Dragonfire

Fifteen

On the way over to North Beach, I kept thinking about Emerson’s probable motives. My hunch was based on three things. First, the revelation that he was a Chinaphile, had a penchant for Chinese prostitutes, and owned a violent temper. Second, the fact that Polly Soon had fallen to her death from a fifth-floor walkway at the Ping Yuen housing project a couple of weeks ago; both Ben Klein and Richard Loo had told me it was a case Eberhardt had been working on. And third, bits and pieces of what Eberhardt had said to me before Jimmy Quon showed up with his .357 Magnum that Sunday afternoon:

“I hate my goddamn job sometimes. It’s a hell of a thing being a cop, you know that?”

“Somebody’s got to do it. And you’re one of the best.”

“Am I? I don’t know about that.”

And:

“You don’t know what I’m liable to do; neither do I.”

And:

“Whores are better off dead anyway. Who cares about a damned whore?”

Put all of those things together, juggle them with a few other facts I had learned about Carl Emerson, and they added up this way:

Emerson picks up Polly Soon at a Chinatown bar — either that, or they’ve had an ongoing relationship — and takes her back to the project. Something happens after they arrive, maybe an argument of some kind, and Emerson loses his temper. Polly Soon tries to get away; Emerson goes after her, out onto the walkway that runs across the front of the building. There’s a scuffle, and she either falls accidentally or Emerson pushes her over the railing. Then he manages to get away without being identified by any of her neighbors.

When the initial police investigation doesn’t turn him up he thinks he’s got away clean. But Eberhardt is a tenacious cop; somehow he gets on to Emerson, with enough proof of Emerson’s guilt to confront him. Emerson’s only out is to offer a bribe lucrative enough to keep Eberhardt from arresting him and filing an official report. Only something goes wrong with the scheme; maybe Eberhardt has second thoughts, maybe Emerson decides the stock-transfer payoff wasn’t such a good idea after all because it leaves him vulnerable. In any case, he opts to take the big plunge into premeditated homicide and hires Jimmy Quon. Emerson knows his way around Chinatown, has probably done some gambling at Lee Chuck’s; it wouldn’t have been difficult for him to find out which Hui Sip body-washer was willing to waste a cop for the right price. Lee Chuck himself might have acted as the go-between; that would explain how he knew it was Quon who pulled the trigger, and why.

A nice, tight little scenario. And I hated it because it meant Eberhardt had not only taken a bribe but done it to cover up a homicide.

The thought gave me a sick, ulcerous feeling in my stomach. You go through life believing in certain things, certain people; they’re central to your outlook, your whole philosophy of right and wrong, good and bad; they’re what you hang on to when the going gets tough. Take them away, one by one, and what did you have left? Nothing, an existence without meaning. That was what was happening to me. Six weeks of erosion, of psychic crumbling, that had reduced my little corner of the world to a pile of rubble. All I could do was to poke around in the ruins, try to rebuild this or that place of meaning so I could go on living there. Only with most of them it seemed to be too late; they kept on crumbling when I touched them, disintegrating into handfuls of dust.

There was not much left now. A few bricks of justice, maybe; I still had those. Emerson was going to pay for what he’d done. So was Jimmy Quon. And so was Eberhardt, if it came to that.

I found a place to park near the Central Station precinct house on Vallejo. Over near Broadway, there was a neighborhood bar called Luigi’s; I went in there and back to a public telephone near the restrooms. It was just seven o’clock when I dialed Kam Fong’s number. I had told him to be there at seven, and he was; he answered on the second ring.

“What did you find out?” I asked him.

“Only man name Emerson known here,” he said. “Other two, no.”

“How is Emerson known? As a gambler?”

“Yes.”

“Does he frequent Lee Chuck’s parlor?”

“Sometimes.”

“Did you get that from Chuck?”

“No. Not talking to him.”

“What about the local whores?”

“Please? Not understand.”

“Emerson likes them too, doesn’t he? Chinese whores?”

“Nobody talking about that.”

“Someone talked to me about it. Did you know Polly Soon?”

Silence.

“Come on, Fong. Polly Soon — did you know her?”

“I... yes.”

“How well?”

“Not well. Nobody know whore well.”

“Did she take on Caucasian tricks?”

“Yes, maybe.”

“How did she die? You hear anything about that?”

“No.”

“Did Lieutenant Eberhardt ask you about her?”

“He asking, but I having no answer.”

“Who else did he talk to?”

“Don’t know. You think Polly Soon’s death...?”

“That’s just what I think. Did she have any close friends? Another prostitute? One of her neighbors?”

Silence.

“I’m waiting, Fong,” I said.

“Maybe... woman name Ming Toy.”

“Also a hooker?”

“Yes.”

“Where does she live? In the Ping Yuen project?”

“Yes.”

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

“Have you been to her apartment?”

“No. Not visiting whores.”

“I’ll bet,” I said. “What floor does she live on?”

“Fifth floor.”

“What apartment?”

“Near Polly Soon. Next door.”

“Did you tell the lieutenant about Ming Toy?”

“Yes.”

“When? Right after Polly Soon was killed?”

“No. Later. He asking me find out who Polly Soon’s friend.”

“How much later? A few days before the shooting, maybe?”

“I think yes.”

“Do you know if he talked to her?”

“No, not knowing.”

“All right. Does Ming Toy work the bars too?”

“Bars, yes.”

“Any one in particular?”

“Pink Dragon Bar.”

“Where’s that?”

“Broadway.”

“Near Grant?”

“Yes.”

“What does she look like? Describe her.”

“Very small. Long pigtail.”

“How old?”

“Over thirty. But she look young, like teenager. People here... they calling her China Doll.”

Yeah, I thought, China Doll. I said, “Is there anybody else who was close to Polly Soon? Any other names you gave to the lieutenant?”

“No. No one else.”

“Okay, Fong. You stick around there in case I need to talk to you again. Don’t go out anywhere tonight.”

He muttered something in Chinese. Then he said, with a kind of nervous resignation, “You call any time, I stay here.”

“Good enough.”

I cradled the receiver and went back out to the street. Dusk was just starting to spread over the city. On Broadway and along Columbus, the garish neon signs advertising the North Beach topless and bottomless joints were already ablaze, softened and given a misty sheen by the fog. There was more fog now than there had been earlier — a thickening mist wind-blown in from the sea, chill and wet and sinuous, eerie in its movements and distortions. Such heavy fog this early in the evening usually meant a London-style pea-souper later on. It was going to be some night.

I pulled the collar of my overcoat tight around my throat, walked down to the intersection of Broadway and Columbus, and crossed over into Chinatown.

The Ping Yuen housing project took up most of the block of Pacific Avenue between Grant and Stockton, a couple of blocks from the Pink Dragon Bar where the China Doll plied her trade. It was one long, tall structure, divided into wings and oddly designed so that it resembled a bastardized architectural hybrid of Chinese pagoda-style and Western motel-style. It was painted a faded pastel green, with rust-red pillars and support posts that had Chinese characters etched into them in black. Set behind an iron-spear fence, the building had a forlorn, decaying look in the fog and approaching darkness.

I pushed through the main entrance gate, under a pagoda arch bearing four statues of stylized Oriental lions. Inside, there was a narrow pebbled-concrete courtyard with some benches and a few shrubs and spindly trees. It would be somewhere in there, on that hard concrete, that Polly Soon had died. A scattering of lights on poles illuminated the area, and there were more lights glowing hazily on the upper walkways and in the windows of the blocky wings between them.

Nobody was hanging around in the courtyard, or at least nobody I could see. I crossed it to a bank of mailboxes, only a few of which bore names; none of the names was Ming Toy’s. I got into a creaking elevator festooned with spray-painted initials and let it carry me up to the fifth floor. As soon as I stepped out I was on the open walkway of the lower wing. The wind blew cold up there; that, and the fact that I was prone to vertigo in high, open places like this, forced me in close to the building wall. The outer portion of the walkway was a thin waist-high wall, with no railing on top of it. It would be easy enough for somebody to fall over it, either by accident or design.

It took me ten minutes and three brief interviews with fifth-floor residents to find out that Ming Toy occupied Apartment 515, in the middle wing. When I got to the door marked with those numerals I rapped on it with my knuckles; there wasn’t any doorbell. Silence from inside. I rapped again, louder, but that did not get me any response, either.

Nobody home.

I tried the knob. Locked. I thought about trying to slip the latch with one of my credit cards — it was that kind of lock — but I didn’t do it. If I was going to learn anything from Ming Toy, it would probably be face to face. Which made finding her my first priority. I could always come back here later on if nothing else worked out.

The Pink Dragon Bar was set back from the street under an arched portico, halfway between Grant and Stockton. The front wall and door were painted black, with a stylized pink dragon curled around the door, breathing bright red flame toward the pavement. But I was tired of looking at dragons; the hell with dragons and the hell with dragonfire. I shoved open the door and went inside.

Dark, with pinkish lights over the bar, pink lanterns on a handful of tables and six booths arranged around a rectangular dance floor. Noisy: a jukebox was playing rock music at full volume. The place was only about a third filled, with most of the customers grouped along the bar. Nearly all of them were Caucasian males. The only Chinese women in evidence were a couple of waitresses in pink miniskirts, and an overweight hooker rubbing herself against a potential John in one of the booths.

I edged up to the bar, down at the end where nobody was sitting. The bartender was a youngish guy with a Fu Man-chu mustache; he wore a pink jacket with a dragon embroidered over the pocket. When he got around to me I leaned forward and said, “I’m looking for the China Doll.”

He’d heard that before; one corner of his mouth lifted in a wise smile. Fine. He thought I was just another John and that was what I wanted him to think.

“Not here,” he said.

“She be in later?”

“Maybe. It depends.”

“She’s a regular, though, isn’t she?”

“She drops in most nights.”

“What time, if she’s coming?”

“Around nine. Something to drink while you wait?”

I thought it over. I could hang around here or I could go out hunting for Ming Toy. But there were a lot of flesh spots in Chinatown and in North Beach; I could wander around all night without finding her. And the less I exposed myself to people on Jimmy Quon’s turf, the better off I would be. The smart thing to do was to stay put for an hour or two.

I said, “Bottle of Schlitz. I’ll take it in a booth.”

The booth I claimed was positioned so that you could see the front door from inside it. One of the waitresses brought the beer, gave me a sloe-eyed look, took my money, and went away again. I poured beer and sat nursing it, not thinking about anything, letting the rock music from the juke fill up my head.

And I waited.