S Rozan - Trail of Blood

I scanned the ruckus, looking for Bill. My heart lurched when I saw him doubled over in a doorway, but then he started to stand. Before I reached him he was on his feet, breathing heavily above Fishface’s lieutenant. “You okay?” I asked. He grinned and flexed his hand like a man who’d just punched a White Eagle’s lights out.

I heard more sirens, wondered why, since the action was pretty much over, and then, looking around, realized it wasn’t more cops, it was ambulances.

C. D. Zhang lay on the sidewalk, a red hole in his chest.

Interview One, my home away from home.

I’d been here for an hour. Bill, last I’d heard, was in Two. In widely separated nooks and crannies, handcuffed White Eagles waited their turns to rotate through Three and Four. I didn’t know where Wong Pan was, and it clearly wasn’t on anyone’s to-do list to tell me.

Leaving a suspect alone to sweat is standard NYPD procedure, and though I didn’t get the idea anybody actually considered me a suspect in the day’s proceedings, Mary was probably mad enough to let me sit here until I grew moss.

I could, of course, make a stink, demand to be charged or released. But that would make my best and oldest friend even more furious. And completely blow my chances of finding out, from anyone’s point of view but my own, what had gone on since we’d all been piled into cop cars outside New Day Noodle.

Besides, I had hope: the backup of White Eagles. The NYPD couldn’t keep me here forever; they needed the room.

After another ten minutes my hope panned out. The door opened and Mary came in, her face one big, dark scowl. Following her was Wei De-xu. Behind Mary’s back the Shanghai inspector gave me a quick grin, then went pokerfaced again as they rattled out chairs.

“How’s C. D. Zhang?” I asked before Mary had a chance to yell at me.

“Luckily for you,” she said icily, “not too bad. A clean through-and-through. Chen and Zhang are at St. Vincent’s with him. He’s sewn up and conscious and not talking.”

“Why would he? He was buying stolen jewelry.”

Mary exchanged a look with Inspector Wei.

“What?” I said. “Are you charging him?”

“Not right now.” She added, unnecessarily, I thought, “He’s an old man.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I doubt it.”

“No, I-”

“Lydia!” She cut me off. “Can you just tell me what you idiots thought you were doing?”

“I called you!” I protested. “And I called nine-one-one. But Wong Pan was dangerous, and we didn’t know if C.D. Zhang knew who he was. We couldn’t just leave him in there with him. And we didn’t know the White Eagles were coming!”

“Bill says you were pretty sure C. D. Zhang knew exactly who Wong Pan was.”

“You talked to Bill already?”

“And every White Eagle we took up. And some of the witnesses. And I tried Chen and Zhang at the hospital, even though I got nowhere. Captain Mentzinger finally said if I didn’t come in here and interview you I’d have to cut you loose. Which I don’t want to do. What I want is to throw you and your idiot partner into a cell way out at the end of Brooklyn for a few months. For being hopelessly stupid.”

Inspector Wei looked up with interest. “Can do here?”

“No,” Mary answered, still glaring at me.

Wei shook her head ruefully. “In China, can’t do also.”

“But as it happens, Lydia,” Mary went on, “Captain Mentzinger is more laid back about your part in this than I am, maybe because if you get killed he’s not the one who’ll have to explain it to your mother. And you have to thank Inspector Wei, too. She pointed out to the captain that, though we had a firefight on Canal Street that resulted in costly property damage and a citizen injured, said citizen was attempting to procure stolen goods at the time of the incident, which, not your presence, was the precipitating factor. Also that we’ve apprehended an internationally sought homicide suspect.”

“Plus suspect in theft from Chinese people,” Inspector Wei added. “So NYPD has gratitude of Shanghai Police Bureau, also government of People’s Republic.”

“And,” Mary finished, “we also took up seven armed gangbangers as a result of your information.”

I was impressed that Mary could produce such an abundance of cop jargon, but this wasn’t the time to mention it.

“Also, Captain Mentzinger wants something from you. So he’d rather I didn’t keep you on ice for the rest of your life.”

“What does he want?”

“We’ll get to that. First, I’m going to ask questions, and you’re going to answer as though you were a good, cooperative PI.” I sat in cooperative PI silence. “One: You did think C. D. Zhang knew who Wong Pan was when you went charging in there, right? The way Bill says?”

“Bill did. I thought maybe.” I didn’t like this shift that made Bill the good guy and me the bad guy in Mary’s eyes.

“And it had occurred to you the White Eagles might be after the Shanghai Moon.”

“Maybe. Possibly. But I thought that’s why they were all gathering near Bright Hopes. I had no idea Fishface Deng knew about the noodle shop! I mean, how did he?” I asked that even though a theory on it was one of the things I’d come up with sitting here in silent meditation.

But if I thought I was going to slip in a question and get Mary to answer it, I was mistaken. A glare, and she said, “It didn’t occur to you just to keep an eye on the place and wait for us? Never mind, that would be only if you’d wanted to help us take up Wong Pan. But that wasn’t it. You wanted to see what was going on. Right?”

“Oh, Mary, of course I did! All right, that was bad judgment. But after all this, to actually see the Shanghai Moon-”

I stopped as Mary reached into her pocket and pulled out a Ziploc holding a cardboard box. “Go ahead. This is what it was all about? Open it.” She tossed it over.

The box was the worse for wear, probably from things like when I landed on Fishface, and it was dusty with fingerprint powder. Despite my new theory, my heart pounded as I lifted the top and pulled off cotton batting. On more batting, stuffed in tight so it wouldn’t roll around, lay a big green cat’s-eye marble.

I sat back heavily against my chair. “Damn.”

“Damn? That’s all you have to say?”

“It’s a marble.”

“That’s right. Not some romantic mysterious lost gem. A piece of glass.”

“Wong Pan never had the Shanghai Moon.”

Mary looked to Inspector Wei, who shook her head. “After you tell story from Attorney Fairchild, Shanghai Police Bureau investigates carved box. Have two expert try. Take to hospital so can make X-ray. Box doesn’t has secret compartment.”

A tide of futility and failure washed over me. Oh, Rosalie, Kai-rong! I’m so sorry!

“Lydia?” Mary’s tone gave me a chill. “You know, you don’t seem surprised. What are you holding back? Girlfriend, I swear-”

“I only just figured it out,” I said wearily. “While you kept me sitting here for an hour. Girlfriend.” I looked from one cop to the other. “Did you find out how the White Eagles knew about the meeting in the noodle shop? Or how Wong Pan knew who Fishface was? No, stop, don’t tell me you’re the one who asks the questions. This”-I pointed at the marble-“confirms what I was thinking. The whole thing was a sting.”

“Go back,” Mary ordered. “Wong Pan knew Fishface?”

“He called him ‘Deng dai lo.’ Not just his name, his title. How would anyone from outside Chinatown know that, let alone some guy from Shanghai? Unless they’d met. And a marble? Wong Pan can’t have expected C. D. Zhang not to look in the box. He didn’t care. The box was showmanship. It wasn’t supposed to be opened. Wong Pan hired the White Eagles to knock the meeting over.”