The Butcher's Granddaughter (31 page)

I got up off the bed and wandered slowly back to Parenti. He still looked asleep. I slipped the towel off his lap and picked up the three handwritten pages of stationery that fluttered to the floor. I put the towel back.

It was a love letter from Josephine. I flipped and checked the bottom of the final page. She had signed it “Ione”. I didn’t have to read more than the first paragraph or two before I knew I’d been right: men like Robert Waterston don’t hire expensive P.I.’s to peep on their daughters; they hire them when they think they’re being screwed. Josephine/Ione promised Parenti she would get off that ship because Denise Waterston had told her some very valuable information: Naomi Nguyen, another whore in Cynthia’s stable, was not who she claimed to be. She was Triad. And for some reason that made Cynthia Ming nervous. The letter didn’t say why.

But I knew why.

I popped my lighter to a corner and set the flaming pages in the ashtray. While they burned I went through and double checked any place I might have left a print. When I was satisfied, I left, leaving the door open, and scuttled down the fire stairs.

The outside heat hit me like a blast furnace after the meat locker air-conditioning of the penthouse. I stood in front of the Kalakaua entrance for about a minute until a cab pulled up to let an elderly woman and her pocket-sized dog onto the curb. I jumped in, almost crushing the dog she had dropped on the sidewalk, and said one word to the cabbie.

“Chinatown.”

Chapter 22

Asian culture is the most tenacious in the world. It doesn’t compromise or assimilate. It has been around for seven thousand years and likes itself just the way it is. That’s the reason every Chinatown in every city in the world looks exactly the same—two or three or ten blocks of transplanted downtown Shanghai. Honolulu’s enclave is no exception. You turn a corner off of Hotel Street and Nuuanu, and the smell and the steam hit like you just stepped into a back alley Hong Kong kitchen at lunchtime in the summer.

Everything is a hum. The streets are filled with old toothless merchants screaming at their customers and each other in Cantonese, and children fighting over extra
char su biao
in front of the bakeries. The gutters are filled with garbage, mostly spoiled food, and you get the feeling that everything, including human beings, is stacked on top of everything else because it has always been that way—damp and hot and crowded and noisy for centuries.

Every storefront sign from the big nightclubs to the tiniest dry cleaning place is done in spectacular neon, and half the restaurants are called Fat’s. I got out and stood in front of one. Fat’s Dim Sum. Fat was standing on the front stoop, picking his fingernails with a small pocketknife and living up to his name. He almost completely blocked the front door to his restaurant, a bright red thing with a huge dragon on it in dramatic relief. I stood and watched him for a minute and then trotted off up the street, folding into the humanity like a rock dropped into a muddy pool.

Numbers runners look the same in any society. I collared one rushing along the sidewalk in front of a small market with rows of dressed ducks hanging in the windows. As I swung him around and his large, emotionless, almost black eyes settled on my own, I brought a carefully folded twenty up between us and let him stare at it. I said “Tran Nguyen.” He pointed down the street and said the name of a pawnshop that I could see a couple of blocks down. As I was looking, he snatched the money and disappeared down an alley, his handful of flashpaper and number sheets fluttering crisply as he ran, dodging around tenement stoops and their slow-moving elderly tenants.

The entrance to the pawnshop was just off the street in a recessed doorway, with two tall windows on either side full of rip-off designer sunglasses and Rolexes with the gold flaking off them. I pushed the door open and stepped inside, a dangling bell announcing my arrival. There was a woman sitting quietly on a stool behind the counter, the top of which was plastered with every kind of cheap jewelry ever made—false jade and gold plate predominating. She was folding origami cranes out of tiny squares of gold paper and dropping them into a large cardboard box at her feet. Her face was the kindest I had ever seen, and sat atop a squat, unattractive little body dressed in blue polyester slacks and a faded and patched pink sweater that had once been a five-button but now had only three. She didn’t look up from her cranes until I said, “I was told Tran Nguyen could be found here.”

She glanced up and smiled teeth stained with decades of strong tea. Then she screamed something in Chinese and dropped her smile and her head back down to the work at hand.

A second later a beaded curtain was swooshed apart behind her, and a man of her almost identical proportions stepped around and leaned over the counter between us. He leered at me like I had scared his wife and was about two steps from paying dearly for it.

I said, “Tran Nguyen. Where is he?”

More puzzled and slightly intimidating looks, more Chinese practically yelled into my left eye. It was no use asking if he spoke English—even if he did, I got the feeling he wasn’t going to give me the pleasure. I pulled Li’s locket out of the watch-pocket of my jeans and handed it to him. I added, “I want to see Tran. Right now.”

He instantly assumed the air of a jeweler appraising a questionable piece, holding the locket at arm’s length and squinting and making his lips into an “0”. I thought he figured me for a seller, and I was about to snatch it back when he figured out the latch and popped it open. He snapped it shut almost immediately and, without another sound, dashed back through the beads. I stared at the woman and she stared at her cranes.

I heard steps go back quite a ways and some doors open and close. Then the sounds were repeated in reverse and the old man came back through the beads, followed by another, larger man who stopped just beyond the curtain. He took a look at me, nodded, and disappeared. The old man motioned me behind the counter. I said, “Thank you,” and stepped past him into the hallway.

The walls on either side were stacked high with pawned merchandise, tagged, but not filed or situated in any orderly way. I saw the broad back of a brown suit step left through a door about twenty feet down. When I went through the same door it opened into a sort of waiting room. There was a small Buddhist altar next to a silk pillow on the floor for kneeling, and that was all. It looked like the kind of place where people received bad news. I stepped up to the opposite door and opened it.

This room was immaculately appointed in ancient Chinese carpeting and drapery, with a huge cherry-wood conference table in the center. When the door shut behind me, a hand went on my shoulder and another gently took the Beretta from my jeans. They were two men I had never seen before. Standing at the far end of the conference table, the locket and chain in a neat pile in front of him, was a man I had seen before, ghost-like, in the faces of his two dead sisters.

I bowed deeply because it seemed like the thing to do and said, “My name is Bird. I’ve come a long way to tell you that I’m sorry about your family.”

At first he didn’t respond. He couldn’t have been a day over twenty-five, but his face was long beyond emotion, a face that would see a smile only rarely for the rest of its life. His eyes seemed, however, curiously satisfied. He finally bowed slightly, dipping little more than his forehead, and said, “Thank you. I am Tran Nguyen. Please, sit down.” He spread a slender-fingered hand toward the chair opposite him and said something in Chinese that excused the two men behind me. They exited quietly.

“Mind if I smoke?” I asked.

“I’m sorry but yes. I’m allergic to cigarette smoke. Also, it damages the pieces.”

I took a fresh look at the decor. Tran pointed to an ink painting on white silk that hung on the wall to my right. The subject matter was two long-stemmed chrysanthemums with what looked like a hummingbird floating near the base of the stems. He said, “The artist of that painting had been dead four centuries when Rome fell.”

“Nothing like a little perspective,” I said. I sat for a moment, wondering what to ask first. He beat me to it.

“I expect you would like to know what this means,” he said thoughtfully, hooking a feminine finger through the chain and lifting it off the table. He held the locket in front of his face and watched it pendulum back and forth. Then he suddenly snatched it up in his fist and placed it in his breast pocket. “The photograph is of a gravestone in the Manoa Cemetery,” he said quietly, gazing at a spot on the wall behind my shoulder. He absent-mindedly waved behind him toward the western hills of the island. “It is, as you have probably discovered, the grave of my sister, Li Nguyen.”

“Empty,” I said flatly.

Tran nodded. “Yes, but not for much longer. She will be buried there, pending certain unpleasant bureaucratic processes with the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office.” There was not so much as a whisper of emotion in his voice. “The stone is one of three that sit there, side by side, and this photo was cropped from a picture taken many years ago by my aunt.” He stared at me silently for a bit.

I pursed my lips and took a deep breath. “I have a sincere apology to make, Tran. I truly believe that Li’s death is on my head. I believe if I’d been a little smarter, and a little quicker, Li might be alive right now. It’s something I haven’t quite come to terms with. When the killing started, it was made to look like ritual murders, and that slowed me down. I don’t mean that as an excuse. You have to understand that I felt toward your sister like I’ve never felt toward anyone, much less any woman.”

His eyebrow went up slightly.

“There was nothing romantic about it,” I said quickly. He stayed quiet while I carefully chose my words. “I am not a sentimental man, Tran. But for some reason I felt a duty to...
idolize
her, I guess. To protect her from the world. She represented something to me, a sense of purity. I don’t precisely know what, or why.”

Tran again shook his head solemnly. “Li’s death is not on your head. It is on mine...and her own. She used you.”

Bile rose in my throat, and for a moment I could have killed him. He sensed my tension and said, “I expect you are sitting in this room right now because you discovered that Li’s middle name was Dazhai. That gave you her connection to the Triads. Tell me, did she ever reveal to you her mother’s maiden name?”

“No.” I tried not to say it through clenched teeth.

“Ming.” He paused and studied me closely for a reaction. He didn’t need to. All the blood in my face fell immediately to my guts. “Therefore, in the eyes of the Triad, Li, and myself, are Chinese through my mother.”

I wanted to say something like, ‘Of course,’ or ‘I knew that,’ but everything sounded so stupid. I simply sat there, staring.

“Thirty years ago,” Tran continued, “the Ming family name in Chinatown was synonymous with crime. In those days, when the Black Societies were welcomed by the Chinese as a positive force against the racism of white policemen and public officials, the Ming Triad was the exception. There was not so much as a curbside dice game or back alley sexual encounter that they did not receive a piece of, and they were as powerful as they were hated. Both of my father’s brothers died at the hands of Triad assassins, and his sister was a whore to the men who called for their execution. My father swore to himself and his family that he would have his revenge on the Ming.” Tran looked me squarely in the eye. “I...am that revenge.”

I struggled to regain my voice. “The whore,” I finally managed, “would be the aunt who took the graveyard pictures.”

“That is correct. My father swallowed his hatred and married into the Ming family, a daughter of one of the central members, a girl named Cynthia. Her English name was the result of an Irish mother; the Ming sometimes bought and sold Irish women as white slaves. It was an arranged marriage, and when my father saw her for the first time on the night of their wedding, he began his revenge.

“I was conceived that night. Soon thereafter, his new father-in-law decided to put my father’s training as an accountant to use, putting him in charge of gambling receipts. It was not long before all the numbers that were run in Chinatown were crossing his desk. The skimming began.

“My father was a strong man, but soon even he began to strain under the weight of the facade. He began to ignore the bride who disgusted him so, and she complained to her father. Close scrutiny was paid to his accounting, and his theft was discovered.

“Before he was executed, he staged the death of his children to protect them from the long and never-forgetful arm of the Triad, and to ensure that his revenge would be carried out. It is about to be. Thanks to this.” He held up Li’s locket in front of him and gazed stonily at it. “I was sent to China with my aunt and educated in the culture. My sisters were sent to the mainland and cared for by relatives.”

And then I knew. “So your mother is Cynthia Ming, and you’re going to burn them down from the inside. This is all a revenge job.” I was fighting to come to terms with the fact that I was sitting across from the man I knew had put a bullet in Parenti’s head less than two hours earlier. I shook my own head as if to remind myself it was still there, and looked around for something, anything, to drink. I made a motion and Tran waved his hand. A glass of water suddenly appeared in front of me, brought by a small, pale man I hadn’t noticed before. I sipped it. “Li died because you had exposed yourself,” I said. “And you exposed yourself because someone had gotten wise to who you and your sisters really were. That person had to be taken care of.”

Another solemn nod. He still had the smile on his face, and my scalp went tight looking at it. He continued calmly. “No one, save for my mother, knew that Li and Song had a brother. It made it quite easy for me to alleviate the problem of discovery.”

“Except,” I said to the water glass, “that you just killed the wrong guy.”