Эд Макбейн - Learning to Kill - Stories

“My name’s Cordell,” I said to him. “I understand Harry Tse was playing cards here the night before he was killed.”

“Yes?” the thin man asked.

“Are you the spokesman for the group?”

“I’ll do. What’s on your mind?”

“Who won Monday night?” The thin man thought this over. He shrugged and turned to another player. “Who won, Tommy?”

Tommy was a husky boy with wide jowls. He shrugged, too. “I don’t remember, Lun.”

“That your name?” I asked the first guy.

“That’s right. Lun Ching.”

“Who won, Lun Ching?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Did Harry win?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Yes or no?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

Lun Ching stared at me. “Are you from the police?”

“No.”

He nodded, his head imperceptibly. “Harry didn’t win. That’s enough for you.” He turned back to his cards, fished two from the fan, and said to a player across the table, “Two cards.”

The dealer threw two cards onto the table, and Lun Ching reached for them. I reached at the same time, clamping my fingers onto his wrist.

“I’m not through yet, Lun.”

He shook his hand free, and shoved his chair back. “You better get the hell out of here, Mac,” he said.

“Matt,” I corrected. “I want to know who won here Monday night. You going to tell me?”

“What difference does it make?”

“I want to know.”

Lun Ching gestured impatiently with his head. “Tommy won.”

I turned to the husky-jowled Chinese. “Did you?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“A few bucks.”

“Did Harry lose?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“I don’t know. Two, three dollars.”

“Who else won?”

“What?”

“You said you’d won a few bucks, Tommy. You also said Harry lost about three bucks. What did the rest of you do?”

Lun Ching stood up. “We broke even. Does that answer you?”

“Maybe,” I said. I turned and started across the room. Over my shoulder, I said, “I might come back.”

Someone from the table whispered, “Don’t hurry.”

The fat Chinese looked up when I stopped at the desk behind the wooden railing.

“I don’t think I caught your name,” I said.

“Wong. Sam Wong.”

“Mr. Wong, did Harry leave here alone on Monday night?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Did he say where he was going? Did he have to meet anyone?”,

“No. He didn’t say. I think he go home.”

“I see.”

Sam Wong looked at me curiously. “Harry no killed Monday night,” he said, his voice puzzled. “Harry killed Tuesday night.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s what’s bothering me.”

None of it fit.

I was banging my head against a stone wall, and I didn’t like the feeling. It wasn’t like the old days when someone shoved a fat retainer under my nose, held it out like a carrot to a rabbit, challenged me to find a missing husband or squelch a bit of blackmail.

There was no retainer now. There was only the thought of Joey lying dead in that small park, Joey about whom I knew practically nothing. We shared a big thirst, that was all, and we’d done our damnedest to quench it. I thought of the last bottle I’d shared with him. We’d sat on the corner of my flophouse cot a few days back, drinking the fifth of Imperial, forgetting the heated streets outside, forgetting everything but the driving desire to get blind stinking drunk.

Now Joey was dead, and Charlie had suggested a tie-in between that and the death of Harry Tse, a man I didn’t know at all. A sensible man would have called it a day. A sensible man would have said, “All right, you stupid bastard, your first idea was wrong. Harry Tse didn’t win any money, and that’s not why he was killed. There was another reason, and it wasn’t a cheating wife because her love is stamped all over her face. So give it up and go rustle a bottle of smoke, give it up and forget it.”

I’d stopped being sensible a long time ago.

I’d stopped the night I took Garth’s face apart.

I shook my head and bummed a dime from the next guy who passed. That bought me a glass of beer, and that cleared my head a little, and I was ready to play shamus again even though it was too hot to be playing anything.

I started walking through Chinatown, looking for an idea. I passed windows crammed with herbs and roots, crammed with fish and spice and fowl. I passed windows brimming with sandals and kimonos and jade and beads and boxes and figurines and fans. I passed newsstands displaying Chinese periodicals and newspapers. I passed restaurants, upstairs, downstairs, level with the street. I passed all these in a miasma of heat that clung to the narrow streets like a living thing.

And no idea came.

The heat stifled thought. It crawled around the open throat of my shirt, stained my armpits, spread sweat across my back muscles. It was too hot to walk, and too hot to think, and too damned hot to do anything but sidle up to a beer glass beaded with cold drops.

But I had to think, so I forced the heat out of my mind and I tried to remember what Mrs. Tse had told me about her husband, Harry.

Export-import.

I stopped in the nearest candy store, waded through two dozen Tses in the phone book, and finally located his business address, right in the center of Chinatown where I’d hoped it would be. I sighed against the heat, wiped the sweat from my forehead, and headed for his office.

It was upstairs. A small unimportant office with an important-looking title on the door: HARRY TSE: EXPORTS-IMPORTS. I tried the knob, half expecting the office to be closed. The door opened, and I found myself in a small reception room. A desk hugged the wall, and a Chinese girl hugged the desk. She stopped typing when I came in, her sloe eyes frankly appraising me.

She was dressed like any girl you’d see in the subway. She was small, the way most Chinese women are, but there was nothing slight or delicate about her. She wore no makeup other than a splash of lipstick across her full mouth.

“My name is Matt Cordell,” I said.

“Yes?” she said. “How may I help you, sir?”

“Mrs. Tse sent me,” I lied. “What do you know about her husband?”

“You’re investigating his murder?”

“More or less,” I said.

She looked at me dubiously and then she shrugged, and her eyes met mine frankly and levelly.

“I don’t know anything about his murder,” she said.

“What about his habits?”

“What about them?”

“Do you know where he was going on the night he was killed?”

“Yes. One of his clients lives on West Seventy-second Street. I think he was going there. In fact, I’m sure he was.”

“How do you know that?”

“He told me he was walking up to Fourteenth to catch the uptown subway there. He never reached it. He was stabbed outside Cooper Union.”

“Where Joey was killed,” I said.

“Who? Oh yes, Joey. Charlie Loo’s friend.”

“You knew Joey?”

“No, I didn’t know Joey,” she said. “But Charlie told me what he said.”

“What do you mean?”

“About seeing somebody.”

“Is that what Joey said?”

“Well, not exactly.”

“What did he say, exactly?”

“He said, ‘So that’s who it was.’ ”

“And that’s what Charlie told you, is that it?”

“Yes. So I figured there might be some connection. To Mr. Tse getting stabbed.”

“I see.”

“So I passed it on to Mrs. Tse. She said she was going to look up Charlie and get him to point out this Joey person to her. She said she wanted to ask him what he’d seen.”