It was nearly nine by the time I pushed the heavy plate-glass door open and entered the restaurant. There was a new red-and-green neon sign out front that blinked LEE’S SZECHUAN PALACE. I’d never known the restaurant had a name beyond Mrs. Lee’s. Business must be good, although you couldn’t tell it from inside the restaurant right now. A couple sat alone over disposable plates in the corner, heads huddled so close together that they had to be either hard-of-hearing or in love.
There was no one at the counter, although that wouldn’t have been that unusual this time of night. Mrs. Lee was probably in the back helping her husband with the cleanup chores. I felt a brief pang of guilt as I pondered how hard these people worked: fourteen-hour days, six days a week, which used to be seven until Mrs. Lee’s health started to show the strain. Nowadays, at least, they took Sunday off.
Through an access window, I could see Mr. Lee, his five-foot, one-hundred-and-ten-pound frame bent over an industrial stainless-steel sink scrubbing out a shiny metal pan the size of a washtub. Sweat soaked through the back of his white T-shirt as his thin, sinewed arms wrestled with the metal.
I watched him through the window for a minute or so until the kitchen door swung open outward and Mary Lee walked through. She was taller than her mother, nearly as tall as me, and athletically thin. Her skin was unblemished, just this side of honey-colored, and her dark almond eyes were almost perfectly symmetrical. Her long black hair hung straight and shiny to the middle of her back. To top it off, she’s smart as a whip. Last year, she came damn close to busting fifteen hundred on her SATs, and I was convinced she’d be off to college next year on a big fat scholarship.
Excuse me, I wax disgusting here. To my own very little credit, I had kept my torch for her properly concealed as well as carried and had never been anything but appropriately civil with her.
“Harry!” she squealed as she saw me. She took two quick steps toward the counter and bent over to wrap her arms around me.
“Hi, sweetie,” I said, when we’d separated. “How ya doing?”
“Fine. I haven’t seen you in here in over a week. Thought you got tired of us.”
“Never,” I said. “I figured I’d give you a break, that’s all.”
Her eyes were bright and danced in the harsh fluorescent light, although there were circles under them that I’d never seen before.
“Don’t be crazy. I’m always glad to see you.”
I looked up at the clock. “What’re you doing working here so late? No school tomorrow?”
Mary leaned against the cash register. “It’s Mom’s high blood pressure again. Doc put her to bed for a couple of days. I’m worried about her.”
“Yeah, me, too,” I said. “She works too hard. You all do.”
“Hey,” she piped, “somebody’s gotta keep it going, right?” She picked up a green order pad. “Besides, I’d rather be here than home. Mom raises hell when the doctor tells her to lie still. What can I get for you?”
“Aw, listen, Mary, if it’s too late, you guys are already shutting down-”
“Don’t be silly. That’s what we’re here for. Although I think there may not be any chicken left. I’ll have to check.”
“That’s okay. I’m going to try something different tonight. Got any sweet-and-sour soup left? Dumplings?”
“Yeah on both counts.”
“Let me have the Kung Bao beef dinner,” I said, reading off the menu, “and some iced tea.”
Mary scribbled the order down. “My, oh my, we
“I’m celebrating cracking a big case,” I said.
She ripped the sheet off the notepad and slipped it under a clip on a rotating wheel in the top of the access door. Then she rolled the wheel around so my order was inside the kitchen and said something to her father through the hole.
“One of these days, you’re going to have to teach me that,” I said. “How long would it take me to learn Chinese?”
She turned and grinned. “We speak a fairly simple Mandarin dialect,” she said. “I’d say if you started right now and worked real hard, practiced every day, I’d say maybe, I don’t know, ten years or so. Yeah, ten years. You could make yourself sort of understood by then.”
She giggled. “Oh, yeah, right. Say, Harry. I’m going to need a summer job, and I’d sure like it to be something else besides this. How’s about I come work for you? I’d like to be a private detective for a while.”
Something in my chest lurched. I didn’t think my working with Mary Lee was a very good idea; the last thing in the world I needed was a gorgeous seventeen-year-old Amerasian girl sharing a one-room office with me.
But I wasn’t going to tell her that. “I probably can’t afford you, Mary. Besides, it’s not what it’s cracked up to be in the movies. It’s pretty tedious most of the time.”
She leaned in close to me. “Oh, like this isn’t?” she stage-whispered.
“Where you going to school next year?” I asked, grabbing at anything possible to change the subject.
“Well, let’s see,” she said, counting off on her fingers, “I’ve got applications in at Tufts, Brown, Columbia, Duke.…”
I chuckled. “Party schools, huh?”
“Yeah, why push myself?” She smiled back with a row of white teeth that lit up the room.
Behind Mary, a tray of food appeared in the window. I suddenly realized I was starving. Mary saw my eyes flick to the window and turned.
“Here we go,” she said. I pulled out the last ten-dollar bill from my wallet and handed it to her, then waited as she got my change.
“Can you come sit with me?” I asked.
She grimaced. “God, Harry, I’ve got to help Daddy get everything cleaned up before we shut down at ten. Then I’ve got a couple of hours of homework.”
“It’s good to see you, dear,” I said. “Don’t work too hard.”
She disappeared into the kitchen as I took a seat at the table across from the couple. I dug into the soup, a thick, hot broth with a melange of sweet, sour, and hot-as-hell tastes all mixed into one. Instantly, I felt this sense of well-being that I knew was probably biologically induced, since there really wasn’t all that much reality to cause it. Things had gotten better, I had to admit.
The worst of my problems were still out there, though. Marsha was still hunkered down at the morgue and Slim was still in the county jail awaiting trial, both in their own way prisoners of circumstances beyond their control. And both innocent …
Of that point, I was sure. When I first heard of how Slim had discovered the body, and how Rebecca Gibson had been battered so completely, I thought it probable that-despite my personal feelings for him-the police had the right man. The more I delved into Rebecca Gibson’s world, though, the more I doubted that Slim was the only person out there with a motive to kill her. There had to be more, had to be something I wasn’t seeing. I wasn’t digging hard enough, wasn’t pushing hard enough.
Wasn’t asking the tough questions …
I ate my dinner in silence, and was mopping up the last few bites when I realized the couple across the room had left and I was alone in the dining room. From the kitchen I heard talking and the sound of water spraying, steam erupting. It was late, and I was beginning to feel the first bittersweet tinges of exhaustion creeping around the edge of my psyche. I’ve noticed that when I get this way, I become fuzzy-headed, loose thinking. Weird stuff starts to make sense, and perfectly sensible things become incomprehensible. It’s a strange combination of fatigue and what I’d always imagined might be a kind of stress-induced dyslexia. All I knew was that I was going to sleep well tonight.
Well, not exactly. At least not yet. As I stuffed my throwaway dishes into a large waste bin near the front door of the restaurant, Mary stepped out with a brown paper sack with a grease spot on the bottom that was growing by the second.
“You going to see Shadow soon?” she asked.
It occurred to me that Lonnie might enjoy hearing about my adventure with Bubba Ray Evans and the insurance company. I could also write him a check for the money I owed him, as long as he’d hold it a day or two before depositing it.
