'He have an agent?'
'I don't know.'
'Management of any kind?'
'I don't know.'
'How'd he get the commercials?'
'I don't know. It wasn't a big deal. He'd go away occasionally and come back and say he'd made a commercial. It's not cool to ask a lot of stuff about things like that.'
'Except when I do it,' I said.
'Oh, anything you do is cool,' Deirdre said.
'It's a gift,' I said.
She grinned at me, full of herself, pleased with her body, enjoying her sexiness, glad about her vocation, optimistic about the future, younger than a new Beaujolais.
'So what do you think? You got any clues yet?'
'Not yet.'
'Do you get a lot of cases that are hard to figure out?'
'Well, the process sort of selects them out. People don't usually call me if the local cops solve it promptly. Even then, though, most cases aren't complicated to solve. A lot of them are more complicated to resolve.'
'What do you mean?'
'I mean sometimes I know who did what, but I'm not sure what I should do about it.'
'What do you do?' Deirdre said.
'I normally have two courses of action. I follow my best instincts guided by experience, or I do what Susan says.'
Deirdre grinned again.
'I bet you don't do what anyone says.'
Without moving, she appeared somehow wiggly.
'Do you ever get a case where there are no clues? You know, when you can, like, never figure out who did it.'
'I solve all my cases,' I said.
'Some of them are just not solved yet.'
Deirdre clapped quietly.
'Great line,' she said.
'Thanks, I'm trying it out for my ad in the Yellow Pages.'
CHAPTER 11
Wearing a spiffy white raincoat beaded with rain drops, and carrying a wet umbrella that looked like a Chinese parasol, Rikki Wu came into her husband's restaurant as if she were walking onto a yacht. The guy at the register jumped up and took her coat and umbrella and disappeared with them. No one had paid any attention to my coat, which I had hung on the back of a chair. She scanned the room looking for Susan. The place was nearly empty for lunch. Maybe it was the rain. Or maybe most people in downtown Port City didn't do lunch. Her eyes swept past me, and stopped, and came back and stayed.
I stood. She walked over to me.
'Mrs. Wu,' I said.
'Where's Susan?'
'She had an emergency with a patient,' I said.
I held Rikki Wu's chair for her. She seemed puzzled.
'So it's just the two of us?' she said.
'Yes, but I'll be twice as lively and amusing to make up,' I said.
Rikki Wu looked uneasy, but she sat.
The restaurant had begun, in another time, before it was a pizzeria, as a store with glass windows facing the street. The windows were half curtained in some sort of accordion-pleated white paper. Above the curtains, the glass was fogged by the wet weather.
A waiter brought us tea, and stood quietly beside us. He was as close to prostrating himself as he could get while standing. Without looking at him, Rikki Wu spoke in rapid Chinese. He bowed and backed away and disappeared.
'I hope you don't mind,' Rikki Wu said in a voice that sounded like she didn't care if I minded or not.
'I took the liberty of ordering for us.'
'I don't mind,' I said.
