China Trade (24 page)

His sudden change of topic threw me. My confusion made me realize how exhausted I was. I shook my head. “I can’t do that, Detective. Trish’s death may have nothing to do with them. Steve found the door open. Maybe so did someone else. Someone came in to rob the place, was surprised by Trish, and panicked.”

“On the third floor?”

I shrugged. “Trish’s murder isn’t my case. The stolen porcelains are my case.”

Bernstein stood abruptly. “All right. Look. I’ve had it, I’m leaving. I’m giving you twenty-four hours. Maybe I’ll find Johnson, maybe Bailey’ll confess. Maybe
you’ll
confess. If I don’t have somebody in the tank by tomorrow night, I’m going to pick you up as a material witness and hold you until you give me all the details. Good night, Miss Chin.”

He turned his broad back on me and strode out, leaving the door open.

I took the hint and left too.

* * *

This time it was my turn to head north. The desk sergeant wouldn’t tell me whether Bill or Steve were still being questioned. I could get a lawyer, and demand to know, and spend all night doing this; or, knowing that Steve—according to Bernstein—was taken care of, I could wait awhile for Bill, who could take care of himself. If he didn’t show, I could go home, sleep, and find him in the morning. The worst that could have happened was that he’d irritated some cop enough that he’d be spending the night in jail.

It wouldn’t be the first time, after all.

Two blocks up Third the windows of an all-night coffee shop spilled hard-edged blocks of light out into the street. One cup of tea, I promised myself, and then I’d go. I ordered the tea and a carrot-raisin muffin from a skinny Greek teenager who looked sleepier than I felt. He passed my order in Greek to the T-shirted man behind the counter. So tired I was bone-cold, I kept my jacket zipped and slumped into the corner of a padded booth, listening to the to-me meaningless, guttural rhythms of their casual conversation.

We were on to something. This Jim Johnson meant something, I knew that. The dish with Steve Bailey’s childhood dog on it meant something, and the fact that someone else—even someone who made my gut clench the way Matt Yin did—had connected Hsing Chung Wah with Lee Kuan Yue meant something.

Something, something, something. What a silly-sounding word. It ought to be spelled with a “p” in the middle. Sumpthing. Okay, Lydia, go home. Drink your tea so you don’t fall asleep in the cab, and then go home.

I nibbled my muffin, drank my tea. I watched the door, asked for more hot water, forced my eyes to stay open. I gave up, asked for my check, and stood.

Bill walked in as the skinny kid handed me my change at the cash register.

“Gee,” he said. “I waited for you before.”

“I knew you were about to walk in, so I paid so we wouldn’t waste time.”

“What about my coffee?”

I bought him a cup of black coffee to go and we went.

In the cab on the way home we talked but it didn’t do us any good. I told Bill that Bernstein had Steve packed away, and Bill told me that Bernstein hadn’t had much to say to him beyond the usual warnings.

“He’s going to lock me up tomorrow if he doesn’t get anybody else to lock up,” I said.

“Me too.”

“Well, that’ll be cozy.”

We talked some more. Bill had the same sense I did, that we were getting close, but he didn’t know, either, what we were getting close to.

I looked out the window while he drank his coffee. I wondered if everyone else I saw moving under streetlights and in the darkness of the city shadows was as cold and exhausted as I was. I felt sorry for everyone who wasn’t in a warm cab on their way home.

“Bill?” I said.

“Hmmm?” he answered through a sip of coffee.

“Were you surprised to find Steve at a place like Dusty’s?”

“You mean a gay bar in the Village?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Me either. I almost expected it, just from the way he acted when we met him that one time.”

“You’re getting at something.”

Something. That dumb word again. “I told you what Dr. Caldwell said about not knowing whether Steve and Trish had a romantic relationship. It just strikes me as sort of weird that Caldwell didn’t know Steve was gay.”

“Maybe he did know. Maybe he was trying to do Steve a
favor by not bringing it up. To guys Caldwell’s age being out isn’t automatic.”

“But still…”

“Still what?”

“I don’t know. The way he said it. He made saying Steve couldn’t have done it sound like … like he was lying for Steve, or something.” Something. Leave me alone, you stupid word.

“Is it possible he was trying to help Steve by confusing things?”

“That’s not very smart.”

“People don’t necessarily think very well when they’re in shock.”

I didn’t answer.

“I think we just have to sleep on it,” Bill said, finishing his coffee. “That’s not a pass, by the way.”

“Yes it is,” I murmured, my eyes already closed, my head lolling against the cab’s back seat. “It’s just not a very good one.”

The cab rolled across Canal into Chinatown. Chinatown’s not a late-night place. All the corrugated shutters were locked down and the neon signs were dark. The streetlights cast a wide, lonely glow on near-empty streets. When the cab stopped at my building I turned automatically to Bill, to kiss him good night, but I got suddenly confused. Since I’d been so obnoxious about his making a pass at me, maybe it wasn’t fair of me to kiss him. And maybe he wouldn’t want me to. And maybe I was too tired to think about it.

Bill solved the problem by leaning over and kissing my cheek.

“Call me,” he said. “As soon as you’re up.”

I watched the cab pull away. Then, taking out my single key, I climbed the flights to my own front door.

I fell asleep immediately, probably before I actually lay down. But somewhere around four I woke, with a nagging feeling that
there was something I needed to do. “Go back to sleep?” I suggested to myself, but that wasn’t it. I lay blankly on my pillows waiting for inspiration. It didn’t come, but the slightly guilty thought that I’d gone to bed without my cup of Mr. Gao’s unpleasant tea did.

Since I wasn’t sleeping, I got up. I tiptoed through our silent apartment to the kitchen to make my tea. At the living room window I stopped to watch the clouds blow away over the rooftops of Chinatown. The moon, close to full, glinted icily. Today had been gray; tomorrow, it seemed, was going to be clear.

As I turned from the window a gleam of moonlight fell on the cabinet where my mother keeps the little mud figures of scholars and horses and carp for longevity that my father used to collect. One of the gods—the one who stuffs evil spirits into a wine barrel—glared at me with his mock-fierce expression, the face that had always made me laugh as a child when my father imitated it.

“Yeah,” I whispered to the figure, so I wouldn’t wake my mother, “you’re about as tough as I am. You don’t scare me.”

He snarled all the harder, as though scaring me was the point. The colored glazes of his robes threw little glittering stars of moonlight into the room. I turned to walk past him. One step, and then I stopped. I turned back, staring at him and his companions.

“Oh,” I whispered. “Oh oh oh oh oh.”

As I dashed back to my room to call Bill the wine barrel god’s glare had taken on a triumphant air.

The phone rang twice. “Smith,” Bill muttered, then coughed a smoker’s cough.

“Wake up. It’s me.”

“What’s wrong?” he demanded, and from his voice I knew a jolt of adrenaline had wakened him fully.

“Nothing’s wrong. Mrs. Hsing’s cup. I know where we saw it before.”

I told him the wine barrel god’s inspiration.

“He’s a genius,” Bill said, when I was done.

“What about me?” I asked indignantly.

“You’re a good medium. All right, go back to bed. Nothing’s going to happen now. We’ll go in the morning.”

I knew he was right, but I said, “You have to be kidding. I can’t sleep now.”

“Sure you can. The sleep of the righteous.”

“Me?”

“Try it.”

He was right. I slept soundly for the next couple of hours. But before I tried, I went back to the kitchen and brewed Mr. Gao’s tea. While it was steeping I tiptoed back to the living room, lit three sticks of incense, and stuck them in my mother’s little altar to burn down. I wasn’t really sure of the right way to do this, but I figured the wine barrel god would know it was for him.

T
W E N T Y - S E V E N

I
n the morning I woke all stiff. I stumbled into the bathroom, dumped a package of Mr. Gao’s herbs into a steaming tub of water, and sat there feeling my muscles melt. I deep-breathed the fragrance of the floating twigs and petals. It cleared my head.

When, softened and passably supple, I wrapped myself in my thick robe and padded into the kitchen, I found my mother hanging the shirt and pants I had worn the night before on the creaky clothesline that runs outside our kitchen window. The frigid January air blasted in as she leaned, clothespins in mouth, out over the windowsill.

“Ma, what are you doing?” I objected. “I’ll take them to the laundry.”

“They smell terrible,” she scolded me, mumbling through the clothespins. “Stale smoke and sweat. I’d be too ashamed to let the laundry have them until they’ve aired out. They won’t be clean but at least they’ll smell like it. You must have been in a very unhealthy place last night, Ling Wan-ju.”

More than one, I thought. For more than one reason.

When I left it was still early, not yet eight-thirty. The day was clear, as the night had promised, and seemed a little warmer than the one before it. I took a cab to Bill’s. We jumped in the rush-hour subway and sped uptown.

Bill had suggested a cab uptown, too, if I wasn’t feeling up to being jostled by crowds, but at that hour it doesn’t pay to try to drive, and the subways are frequent and fast.

And it never pays to admit you’re not up to something.

We arrived at the brown brick building off West End twenty minutes after we left Bill’s. The doorman remembered us, and called upstairs. Soon we were in the wheezing elevator, and then walking the worn carpet, and then knocking on Dr. Browning’s door.

The door opened part way, and Dr. Browning’s wide eyes and thick glasses peered out. His head moved slowly back and forth from Bill to me, as though he were comparing us to photographs he thought he might have seen once.

“Well,” he said. He smiled the little shy smile. “Ms. Chin. And Mr. Smith. This is an unexpected pleasure. What can I do for you?”

“There’s something we’d like to ask you about,” I told him. “May we come in?”

“Oh. Oh, my, of course.” Dr. Browning stood aside in the doorway, and we came in.

The dimness, the paper snowdrifts, the musty smell were the same, and if anything had been moved since we were here last, I wouldn’t be the one to be able to prove it.

“Would you like to sit?” Dr. Browning asked with bashful pride. He gestured at the spaces Bill had cleared on the small sofa and the chair at our last visit. They were still clear, and their cushions still showed the imprints of us. The piles
Bill had moved to the floor were still where he’d put them, and would probably stay there, I thought, until some other force of nature put them somewhere else.

I’d seen Bill’s eyes, when we first came in, search out what we’d come to see, although, when he’d found it, his expression hadn’t changed. Now he smiled, thanked Dr. Browning, and sat, his jacket loosely open, his whole demeanor casual and friendly.

I didn’t sit, although I smiled also. I wandered over to the china cabinet on the wall, the one glittering thing in this dusty room, the one place where, instead of disappearing into the shadows like a footfall into carpet, light bounced and played and shot little piercing sparks into the dimness of years.

Just like the wine barrel god’s cabinet in my own living room.

“They are lovely,” I murmured. “Your collection.”

“Oh,” Dr. Browning blushed. “Well, they’re so small, but they’re quite special. Each of them really is wonderful, in its way. Thank you for noticing.”

I turned to him, some part of me already apologizing silently for what I was about to say. “You might not thank me, Dr. Browning, for what I noticed. Would you take one of them out for me?”

“Take one of them out? One of my little ones? Why—why would you want me to do that?” He moved protectively toward the cabinet.

I looked from him to the small, shiny porcelains on the shelves, and I caught Bill’s eye. “Well,” I said, “I suppose that may not be necessary.” I studied the shelves again, and then navigated the paper hillocks to the small sofa. “But I think you know which piece we’ve come to talk about.”

Dr. Browning remained standing, his owl-eyes regarding me through their thick lenses. Neither Bill nor I spoke; we waited. The silence was as thick and old as the dust that was everywhere. Slowly, Dr. Browning’s thin, stooped form seemed to deflate; he sank into the desk chair as though his legs were finally too weak to support their burden.

When he spoke, his words were so soft that I had to lean forward to hear him.

“The truth is,” he whispered, with a small, sad smile I didn’t understand, “that I don’t. Although I might hazard a guess.”

“I beg your pardon?” I said, more because I wasn’t sure I’d heard him than because I expected him to explain himself.

“They’re all… my little ones are all…” He trailed off, hands twisted in his lap, head bowed.

I glanced at Bill, then spoke again. “The cup.” I tried to make my words gentle. “The tiger cup with the tiger on the lid. It’s from the Blair collection, isn’t it?”

Dr. Browning nodded, eyes still on the floor. “I thought that must be the one you meant.” Suddenly he looked up. “I could tell you it isn’t.” That was offered in the tone of a hopeful suggestion, but before I could respond he folded in on himself again. “Oh, I’m no good at that,” he sighed. “I always knew my only luck would be not to be found out. And it lasted such a long time, too, my luck. But I always knew this would happen one day, and there’d be nothing I could do about it. I’m no good at the bold-faced lie.”