“Then why introduce us?”
“Could be spite,” April speculated. She was known to be stuck up, hard to please. Her rejecting the doctor son of an old enemy would make the enemy lose face. On the other hand, if the doctor rejected her, Sai Woo would lose face. All around it was risky. Pretty much a no-win situation.
“Could be desperation.” George laughed, opening his mouth wide enough to reveal white, even teeth. “Anything for a grandson to carry on the name.”
“My mother would settle for a granddaughter. Where did you go to school?”
“Queens. Then Columbia all the way.”
April guessed he meant college, medical school, and all that other training. She frowned. And then he came down to Chinatown to practice when he had never been stuck here in the first place? That didn’t make sense. Why would he return to a place he’d never been? Most ABAs who got to college and learned to blend married Caucasians if they possibly could. They didn’t exactly come stampeding back to live with the immigrants just off the plane.
“You live down here?” she asked.
He shook his head.
The steamed buns came. April bit into one. “Ummm. Food’s good.”
He drank down some of his beer, nodding. “You have to be in the right mood though.”
Ah, so that was it. He hadn’t known what kind of girl she was, and didn’t want to be seen with her if she wasn’t up to a better place. She flushed, feeling put down by the Ivy League graduate. Last spring she’d laid eyes on Columbia University for the first time. She had a missing person from there. Seventeen-year-old girl. The girl was killed in California, and April Woo was the one who located her.
All right, so maybe she was a cop, a street person, not a doctor, not exactly a first-class medical school graduate. Okay. Maybe she was just a cop. But in a month she’d be a cop with a college degree herself. And if she had anything to do with it, she’d be a sergeant in the department, too.
“Is that a tennis bag?” She jerked her chin at the bag at his feet.
“Yes. You ask a lot of questions.”
“I’m a cop. It comes with the territory. How did you get to be a doctor?”
He smiled again, sipped more beer. “I studied for a lot of years. And my parents wanted a docta.” He twisted his face into old style. “You know how that is. Ten thousand pounds of steaming guilt a day. ‘Have dumpring. Study book. Be docta. Take care palents.’ I really didn’t have much choice.”
Another cart came by. This one was filled with pearl balls and shui mai. April took the shui mai. She’d heard that in old China dim sum was served in tea houses for breakfast. The words “dim sum” meant “touch the heart lightly.” She tried to concentrate on the meaning of the words and the delicate taste of shrimp and dried mushroom. Yes, she knew exactly how much ten thousand pounds of steaming guilt a day weighed on a child’s shoulders. She liked the image and his joking about the accent, liked the gold signet ring on his finger.
He drank down half the beer and looked at her appraisingly. “What made you become a cop?”
She tasted hers, considering an answer. She didn’t want him to think badly of her parents for not insisting she go to Columbia. Didn’t want to insult her parents by implying poverty. She put her glass down. The beer was warm. “There seemed to be a need.”
In response to that, her beeper sounded from inside her lucky red blazer.
George looked surprised. “What’s that?”
“My beeper. Something must have come up. I’m sorry. I have to call in.”
She pushed her chair back and made her way through the crush to the front of the restaurant, where a pay phone hung prominently behind the cash register. She dialed the squad number.
“What’s going on?” she asked when Sanchez came on the line.
“Where are you?”
“Doyers Street.”
“Chinatown. What’re you doing down there?”
“It’s lunchtime, my day off. I’m having lunch.” April tried not to sound impatient. “What’s coming down?”
“Braun wants you in here now. Third floor, examination room.”
“Yeah, what for?” Adrenaline and alarm shot through her in equal measures.
“He’s got Maggie’s boyfriend.”
“No kidding.” April’s heart thudded. How did he do that, when she and Sanchez had missed him? Son of a bitch. This wasn’t going to go down well with Sergeant Joyce or Captain Higgins.
“No kidding. And get this. Braun wants his team there with him.”
Oh, now they were a team, great. April looked at her watch. She’d been with George Dong all of twenty-three minutes. So much for dating. “Twenty minutes max,” she promised.
Sanchez hung up without comment.
April pushed her way back to the table through an even larger crowd than had been there earlier. George Dong, the doctor, was smiling at her. She noticed he was not so very ordinary-looking when his mouth turned up at the edges. As she approached the table, she had a minute to wonder if he really played tennis or if he just carried the racquet around for show. Lot of people were sneaky like that.
“You have to go, right.” It wasn’t even a question. He knew.
“Sometimes it happens. I’m really sorry. The case I’m working—something’s come up.”
“It’s okay. I know how it is,” he said magnanimously.
But she knew it wasn’t okay. All the way uptown, she had a really sick feeling about the whole thing. She didn’t know if there was any way to make it all right with him. She figured the worst case was he’d bad-mouth her to his mother. His mother would bad-mouth her to her mother and her mother would kill her. Best case he wouldn’t say anything.
37
Lieutenant Braun was still wearing his powder-blue jacket. April spotted it across the squad room when she arrived. Braun was crowding Mike’s desk, talking fast, and poking a finger at the air. He turned around at Mike’s welcoming smile.
“Ah. Detective Woo,” Braun said. A hint of sarcasm edged into his voice.
“Lieutenant Braun.”
April’s desk appeared to be unoccupied by anyone on the Sunday shift. She put her bag down on it. “What’s happening?”
Mike raised a crooked eyebrow, jerking his head at the farthest desk down the line. A preppy-looking young man in a seersucker sport jacket seemed to have tied his body in a knot around a telephone, and was relating to it intimately.
April took him in. Light brown hair, blue eyes, a spattering of freckles across the nose. Medium build. Looked not unlike Dan Quayle, the former vice president. Five eleven to six foot. Where did Braun dig him up?
Braun nodded. “I’m pretty hot shit” was written all over him. He smirked and folded a fresh stick of gum into his mouth. “Name’s Roger McLellan. Says he left town a week ago Friday. That’s the day before Maggie got hit. Easy enough to check out. Claims he has no idea what this is all about, none at all. He consented to come down here to help us out with whatever our problem is. But lo and behold, the second he gets here he changes his mind and decides he better not say anything without his lawyer present. Hey, does that look like a guy who doesn’t know what this is all about?”
“What kind of guy that young knows a lawyer? He knew the number by heart, didn’t even have to look it up. I’m running a sheet on him,” Mike added.
“Maybe they’re friends,” April murmured.
McLellan’s body was still wrapped around the telephone receiver as he whispered into it heatedly.
“Who?” Braun looked at her.
“Him and the lawyer.”
“Yeah, sure. Who’s friends with a lawyer?”
They watched McLellan reluctantly put the receiver back on the phone and straighten up, visibly pulling himself together. When he approached the three detectives, it was with an air of nervous belligerence.