When I finally called Bill back, from my brother’s place in Flushing, I told him to meet me at my office in an hour and a half. “And bring your boy detective kit.”
“Why?”
“Because my mother’s a genius.”
He didn’t respond to that, as well he shouldn’t. And admittedly it’s not something I say often. On the way to Queens, though, she’d outdone herself.
Not that she’d meant to be helpful. She’d meant to keep complaining. “Send your mother all the way to Flushing again,” she’d grumbled. “When she has not been back in her own home for one week yet.” That was at the station, after we’d stopped at a tea shop for red bean buns. Ted’s kids love them, and though you can get them at a bakery two blocks from their house, my mother swears no one in Flushing, with the exception of Ling-an when she’s not too busy, can cook. We also picked up cream puffs, almond cookies, and chocolate tarts with green frosting that looked like something Bill might eat. Which I didn’t mention.
Once we were on the subway, bakery boxes in pink plastic bags, my mother had another thought. “Chin Ling Wan-ju! If you are in the apartment alone when the gang boys come, who will keep you safe?” She stood, ready to turn and go back.
To tell the truth, I was surprised this hadn’t come up sooner. I was ready. “Sit down, Ma. I’m going to get alarms for the door and the kitchen window. And I’ll keep the window locked. But I really don’t think anyone will come while I’m there. I was mostly worried that they’d wait until I went out and break in while you were there.”
“Why will they not come while you are there?”
Because I have a gun. No, Lydia, don’t say that. “They waited until my office was empty. They seem to not want to run into me.”
She narrowed her eyes, but for a while after that she sat silent. Then, in a mutter that grew steadily louder, she picked up her earlier theme. The first words I made out were “… valued our elders.” I guessed what was coming. “Children today, no respect,” she told no one in particular. “Make their parents leave home, go far away.”
“Ma, I-”
“Your cousin Danny.” She gave me a dirty look, like every bad thing Danny had ever done was my fault. “Sent his mother all the way to China.”
“She wanted to see her home village. Danny paid for the trip. He’s very generous.”
“He should have gone with her, not make her go alone.”
“She’s not alone. She’s on a tour.”
“With strangers.”
“And her sister and two of her best friends!”
“And strangers. Instead of their own children. And your cousin Clifford. A very unfilial son. Made his mother go to New Jersey.”
“Clifford Kwan? Armpit? He sent his mother to New Jersey?”
She frowned at me. “No wonder he is bad. People call him disgusting names.”
“He’s proud of that name.”
“Does that make it not disgusting?”
“What do you mean, he sent his mother to New Jersey?”
“The son caused the mother so much heartache, the mother moved away.”
“Oh. So he didn’t send her away. She moved to the suburbs.”
“He made her go away by breaking her heart.”
“Ma, Clifford’s been rotten from the day he was born. I’m surprised Kwan Shan didn’t kick him out of the house years ago.”
She rolled her eyes. Once again I’d failed to understand something basic. “It would be better if you could choose your relatives. Get ones you want, throw away bad ones. But you can’t. The child you get is the child you have to keep.” Her narrowed eyes told me that, by the way, I should consider myself lucky this was true. As if to emphasize her point, she added, “It was when Kwan Shan left Chinatown that her son became involved with gang boys.”
I wasn’t having any. “I thought you said his bad behavior made her move away.”
“Now she will not come back. She is ashamed to show her face.”
“She’s probably just happy in her nice new apartment. With a garden. Near her grandchildren.”
“What mother could be happy when her youngest son is a White Eagle?”
“Ma-what?”
“I said-”
“I know what you said. Armpit’s a White Eagle? Since when?”
“Auntie Ro, at the pharmacy, told me. Her brother-in-law, who makes tattoos, drew a white eagle on Clifford three days ago. Auntie Ro says that means he is accepted as one of them.”
It sure did. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Oh, have you been home for me to tell you? I’m sorry, Ling Wan-ju, I must not have noticed.”
When I got to my office, I found Bill shooting the breeze with the Golden Adventure ladies. They all but batted their eyes when he said good-bye. Well, good. Anything to keep them thinking I was a worthwhile subtenant.
“How did you talk your mother into going?” he asked as we went down the hall.
“Believe me, I didn’t. I told her I didn’t want to have to worry about her. She said, ‘Oh, this is for you, not for me?’ and I thought she was mad. Next thing I knew she was looking for her MetroCard.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“I hope that’s for the mess and not my mother?” I could tell it was, though, by the way he’d stopped inside my door and was staring around.
“All these papers were on your desk? That’s amazing.”
“Oh, give me a break. They went through the files, too.”
“I’d sure like to know what they were after.”
“So? Get to work and I’ll start digging.”
Bill headed for the bathroom with his toolbox. He can be a pain, but he has his good points. One is, he has some manual skills I’ve never mastered: hammering nails straight, driving a stick shift. And lifting fingerprints. He can do that, too.
“Rough, dry surfaces.” He examined the sill and bars. “I don’t know how much I can get.”
“It doesn’t matter. Just be thorough. And do as much as you can from outside. And take your time.”
While Bill was playing with powders and brushes, I picked up papers. The scattered folders and any papers whose provenance was obvious I refiled. Then I went through what was left. What I was doing was in the nature of carving away the marble to get to the statue. By clearing up everything I could, I was hoping to discover what wasn’t there.
“Tell me about the Shanghai cop,” Bill called through the window as he worked. “Is he any good, do you think?”
“Hah! A story in itself. Oh, my God, and a big one!” I stopped in the middle of my piles of paper. “I didn’t tell you about Alice.”
“What about Alice?”
“It’s long. And bad. And involves the Chinese cop.” I described Inspector Wei, which made him grin. Then I told him about the likelihood Alice Fairchild was involved in the jewel theft with Wong Pan, and the grin faded.
“That would explain a lot,” he said. “And change everything.”
“It sure would.”
“Is Mary looking for her?”
“You bet. I called her again, too, but of course she didn’t answer.”
The locksmith showed up right as Bill was finishing. He raised his eyebrows at the fingerprint powder all over everything. “Run-of-the-mill B and E?” he said to me. “How come you rate?”
“Homeland Security,” Bill offered without looking up.
An hour later my window had a case-hardened dead bolt and bars, my office was neater than it had been in months, and we still had no idea what had gone on. All my papers were accounted for. If the burglars were after anything besides making a mess and driving up my blood pressure, I couldn’t see that they’d had much success.
Neither had Bill, it looked like. “A partial palm. A smear. And what might be a thumb up by the lock.”
“I bet that’s mine. Oh, well, that wasn’t the point. What’s ‘case-hardened’?”
“Your pal Mulgrew.”
“What?”
“A cop who’s lost all human emotion.”
“Okay, be like that.” I took out my phone and dialed. I spoke briefly in Cantonese with Armpit Kwan’s heartbroken mother in New Jersey. Then I called the cell phone number she gave me for her heartbreaking son.
“Yah?” Well, it was the right number. That was Armpit: nasal and aggrieved.
“Hi, Clifford. It’s your cousin Lydia.”
“I don’t have-”
“Lydia Chin, Armpit. You do have: Our mother’s fathers were second cousins twice removed.” Or something. Whatever it was, he didn’t know it, I’d bet on that. “Your White Eagle homies broke into my office this afternoon and I want to know why.”
“Lydia Chin?” Armpit paused in pretend thought, which is the only kind he has. “Oh, that Lydia.”
“Why, Armpit?”
“Why what?”
“My office!”
“Aw, cuz, you’re tripping.”
“Don’t let’s go through all that. They were here, they made a mess, and you’re going to tell me why.”
“I don’t know shit about anything.”
“That’s all you know about anything, but I want to hear it anyway. You want to meet uptown where no one knows us, or you want me to come find you in Chinatown?”
“No way I’m meeting you.”
“Then I’ll find you, and your new friends will see us together.”
“No way you’re finding me, either.” Armpit was stuck in a groove.
“Cousin, I’m a private eye, remember? I can do pretty much everything the cops can do”-I put a little weight on “cops”-“and I don’t have to be as careful about legal niceties.” I wondered if anyone had ever used “nicety” in conversation with Armpit before. “I can trace your phone. No, don’t hang up, it’s already too late. And I can also lift fingerprints.”
A half-second delay. “So?” He was buying it, so I stepped it up.
“I have three sets of prints here. Later I’m going to send them to a private lab I use. Unless I have something better to do, like talk to my cousin. One set’s small. The kid, Armpit. You sent in a kid, and once I know who it was you can bet I’m telling his parents. And their family association, and their village association, and whatever tong their village association headman belongs to. And the beauty of it, Cousin Clifford, is that all those people, who will then go out of their way to give the White Eagles as hard a time as they possibly can, will know it was your cousin who jammed the White Eagles up. And the White Eagles will know it, too. Now: uptown, or right there where you are?”
And bless Armpit’s cowardly, probably stoned, and inarguably stupid little heart, if he didn’t suggest a pizza place on Union Square. Which was a good thing, because while Bill could lift fingerprints, we had no way to ID some ten-year-old from prints even if he’d left any, which he didn’t. The point of Bill dusting and lifting was to make sure the locksmith, the travel ladies, and any curious onlookers above could confirm we’d dusted and lifted. Also, though certain technologies available to the police are in fact available to PIs, I couldn’t trace a cell phone call. So it was good he’d told me where to meet him, because right at that moment I had not the first idea where Armpit was.