Michael Collins - Shadow of a Tiger

I said, “That Buddha is all you found, Lieutenant?”

“Isn’t it enough for you?” Captain Olsen said behind me.

“One piece?” I said to Olsen, to all of them in the dark room. “Where’s the rest? Why keep one piece? Come on, it looks to me like some crude frame-up. Jimmy’s no thief.”

“I’d agree, Dan,” Lieutenant Marx said, “if we hadn’t also found this at Eugene Marais’s shop.”

He held a half-pint bottle of vodka. Some brand I’d never heard of. Marx held it in a handkerchief.

“It was on the floor in the backroom, half empty. We found the liquor store clerk who sold it to Jimmy at about ten that night. It was the only half pint he sold, it’s a brand only his store carries around here-a cheap brand for bums and alkies. The bottle has Jimmy’s prints on it. Clear.”

I looked at Jimmy Sung. He still sat unmoving, that thin smile on his face, his bright eyes alert.

“Jimmy’s woman says he left his place about nine-fifty. So did she. No one knows when he got home.”

In a silence, everyone looked at Jimmy Sung. For a time, he didn’t change. Then he licked his lips, lost the thin smile.

“Okay, we played chess. I got there maybe ten o’clock, left maybe eleven o’clock. Mr. Marais was alive. I swear.”

A long breath seemed to go through the dark interrogation room. Jimmy had confessed, the denial didn’t count. Jimmy had been there, he had had a piece of the stolen property.

“Book him, Marx,” Captain Olsen said, and walked out to tend to more important business than Jimmy Sung.

After the two detectives took Jimmy Sung out, small and silent between them, Marx and I sat alone in the interrogation room. I lit a cigarette.

“The rest of the stuff?” I said.

“In the river. In some sewer. We’ll look, maybe Jimmy’ll tell us now, but it doesn’t matter. He’s a drunk, Dan, and maybe half crazy, too. When a drunk needs booze money he gets desperate and stupid. We found out that he was in a mental hospital out in California for six years about twenty years ago. It fits, Dan.”

It fitted. I went out to call Viviane Marais to tell her the reason her husband had died. She wouldn’t like it. Chance, a stupid act of a half-crazy alcoholic. Marty wouldn’t like it, either. It would depress her more. Damn!

Most men are guilty of the weak hope that if something isn’t talked about it will, somehow, go away. I’m no exception, so I didn’t tell Marty about Jimmy Sung and how Eugene Marais had died. She heard anyway.

Two days after Jimmy had been booked, the oven-night of the city outside, we were in my bed talking about our vacation plans. I was talking. Marty had been silent for some time. Then she sat up, leaned down over me, and kissed me. She held my shoulders hard-too hard, and a moment too long. It was a kiss that had a lot of years in it, and a decision.

She got out of bed, began to dress. It wasn’t quite midnight, not even time to sleep. I lit a cigarette.

“I have to go away, Dan, alone,” Marty said. “I have to.”

“I have the money, Marty,” I said.

“One job. No plan, no growth. You live in space, Dan, not in time. Now is always. Maybe you’re right, I don’t know.”

“When will you know?”

“Probably too late. I’ll call you when I get back.”

So she went. She would think, but in the end…? A woman doesn’t go off alone to think about her relationship to a man unless she has some alternative to think about too.

What Viviane Marais was thinking about I wasn’t sure, either. I called her on the phone to tell her about Jimmy Sung the afternoon he was booked. She was silent on the other end for a time.

“Then there is nothing for you to do,” she said at last. “Unless you have some doubt, Mr. Fortune?”

Did I have a doubt? Yes and no. Jimmy Sung fitted, and yet there was still the bulk of the stolen goods, Jimmy’s weak lying I couldn’t understand, and the clumsiness of it all. But all of that could be answered by the confused thinking of an unbalanced drunk, and the police would try to answer it all. They had no axe to grind over Jimmy Sung.

“I don’t think I can do much, Mrs. Marais,” I said. “So I worked one day. You want fifty dollars back?”

“No, I think not,” Viviane Marais said. “So, Jimmy it was? An accident after all? Chance? It would have pleased Eugene.”

“But not you?”

“No, but I cannot order the world.” She was silent again on the other end of the line. “Keep the money, Mr. Fortune, and if there is some news, call me again.”

Everyone was being generous with money. That makes me uneasy. After Marty had gone, I checked to see if Jimmy Sung needed a decent lawyer, or if anything new had happened. Nothing had, and Jimmy had a good lawyer-private, not court appointed. More money from somewhere.

The next few days I spent tracking down a skipped husband for a woman who owned four tenements. The husband had managed the properties, a paid hand. He had vanished without taking any of the cash. That puzzled the woman. The trail ended at Kennedy Airport-tickets for two to Montreal. The second ticket had been used by a dumpy brunette who had hung on the rabbit-husband’s arm. The woman-landlord called me off, and even paid me. That gave me over six hundred dollars, rich for me. The money didn’t seem very important, somehow.

I was sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park a week after Jimmy’s arrest, watching a gang of overage and hairy kids making music in the circle, when the man sat down beside me. Anyone can sit on a bench, for any reason, but this man I watched. Maybe because he was another Oriental. He watched the singers.

“You know Jimmy Sung didn’t rob that shop, or kill Mr. Marais,” he said.

He was small, slender, in a light brown tropical suit and a hat. Japanese, I decided, but American-Japanese. His English was pure, unaccented American; his voice quiet, even humble. A meditative manner, and no hair came from under his hat as if his head was shaved.

“Why do I know that?” I said.

“Because Jimmy Sung would not steal. Our people do not steal, and Jimmy had no need, anyway. He is hard-working, an industrious man, and has enough money for his needs-all needs.”

“Our people?” I said. “Just who are you, Mr.-?”

“Noyoda,” the small man said. “I am a Buddhist priest, Mr. Fortune. We have our temple in Chinatown. Jimmy is one of our members. Not very religious, but devoted. He comes to us often, is also paid a small wage as custodian. He would not steal, and if he did not steal, why then would he murder Mr. Marais?”

“Jimmy’s a Buddhist?”

“You are surprised?”

“I figured Jimmy as an all-American Chinese.”

“In most ways he is,” Noyoda said. “Perhaps he felt a certain isolation when he joined us five years ago, I can’t say for sure. His life has not been easy or even pleasant, which, I imagine, is why he drinks.”

Noyoda seemed to watch the hairy singers in the circle. His face showed no disapproval, nor any approval, only a kind of understanding, as if his meditations embraced all things alive.

“Jimmy was brought from China as a boy. He talks little, but from things he has said I think he was almost a slave of the man who brought him to America. It seems there was some trouble in his late teens with this employer’s daughter. Some drinking, a fight, and Jimmy was locked in a mental hospital for six years. He was alone, without friends or visitors, the entire six years because no one could communicate with him. Schizophrenic was the diagnosis because Jimmy was silent or seemed to babble in gibberish. You see, at that time, Jimmy spoke only a Manchurian dialect, and no one understood a word of it!