18

Rule #95: When you’re already lost and clueless, it’s best not to clutter things with any more information that’s as likely to be superfluous as not.

 

We met with Ms. Masterson the morning after the Toyota got us to St. Louis, at a sandwich shop near the FBI’s offices in Clayton, a suburb a few miles from downtown St. Louis. It was where lots of government offices and other businesses that preferred clean streets and safety over city squalor and random crime were located. Corinne ordered a sweet roll while we waited for her.

“You’re not going to believe this,” Corinne said. “But I’ve been craving a sweet roll ever since I saw you eat that one at the rest stop, back in New Hampshire.”

“Can’t expect this one to measure up,” I said. “The cellophane wrapper imparts a plasticky undercurrent of flavor profile you just can’t get anywhere else.”

“Along with that special aging that takes place when they sit in that machine for a month or so.”

I nodded.

Even so, she did some work on it. Corinne was halfway through the roll when Ms. Masterson came in. She was wearing a dark green skirt and jacket with a white blouse. She looked like any of the other office workers in the place getting a late breakfast, sitting at booths and tables, studying the laptops in front of them. I introduced Corinne. Ms. Masterson sat at our table, across from me and next to Corinne.

“Show her your badge,” I said.

Ms. Masterson looked at Corinne. “You want to see my badge?”

“Pass,” Corinne said.

“You should,” I said. “It’s pretty neat.”

Both of them ignored me.

“You’re Corinne Chang,” Ms. Masterson said, pulling a small notebook from her purse, flipping it open and scanning it. Her hands looked strong. Her fingers were thick. Not fat. But powerful. I was willing to double down on my bet that she’d played field hockey in college.

“Born March fourteenth, nineteen eighty-eight?” she said, reading off the pad.

“Yes.”

“And you have been living for the past five years in Montreal?”

“I have.”

“You worked as a gem sorter for a diamond company there? Wing Sung Jewelry Importers?”

Corinne nodded. “It’s not a retail company. We sold diamonds wholesale, along with a few other gems. We sold to larger jewelry stores all over Canada. Some parts of the U.S.”

“Wing Sung?” I said. “Cantonese?” Corinne nodded. I did too, more slowly.

“What’s that mean?” Ms. Masterson asked.

“Cantonese—they’re mostly in southern China—and Mandarin speakers—they’re dominant in the rest of the country—don’t always get along so well.” I didn’t add that for many Mandarin-speaking Chinese in the northern part of China, Cantonese people, from the southern part of the country, are thought of the way a lot of New Yorkers would tend to think of Appalachian hillbillies, as slightly uncouth and unsophisticated country cousins. It was a snobbery that went back a long way in Chinese history.

“That’s true,” Corinne said. “But if you want to work in the diamond trade for Chinese, you’d better learn to get along with Cantonese.”

“Which you did?” Ms. Masterson asked.

“Sure,” Corinne answered. “I even managed to get along with him”—she tilted her head in my direction—“for four or five days.”

“You cannot think of me as being worse than Cantonese,” I said, feigning surprise. I didn’t think Corinne had any prejudices against Cantonese. Most Chinese Americans of her generation wouldn’t. I was working for a Cantonese guy, Mr. Leong, at the Eastern Palace, and I never heard much anti-Cantonese sentiment from the northern Chinese I worked with. I was just amusing myself. Corinne went along with it.

“At least they’re Chinese,” she said to me in Mandarin.

“Okay,” Ms. Masterson went on, as if she hadn’t heard our exchange, “so why did you leave Wing Sung?”

“The company went out of business,” Corinne said.

“That’s an understatement,” Ms. Masterson said.

“It is.”

I wondered what that was all about. I had begun, I realized, to think about Corinne Chang as something of a jigsaw puzzle that needed assembling. I had assembled a few pieces. Maybe some of the edges of the puzzle were done. Those were always the easy part. I was missing a lot more of the pieces in the middle of the puzzle, though. I didn’t think this was a good time to try to put any new ones in place. I kept my mouth shut. Tucker’s Rule #95: When you’re already lost and clueless, it’s best not to clutter things with any more information that’s as likely to be superfluous as not.

“Do you have some idea why we want to talk to you?” Ms. Masterson asked Corinne.

Corinne nodded. I wondered if she needed a lawyer. I wondered if you’re supposed to ask about getting a lawyer. I wondered if Corinne had the right to remain silent. I wished I’d watched more of those cop shows my roommate Toby was always watching back at Beddingfield. Former roommate. Mostly, though, I wondered where the hell all this was going. So I just sat and listened. Rule #95 was still in play.

“The FBI has been asked by the Canadian police to help out in an investigation of the Wing Sung company,” Ms. Masterson said. “There’s a strong possibility the case may cross, ah, jurisdictional boundaries.”

Corinne took a deep breath, then let it out. Then she started telling the story. I’d heard it earlier, back in the motel in Ohio.

“I came to work one morning,” she said. “It was a Friday. I’d been working at Wing Sung for almost five years. It was the same routine. Mr. Sung, the owner, was always there first. He opened up. The shop was on the third floor of the Mercantile Mart, in the Central Business District. Do you know that area, by any chance?”

“I’ve been there,” Ms. Masterson said. I wondered why she’d have been to Montreal. I tried to work it into my theory about her having been a field hockey player in college. Maybe they had a big tournament in Montreal. Maybe there were some pieces in her puzzle that needed work. I decided I was too busy on the Corinne puzzle, though, to spend a lot of time on another one.

“So I get there, go up, and the door’s locked,” Corinne said. “And there’s a sign in the window, saying that Wing Sung Jewelry Importers is no longer in business.”

“That’s it?” Ms. Masterson said. “No forwarding address on the sign, no telephone number? No nothing?”

“No nothing,” Corinne said.

“What did you think?”

“I thought it was a joke,” Corinne said. “I actually thought for a second or two that I was having a dream. It was like getting up in the morning and walking to your bathroom and finding it wasn’t there anymore.”

Corinne told Ms. Masterson what she’d told me that night back in Ohio. She used her key to get into the building. Everything was still in place, she said. Desks for Mr. Sung and two assistants? Check. Stacks of invoices in baskets on top? Check. Her forceps, viewing loupe, and notebooks, all in place on the counter in the back room where she worked, under a big skylight to let in the natural light? Check. The inventory, kept, she said, in a bedroom closet–size vault? Checked out. As in gone. Faded away. Departed the premises.

“Did you have the combination to the vault door?” Ms. Masterson asked. She was sitting with both hands on the table between us, listening carefully.

Corinne shook her head. “I didn’t need it. The vault door was open when I got there.”

“Do you know how much inventory had been in there?”

Corinne shrugged. “I didn’t have much to do with that end of the business,” she said. “So I’d be guessing. But if I had to do that—guess—I’d say we had about fifteen million dollars’ worth of diamonds there, retail value.”

“Would the other people working there know?”

“They could probably guess, like me,” Corinne said. “But Mr. Sung kept track of inventory. And if you want an exact figure, you could probably call the police in Montreal. They could go in and check all our paperwork. It looked to me like it was all still there. Nothing seemed missing.”

“Except the diamonds,” Ms. Masterson said.

“Except them.”

“Which is a pretty big exception,” I said.

They both turned and looked at me like they’d forgotten I was there. Tucker, you suave guy, you. Ms. Masterson looked back at Corinne.

I was fairly sure the police had already done as Corinne suggested. It was a reasonable bet they’d been over every piece of paper in that office. They would have also interviewed everyone who worked there. Except for Corinne. Who was unavailable for an interview. Because she was, about that time, sitting at a highway rest stop outside a town that had originally been named for a cheese farm.

“Did you get in touch with either of the people who worked there?” Ms. Masterson asked.

“I called them,” Corinne said. “They sounded as surprised as I was.”

“Did you notice anything unusual in the time leading up to all of this?” Ms. Masterson sat back in her chair and lifted her hands, turning them over so her palms faced out. “Something out of the ordinary?” She leaned back in and put her elbows on the table. “You know what we’re looking for. I mean, was it like things were just perfectly normal, nothing at all odd or unusual going on, and suddenly, completely out of the blue—bang!—your boss is gone, the other people in the office are gone, nothing? No clues beforehand?”

“Two things you ought to know,” Corinne said. “One, about six months ago, Mr. Sung suddenly had a girlfriend. He was private about his life. He’d never talked about any relationships. Then one day a woman walks in and asks for him, and he comes hustling out the office, and it’s obvious something’s going on between them.” Corinne paused, then added, “And it was a little weird.”

“Weird how?”

“Mr. Sung is in his mid-fifties, I’d guess,” Corinne said. “He was kind of a lao touzi—” She looked at me and raised her eyebrows.

“Nebbish,” I translated. “What nerds become when they drift past middle age.”

“And the girlfriend?” Ms. Masterson asked. “She didn’t fit the—what’d you call it?—lao touzo—girlfriend image?”

“Lao touzi,” Corinne corrected, and shook her head. “No. She was definitely a gong-gong qi-che,” she said, and noticing Ms. Masterson’s expression, she instantly translated. “Loose. Gong-gong qi-che is literally a ‘public bus.’”

This time it was Ms. Masterson’s eyebrows that lifted.

“Everybody can ride,” I said. “Get it?”

“I do,” Ms. Masterson said.

“Besides the girlfriend, there were also some guys who came around a few times,” Corinne added. “They weren’t the typical customers we got. They’re what we’d call in Mandarin huai dan. A ‘bad egg.’ It’s like a low-life type. Somebody who’s shady, sleazy; somebody you wouldn’t turn your back to.”

Ms. Masterson sat back in her chair. She propped her elbows on the table again, folded her hands, and stuck her chin on top her knuckles. “They weren’t the usual sorts of people who came into Wing Sung?”

Corinne shook her head. “The usual sorts of people who come into a wholesale diamond office are buyers or sellers. In the diamond business, it’s a good idea to keep a low profile. Not many diamond buyers look like thugs.”

“And so when you considered that these ‘bad eggs’ had started visiting the place, you thought that maybe something was going on, right?” Ms. Masterson said.

“Something was going on,” Corinne said. “It wasn’t business as usual. At first I just assumed it wasn’t any of my concern. But then, walking in that morning and finding that whole bizarre situation, I was worried.”

“Did you think it might be dangerous?”

“Yes,” Corinne said simply. “And I thought whatever it was, it could be dangerous for anyone associated with Wing Sung.”

“And that’s why you left Montreal after you found the office deserted and apparently abandoned,” Ms. Masterson said.

“I didn’t know what was going on. I still don’t. But I thought it was too much a coincidence that these guys had shown up a few times over the past few months, and all of the sudden, the place is closed and Mr. Sung is gone. That, and I didn’t have any family or other connections in Montreal. It was a good first job in the field. But it wasn’t going anywhere. I thought it was the right time to leave and try living somewhere else.”

“Like Buffalo?” Ms. Masterson said, and Corinne nodded.

“So if you were going from Montreal to Buffalo,” Ms. Masterson pressed, “how’d you end up in the wilds of New Hampshire meeting”—she tilted her head in my direction—“the world’s only Chinese chef whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower?”

“Some friends were going skiing in New Hampshire,” Corinne said, and I remembered the conversation she’d been having on the phone back at that rest stop. “I thought it was a good idea to get out of town as quickly as I could. They were going in that direction.”

“So why are you here?” Ms. Masterson said, and then quickly added, “Not that you have to tell me. I’m just curious.”

I interrupted. “It’s been my familial experience that people in law enforcement aren’t ever ‘just curious.’ They don’t even ask you your favorite ice cream flavor without some reason.”

“You’re cynical for one so young,” Ms. Masterson said. “The truth is I’m kind of a romantic.”

“I don’t doubt it,” I said. “First thing I think of when I hear ‘FBI agent’ is ‘romantic.’ Maybe it’s the gun thing.”

“Give me a break,” Ms. Masterson said. “You told me you met Corinne on the road. You take her to Buffalo, then she calls you to pick her up, and now here are the two of you, sitting together next to one another. Come on. Are you telling me this doesn’t have all the makings for a love story?”

“I’m thinking of asking her to the prom.”

“Would it be any less romantic if I told you somebody came to my friend’s work and was asking about me?” Corinne said.

Ms. Masterson straightened. Her expression changed. Not dramatically. But we went from having a “just some new friends having a conversation” to “just the facts, ma’am.” We went there in about a quarter second. Ms. Masterson, I decided, wasn’t an amateur.

“Any idea how someone would have known you had gone to Buffalo?” she asked Corinne, who shook her head.

“Are you concerned about your safety now?” Ms. Masterson asked her.

“St. Louis is a long way from Buffalo—and even farther from Montreal. No one but Ariadna knows I’m here.”

“So what’re your plans now?”

“Stay in St. Louis for a while,” Corinne said. “Maybe get a job waiting tables at the place where the Master Chef here is cooking.” She looked at me.

“See,” Ms. Masterson said, relaxing a little. “I told you. I’m a trained detective, and I’m telling you, all the clues are pointing to romance.”

“I hope your crime-fighting skills are better than your detective work,” I said.

Before she could answer, her phone buzzed. She took it from her purse and checked it, then excused herself. “I have an appointment,” she said. “But let me know if you think of anything else that might be of use.”

“She’s a nice person,” Corinne said, after Ms. Masterson had gone. She offered me the last bite of her cinnamon roll. I accepted. It wasn’t bad. Not as good as the one in the rest stop. But not bad.

“She is,” I said. “You should have asked to see her badge, though. It really does look pretty cool.”