Again I should have kept my mouth shut and just claimed to be a friend. But I don’t always stop to think through consequences. “Not at all,” I said. “I’m a private investigator. That’s why Mr. Lee hired me.”
“Really?” He was looking at me with interest tinged with amusement now. “A female dick. That’s a novel one.”
He glanced down at my letter he was still holding. “Murphy, is that the name? Molly Murphy? I’ve heard of you before somewhere.”
I wasn’t going to say that my name had probably been mentioned as Daniel’s future wife. “I have worked on cases in this part of the city,” I said.
“Have you, by george? What kind of cases?”
I tried to think of harmless things I might have done in the Lower East Side—certainly not dealing with Monk Eastman and his gang. “Another missing person case once. A girl who had come over from Ireland. Her family wanted to trace her.”
I hoped he’d be satisfied with that, but he was still frowning. “And why exactly did old Lee hire you particularly to find this bride?”
“I suppose he thought that a young woman like myself could move among other young women in the world outside of Chinatown, without arousing suspicion.”
“I see.” He paused. “And what made him think that his bride had run away and not been kidnapped by Hip Sing, for example?”
“I asked him the same question,” I said. “He indicated that his spies had looked into that aspect thoroughly before he thought of hiring me.” I hesitated, then went on. “From what I understand of the Chinese, I don’t think Mr. Lee would have resorted to hiring an outsider and a female unless he’d done everything he could himself to recover the young woman.”
“That’s true enough,” he agreed, then he stood looking at me, head cocked to one side, like a bird’s. “You know what I find interesting? That Mr. Lee smuggles in a new bride from China—which I might point out to you is breaking the law to start with, Chinese women not being allowed to enter the United States. Then this bride does a flit, he hires you to find her, and immediately afterward he plunges to his death. Odd chain of events, don’t you think? And in my twenty years of experience in the New York Police Department, I’ve always found that when strange things happen, one after the other, there’s always a connection.”
He was staring at me, long and hard, as if he expected me to crack and confess all. “Now look here,” I said, my hackles rising. “I don’t know if you’re hinting that I might have had anything to do with his death. If so, I’ve no idea why you’d think that. For one thing, he hasn’t yet paid me my fee—and now he’s not going to, so I’m left out of pocket. Besides, I’d never met the man before and I have no interest in Chinatown or its inhabitants.”
As I said this, unwanted thoughts were racing through my brain. I could think of several people who might want Lee Sing Tai dead, and first on the list was his runaway bride. The officer’s mind must have been working along the same lines because he said, “So you haven’t located this runaway bride yet?”
Now what do I say? Lying to the police was a serious matter, but I also realized that she’d make a perfect scapegoat for them, so that the case could be solved neatly and a new tong war would not erupt. “I did start to look for her. I went around the local missions. But as you can see from the letter, I decided to withdraw from the case,” I said. “I realized that I didn’t wish to be any part of this sordid business. I don’t approve.”
Suddenly his expression changed. He was no longer looking at me as if I was his prime suspect. I could see an idea had just come to him. “Look, Miss Murphy, I’m Captain Kear of the Sixth Precinct,” he said. “Can I ask you to do something for me? Nobody has officially verified the identification of the body for us yet. The old woman in there couldn’t make it down the stairs on those feet, even if we could get her to shut up.”
“What about the servants?” I asked.
“They must have run off when they heard the police were on their way,” he said. “There was nobody in the house when we got here and the door was wide open. Probably thought we were going to blame them. And the Chinamen in the crowd suddenly can’t understand any English or claim to be complete strangers.”
“Is Mr. Lee’s son nowhere around?” I asked.
“He has a son?”
“Bobby Lee,” I said.
“Oh, Bobby Lee, that’s right. Old Lee’s paper son, isn’t he? I haven’t seen him for a while. I heard old Lee shipped him out to the cigar factory in Brooklyn after the last dustup with Hip Sing.”
“He was around here yesterday,” I said.