Michael Collins - Shadow of a Tiger

“Yeh?” A wary voice, protective. She dabbed her eyes.

“This is Jimmy Sung’s apartment?” I said.

She nodded. “He’s in jail. No key. Go-”

“I know where he is,” I said. “My names Dan Fortune, a private detective working on the Marais murder.”

“What’s to work on?” she said, but she left the door open as she walked back into the apartment.

I followed into a windowless living room smaller than my own-and a lot neater. An almost bare room, clean and scrubbed, like the cell of some ascetic monk. A day-bed couch without cushions, the wall for a back rest; two high-backed wooden armchairs of the kind they sell for rustic lawn furniture; one lamp from some junkyard; a wooden table and three kitchen chairs. The woman didn’t sit, she leaned against a wall, lit a cigarette, one eye half closed against the smoke that drifted up.

“Nobodies like Jimmy are always guilty,” she said, her open eye fixed on my face. “Isn’t it over? Sure it is.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Some of us aren’t so sure.”

“Forget the forgotten,” she said. “Mentally homeless, the only world left is inside. They turn the key, the end.”

“You’re his woman?”

“Marie Schmidt. Drunky Marie. I’m not even my own woman.” She took the cigarette from her lips, picked tobacco. “Yeh, I’m his woman. I told them about that Buddha. My big mouth. You really think he’s got a chance?”

“If he didn’t do it. I’ll need help.”

“Help? What, witnesses to say he was somewhere else? All the people who remember a drunk Chinese on the street? His business partners, wife, children, friends, alumni brothers? How about a magician?”

“Did anyone see him that night?”

She laughed. “Nobody ever sees him. Just a Chink. Six years in a damned insane asylum because he couldn’t speak-”

“I know about that,” I said.

“Okay, you know. It was never much different for Jimmy outside that booby hatch. Who knows him? Who talks to him? The neighborhood Chink. Most people act like he’s got no real right to speak English or be alive here. No big discrimination, you know, no real bigotry. Just that he doesn’t really exist, they don’t even see him. All except Mr. Marais, he was nice, a friend. So it got to be him they say Jimmy killed!”

She stopped, sighed, found an ashtray for her cigarette. “That Buddha, you know? He put it back there in the bedroom the day after Mr. Marais was killed-to honor Mr. Marais, he said. He said Mr. Marais gave it to him, and he put it in the bookcase and lighted incense in front of it. He sat down on the floor looking at it for an hour without saying anything.”

She was silent as if seeing Jimmy Sung silent in front of the small Buddha. “I never saw it before, and I told the cops. I don’t know how long Jimmy had it, but the cops say it proves he just got it from the shop the night of the murder. If he got it that way, you’d think he’d hide it, not bring it out.”

“You would,” I said, “if he’s sane. Is he sane?”

“Who is?” she said. “He’s not crazy, Fortune. Not perfect, but not crazy more than anyone. He gets moody, who doesn’t? Sometimes when he’s drunk he gets mad and says I got the wrong eyes, I’m not a Chink. Hell, I get mad and call him a Chink. That doesn’t make me crazy or a murderer.”

“You live here, Marie?”

“Here? Hell no!” She looked for another cigarette, lit one. “Like I said, who’s perfect? He’s a Chink, I couldn’t live with him, you know? Maybe I’m ashamed, but he’s all I’ve got, and I want him back.”

As she’d said, no one is perfect, and no one can escape their past, their culture, completely. She’d gone a long way, she had her Chinese man, but the past dies hard and slow.

“I’ll do my best,” I said. “You said he left here at nine-fifty that night. Did he say where he was going?”

“No, he never says. That’s his hang-up-tell no woman. A man does what he feels like, okay?”

“Did anyone see him anywhere after eleven o’clock that night? He says he left the pawn shop at eleven o’clock, Marais was alive.”

“If anyone saw him, no one’s told me.”

“You weren’t here after ten o’clock anyway?”

“No, not until next morning. He was asleep when I came.”

It was no help at all. “Can I look over the apartment?”

“Why not?” Marie Schmidt said.

There were three other railroad rooms-a bedroom with windows at the front as clean and bare as the living room: a double bed with sheets but no cover, and no blanket in a New York summer; two wooden chairs; a stained bureau; and a large bookcase with books in English and Chinese. On the third shelf of the bookcase there was an open niche that was empty except for a small, bronze saucer with incense ash in it-where the Buddha that sent Jimmy to jail had been.

A windowless middle room set up with a mattress on the floor, two low, Oriental chairs, and a television set.

A rear room bright with the late afternoon sun through backyard windows. A totally empty room. Some shelves, hooks on the walls, and nothing else.

“He usually keeps this room locked,” Marie Schmidt said behind me. “Burglars. The fire escape’s out there, and Jimmy was afraid of burglars. They might steal his treasures.”

She looked behind her at the bare, cheap furniture. She shook her head as if she would never understand people or life. She wasn’t alone in that feeling.

“Even here, four rooms don’t cost peanuts,” I said. “Did Jimmy make enough money for this and his booze?”

“Not money,” Marie Schmidt said. “Work. He helps the super, gets free rent. That’s why this building is clean, painted. He doesn’t pay for much except booze, he works for it. He likes work. See what it’s gotten him?”

I called Lieutenant Marx before I went down to the prison, and when I got there they were expecting me. Marx had said I could see Jimmy Sung-with Jimmy’s lawyer.

The lawyer was a big, energetic-looking man with a heavy briefcase and eyes sunk deep in the heavy black sockets of a man who rarely got enough sleep. His name was Kandinsky. He wanted to know what I had. I told him. It wasn’t much, but Kandinsky hadn’t expected much.

“The wife too?” the lawyer said. “The sister-in-law hires me, the wife hires you. Good, I can use that.”

“His priest hired me too, swears by Jimmy,” I said.

“A Buddhist kook won’t carry much weight with a jury sure to be half-Catholic, half-Jewish,” Kandinsky said se riously, “but the wife thinking he didn’t do it is good. I can deal with that. With no real motive, a shaky case on the robbery, that bad deal out in the California nut house, and the victim’s wife and sister-in-law on our side, the D.A.’ll have to deal. I can get delays and rulings forever. He’ll settle for a minimum charge, and a guilty plea. Clear the calendar. Five years tops.”

“How about if I prove him innocent?”

“Well, that’s the hard way, but go ahead and try,” Kandinsky said. “That all you have?”

“That’s all.”

The lawyer nodded, and when Jimmy was brought into the visitors room, gave the stocky Chinese a reassuring smile.

“It’s good, Jimmy. I’m sure I can deal for you. Behave yourself, get some sleep. I’ve got four more clients to see today, okay?”

The lawyer’s smile seemed to still be in the room after he had gone. I watched Jimmy. The stocky man’s broad, pale-brown face revealed nothing, not even the alcoholic’s torture inside without his liquor. His dark eyes blinked at the door where Kandinsky had left. His work-gnarled fingers ran through his thinning gray hair-the only sign of any nerves.

“He’s a good lawyer?” Jimmy said.