin instead.) “Not . . . to . . . ask . . . you . . . for . . . money . . . again?”

  It was the cash Chan had laid out for the Black Dove I was thinking of—and Old Red must have been thinking of it, too, for he gave my question his approval with another quick scribble.

  “As I indicated, Gee Woo Chan’s visit was personal—and private.” Chu walked slowly around to the front of his desk, looking like he was going to lean back against it. “And now I have a question for you.”

  I would say Chu’s hand whipped out quick as lightning, but that wouldn’t be doing the man justice. He grabbed Gustav’s little notebook with such swiftness it made your average lightning flash look about as fast as a slug oozing through mud.

  “How is it,” he said, “you can begin writing what I say before I say it?”

  “Hey!” Old Red protested. “Give that back!”

  Chu frowned down at the notepad, then held it up to give us all a look at my brother’s “notes.”

  “English is not my first language, but I can read it. This, on the other hand . . . what is it?”

  It was meaningless chickenscratch—random lines and squiggles scrawled hither-yon across the page.

  Gustav flushed so fiercely it looked like someone had smeared a fistful of raspberries across his face.

  “It’s shorthand, of course,” Diana said, and she took a quick step forward and snatched away the notebook with almost as much speed as Chu.

  She was so close to the Chinaman he’d head-butt her if he was to take a bow, and still she moved in closer, crowding him, her body mere inches from his.

  He didn’t back up. He didn’t move at all. He was a statue again.

  “What do you want with the Black Dove?” Diana spat at him.

  She was trying to shock an answer out of the man—and she failed. Chu merely stared back at her, content to stand there silent and still till vines twined up his legs and birds took to nesting on his head.

  Before any of that could happen, though, the door behind us opened, and I turned to see what he’d really been waiting for.

  “Ahhh . . . at last,” Chu said as Wong Woon came waddling into the room. “What took you so long?”

  25

  HAT TRICK

  Or, Our Ruse Comes to Naught While Someone Else’s Comes to a Head

  “Well, hey there, Wong.” I said as the portly detective trudged toward us. “Would ya believe we got new jobs since you last seen us?”

  Woon stopped just a couple steps inside Chu’s office. Iron bars couldn’t have blocked our exit any better.

  “New names, too?” he asked.

  “Why, sure. ‘Numb de plums’ they’re called in the writin’ business. Everybody gets ’em one. Just look at Mark Twain and . . . uhhhh . . . Mark Twain.”

  “Brother, please,” Gustav said with a sigh—which was about the nicest way he’s ever told me to shut up. He turned to Chu. “It was Woon you was talkin’ to on the telly-phone when we come in, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. You see, I already spoke to reporters from the Chronicle and the Examiner earlier today. As with Woon, on that.” He nodded at the telephone on his desk. “I also rang the offices of the Southern Pacific and spoke to a Mr. Powless of the Railroad Police. He was most displeased to hear you’ve been presenting yourselves as agents of his organization. He says he recently dismissed all three of you himself.”

  “Oh, he did, did he?”

  I threw a little up-down up-down eyebrow waggle at my brother.

  He didn’t catch it. He was looking over at Diana, his own auburn brows knit together in befuddlement, as if the strangest thing he’d encountered that day was the possibility she might be telling the truth.

  “Look, Mr. Chu,” Gustav said, slowly peeling his gaze away from the lady, “Doc Chan was a friend of ours. As I see it, that gives us as much right as any badge to hunt down the man who murdered him. More even.”

  Chu shook his head slowly. “There has been no murder. Gee Woo Chan killed himself.”

  “Oh, yeah, right. I forgot. There was a ‘suicide note.’ ” Old Red scowled at Woon. “You still got it in your pocket?”

  Woon stared back so blankly I almost expected him to try trotting out a “No sabe Englee.”

  “I saw that flimflam you pulled on Mahoney,” my brother snapped, his words lashing out like a whip at a mule’s ass. “I don’t know what you handed him back at Chan’s place, but it sure as hell wasn’t the note I found in the Doc’s pocket. Which means we still ain’t got no proof that was a suicide note at all.”

  “My word is not proof?” Woon said, his voice soft yet with a hard edge just beneath the surface—a pillow wrapped around a crowbar.

  “No,” Gustav said, his own tone nothing but iron, no padding to it. “It ain’t.”

  Chu held up his hands. “Please. If you truly were Gee Woo Chan’s friends, if you have any respect for his memory, you will drop this matter. You do him no honor by prying further.”

  “What about Hok Gup?” Diana asked.

  The lady was still standing so close to Chu they could just about share slippers. But at the mention of the Black Dove’s name, the Chinaman backed off, his gaze dropping to the carpet as he shuffled around his desk.

  “That girl’s not just a memory,” Diana went on. “She’s still alive . . . or so we hope. If we don’t find Fat Choy soon, though—”

  “Yeah,” Old Red threw in. “Seems to me if you really gave a crap about findin’ Hok Gup, you wouldn’t turn away our help.”

  “Help? This is not help.”

  Chu slumped into the plush chair behind his desk. Before, he’d struck me as a statue—solid, stern, dignified. Now I was starting to see the cracks in the marble. The tilt to the pedestal. The pigeon shit on the shoulders.

  “This is meddling,” Chu said wearily. “And it ends now.”

  His next words were to Woon in Chinese. When he spoke to us in English again, his tone was regretful, sympathetic—even if his words weren’t.

  “I have instructed Wong Woon to take you to the police substation at Waverly Place. As his prisoners. You should consider yourselves under arrest.”

  “Under arrest?” I said. “For what? Last I heard, tryin’ to pass yourself off as a reporter ain’t illegal. Stupid, maybe, but not illegal.”

  Chu shrugged. “Wong Woon will find something suitable. Unfortunately, in Chinatown, there are always many unsolved crimes to choose from.”

  “Yeah,” Gustav growled. “And I’m beginnin’ to see why.”

  “Whatever you try to charge us with, it won’t stand up in court,” Diana said.

  Chu shrugged again. “It doesn’t have to. Good-bye.”

  He picked up a sheet of paper from his desk and began reading it as if we were already gone.

  Just in case we didn’t get the point, Woon stepped aside and waved us through the door.

  “Go.�
��

  Diana walked out first, then me. Old Red lingered in the doorway, though.

  “Just one thing before I go,” he said. “Look me in the eye, Mr. Chu, and you promise me: If you get to that gal first, you ain’t sendin’ her back to the whorehouse.”

  I couldn’t see Chu any longer, but I heard the rustling of the paper in his hand and the squeaking of springs as he shifted in his seat. And then I heard his voice.

  “I give you my word. Hok Gup will not go back to Madam Fong’s.”

  Gustav jerked his chin down in a single, brusque nod. Then he stepped out of the room and turned toward me and Diana.

  “Alright. Let’s go.”

  As we paraded through the lobby single file, Woon in the rear, we passed the quivery clerk who’d stymied us with his “No sabe Englee” on our way in.

  “You lying son of beech!” he spat at me from behind his desk.

  So he understood English after all—including the phrase I’d used when trying to test him.

  “No,” I snapped back as we past him, “you lying son of bitch!”

  “No, you lying son of beech!”

  “No, you lying son of bitch!”

  “No, you—!”

  And then we were out the front door and on the sidewalk, and the great debate ended in a draw.

  “That way,” Woon said, pointing to the left.

  We dutifully marched east toward Waverly Place.

  Gustav, Diana, and I were bunched up three-abreast now, with me in the middle and Woon behind. It was easy to forget the bulky detective was there at all, though, and I certainly didn’t feel like a prisoner being herded off to the hoosegow.

  “Woon,” I said, “I think I’d feel better about this if you had us in handcuffs or something. A bull ain’t supposed to just mosey into the slaughterhouse without at least a prod, know what I mean?”

  “Oh, Mr. Woon doesn’t want to put us in handcuffs, Otto,” Diana said. “If he did that, how could we escape?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Think about it,” Old Red said. “Woon can’t turn us over to Mahoney.”

  “Whyever not?”

  “Because we know Woon kept the real ‘suicide note,’ remember?” Diana said. “So now he’s just waiting for us to . . . ‘make a break for it’ is the term, I think.”