Marcia Muller: The Body Snatchers Affair

Mock Quan was groggily awake by then, struggling in vain to free himself from his bonds. He attempted a bluff at first, claiming to the patrolman that the fan kwei detective had sought to murder him and he was the one who had acted in self-defense, but the words fell on deaf ears. Mock Quan’s pistol — jammed, as it turned out — and his fear-raddled visage, coolie disguise, and highborn mow yung were sufficiently damning. When a pair of steel bracelets replaced the cloth strips binding his wrists, he lapsed into sullen silence.

Together, Quincannon and the copper hauled him downstairs to Fowler Alley, where they loaded him into the waiting paddy wagon. Quincannon readily agreed to go along. Not a word was spoken on the jouncing drive to the Hall of Justice; Mock Quan might have been a block of stone perched on the bench across from where Quincannon sat watching him with a basilisk eye.

Lieutenant Price and a glowering Sergeant Gentry were waiting at the booking desk when they arrived. The two officers listened to a brief account of the afternoon’s events, after which Gentry said to Price, “Let me have him for five minutes alone, Lieutenant. I’ll make him talk.”

Quincannon said, “I would advise against that, Lieutenant.”

Price agreed. “There’ll be no more strongarm tactics until we have this matter straightened out.”

Mock Quan paid no attention to this exchange. He maintained his stoic silence throughout the booking process.

Quincannon drew Price aside, into the privacy of the muster room, where the ropes, firemen’s axes, weapons, bulletproof vests, and other flying squad paraphernalia were still in evidence. Men had been dispatched to the undertaking parlor, the lieutenant said, to arrest anyone occupying the premises. And to claim Bing Ah Kee’s husk, if it was still there, so it could be returned to its rightful place at the Four Families Temple.

“It will still be there,” Quincannon said.

“What makes you so sure?”

“The mortician has nowhere to move the body on short notice, nor would he dare destroy it for fear of the wrath of the gods and all of Chinatown. Mock Quan was the motivating force behind it being stored there, either through threats or bribery.”

“But how did you know that’s where it was hidden?” Price asked. “And that it was Mock Quan who was behind the theft, and that he would be at the parlor this afternoon?”

“I didn’t know he would be there,” Quincannon said, “only having just deduced the significance of Fowler Alley.” This was stretching the truth, but explaining Sabina’s role would have required revealing confidential details of the Blanchford case. “Mock Quan’s presence was a fortunate coincidence, as it turned out. He must have gone to the parlor to arrange for the body to be found in a place that would lay the blame for the snatch on Little Pete — lighting the final fuse to ignite full-scale tong warfare. And he wore his highbinder’s disguise for the obvious reason of avoiding recognition on the streets by both his countrymen and the police patrols. As for the rest...”

“Yes?”

“It’s a long story, Lieutenant. Would you mind if I told it to you in the company of Sergeant Gentry and Chief Crowley, if he’s here?”

“He is. And as eager to hear your explanations as I am.”

A short time later Quincannon and the three ranking officers were once again seated in the chief’s private sanctum. Crowley’s round, florid face had the same haggard appearance as Price’s; Gentry, too, looked as if he had had little sleep the past few days. Quincannon made himself comfortable on one of the chairs, taking time to load and light his pipe before speaking. Enjoying himself, as he always did at such moments as these.

“Well, Quincannon?” Crowley said irritably. “Don’t dally — get on with it.”

He did so, though not until he had the briar drawing to his satisfaction. He began by recounting in detail the afternoon’s events and reiterating the comments he’d made to Price in the muster room. The three officers listened without interruption, Crowley’s expression grim, Price’s intently thoughtful, Gentry’s skeptical.

When Quincannon paused to relight his pipe, it was the chief who spoke first. “What made you first suspect Mock Quan?”

“His vainglorious attitude and his attempts to lay the blame for the body snatching on Little Pete, when I spoke to him at the Hip Sing Company. Later I discovered James Scarlett had been keeping company with a highborn Chinese woman named Dongmei, that she had likely been the one to introduce him to opium, and that she was a known consort of Mock Quan. It seemed likely then that he had arranged the seduction in order to force Scarlett not only to work on behalf of the Hip Sing but to do his private bidding as well.”

“You have proof of this, Quincannon?” Gentry demanded. “It seems pretty farfetched to me.”

“Specific proof, no. But Mock Quan’s other actions make it undeniable that he’s guilty of murder, attempted murder, body snatching, and racketeering.”

“Murder? Whose murder?”

“James Scarlett, of course.”

Crowley said, “You mean he ordered the assassination?”

“No. I mean he carried it out himself.”

“What’s that? You told us before that it was a highbinder who shot Scarlett.”

Price was much quicker to understand. “Ah, you mean the assassin was Mock Quan in his coolie disguise. But how can you be sure of that?”

Quincannon told of the shooter wearing a hat with a red topknot, stating it as a known fact from the first and skipping over the manner in which he’d come to the conclusion. “That was the first time he tried to ventilate me, after he shot Scarlett.”

“For what reason? How could he have known you were hired to find Scarlett?”

“He didn’t,” Quincannon said, and went on to give the theory he had broached to Sabina.

“But then when the attempt on your life failed, why didn’t he try again before this afternoon?”

“He saw no need to. When I went to the Hip Sing Company the next morning, he agreed to an audience to find out what, if anything, I knew. Since I made no accusations against him, or said anything that indicated Scarlett might have confided in me, he decided I was not a threat after all — a fatal mistake on his part.”

“And Scarlett? Why was he targeted?”

“Likely because he knew too much and couldn’t be trusted to keep silent. Knew for one thing that Mock Quan was behind the Bing Ah Kee snatch, the reasons behind it, and the whereabouts of the corpse. How he found out is anyone’s guess; he may have been part of the takeover plot from the beginning, or may have simply stumbled on the truth. It’s also possible he attempted to blackmail Mock Quan. Scarlett was corrupt enough, and foolish enough, to have thought he could get away with such a trick.”

“Sure he was,” Gentry said, “but it wasn’t Mock Quan he was blackmailing, it was Little Pete. A letter from Scarlett implicating him was found on a highbinder I was forced to shoot yesterday, one of Pete’s hatchet men. I saw it myself.”

“So I’ve been told. The letter is a forgery. Planted to throw suspicion on Pete.”

“Planted by who? It couldn’t have been Mock Quan.”

“No, not Mock Quan. Although he did manufacture and plant a similar document to throw suspicion away from him.”

“Bullcrap. How do you know that?”

Quincannon explained about his first visit to James Scarlett’s law offices, adding by way of a little white lie that he had had permission to do so from his widowed client. “The offices had already been searched sometime earlier that evening,” he went on, “or so I believed at the time. The job was done by Mock Quan, not to remove incriminating evidence but to leave the document I mentioned, written in Chinese and inserted in Mock Don Yuen’s file.”