by S. J. Rozan
Andi’s bullet had sliced through Dawn’s left arm. Once out on the street, she winced, then grinned as the paramedics sat her on a gurney and worked on her. “Doesn’t hurt much,” she said, in answer to someone’s question. Then, to Bill, who’d given her the cigarette she was smoking while they wrapped her arm, she added, “And some of my dates are really into scars.”
Bill smiled past his own cigarette. He was hanging out at the front of the building, strolling around, sitting on the stoop, rising again, strolling, but not far. He couldn’t go far. He was waiting for the Ninth Precinct detectives who were grilling me to finish so they could start on him.
As soon as they’d come, we told them what had happened and why, but they seemed to be having a hard time believing us. “You mean to tell me,” one of them, a thin man with jerky movements, kept asking, “We got three Chinese in the same shootout here and it’s got nothing to do with gangs, tongs, like that?”
“Yes,” I said wearily, for what seemed like the fifteenth time. “It was kidnapping. I told you. Talk to John. Talk to Genna. Talk to John’s mother—she can tell you all about Chinese people.”
“No reason to get snappy, miss,” his heavier, slower partner said, although I could think of a few. “Tell us again what you have to do with it.” He smiled reasonably and offered me a Life Saver. I couldn’t decide which of them I disliked more.
I told them again, and then again. Finally they gave up, took my gun to be tested though anyone could tell it hadn’t been fired, and converged on Bill.
They’d told me not to leave. I sat on the steps. As the ambulance took Dawn Jing away, I heard Bill say that he was working for me, that he’d come here in response to the message I’d left with his service, that he’d never met or seen Roland before but he knew I’d been suspicious of him for a while. They asked Bill about the Chinese gang angle, too, and they asked him a lot of other things while I sat, felt the breeze against my skin, and tried to think of nothing.
In the end they took us over to the Ninth Precinct and went through the whole thing again. They waited for the cops talking to John at the hospital to call in, and they compared Dawn’s statement to Bill’s, and Bill’s to mine, and they left us each in different rooms for a while. Then they told me I could go, so I left the station house, crossed the street, sat on the curb, and waited.
It was another ten minutes before Bill came out. As the light blazed gold on the faces of the buildings, picking out windowsills and cornices, throwing barred, slanted shadows from fire escapes, he crossed the street to join me.
Crouching next to me, he took my hand. I hadn’t realized how chilly the spring air had gotten until I felt the rough warmth of Bill’s hand.
“You okay?” he asked.
I nodded. “You?”
“Never better.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
He smiled and dropped himself onto the curb beside me.
“Mrs. Ryan made Genna sign a contract,” I said, watching the late sun glint off the windows across the street.
“A contract?”
“That was the only reason she gave us the money. It says that Genna borrowed a million dollars from her. If she never sees John again, she doesn’t have to return it. If she does, she does. Mrs. Ryan says she’ll take Genna to court and ruin her if she tries to get out of it.”
“She made her sign that for the ransom money?” I could hear in Bill’s voice that even he, Mr. Cynicism, had trouble with that.
“She didn’t believe it was a ransom. She thought Genna and I had cooked the whole thing up. The kind of thing the Chinese do, you know.”
Bill didn’t answer. I hugged my knees to my chest and rested my chin on them. “You know,” I said, “I didn’t leave the address of that place with your service.”
“I know.”
“On purpose. So you wouldn’t go racing down there before me, without the ransom money, and get yourself killed.”
“I know.”
“But you told the cops that’s why you went there. Because of the message I left you. You couldn’t have.”
“I didn’t,” he said. “When I got there I wasn’t even sure it was the right place.”
“Why did you say that, then? And why did you come?”
“Dawn brought me. If I’d told them that, I’d have had to tell them how she knew where to go. And why I called her.”
“Why did you?”
He looked across the street, too, to where the top floors of the buildings glowed in the dying light and the bottom floors were already in shadow. He said, “There’s no phone booth at Thirty-fifth and Third.”
Late afternoon light can play strange tricks. The buildings across the street suddenly took on an alien aspect, an unfamiliar and sinister quality I hadn’t noticed before. “But …” I said. “Then … ?”
Bill looked at me and I looked at him, and we stood up and headed for St. Vincent’s.
We talked it out while we walked across town into the red-striped sunset, and finished as we sat over espresso and perfumey Earl Grey tea in the Peacock Cafe, around the corner from St. Vincent’s. In spindly metal-backed cafe chairs, listening to old recordings of an achingly beautiful operatic soprano, we went back and forth. Bill told me what he’d thought and what he’d done, the calls he’d made. I told him what Roland had said as we stood under the swinging light. We discussed what we didn’t know and what we thought, now, that we did. We fell quiet, only the singer filling the space around us with music that, to me, was beautiful but meaningless, just as the tea I was drinking was warm and sweet but didn’t reach the chill I felt inside.
We went on, to the hospital. They told us John Ryan was in stable condition and could have visitors, and they gave us the passes. We glided up to the third floor in the big, smooth elevator. The air smelled like Lysol, the floors were shiny, and conversations were hushed. Down the hall to the left we found John’s room.
John was in the first bed, the one by the door. The other bed was empty. John had a drip in his arm, a bandage around his head, and a swollen purple bruise with a Band-Aid riding the crest of it on his cheek. He looked like hell, but he wasn’t asleep. He turned slowly to the door as we came in.
“Lydia,” he smiled weakly. “Smith. Hey, thanks.” He closed his eyes, but opened them again right away. “God, how stupid does that sound?” he asked. His words were slow and soft, either from medication or from the concussion. “You saved my life, and I’m saying ‘thanks.’ ”
“How do you feel?” I asked.
“Headache. I’ll be all right. Run-of-the-mill concussion, they tell me. That guy was really crazy, wasn’t he?”
“Roland? I guess he was.”
“And Andi. Jesus, Andi. Poor kid. Is she—?”
“She’s dead,” I told him.
“God.” He was quiet for a moment. Then he asked, “How’s Genna? Is she okay with all this? Is she coming down?”
“I spoke to her a few hours ago, but not since. She was upset, but all right.”
“Could you call her? Tell her I’m okay? I don’t know what they’re giving me here, I’m pretty sleepy, but I’d love it if she got here before I really go under.”
He smiled again, and his blue eyes smiled, too. I wondered if his mother’s blue eyes had ever smiled like that.
“Genna has a problem, John.”
The smile faded. “What problem?”
“Your mother made her sign a contract agreeing to never see you again.” I told him the story, the deckle-edged paper, his mother’s coldness and her accusations.
“My God,” he breathed. “My God. But,” he stopped, creasing his brow, “now she’ll get the money back, won’t she? So the contract is void. If it ever was good.”
“It doesn’t matter if it’s void or if it ever was good. Your mother can tie Genna up in court for years trying to get out of it, even though everyone knows Genna will win in the end. You can count on that being the end of Mandarin Plaid if she does.”
&
nbsp; John swore softly, under his breath.
“But that would make your mother happy,” I said. “To destroy Mandarin Plaid. Because she thinks you’re with Genna for the glitz and the glamour, and that if Genna’s a failure you’ll dump her.”
John sighed. “I know she does. All that glitz and glamour. But it’s not true.”
“I know it isn’t. And I know you know she thinks so.”
John lifted his hand tentatively to rub his eyes. Then, realizing we were waiting for him to speak, he said, “You lost me. Who knows what?”
“You knew your mother was trying to destroy Mandarin Plaid. That she was behind all the things that went wrong—the vendors dropping out, Wayne Lewis quitting. She didn’t want you to know, and you never told Genna, but you knew.”
John waited a moment. Then, looking up at me, he said, “You’re right. I knew what she was up to. She thought she was so smart, but it’s her style, that knife-in-the-back stuff. I couldn’t tell Genna. What I did was to run all around the city, trying to fix things.” He laughed weakly. “My mother’s always been disgusted with me because I’ve never worked. Her definition of work, you know, nine-to-five in a suit in a big glass building. Maybe up till I met Genna she was right. All I know is, I’ve never worked as hard as I did to try to keep her from destroying Genna.”
“She was why Roland backed out after you had the factory lined up?”
John started to nod, but winced and thought better, apparently, of movement. “Right,” he said. He added, “I thought I just about had him convinced to come back with us. I spent a lot of time talking to that guy. Shows you what I know, right? God, what some people will do for money.”
“Let’s talk about money, John,” I said.
He looked up at me again. “Money?”
“Well, not that money. Not the million dollars, yet. The fifty thousand dollars for the sketches that you got from your bank.”
“What about it?” He frowned again. “Where is it?”
“That’s the question. Or it would be, if there were any such money.”
He squeezed his eyes shut and then opened them again, as though he were having difficulty focusing. “What do you mean, if there were?”
“You had Genna wait in the lobby when you went to talk to the bank officer. You came back with an envelope, told Genna to go back to her office, and got in a cab. To go leave the money at Thirty-fifth and Third. Where there’s no phone booth.”
“No—? Sure there is. Where I left the envelope. And then, like an idiot, I stayed to see what would happen. Duh.” He smiled again, weakly, engagingly. “Look, I don’t think I can hold it together much longer. Thanks for—”
“No, there’s not,” Bill said, speaking for the first time since we’d come in here. His tone was mild, friendly even, but his words wove themselves together like a net settling over John. “I went there to try to pick up your trail. There’s no phone booth on Third at Thirty-fifth, or at Thirty-sixth. There’s one at Thirty-fourth, but it’s on a heavy-traffic corner, the kind of place you wouldn’t tell someone to leave an envelope full of cash because it would be gone before you could get to it. There’s a phone between Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth, but there was a drug dealer hanging out at it waiting for a call. The neighborhood says he uses it most afternoons. Not a good bet, either. And,” he added, “neither of those two is anywhere near a dry cleaner.”
“Third?” John frowned. “No, not Third. It was Second.”
“Third,” Bill said. “Genna was positive about that. I don’t think that’s the kind of mistake she makes. So—” John opened his mouth to speak, but Bill wouldn’t let him get started “—so I called Citibank. I told them I was from Chemical and we suspected someone had been fraudulently accessing your account with us. I asked if there had been any large withdrawals in the last few days from any of your accounts with them. Not the amounts, so they didn’t have to break a confidence, just any large cash movements. They told me no.”
“I—”
“It wasn’t there, John,” I said. “I saw everything come up out of that basement in plastic evidence bags. I know what an envelope full of fifty thousand dollars looks like: I’d just put one down when someone shot at me, remember? Was that Andi? Or was it Roland? That’s more his style, to do the cowboy stuff while someone else grabs and runs. Am I right?”
John raised his hand again to rub his eyes. After a moment he said, “Could you turn the light out?”
Bill went over by the door and did that. I didn’t move. In the room’s new twilight, the bed and the equipment cast soft, conflicting shadows from the light that drifted in through the window and through the glass in the door.
Bill came back to stand by the bed. John remained silent. Bill said, “When I knew there was no money and no phone booth, I called Dawn. I wanted someone who knew you, who might know how you’d think.” He paused, then said, “Someone you’d once shown a building you owned. She remembered that building. She led me right to it.”
Silence filled the room again. When John finally spoke, it was without anger, with great weariness. “I should tell you to go to hell,” he said. “I should tell you you’re crazy and to get the hell out of here. I could yell for a nurse. I ought to do a whole thing. But you know what?”
“What?” I asked.
He sighed, from deep within. “Screw it, that’s what. I haven’t got the energy. I can’t do this anymore.”
“Tell us what it is you can’t do,” I said gently.
“I guess my mother’s right. I’m not good at much. I’m not even good at this.”
“At what?”
“For a while,” he spoke slowly, but clearly, as though he were explaining this not only to us, but to himself, “I actually thought I was. Good at something, I mean. At what Genna needed me for, at Mandarin Plaid. Not good enough to keep my mother from pulling her shit, but I never expected to be as good as my mother. Even my father was never in her league.
“But this idea. I thought this idea was good. Great. Awesome. Not mine, of course. But I thought it was brilliant.”
“It was Roland’s?” I asked.
“Sure it was Roland’s. Roland was a genius. My mother offered him five thousand dollars to break his contract with us. He pushed her up to seventy-five hundred. He said he had this idea the minute she called.” He coughed, then closed his eyes in pain. He opened them, though, and kept going. “I liked him, too. I thought he liked me. I thought we were partners. I didn’t know he had any … I didn’t know he was even thinking … shit! Son of a bitch. He was planning to kill me all along.”
Anger flooded his drained face. With his right hand, the one that didn’t have a needle and a tube in it, he pounded the bed.
I said, “You’d been planning to split the money?”
“Right down the middle.”
“And Andi Shechter?”
“We brought her in at first just to grab the envelope in the park. She was my idea. I knew she needed cash.”
“For drugs.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, as though needing cash for drugs was the same as needing cash to pay the rent. “She was going to get to keep what was in the envelope after the whole thing was over. She got off on it.”
“Is that what you were talking about in Donna’s that night? When she looked sort of meanly happy, and you didn’t?”
“You were in Donna’s?”
I nodded.
“Shit,” John said. “You were on to us that long ago?”
“No. I just had a feeling you were up to something. Is that what that was about?”
“Yeah. And she wanted to tell me something else, too: my mother had called her to say she’d pay Andi to back out of Genna’s show. Andi thought that was pretty funny.”
Oh, yeah. Pretty funny. “And you gave her money.”
“For the information. About my mother. That’s how I knew what she was up to. I paid people to tell me.”
My god, I thought. Like mother, like son.
I had another question. “If all Andi was supposed to do was grab the money the first time, what was she doing there today?”
“When we realized you were going to be bringing the ransom money, Roland said we’d better make it look good. So we called Andi. She was up for it. You were the dark horse, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“Roland was really impressed with you. At first he thought it was a great idea, having you involved. A pro—a pair of pros—would lend a lot of credibility to the thing. The bit about shooting at you in the park—that was so you’d get the idea these guys were crazy and dangerous. So when I got kidnapped everyone would be worried.
“But you two were better than he thought. He had to keep improvising to deal with what you were doing. But he said that made it exciting.”
I didn’t know how I felt about this, a compliment on my professional skills from an extortionist and would-be murderer, now dead, received secondhand from his wounded co-conspirator. “Andi Shechter,” I prompted, to cover my confused thoughts.
“We offered her another fifty thousand,” John said. “Just to stand there with a gun, for you. Shit, I didn’t even know that gun was loaded. Roland’s guns, both of them,” he added. “So maybe I should have figured. It must have made it exciting.”
“What were you going to do with the money?”
John looked at me as though he was surprised I was even asking the question. “Mine was for Genna,” he said. “To get Mandarin Plaid going the way she needs, for a first season. Even with the investors, she hasn’t got enough. She doesn’t want to believe it, but it’s true. She’s undercapitalized. She won’t make it without more startup cash.”
Something came back to me. “That’s why you were so mad when she used her own money for the ransom?”
“Right. The whole point was for her, to get money for her, not to drain her. She should have used mine.”
Well, actually Dawn’s, I thought, but I didn’t want to go into that now. “What about Roland?” I asked.
“The money? Roland was going to use his to ditch the factory and set himself up. He wanted to open an import business—factories on the mainland, that’s the coming thing, he kept saying. Labor’s cheap and there are fortunes to be made. He just needed some capital to start. Shit, if I could have gotten my hands on my money legitimately, I’d probably have invested with him.”
