My mother smiled. “Is he very nice?”
Some things you can’t fight. I’d have to talk to myself about the color in my cheeks later. “Yes.”
“And he is Chinese?” Just checking. Because he might be Japanese, or Korean. From a different planet, in her universe, but still light-years ahead of Bill.
“Jack Lee Yat-sen,” I confirmed. “From Wisconsin. He’s second generation, parents born here, too. But, Ma, it was work. Jack’s also on the case. He’s another PI.”
Her face fell. My mother’s been to California twice, to visit relatives, and to New England to view the fall leaves, but she has only a vague idea where Wisconsin is. “Second generation” clearly worried her, too. But Jack’s job was the final blow.
“Chinese, is he?” She sniffed. “Hollow bamboo.” Hollow bamboo: Chinese-looking outside, empty inside.
“Ma, you don’t even know him! He speaks and reads Chinese. And his field is Chinese art.” I didn’t tell her that in most other ways Jack was the guy who put the “A” in “ABC.”
“I thought his field was detecting.”
“In the art world. He finds stolen paintings, things like that.”
“So he’s involved with criminals, then.”
“No more than I am.”
“There, you see?” She plugged in the rice cooker emphatically, with bitter triumph.
I gave up. Whatever we were arguing about, I wasn’t going to win. And why, I suddenly asked myself, did I care whether my mother thought well of Jack Lee, anyway?
I was finishing my tea when the cell phone in my robe pocket chirped out Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs.” That would be Linus.
“Cuz!” he said. “Too early?”
“Not at all. Have a good time last night?”
“Dudess, it was sick! Dum Dum Girls at the Mercury Lounge! They tore it up! We didn’t get back until, like, five a.m.”
“And you’re up working? I’m impressed.”
“No way. We just didn’t crash yet. A little wired, you know? So I thought I’d check out your dude first, to kinda bring me down.”
“So does he? Bring you down?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, the dude himself, I don’t know anything about him. You didn’t get, like, cell phone pix or something?” His voice was hopeful.
“Linus, we were—” I almost said, pointing guns at each other, but I remembered where I was. “It was dark.”
“Oh. Well.” He sounded like he wasn’t sure why that mattered, and to a tech geek I guess it wouldn’t. But he moved on. “Okay, so, I found the car. This dude I know, he has a dude he rolls with—sorry, TMI. A Navigator—last year’s, like you said. Plate number you gave me plus six-eight at the end? It’s registered to Tiger Holdings, LLC. Addresses in Beijing, Hong Kong, Manhattan, and Basking Ridge, New Jersey.”
“Who are they, Tiger Holdings? What do they do?”
“Well, I don’t know who they are, but a couple of their honchos, you can see photos on their Web site.” He gave me the URL. “Maybe your guy’s there.”
“Okay, I’ll check it out. Anything else?”
“Well, sort of. I mean, I could be wrong.”
“But?”
“Well, you remember that Web site I built for Vassily Imports? So Bill could be a shady Russian?”
“Sure.”
“It kind of … smells the same.”
“What do you mean? You think the Tiger Holdings Web site’s a fake?”
“Not really. There’s got to be a real Tiger Holdings, because they own at least one car, right? But you said, make Bill’s look dubious, so I did. This one, it’s like they’re hiding the same things. Who the boss really is, all that. I mean, I was fake hiding, but I think they’re real hiding. Cuz, I think they’re gangsters.”
* * *
I didn’t finish the tea in my mother’s pot because I was headed out soon to Maria’s to meet Mighty Casey the Gangster. This disappointed my mother, but there’s not much I do that doesn’t. I had about twenty minutes before I needed to leave, so I sat down at my computer and brought up the Tiger Holdings Web site.
Linus’s conclusion didn’t surprise me. We’d figured Casey for a gangster last night. That whole kidnap thing, it was kind of a clue. Interesting to have it confirmed through the smell of a Web site, though. And Linus’s worried tone made me glad I hadn’t gotten to tell him the part about the guns.
I clicked through the bios of Tiger Holdings’s officers, each page topped by a photo of a confident Asian man in a costly suit. A prosperous crowd, though I could see what Linus meant: They made it easy to get in touch with them to discuss investment and partnership opportunities, but exactly what they did was hard to tell.
I did find Casey, though. His broad face and thick shoulders were labeled as belonging to one Woo Long. Title: Corporate Liaison. If last night was illustrative of his liaising technique, I’d be surprised to find Tiger Holdings actually doing all that well.
Figuring Linus had already followed Tiger Holdings as far as he could, I Googled Woo Long, but found nothing. Linus had been heading for bed, an unorthodox sleep schedule being his MO and one of the perks of running your own e-business. This wasn’t worth waking him for, but I sent him a note so when he resurfaced he’d know which of these guys I was interested in. Just because Google came up empty didn’t mean Linus would.
I got dressed, clipping on my small-of-the-back holster with the .25 that had come in so handy last night. I surveyed my closet for a drapey jacket loose enough to hide them. I have a bunch of those, mostly made by my mother. She sews them out of fabric I buy and to specs I describe while I wave my hands around. When I was young she taught me embroidery, knitting, and other handwork, but she never let me touch the sewing machine. Her theory was if I couldn’t sew I wouldn’t end up in the factory. Now that she’s retired, dressing my brothers’ wives and me is her chief joy. Though making things for my sisters-in-law seems to be the more gratifying: When she’s sewing my clothes she never stops grumbling about girls not finding husbands if they walk around wearing trousers and tents.
If she has any idea why I really like my jackets baggy, she’s never said.
I chose one of my favorites, a black cotton twill that swings at the hem. It looks particularly good with black pants and a white shirt, and I added a red scarf because black-white-and-red is a power-color combination and I was, after all, meeting a gangster. The fact that Jack Lee would be sitting at a back table watching me barely crossed my mind.
“So long, Ma,” I called, hopping around one-legged in the foyer, putting on my shoes.
“You are going to work?” She appeared from the kitchen, cleaver in hand.
“Yes.”
“With the white baboon? Or the hollow bamboo?”
“Both. Aren’t I lucky?”
She frowned. “Ling Wan-ju. You think you have been lucky, on your road in life. But take care. What looks like the path to good fortune can often be the opposite. And to bad luck, the same.” With that she turned and walked back to the kitchen. Wow, I thought. All that was missing were crickets and ants.
* * *
In the bright spring sunlight I cut a path—to what kind of fortune, I didn’t know. Pushing through the crowds of morning shoppers and early-bird tourists, I called Jack to ask if he’d heard from Anna Yang.
“Nope. I called her this morning again, just got voice mail. After I get through bodyguarding you here I’ll try again.”
“Here? You’re at Maria’s already?”
“The egg custard tarts come out of the oven at eight-thirty. Didn’t you know that?”
I was early, too, and as I planned, I hit Maria’s before Mighty Woo Long Casey. Inside the bakery things were only slightly less chaotic than on the street. I found Jack spread out over a cup of coffee, an egg custard tart, and The Times. His leather jacket hung over the back of his chair and he seemed completely absorbed in the news and caffeine, oblivious to the din around him, which included me ordering milk tea and a red bean bun.