things from me, and if you don’t tell me the truth, I’ll have the police take you to an American jail.”
“But I tell you truth,” she wailed. “I say that I do not kill Lee Sing Tai and I do not know who kills him. This is truth.”
“Not the whole truth, obviously. You didn’t want to leave Annie behind at the house. You were frightened for her—why?”
“She is family and she is sick. I no want to leave her alone among strangers.”
“No, it was more than that,” I said. A strange idea was forming in my head—a picture of the two girls dancing around together, Annie looking livelier than I’d ever have believed possible. “You thought she might be in danger. Well, it turned out she was in danger. Somebody killed her, Bo Kei.”
“Kill her?”
“Put a pillow over her face and suffocated her. Made her stop breathing.” I stepped closer, staring her right in the eye, hoping that my greater height would be intimidating. “Why do you think that was? Do you want to tell me the truth now, or are you going to let Annie’s killer walk free?”
She looked at me with frightened eyes. “I do not know who might have killed her,” she said.
“Then let me ask you this—why do you think someone killed her? Was it someone from the brothel who came after her? Someone who worked for Lee Sing Tai or Bobby Lee? Was someone afraid she would divulge something she knew?”
She shook her head.
“She’s dead, Bo. There’s nothing you can do to bring her back, but you can help us find her killer. So let me ask you this—I saw small footprints on the roof. A tiny, dainty foot. Were they possibly Annie’s footprints? Was she on that roof? Did she go to kill Lee Sing Tai?”
She hung her head. “She make me promise I never tell anyone,” she said.
“But she’s dead now. Tell me. In this country we punish people for being an accessory to a crime.”
“What does this mean?”
“That you knew about a crime and you helped the criminal in some way, even if you didn’t commit the crime yourself. Did she kill Lee Sing Tai? Did she?”
“No!” She yelled out the word. “No, she did not kill him.” Then she sank onto the top stair and put her head in her hands. “She wanted to. She went to the rooftop with that purpose.”
“She was well and strong enough to climb up to a rooftop and then leap from one roof to the next?”
She nodded. “She was not as sick as she acted. She knew if she was sick they would throw her out of the bad-women house—not want her to make their customers sick.”
“You’re saying she was only acting? She didn’t have consumption?”
“Yes, she knew that she had this disease, but not as bad as she wanted everyone to think. She knew she would die from it one day, but right now she was strong enough to climb up and jump across from one roof to the next. It is not such a big leap if one has no fear. And she had no fear, only anger. She said to me, ‘This man must not be allowed to put more girls through shame and misery. He must be stopped now.’ And when I tried to tell her not to go, she said, ‘My life is over. I will die some day soon. But I make sure this man pays before I die.’”
“She went to kill him—but she didn’t go through with it?”
“No,” she said. “Because of the ghost.”
“What ghost?”
Bo Kei looked up at me as if she didn’t want to go on. “When she reached the roof of Lee Sing Tai’s house, he was not there but the door that led to the stairs was open. She plucked up courage and started to go down the stairs to his bedroom. As she stood at the top of the stairs she looked down and what do you think she saw? She saw a ghost floating up toward her. That’s when she knew that Lee Sing Tai was already dead.”
“So what did she do then?”
“Everyone is afraid of angry ghosts. She ran. She jumped across to the next roof and almost didn’t make it. When she came back to me she was crying and couldn’t breathe. She made me promise that I would tell nobody what she had done.”
“This ghost?” I said. “What did it look like?”
“It was a white floating head in the darkness,” she said. “It stared up at her with an open mouth but no sound came out. And it had lots of arms and legs, like a demon or a monster.”
“And she thought it was Lee’s ghost and he was already dead?”
She nodded. “What else could it be?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t believe in ghosts myself. I’m afraid we’ll have to tell this story to the police, Bo Kei. At least it should make them release Frederick.”
She gave me a watery smile. “All right. I will tell your good policeman.”
“I’m going to see him now,” I said. “I will bring him back here to talk to you and you will tell him everything you know.”
“I will get in trouble?”
I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so. If what you say is true, then Annie did nothing wrong—except for trespassing on someone’s property.”
“And they will now believe that Frederick did nothing wrong either and they will set him free?” she asked hopefully.
