Ghost Month (17 page)

“Sit down, sit down!” she cried. “Do you want tea? Hey, maybe you want whiskey instead?”

“I’m not ready for a drink,” I said, settling into an ergonomic
chair that felt like a big piece of boneless meat. Peggy swung into her Aeron and leaned across the table, splaying out her cat claws.

“You know what, Jing-nan? You look like you’ve never been to America.” Peggy cut off my objection. “I mean that as a compliment. You look like a contemporary Taiwanese right there.

“This building, Taipei 101, they didn’t finish it until we were away at college, but I was here for the opening over winter break freshman year. It was the tallest one in the world for six years! That’s something to be pretty goddamned proud of, right? Our politically marginalized, pissant island showed the rest of the world up for a little while. When my father moved the Lee family headquarters into the building, I was like, ‘Fuck, yeah!’ ”

She got up and stretched her arms over her head, pulling the material of her suit taut. Had she gotten new boobs?

Peggy smiled, approving my glance at her chest. Then she stepped away from the window and tapped the glass.

“That’s Taiwan out there, Jing-nan. Come over here! I want you to take a good, hard look at it!”

I pulled myself out of the chair a little awkwardly and nearly fell to my knees. I stumbled over to the full-length window. She put her hand on my shoulder and rubbed.

“What do you notice about the buildings out there? The best ones were constructed by the Japanese while they colonized us. That was seventy years ago! Honestly, it is embarrassing as hell that our Presidential Office Building was originally built for the Japanese governor-general. You think the American president would live in a house built for the king of England? No way!

“Look over there, up in the hills. You see all of those crappy houses? Those are illegal houses, Jing-nan. They’re eyesores. Tourists from all over the world are looking down at them from the Taipei 101 observation deck, and they’re like, ‘What the hell are those?’ People who live in illegal houses should all be sent to jail.”

“Peggy,” I said, “I never really cared much for architecture.”

“You have to admire this building. It’s a remarkable human achievement.”

“I like Taipei 101, but sometimes I think it lacks some heart.”

Peggy slapped her forehead with the back of her hand and fell
back into her chair in an exaggerated motion. “Oh, I forgot I was talking to
you
! Mr. Joy Division! Of course you have an eye for the negative aspects of everything! Hey, you could leverage that pessimism—start a bearish fund. Maybe clean up a little bit.”

I returned to the boneless chair and put my hands tentatively on the edge of my side of the desk. “Actually, Peggy, I am here on rather depressing business.”

“Julia,” she said, looking down at her open palms.

“You know.”

“Of course I do. It was all over our school Facebook page. This was like two days ago.”

“I’m not on Facebook.”

“You’re not, eh?” she said, crossing her arms. “I thought you were just blocking me.”

“I wouldn’t know how to do that.”

Peggy turned her chair, leaned under the table and shrugged. She came up with a bottle of Yamazaki Single Malt and two glasses. “So, you wanted to come here to talk about your old girlfriend? You didn’t really want to see me, after all.” She poured and made two amber slits dance in the glasses.

“I still don’t feel up for a drink,” I said.

“They’re both for me,” she snapped.

I spoke as she took a long sip. “Peggy, you went to NYU with Julia. What can you tell me about her time in school?”

“Well, what do you think?” Peggy eased her chair back and banged a drawer shut. “With a face and a body like that, what do you think? She was popular. Everybody liked her. Guys wanted to take her out—even the Americans. Girls wanted to be her friend. But you know her nature. Study study study all the time.” Peggy emptied the first glass and shoved her chair forward until the edge of the desk bit into her waist. “Julia made things as hard as she possibly could for herself. She was a double major.”

“What did she study?”

“Political science and something else.”

“What else?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You remember.”

I saw her teeth for a second.

“I didn’t see her that often. You know we were not friends, Jing-nan. The only time I ran into her was at the Japanese market or at the library, one of the few times I went.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

Peggy shook her head and picked up the second glass. “Back in the US,” she said, sipping her drink.

“You didn’t know Julia was here?”

She gave me a long look, her eyes half-closed. “I. Had. No. Idea. What?! Do you think I killed her?”

“No, I don’t think that.” But you probably don’t mind that she’s dead. “Please, just tell me about when you saw her last.”

“The day she was kicked out of NYU, the end of junior year. Six years ago.” Peggy sipped some whiskey and snorted. “She cheated. You knew that, right?” She arched an eyebrow that seemed to question Julia’s lifetime academic record.

“That’s what I heard, but I have a hard time believing it.”

“You’d better believe it. She was dumping most of her stuff right in the street. All she was going to take back to Taiwan were two tiny, tiny suitcases. I asked her what had happened, and she told me they had caught her cheating. The double major was too much work, and she had taken one little shortcut. All she did was copy one paragraph and they were throwing her out. It was a bad scene. She had me crying, too!”

I folded my arms. Crying with laughter, I’ll bet.

“You knew, Peggy, that I had a serious agreement with Julia.”

“The two of you were going to stop seeing each other and one day you would come for her like a knight riding out of the mist. Blah blah. Who didn’t know about it?” She finished the second glass and her face twitched.

“We never imagined things would turn out this way.”

“No one knows the future, right?”

I felt something at my ankle. It was Peggy’s foot. With some effort I shifted in my seat and pulled my feet underneath my chair. “You know what happened to me, right?”

“I heard, Jing-nan. There was a big chain email going around
our old classmates. I was a part of the group that sent a banner and flowers to the funerals.”

“I’m sure you were the one who spearheaded the gesture, so thank you.” She nodded and folded her hands in front of her. “Listen, Peggy. Julia’s parents have asked me to help find some more information about her murder. They say the cops aren’t helping at all.”

“Nobody wants to take the blame for an unsolved crime, so nobody will take it up. Cops won’t do anything unless the victim was someone important, someone rich or famous.”

“Julia was murdered.”

For the first time, I saw a sympathetic look in Peggy’s eyes. “I know. It’s just unbelievable.”

“It would have to be a gangster or a cop—someone who had access to a gun.”

“It could be an aborigine,” she offered. “They’re allowed to carry firearms for hunting and maintaining their culture.”

“I didn’t think about that.”

Peggy looked thoughtful. “A betel-nut girl is essentially a prostitute,” she said. “I don’t mean to speak ill of Julia, but she probably did turn a few tricks, right? Just to get by.”

My hands curled into two fists on my thighs. I had to admit that it was a possibility. If only I had backed down from my big plan and swallowed my pride, she could have stayed with me in the toaster house. She wouldn’t have had to do any of it. I’m sure her parents wouldn’t have been happy about the living arrangements, but we’d be happy, and Julia would be alive.

We could have just gotten married, anyway. Did it matter that the two of us would be back at the night market, living the same lives as our parents?

Doesn’t matter
.

Thinking of my father’s favorite phrase rubbed the wistfulness away.

“You want me to tell her parents that their daughter was a hooker?” I said evenly to Peggy.

“Hey, they probably half think it themselves but don’t want to believe it. Maybe you, too.”

I crossed my arms.

“Jing-nan! We really need to consider everything possible.”

“Maybe it was a waste of time for me to come here.”

“You have an issue with me, don’t you, Jing-nan? You always did. Don’t think I can’t tell.”

“This is the issue: you never respected my relationship with Julia.”

Peggy sprung from her chair and pointed at my nose with the white-star end of her Montblanc pen. “You hate mainlanders! You hate me and my family, right?” She put on a smug smile.

“I came here to see if you knew more about Julia, about her life when she came back to Taiwan. I’m an optimist. I thought maybe you might have set aside your animosity and become friends with Julia. I thought you two might have been in touch by email or through Facebook.”

“If it were up to me, we would have been friends,” said Peggy. “When my parents made me a VP I wrote to Julia to offer her a job—an important job—and I told her I didn’t care if she didn’t have a college degree. She completely ignored me. Can you believe that?”

“When was this?”

Peggy visibly stiffened. “Two years ago. I guess you missed the press coverage. I was the youngest female vice president ever in the securities industry.”

“How did you reach out to her?”

“I wrote to her NYU email. It was still good, and I know she read it because I had a read receipt on it.” She splashed more whiskey in her first glass. “Am I really such a horrible person that I don’t deserve a reply?”

“What sort of job did you offer her?”

“I was going to make her my top researcher—reporting directly to me.”

“I can’t see why she didn’t respond,” I said, leaking sarcasm.

“Wait, Jing-nan, why can’t we simply be decent with each other? It’s been so long, after all.”

“It has been a while.”

She slapped the desk and grunted like an old man. “Do you know what’s been going on with me? Do you care? It hasn’t been all good for me, either, you know.”

“I’m sorry, I never even asked about you,” I said as sincerely as possible. “I just assumed you were doing well because … you seem to be. How have you been?”

“I married a guy from Switzerland after graduation. A banker.”

“You have my congratulations.”

“We got divorced six months ago.” She fixed the shoulders on her pantsuit. “It was over before then, but you know how it is.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“My parents won’t get off my case. They say I should have found a good mainlander boy. Guess I’m cursed, huh?”

She looked sad. The world doesn’t need another sad person.

“Peggy, I’ve changed my mind. I will have a whiskey. A small one.”

“I’ll get you a clean glass.”

“I’ll just use this one. Alcohol kills germs. And anyway, we’re old friends.”

It was nice to see her smile for real.

“You wouldn’t happen to know,” I asked halfway through my shallow drink, “where Cookie Monster is, would you?”

She spit on me when she laughed. “Oh my God, I’m sorry, Jing-nan!”

“It’s all right.” I wiped myself with my hand.

“Wow, I have no idea where he is now!”

“He might be better. You never know.”

She shook her head. “Say, Jing-nan, have you been seeing anybody?”

“Oh, no.” I felt a lump in my throat spiral upward. “I was still going to, you know, marry Julia. Are you seeing anybody now?”

“No. My life is all about work.”

“Your family has all these business connections and you know all these people—a lot of guys, I’m sure.”

She smiled bitterly. “Do you think any of us are free to see each other? We all work eighty-hour weeks!”

E
VERY ELEVATOR HAD SEEMED
to be going down when I arrived at Taipei 101, but when I stepped out of Peggy’s office they all seemed to be coming up.

I had forgotten how straight whiskey could burn. I felt like my throat and nose had been cauterized. I rubbed my tongue against the roof of my mouth. I needed some water.

Finally the elevator arrived. It was empty, save for the smell of burning cigars. Or was it incense?

I rode down, thinking of Peggy’s words: “If it were up to me, we would have been friends.”

Julia was just like me, I thought. After my exit from UCLA, I completely avoided messages from all my former roommates and classmates. I didn’t want to field their sympathetic emails or explain exactly what had happened. It had been too much for a newly minted orphan to deal with. After a while, people stopped asking, stopped emailing. I’m sure I was no longer even in their address books.

I rode the elevator alone. The car slowed as it approached ground level, and I could hear a disturbance outside. As the doors opened, two big men in overcoats, one wearing shades and one wearing a floppy rain hat, shoved their way in and blocked the doors before I could exit.

I quickly recognized the guy on the left as the American who had accosted me at the Huangs’ parking lot and on the highway. I looked into his shades and he greeted me by throwing the back of his hand against my face. Before I could react, the man in the hat jabbed me hard in the gut with an umbrella handle. My body involuntarily folded in on itself, as if I were a startled armadillo. I staggered to a corner of the elevator and propped myself up. That bastard had gotten me good in the middle and I couldn’t inhale. Behind my assailants, an old woman tried to enter the elevator.

“I’m sorry, auntie,” the man in the hat said. “This car is going out of service.” Unlike the American, he was a yam and spoke Taiwanese. She nodded and stepped back.

The men opened up their umbrellas, I observed, to block the security cameras. There were a few awkward seconds before the doors closed. There was little I could do apart from trying to get my halting breaths under control as the elevator shot up.

The American turned to the side and activated a switch on the elevator panel, possibly with a key. It was hard to see his actions
clearly from the floor. I still couldn’t raise the upper part of my body. The car slowed and then stopped. An emergency light on the panel began to blink, and a prerecorded message began to play loudly.