S Rozan - Trail of Blood

“Do you?”

“Yes. The client does, too. She wants me to stop.”

A few moments of silence. “Are you in danger, Ling Wan-ju?”

“I don’t know.”

“But it wouldn’t matter, would it?”

“Ma-”

“No, it would not. And what the client wants will not matter either. You will do what you think is the right thing for your friend, even if you must do it all alone.”

I wasn’t going to be alone, but this would have been a particularly bad time to bring up Bill.

“No, you will continue. You will not consider the consequences until they happen.”

“I have no choice, Ma.”

She looked across the room to the cabinet holding my father’s collection of mud figurines: fishermen, farmers, a young woman weaving. People living the lives their parents had lived, and their parents’ parents, unchanging, peaceful, and unsurprising. She stood. “You have a choice, Ling Wan-ju: whether to eat dinner or not. I have jyu sam tong.”

Pig’s heart soup, for reviving the fainthearted. As I followed my mother into the kitchen, I wondered, how had she known?

My mother and I watched a Cantonese soap opera while we ate, a costume drama full of drums and cymbals, Tang dynasty outfits, and complicated hairdos. Trying to follow the story absorbed my attention, as had the running around I’d done all day. It wasn’t until I was alone in my room that the image of Joel open-eyed in his chair flooded back into my brain.

I stood in the middle of the floor, feeling my breath knocked out the same way it had been by the actual sight. I closed my eyes, didn’t try to muscle the picture away, but let it rush in like a tide until, like a tide, it could ebb again.

It did. But tired as I was, there was no way, after that, I was going to be able to sleep.

So I turned my computer on and Googled “Shanghai Moon.”

I didn’t learn much more than I had from Mr. Friedman’s book. No Web site had photos, or even a good description. All agreed the Shanghai Moon’s whereabouts were unknown; few agreed on its last known location. In a chat room I found a breathless account of a brooch seen at an audience with some Bhutanese royals; could this be the Shanghai Moon? Two curt responses: no, and no way. The jade described was apple green. The setting included sapphires. The poster, someone scoffed, must be a newbie even to ask. On another site someone calling himself MoonHunter reported on a private jewelry auction at a swank hotel in Kuala Lumpur, which he’d been invited to by a collector friend. He dwelled a little long, I thought, on the VIP status of the attendees, the lapis fountain, the free Moët, and the stunning waitresses, but that was probably because he had to admit that in the end he’d caught no sniff of the Shanghai Moon. Now that he was in the private auction world, though, he just knew he was on the right track. I didn’t know much about private jewelry auctions, but it rather uncharitably occurred to me that anyone so impressed with celebrities, fountains, and waitresses-and who had to be invited into their presence by someone else-was, just possibly, a gasbag.

After an hour of surfing, I got tired of rehashes of the same rumors. Also, the aroma of greed, the focus on the guessed-at value of the brooch, began to bother me. Where was Rosalie in all this, these discussions of colors of jade? Where was Chen Kai-rong, where was the reason the Shanghai Moon had come into existence in the first place?

I logged off. It was possible this was nothing but a big waste of time anyway. Strictly speaking, only Stanley Friedman’s book even suggested a connection between Joel’s death and the Shanghai Moon. Fingering the jade pendant my parents gave me when I was born, I crawled into bed and fell asleep.

The Wonder Woman theme song jarred me out of an indistinct, menacing dream. “Oh ho,” I mumbled, finding the phone and sinking back into the pillow. “Hi, Benedict Arnold.”

Mary said, “Sorry to call so late.”

I checked the clock: not quite midnight. “I’m surprised you have the nerve to call me at all.”

“You’re mad I told Bill about Joel.”

“Good guess.”

“But that means you know I told him, which means he must have called you.”

“No wonder you have that gold shield.”

“So what happened?”

“He wormed his way into my office and into the case.”

“And into your heart?”

“Not so fast, sister.”

“Okay, but you’re working together again?”

“Until we find out who killed Joel. Then I’ll see how he’s behaving.”

“So I did the right thing.”

“You think I’d admit that?”

“I wouldn’t, in your position. Anyway, I really hope it works out. But Lydia, that’s not why I called.”

“If you’re checking up on me because of Joel, I’m okay, truly.”

“I still don’t believe that, but I’m glad to hear it. But that’s not why either.”

There was a tone in her voice I was finally awake enough to hear, and I didn’t like it. “Mary? Is something else wrong?”

“It sort of is. We identified my John Doe.”

“Hey, if I weren’t mad at you I’d say, ‘Great’! Did it make you look smart? Who is he?”

“Not that smart. He’s Chinese, but not an illegal. Not an immigrant at all. Lydia, he’s a cop.”

“A cop? You mean from another department, or from like the FBI?”

“I mean from China. From Shanghai.”

“A cop from China?”

“They’d made contact a few days ago, brass to brass, to say he was coming, but that kind of thing doesn’t trickle down to precinct level until the out-of-town cop gets here. This guy never got that far. Shanghai got in touch when he missed a check-in call home.”

“What was he doing here?”

“Chasing a fugitive.”

“And you’re calling me in the middle of the night to tell me this. Wait-the light is dawning. It was my fugitive? He was after Wong Pan?”

“Yes.”

“Oh boy.”

“Oh boy, what?”

“Probably nothing. But there may be more going on than you know about.” I told Mary what Stanley Friedman had told us.

When I was done she was silent for moment. “You’re kidding. A mysterious lost fabulous jewel?”

“Just keep an open mind.”

“If you say so. But you don’t know if Wong Pan has this jewel.”

“No.”

“Or if he does, if Joel knew that.”

“No.”

“Or if it has anything to do with this at all.”

“What happened to that open mind?”

“It’s still ajar. Right now I need to speak to Alice Fairchild. She doesn’t answer her phone at the Waldorf or her cell. How do I find her?”

“Mary, it’s midnight! Maybe she sleeps with earplugs. If you want her, go over there and bang on the door. That’s what Mulgrew would do. Speaking of Mulgrew, did you tell him about the Chinese cop? That’s his case, too, isn’t it?”

“Teed him off. He told me I should have figured it out sooner.”

“You should have?”

“And he’s still clinging to his messenger theory on Joel.”

“He thinks this can possibly be coincidence?”

“More like hopes. He did promise they’ll check the forensics at Joel’s office and the cop’s hotel room.”

“Well, I guess that’s all we can hope for. Mary? What was his name?”

“The Chinese cop?”

“Yes.”

“Sheng Yue. Why?”

“I don’t know. He’s dead. We should at least be calling him by his name.”

After we hung up I stared at the ceiling for a while. I thought about Joel, drinking coffee at the Waldorf; about Alice, remembering how I took my tea; about Rosalie and Kai-rong on the deck of an ocean liner. I thought about calling Bill, and while I was thinking, I suddenly found the room bright with sun. And though I hadn’t noticed myself sleeping, I’d woken with an inspiration. I groped for my phone and speed-dialed Mary. “The cop from Shanghai. Sheng Yue. His hotel room’s the one that was registered to Wu Ming? ‘Anonymous?’ ”