There was a walk-space between the two main altars; I detoured through it, thinking of Anna Chu, but the floor back there was empty. Out in the front alcove, I eased open the gate and stood listening. The stairwell and the rest of the building were hushed. I went down slowly, holding the gun pointed downward along my thigh. I did not put it away until I got to the street door at the bottom.
The sidewalk in front was deserted. I turned left, into the eddies of fog; the wet, brackish odor of it chased away the lingering vestiges of the incense. When I got to Washington I found a quiet-looking neighborhood tavern and went in and sat at the bar, away from the knot of other customers. I needed time to think, to make some sense out of Jimmy Quon’s murder, before I could decide on my next move.
Who had killed him? Somebody else in Hui Sip, another boo how doy? Revenge motive, maybe? Not likely. Convenient coincidence? I did not like that much. All right. It had to be tied into the shooting, and that meant one obvious candidate: the man who had hired Quon in the first place, Carl Emerson.
But why? A falling-out of some kind? That was possible, but why would it have happened in the Tien Hou Temple? It was an unlikely place for a rendezvous. Then why would Emerson go there? Why would Quon go there? Quon might have gone to see Anna Chu, if she did know something about Polly Soon’s death and if she had talked to Eberhardt and if Emerson was afraid she’d talk to somebody else... no, that didn’t add up. Polly Soon had been dead more than three weeks, the bribe to Eberhardt had taken place two weeks ago; if Emerson had been worried about a witness, he could have used Quon to find out about Anna Chu the same way both Eberhardt and I had, through Ming Toy, long before this. And maybe Emerson had found out about her, maybe Eberhardt himself had given him her name, and he’d bribed her, too.
Possible. But then I was right back to zero. Why had Quon gone to the temple tonight? Why was Emerson there? Yes, and where was Anna Chu?
Maybe there isn’t any Anna Chu, I thought.
The possibility came bubbling up out of my subconscious, and right behind it a whole bunch of other possibilities. I sat still, letting them take shape.
Suppose Ming Toy had lied to me earlier. Suppose she was the witness after all — she lived on the same floor as Polly Soon, she could have been home that night — and suppose Emerson had got to her and paid her off to keep her mouth shut. She’d be afraid of him, and even more afraid of Quon. She’d do anything Mau Yee told her to do. Like lying to me. Like giving me a phony name and sending me up to the temple.
A set up.
Sure, it made sense that way. I go to the Pink Dragon and ask for Ming Toy; somebody there, the bartender or the waitress who’d given me the sloe-eyed look, is a friend of the China Doll’s and has been alerted to contact her if a big guy with one arm in a sling comes around asking for her. Quon’s doing, probably; he’d want to know right away if I started sniffing around Ming Toy. So the friend gets in touch with her, and she gets in touch with Quon, and he tells her to send me to the Tien Hou. He knows I’m on my guard and he wants to throw me off it. What better place for an ambush than a temple, a house of worship?
Only something had screwed up the plan. What? Where did Emerson come into it?
Well, suppose he was with Quon when the call came from the China Doll. Or showed up just afterward, before Quon left for the temple. Okay, but why would he go along? He wouldn’t want to be present at the ambush; that wasn’t his style. He wanted me dead, yes, but—
Wait now, I thought. Does he want me dead?
If he wasn’t aware that I’d talked to Tedescu and Bexley, he might not suspect that I was on to him. All he’d know was that I was on to Jimmy Quon. Quon would have told him that much; but Quon couldn’t have told him I’d been asking questions about Emerson because he hadn’t known it. I had not used Emerson’s name when I confronted Lee Chuck, and it was only after the setup had been arranged tonight that I’d asked Ming Toy about Emerson.
The only people who knew about his connection with the death of Polly Soon, as far as Emerson was concerned, were Eberhardt and Quon and Ming Toy. He’d bought Ming Toy’s silence, and there was nothing he could do about Eberhardt. But Quon was another matter. In his eyes, Quon might have seemed much more dangerous to him than I was, particularly after the abortive attempt on my life last night. Suppose Emerson hadn’t sanctioned that; suppose he’d been upset about it when Quon told him what had happened, because he was afraid that kind of open warfare would blow the whole thing wide open. If I got Mau Yee before he got me, and Quon survived and talked, Emerson was in the soup.
But if Quon was out of the picture, it would eliminate one major threat and neutralize the one I presented. The way Emerson would see it, I’d have nowhere to go; maybe I’d back off and maybe I’d keep looking, but with Quon dead it wouldn’t matter either way. Ming Toy was in his pocket, and he’d just have to hope Eberhardt died without coming out of his coma. There were no other links, no other way for me to tie on to him.
It was panic reasoning, but Emerson had to be panicked by this time. Trying to burn his bridges was something he might have opted for. If that was it, then it was clear enough what had gone down tonight. He’d followed Mau Yee to the temple, made some excuse for showing up, and then used the altar standard to crush Quon’s skull when his back was turned. By the time I got there, he was long gone.
Gone where? Would he go after Ming Toy, try to burn that bridge too? He might think the money he’d given her was enough to ensure her silence, he might not; it all depended on how panicked he was, how homicidal. He could be out looking for her. Or he could have gone home to Burlingame. Or, hell, he could be anywhere by now.
So what was my move? I could go looking for Ming Toy myself, but even if I could find her, it would be an exercise in futility if Emerson had decided to leave her alone. No, it was Emerson I had to find, not the China Doll. Two choices, then. One was Burlingame, but I did not want to drive all the way down there, not yet. There was a chance he was still in Chinatown, and if he was, I knew one place he might have gone — to establish an alibi, if for no other reason, in order to keep the Hui Sip from looking his way when they learned Jimmy Quon was dead.
Lee Chuck’s gambling parlor.
Ross Alley was deserted, choked with fog, when I came into it off Jackson Street. My shoes made hollow, muffled clicks on the damp pavement; there were no other sounds except for the whisper of cars drifting up the hill behind me, the tinny beat of music from the pair of bars down the way. A neon sign over one of the bars, half hidden, gave the mist a reddish tint, as if it had been stained with blood. Blobs of pale light marked the windows of the second-floor bundle shops, and there were night-lights burning in a couple of the small stores — one of them Lee Chuck’s herb shop.
I stepped into the alcove there, peered through the door glass; there was nothing to see. And nothing to see in the second-floor windows along the alley: no sign of a lookout. I leaned over finally and banged on the adjacent door, the one that hung crooked in its frame. Then I got the .38 out and flattened back against the shop door, away from the crooked one. And waited.
Pretty soon the peephole opened; I could hear it and I could see the faint outspill of light just before the guy in there filled the hole with his eye. But he could not see me where I was standing. The light reappeared as he pulled his head back; then the lid came back over the hole and shut it off. The door stayed closed.