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Authors: Domenic Stansberry

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Hard-Boiled

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BOOK: Naked Moon
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“She did good tonight,” said the old man. “She can move a crowd.”

“I've seen.”

“She has a light about her.”

“The diary,” Dante interrupted. “Is there another copy?”

Joe Rossi put his head into his hand. “I'm sorry. It's just, this campaign is important to Gennae. And she doesn't need some nonsense in the paper. I don't need this.”

“No one cares about fifteen minutes you spent with a girl in a hotel room twenty years ago.”

“Then what?”

“Is there a copy?”

Rossi walked over to his wall, the one with all the photos of the old days, showing how he'd started as a young lawyer, out there in front of the crab house, smelling of fish, standing in the midst of the men with the torn sweaters. From there he'd worked himself up to judge, then mayor, surrounded by every businessman in town. His daughter, in her wheelchair, was trying to follow the same path behind him. From Rossi's posture, the way he stood now, Dante understood that the old man knew she wasn't going to make it. She was too far behind. Even so, he did not want some tawdriness spoiling her campaign.

“The Chinese Historical Society, maybe.”

“What?”

“It's possible,” Rossi said.

The mayor explained how, before Ru Shen's body was identified, the Chinese Historical Society had been involved in a special project, gathering the effects of stowaways. It was possible, Rossi supposed, they'd rummaged Ru Shen's effects as well, not knowing who he was, not caring, simply gathering artifacts of stowaways to be stored as part of their collection. Immigration had allowed them to make facsimiles of such documents, but so far as Rossi knew, whatever they'd found sat in a box, in the basement of the Historical Society.

“You never checked.”

“It seemed best, you know, to leave well enough alone. And like you said, who cares now, what an old man did in a hotel room.”

“It was never cataloged?”

“The grant ran out.” The mayor shrugged. “Then recently, they got some money. For ‘Across the Water'—that exhibit.”

It was the kind of thing that happened in the city. Projects were initiated, papers gathered, then left to gather dust. Then, sooner or later, someone came along and stirred it all up. Dante had seen the workers, just the other day, dismantling the last phase of “Across the Water” down at Portsmouth Square.

“The Wus financed that?”

“In part. There was a fuss in the paper.”

That, too, was the kind of squabbling that happened after those sorts of things, mutually funded, in which the parties
disagreed as to where the items should be permanently housed. In this case, some of the artifacts had disappeared, and there were allegations back and forth.

“My wife …”

The old man's eyes went soft, and Dante saw Rossi's concern, worried that all of a sudden, his old indiscretions would become public.

“Don't worry,” Dante said.

Rossi nodded his head, not quite convinced. Once, he could have interfered, but Rossi didn't have the resources or stamina anymore.

Dante put his hand on the old man's shoulder. “Go to sleep,” he said.

D
ante left. The fuss regarding “Across the Water” had died down as quickly as it started, he remembered, the allegations withdrawn. Even so, the insinuation had been clear enough at the time. The artifacts had been taken by the Benevolent Association itself, for its private collection, carried across the square, up into the chambers of Love Wu.

SIXTEEN

H
e woke up later, alone in his bed with the image of Marilyn in that velvet dress, in her black wrap, crossing the road, Lake beside her, heading to the opera house at dusk. He lay sleepless, thinking of her and of his dead cousin, and of Dominick Greene, in residence at the Sam Wong.

He and Marilyn were supposed to meet later today, midmorning, down at the marina, at the slip where he docked his grandfather's boat. Only Marilyn called, just past nine.

“I'm going to be late,” she said.

“Oh.”

“My couple.”

“What about them?”

“They called me up just a few minutes ago. There's a place they want to see.”

For the past week or so, Marilyn had been showing a couple around North Beach, some newcomers with money,
looking for a place to buy but staying meantime in the Stanford Court, halfway up Nob Hill. They had cash, they claimed, having just sold their place in Barcelona. Meantime, today, just before lunch, there was a two-bedroom they wanted to see, over in Noe Valley, on the other side of the city, so Marilyn wouldn't be able to meet him till almost one.

“All right?”

“Of course.”

There was something in her voice, subdued, and something in his own voice, too, when he responded. Things between him and Marilyn, they had reached a tipping point, and maybe that was a good thing, given the circumstances. He needed to cut her loose. For her own safety, if nothing else. He worried, though, that he had waited too long.

“I'll see you at one,” he said.

J
ake Cicero had been running his investigative business for almost thirty years, out of a third-story office in a brick building that stood on a terrace over the Broadway Tunnel. Dante had been working for Cicero for some time, and he knew the man's habits well. The front office looked out into the neighborhood, and that was where Jake sat when he talked on the phone, at that window, his Italian loafers up on the metal desk.

“Someone has been making us,” said Cicero. “Either that, or we got a fish.”

“What makes you say that?”

“A gray sedan, out front.”

“Now?”

“Yesterday. Twice.”

Dante had called to check the book on Dominick Greene, but Cicero was more concerned with the come-and-go outside the building. It was a hobby of Cicero's, trying to figure the business of passersby, and he indulged that hobby when his own business was slow. There was the apartment building across the way, and an accounting firm on the floor above, and a marijuana dealer around the corner, and over the years, he'd gotten pretty good at guessing who was going where. Private investigation wasn't exactly a walk-in business, but there were still those who lingered on occasion outside. Disgruntled crooks. Spouses, pissed they'd been caught in the act. Plainclothes cops looking to nab one of Cicero's criminal clients in violation of parole.

“Did you get a look?”

“Guy never got out of the car. But there was a woman out there as well. Same vehicle, later in the day.”

“You sure.”

“The woman got out. Walked up to the building. Then back out. Checking the directory.”

“Wrong building, maybe.”

“Divorce case. She had that look.”

“Except she didn't come up.”

“Embarrassed, you know how they are. Not sure she wants to hire someone, not yet. But she'll be back.”

“You should know.”

Cicero laughed. He had been divorced three times himself, and spent a good deal of his career tracking unfaithful
husbands. It was still a good part of the firm's business, though these days they made their bread and butter on contract work from the public defender's office, looking for mitigating circumstances for career criminals.

“What about Greene?”

“Nothing much.”

“No?”

“Why are you so interested?”

“Just tell me what you have.”

Cicero went over it. Greene's father was a businessman, Garment District, New York City. Greene himself had done a stint in the army. Worked now for a fabric importer. Unmarried, traveled a lot. No criminal record. Nothing to make it seem like he was anything other than he claimed: a business rep looking for the cheapest way to get his goods to market. On the surface of it, anyway, the man's file sounded much like Dante's own, back when he'd worked in New Orleans.

“This guy—he have something to do with Gary?” asked Cicero.

“I don't know.”

“You're not telling me.”

“Later, we'll talk.”

Dante did not want to get Cicero further involved if he could help it. Meanwhile, If Ru Shen's journal had been in “Across the Water,” as the mayor suspected, it would be on the manifest, over at the Chinese Historical Society. Dante didn't need to meet Marilyn until one, so he headed down there. As it turned out, the place kept odd hours, and the
room he needed to visit, Special Collections, was closed on Fridays. So he found himself aimless in Chinatown. There was the softest breeze, no fog, a nice day for going out on the water, as good as it gets, but at the same time, he could feel the day heating, the air thickening with the smell of the Chinese stalls, the dried fish, the twisted duck, the bok choy, all mixed with the smell of the asphalt and the crowds, people close together, perspiring in cheap nylon. Above it all, hovered the Empress Building.

SEVENTEEN

T
he Empress was not an easy building to navigate. Over the years, its seven stories had been carved up in incomprehensible ways, so that halls ended suddenly and the office numbering was askew. The lower corridors smelled of cheap veneer and cleaning fluid, and a sign at the end of one of these corridors listed the second story businesses: money exchange and employment services, travel and real estate, legal assistance for immigrants. These offices could be attained by stair or by elevator but Dante was not interested. The offices of the Wu family themselves, and their intimates—those were higher up and harder to reach.

Both the stairwell and the elevator went only as far as the third floor. To get higher access, he had to negotiate the receptionist in the third-floor lobby, then the security office at the end of another hall.

“I'd like to see Love Wu.”

The receptionist regarded him blankly. It was the face he always got in Chinatown, though he had seen the woman's cheek tremble. Fear—the suspicion she was being mocked. No one asked to see Love Wu, not if you were from the neighborhood and knew the stories. It was an arrogant thing to do.

“What is your name?”

“Mancuso.”

Dante did not know his cousin's contact here. He was relying on the arrogance of his request—together with the card he slid across the desk, bearing the name of the family warehouse. The receptionist got on the phone, speaking Chinese, her voice rising, falling, and in that glottal music, the sudden pitch and yaw, he heard the sound of his own name. She uttered it again a little later, talking to someone a little higher in the building, he supposed, then again, and with each utterance his name seemed more foreign, less his own. The receptionist pointed him toward a plastic chair.

“You may wait,” she said.

As he sat, a young nurse came up the stairs from the street, from the same direction he himself had come. She was Chinese, with dark eyes and darker hair. She had porcelain skin and delicate features, and she carried a shopping bag from one of the downtown stores. She skimmed over him with her sharp black eyes, a fleeting look, regarding him in much the same way the receptionist had, as if she were glancing through him, seeing him without seeing. Then she put her access card in the elevator slot and went up.

E
ventually, two young men sauntered from the security office down the hall, big-shouldered boys who looked as if they took a special pleasure in bouncing people into the street. One was big-boned, with a face from the Mongolian plains, but the other was a small man, quick-eyed and nervous. They took him to the elevator. Once the door closed, the pair gave him the same treatment he'd gotten from Angelo and the thick-necked cop out on Fresno Street a couple days before. The Mongol lurked behind him while the smaller man patted Dante down, touching him in all the usual places.

“Why are you here?”

“I have business with Mr. Wu.”

“Love Wu,” the small one said, his voice dripping, and Dante guessed the boys from security were among those the receptionist had been talking to.

“Who do you think you are?”

Dante told him his name.

“That's not what I mean. I mean just who do you think you are?”

“He's not doing much thinking, you ask me.”

“A business associate,” said Dante.

“The Benevolent Association has lots of partners. They don't come without appointments.”

“Apparently, there are exceptions. You've been told to bring me up.”

“What year do you think this is? You think this is 1878?”

“He thinks we are little Chinamen with pigtails, this is what he thinks.”

“You think it is the year of the monkey?”

“He thinks we wear red silk jackets and sell egg rolls on the street.”

“He thinks maybe he can find himself a yellow mistress.”

“Maybe he is an admirer of the Orient.”

“He wants a yellow girl to scrub his toilets.”

“Is that why you came here, looking for a yellow girl?”

BOOK: Naked Moon
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