Daniel had pulled out his pocket watch from his waistcoat. “You’d better question Frederick Lee before he bribes the On Leong types to let him slip away. And if you want my advice, bring him to the precinct for questioning. Shut him up overnight. There’s nothing like a night in the cells to get the truth out of a suspect. You can take him to the Tombs if you like. I’ll let them know.”
“Kind of you,” Captain Kear said in a way that might have been sarcastic.
“And put out a city-wide bulletin to look for the girl. You have a description, do you?”
“Miss Murphy has just given me a photograph.” Captain Kear held up the package.
“Excellent. She should be easy enough to find then, if she hasn’t skipped town. In my experience nothing works better than playing one suspect against the other. If Frederick Lee thinks we’ve got her in the Tombs, I guarantee he’ll talk.”
“Very well.” Captain Kear looked long and hard at Daniel, then said, “And I take it you’ll know where to find Miss Murphy, if we need to ask her any further questions.”
Twenty-one
It was a good parting blow as Captain Kear walked away and I saw Daniel’s mouth twitch. The moment we were out of earshot Daniel grabbed my arm and spun me to face him.
“What the devil do you think you were doing?” he demanded. “Do you realize what you’ve done? You’ve made me the butt of jokes in the police department for years to come, not to mention starting up the tong wars again single-handedly.”
He was shouting loudly and his voice echoed back from the tall tenements and the empty street. He was glaring at me, his eyes blazing. “Did you or did you not promise me that you’d give up this ridiculous nonsense?”
I decided that this time fighting was not going to get me anywhere. “I did promise, Daniel, and I’m sorry. I never intended to get involved in something like this. Only the man who came to see me was so persistent and said his employer wouldn’t take no for an answer and would pay me generously, so I went to see him, just out of curiosity, and to start with all he asked me to do was to locate a piece of jade jewelry that had gone missing. That seemed like a harmless enough commission, didn’t it?” The words came flying out in a torrent. “It was only later I found out that he was really looking for a missing woman.”
“And yet you continued to look for her.” His eyes were still blazing.
“You’re very attractive when you’re angry, you know,” I said, attempting to lighten the mood.
“Don’t try to make light of this, Molly. It’s a very serious matter,” Daniel said. “You betrayed my trust. You broke a promise. What sort of start to a marriage is that?”
All right, I had tried being meek and it hadn’t worked. My usual fighting spirit could not be suppressed any longer. “Maybe if you hadn’t insisted that I stay at your mother’s house, sewing undergarments all day and hearing over and over how I didn’t measure up to any of your other lady friends, I wouldn’t have been so anxious for a little excitement,” I said, my own voice rising now.
“That’s beside the point,” he began, then stopped. “My mother actually told you that you didn’t measure up to my other lady friends?”
“All the time. In a very subtle and genteel way, of course. ‘Dear Miss So-and-so. Daniel was so fond of her when they were growing up and such a good family too. And the way you sew, your poor children are going to run around in rags.’”
“She said that?”
“I didn’t mean to tell you,” I said. “But you pushed me into a corner. That’s why I couldn’t wait to escape. But I’m sorry I took this stupid case. I’m sorry I deceived you. If you want to know the reason I was at Mr. Lee’s house this morning, it was to hand him a letter tendering my resignation. Only I arrived to find Captain Kear in charge and Mr. Lee lying dead in the street.”
“A tricky business, Molly,” he said, speaking quietly now. “You know nothing of the way things work in Chinatown. This Lee was a wily old fox and a powerful figure in one of the tongs. Until a year ago there was the most awful bloodshed on a daily basis—men gunned down as they ate in restaurants, firebombs thrown into shops. We worked hard to bring about a peace that was beneficial to both sides. This death could start the whole thing off again. That’s why I felt I had to step in.”
He was frowning down at me, like an earnest schoolmaster giving a pupil a stern lecture. “And I really don’t want to be known as the police officer whose fiancee started a new tong war.”
“Daniel, that’s absurd,” I said angrily. “I was asked to look for a missing girl. How could that have had anything to do with Mr. Lee being killed?”
“We’ll just have to see, won’t we?” He started striding out around the corner into Pell Street. “I’ve always been suspicious of coincidences. Something happened to make a person choose last night to kill Lee Sing Tai, rather than any other night. So the immediate thought that comes to mind is whether the girl realized you were hot on her trail and took the ultimate step not to be returned to the old man.”
“I don’t believe that,” I said.
“Oh. Why not?”
I hesitated, debating whether to tell him that I knew where the girl was. “If she was frightened enough to face being alone in a big city rather than staying where at least she got food and shelter, then I can’t see she’d want to risk going back there,” I said. “And for another thing, how would a young girl be strong enough to throw a man off the roof?”
“Then Kear was probably on the right track. She and Frederick Lee formed an attachment on their way to New York and he carried out the murder with her help. Let’s hope that’s how it turns out. At least it will satisfy the tongs.”
We reached the corner of Pell. A crowd was still milling around. Daniel turned back to me. “I’m going to take a quick look at the body and then get it moved off the street. We don’t want the whole world gawking at it and spreading rumors of tong killings. However, you don’t need to come any farther. I will spare you having to look at an unpleasant sight.”
“I’ve already seen the body,” I said. “Captain Kear asked me to make a positive identification because none of
