Beg Me (26 page)

“
You didn’t know?
You’re a bloody New York City detective!”

“Yes, I’m a ‘bloody’ detective, and I work Manhattan’s Chinatown! I can’t keep track of every homicide, especially out in Brooklyn even if it is an Asian girl. And especially while I’m undercover! You want to see my case load? And shit, why didn’t Jeff even call me? Why’s he got you on this and not me?”

I didn’t respond immediately, and the answer was already clouding his features, Jeff’s rationale dawning on him. He’d spelled it out himself. Because the Chinese do not normally like cops. The Chinese do not normally trust cops. And it’s a steady struggle just to find Chinese anywhere who want to risk becoming pariahs within their own communities by becoming cops, whether it was in New York or Hong Kong or Bangkok.

As good friends as Lee and Chen were, Lee must have been thinking,
Well, he’s a cop now.
Good enough to hook Teresa up and give her the lay of the land, but that was only because I’d asked him for a name, a contact within Chinatown’s underworld. Enough years and their different “career paths” had dictated that his old friend was not to be trusted with finding the killers of his kid sister.

Chen’s hurt was all over his face. He knew he hadn’t dropped his culture when he put on his badge.

I briefed him on the details. First Oliver, now Chen. Hating this, seeing the grief reflected in others’ eyes.

Chen was similarly baffled by all the trouble they went to to mark Anna with a tattoo.

“They put it on Anna’s leg to throw everyone off,” I explained. “It was written in Thai, but it came from a Vietnamese gang.”

“But Anna was Chinese.”

I groaned my impatience. “Yes, I
know,
John, thanks. That’s the problem that’s been nagging at me. They didn’t know she was Chinese, they thought she was Thai. But the motto comes from a
Vietnamese
gang. How the hell do Isaac and a bunch of black dudes know anything about Vietnamese gangs? Especially since they didn’t bother to even check Anna’s ancestry?”

“But we know they must be hooked up with one of the gangs in Chinatown to distribute the ecstasy,” he argued. “Maybe they picked up a few things. You fall back on what you know, right?”

“Right,” I mumbled. I told him I’d better get back to the mansion.

“Wait a minute.” He scribbled down his cell number and a private text code we could use to contact each other.

“Cheers.”

“Let me ask you something,” said Chen. “You regularly get mixed up in crazy stuff like this?”

I tried to be modest. Tried, anyway. “Do you remember news stories a couple of years ago about that pointy-nosed tobacco heiress who got into trouble over her visit to Paris?”

“
You’re
the one who slapped her?”

I shrugged. “She bought a person, John. Twelve-year-old Ugandan girl to scrub her floors, do her laundry—the girl put in an eighteen-hour day and hadn’t been outside the house in a month.”

“Teresa Knight,” he said, “I just know you’re gonna give me a migraine.”

I went about my chores for the next three days to avoid suspicion. And when I thought I wasn’t raising any alarms, I used my free time to be with Violet. That time was gold. I couldn’t get enough of her, and yet we had to ration each other’s company.

On the third day I found her in her favorite place, the meadow field where we had first made love. Looking cute in her reading spectacles, scribbling away on a pad as she sat on the grass in front of a football. What we in the rest of the world call a football—not that leather pecan-shaped thing the Americans throw around with their hands and call a football.

“Hey, stand right there,” she requested. “Just stand for a moment, ’kay?”

I stopped a few yards away. “Okay. Umm, what am I doing?”

“You’re a gravitational mass,” she explained.

“Oooh, a pet name! Thank you, darling.”

She smiled, and then I could see her mind switching back to her work, looking right through me as if I really were a dwarf star or a planet or whatever cosmic thing she was thinking of. At last she said, “Okay, you can move now, thanks.”

“In circles?” I teased. “Orbits? You want me maybe to make a crash sound like an asteroid?”

“I think you mean meteorite.” She took off her specs, letting them plop on her equations, and raised a hand for me to take.

“Uh-oh,” I said. “Serious face.”

“Yeah…”

Her hand was actually trembling in mine. “Whoa! What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, nothing—I’m okay. Well, I’m not, but…Look, we ought to talk, baby. I know you’ve been here, like, I don’t know—days? Weeks, whatever? But I don’t think I can stay here anymore. That’s because of you.”

“Oh, God, I didn’t mean to—”

“Teresa, just shut up for a second, girl. I’m not finished, all right? I’m telling you I think I want to leave. This place isn’t what I want—not anymore. I’m not getting work done, and I’ve got no one to talk to about it.” She smiled faintly. “Besides you.”

“Where do you want to go?”

She laughed at herself. “That’s the part I haven’t thought through! I don’t know. I can’t go back to my family, I just can’t, and they’re not in New York anyway. I can see if one of my old girlfriends still has her place in Washington Heights maybe.”

“Come with me,” I said.

“What?”

“Come with me.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know, back to Britain? Look, we’ve got some of the most prestigious universities in the world—not that I ever stayed that long in one, but still! We could go through the paperwork, look into how you could apply. I don’t even know what the costs are for international students these days, but my dad’s a professor, and he’s got contacts, and I’m coming into a big chunk of change soon—”

I was talking in a mad rush, watching her face. “I’d find a way, depending on where you want to go—I mean, unless you want to go here. I don’t know how I’d stay in America, but I’ll have enough money for us to figure out what we both want.”

She looked very pensive. And scared. Couldn’t blame her, really. The mansion, the princes—she likely suspected they’d put pressure on her not to leave.

I put in quickly, “I’m not staying either, darling. I’ll explain when we’re out, but for now I need you to trust me.”

“You’d really help me with university entrance?” she asked, astonished.

“You think we’re going too fast,” I said nervously.

“No, no, babe. I’m sure about you. I’m just not sure what I want.”

“Do you want to figure it out together?” I asked.

“Yes. Oh, yes, Teresa, please!”

We kissed each other, giddy over the idea of running away together, and then she turned practical. “Baby, I’m kinda scared of what they’re going to say to us.”

“We don’t tell them,” I said. “You pack what you need and
only
what you need in one bag. Can you do that? Don’t do it too early or you’ll tip them off. I’ll tell you. It’ll be okay, Violet, I’ve still got my hotel room in town.”

“If you’re here, how can you afford—”

“I’ll explain it all to you when we’re out, darling, I promise.”

“Okay.”

I caressed her cheek, kissed her again, and said, “I’ve got to do some things in the city tomorrow. You going to be all right? You can’t give them a hint anything’s different.”

“Hey!” She gave me a look that said stop treating her like a child.

Then she picked up her notebook full of equations, looking very happy.

I was running away with a physics genius. I can’t even balance my checkbook.

Damn good thing they’d made the Staten Island Ferry free.

“All I found are records for an Isaac Jackson, Sr.” confessed John Chen when we met in an East Village café. “You’re right. Jackson’s dad fought in the Vietnam War.”

“He never got any service decorations, did he?”

“You mean Silver Star or shit like that? No.”

“No award from the French government?”

He looked at me sideways. I said never mind.

“Isaac Sr. did his tour, came back home fucked up like so many other vets. Nothing criminal, but he checked himself voluntarily into psychiatric institutions in Chicago. Did it at least twice.”

“Any details?”

He read out his notes. “Mental problems associated with drug use. Heroin mainly. High percentage of that among vets at the time. He tried to hold down a job but died of tuberculosis in a project in Harlem in the eighties. Sad story.”

“But what about the son?”

“That’s just it,” said Chen. “Isaac Jr. isn’t in the system. No criminal record, never worked for a hospital or the civil service so he doesn’t rate a blip. He listed his father and the project address on an old learner’s permit for a New York driver’s license, but the old forms didn’t need as much for identification as post 9/11.”

“Well, what about renewals?”

“Never filed one.” Chen shrugged. “In fact, he never followed through on the driving test. Hey, it’s New York! Having a car’s a pain in the ass. Must have changed his mind. Lots of people here go their whole lives without ever getting behind a wheel.”

“Strange,” I said. “You’d think he’d still want one. He lives out on Staten Island, after all.”

“You said yourself, he’s got all these minions. They must drive him around too.”

“I suppose so.”

Manhattan was a different planet. Go figure. As huge as London is and as extensive as the Tube, Southeast Rail, Southwest Rail, and so on, are, there are still plenty of times when I’m glad that I have my license and can borrow a car.

“This guy’s either never made a false move in his life, or he was born yesterday,” said Chen. “No sealed juvenile record—we’ve checked that. I’m having one of my guys go through school records for Manhattan near Daddy’s old place and in Chicago where he used to live.”

“What about birth records?” I asked.

“Well, why would you need them?” he asked back. “We have his address, we have his social security number, we have date of birth—what else is his birth certificate going to tell you? Especially considering that Dad moved around. Place of birth? So what? Just because he might have been born in Chicago or here doesn’t mean he went to school in the same place.”

I was getting frustrated. “Then what will school records tell you?”

He threw up his hands. “Hey, everybody has to work, right? He had to hold down
some
job before he was the black Hugh Hefner and Al Sharpton combined. When he was a kid, it must have been tough with his daddy going through problems. My theory? Maybe a teacher helped him get into a vocational program, helped him up his grades to get into a technical college—I don’t know, something.”

“Makes sense,” I said.

Chen laughed. “I’m so glad you approve.”

My cell was ringing. I recognized the number and wondered what they could possibly want.

“Hello, Teresa.”

“Danielle?”

“Hi, sweetie!” she said. “I heard you’re in Manhattan this afternoon. I’m here too, and I thought maybe it’s time we had another private chat, just us girls.”

“Oh…Right. Sure, Danielle. Where are you? If you give me, say, thirty—”

“Why don’t you come right now. It’s really important, hon.”

Chen listened to all this with mild amusement, his eyebrows lifting.

“Remember I said I never have to worry about you? Please, Teresa. I know you’re obedient, and you always try to do your best. It won’t take long. Central Park. Just come as quick as you can.”

She rattled off a landmark and gave me directions. Hung up with a breezy good-bye.

“I’d better go,” I told Chen with little enthusiasm.

“See ya, Princess,” he said with a smirk.

“Don’t call me that.”