The Man With No Time

I let her get well past me before I stepped into the light and called her.

“Lek,” I said.

She wheeled immediately, the heel of her sneaker making a faint squeal against the asphalt, and her hand came up out of her little purse with a white canister in it. She extended her arm to its full length and pointed the can at my face. Bracelets jingled on her wrist. “Stop there,” she said.

I stopped. “Mace?”

“You bet,” she said. “Put you away good, too. What's your problem?” Her English in the bar had been heavily accented. She'd left most of the accent inside.

“I was here on Saturday night,” I said. “With two Chinese guys, one young and one old, remember?”

“So what?” The hand with the mace didn't shake at all. I hadn't paid much attention to her in the bar, but now I was struck by the size of her eyes. They seemed to take up half her face, and their whites were as clear as porcelain under the streetlight. “I didn't ask you who you were, I asked what your problem was.”

I slowly held my hands up, palms toward her, two feet apart. Gave her my Harmless Smile, just a big Boy Scout looking for a good deed. “Nothing up my sleeve,” I said. “I want to talk for a minute.”

“I get paid to talk,” she said tersely.

“And you sound different when you do.”

She made a small raspberry sound. “Oh, shooah,” she said, “everybody like pidgin, na? Make everybody feel same-same Rambo, got too-big gun.”

I couldn't help it. I laughed. Her face darkened, but then her Thai good nature carried the moment and her teeth gleamed, sudden and white in her face.

“Well, it's the truth,” she said. “You think the guy wants to know that his little piece of sweet-and-sour has a day job translating English news for the local Thai paper? Will he tip her more if he knows she went to school longer than he did?”

“You have a degree?”

“I have two from Thailand, in English. Ning's a nurse, three-quarter time.” She turned her head slightly to one side, regarding me. “I remember you now. You're the one who was no fun.”

“You can put down the mace, then,” I said.

“No way,” she said, “but I'll change hands and lean on my car. My arm's getting tired and my feet hurt.” She backed up against a gleaming little white Toyota that was parked facing out. The mace went from the right to the left hand. Her chin lifted a quarter of an inch, a prompt for me to talk. “So?”

“I want to ask you about the old man.”

“Lo,” she said.

I nodded, faintly surprised that she remembered him.

“Funny old guy. Still likes the girls, maybe too much. Like a dog sniffing, but funny about it. Some old guys never seem to run out, you know?”

“Lucky him,” I said. “Some of us run out almost immediately. You were with him when he made his phone call.”

“No.” She raked damp hair back from her forehead with her right hand, and her eyes suddenly seemed even larger. “I was in the toilet, trying to look younger.”

“Could you hear him?”

I got the sidelong gaze again. “I liked him,” she said.

I spread my hands in what I hoped was an international gesture of reason. “I don't want to do him any harm. I just want to know who he called.”

“Why?” It was thick with skepticism.

“I can't tell you.”

“Go away.” She started to back around the Toyota, mace still pointed at my face. “Go to the end of the parking lot and stay there until I've driven away.”

“Wait,” I said. “Um, wait, look here, I'll put my driver's license and my business card and whatever else you want right here on the hood, and then I'll back off and you come and check it out. Would I do that if I was going to hurt him?” I slipped my wallet out of my shirt pocket and started to pull pieces out of it. “Oh, hell, look at the whole thing.”

The wallet landed with a hollow thump on the Toyota's hood as I backed away, my hands in plain view again. Lek waited until I was a good ten feet off before she came and flipped through it one-handed.

“Okay,” she said at last. She'd read everything in it and compared my face under the lamplight with the photo on my driver's license twice. “I'd take your check.”

“Anything happens to Lo, the cops talk to you and you can send them straight to me.”

“I said I liked him. I said I thought he was a funny old man. I didn't say I thought he was a good old man.”

“No,” I said, “he's not a good old man.”

She pushed her lower lip out and then drew it back in again. Then she lowered the mace and dropped it into her purse. “In fact, I think he's probably a pretty terrible old man. I don't think he told the truth once all evening. And he was jumpy, always looking at his watch like he heard it ticking all the time.”

“Did he speak English or Chinese on the phone?”

“I still don't know why you're asking.”

“He did something to someone I love.”

She weighed it. “A girl?”

“The people I love are mostly girls.”

Her teeth caught the light again, and she chuckled. “I didn't think you were a lady-boy.”

“As you said, he's a pretty terrible old man.”

“Fun, though.” Lek sighed at the injustice of it all, and then made up her mind or, more likely, her heart. “Spoke mostly English, a little Cantonese when he ran out of words. Only talked a few seconds. He called a lady, said he'd come for his things the next day. 'Dim sum time,' he said.”

Sure. Dim sum time made sense. The rest of it didn't.

“His things? Are you sure?” Eleanor had said he'd brought a canvas suitcase.

She did the thing with the lip again, dropped the long eyelids briefly and then shook her head. “No,” she said. “The rest of his things.”

“Do you think she was a Chinese lady?”

She fished in her purse while she considered the question, and pulled out a ring of keys that would have slipped easily over her ankle. “Don't know. If she's Chinese, she didn't speak his dialect and she's married to an Anglo. He called her Mrs. Summerson.”

A bubble of air forced its way through my lips, surprising both of us.

“You know her?” Lek asked, looking startled at the sound.

“I know her,” I said. And I did, and there was no way in the world I could talk to her without Eleanor's permission. If Lo was the Chan family's guardian angel, Esther Summerson was their household god.

I even knew where she lived. I'd been there twice, most recently after the twins' hundred-day party. Mrs. Esther Summerson occupied a perfectly restored 1918 Craftsman's Bungalow, set back at least fifty feet from the sidewalk on an idyllic one-way lane called Jacaranda Street. The house was dark now, sleeping under ivy and dormant climbing roses, just visible beneath arbors that had dangled sweet, dusky clusters of grapes only two months before. By daylight, the whole thing looked like the scenes they'd painted on the labels of orange crates in the twenties.

With Alice parked two streets to the west, I toted a large Styrofoam container of coffee up Jacaranda Street and found myself a dark little piece of curb between two parked cars almost directly across from Mrs. Summerson's. I couldn't talk to her, but nobody had said I couldn't look at her house.

My watch said 3:20 when I sat down to look at Mrs. Summerson's house. The Styrofoam quart of coffee said Donut Deelite. I needed the coffee more than I needed the watch; I'd gone to bed for a couple of hours after the firemen finished putting out 1321 and then gotten up to go meet Lek, and every time I closed my eyes I saw little bitty fireworks.

The coffee was so extraordinarily awful that it held my attention for almost an hour. Since nothing whatsoever was happening in front of me, I had ample time and attention to devote to analyzing the components of