SEVENTEEN

It was one of the older houses from the Canton Center days, re-sided recently with cedar and set in the center of a square of laser-trimmed lawn. A concrete driveway left a strip of grass between it and the house next door. At the end of it stood an old-fashioned one-car garage, unattached but with a covered dogtrot added on to provide shelter during the trip from car to house and vice versa. She parked in the driveway and we got out and entered through the front door.

The living room was small but comfortably furnished, with a chair and love seat covered in red nubby fabric, a Windsor rocker, and low tables for people to put their cups and glasses on. An antique French-finished wardrobe hid the obligatory electronics. Civilization is bashful about such things.

“Nice,” I said, standing on wall-to-wall sisal.

“Not what you’d expect from a health-care professional with her own practice, you mean.” She dropped her keys in a ceramic bowl on a table beside the door. “Between work and looking after Aunt Lee, I don’t have a lot of time to collect trinkets and gadgets. Frankly I’m tired of places with glass shelves and ugly fertility statues and no dust. The woman who comes in twice a week has poor depth perception.” She drew a finger across the surface of a table, leaving a track.

“What kind of looking after does Aunt Lee need?”

“She has no depth perception. Her ophthalmologists diagnosed her with macular degeneration ten years ago and prescribed eye drops, but she doesn’t believe in them. Between you and me, they cost ninety dollars an ounce and she refused to pay it. Pushing narcotics doesn’t come with a medical plan.”

“She picked the wrong kind of drugs to deal.”

“Snoop around as much as you like while I prepare her for your visit. She thinks INS, or whatever it’s calling itself now, is sending spies to gather evidence to take another whack at her immigration status.” She took off her sunglasses. “You’re not, are you?”

“I’d have come here straight off if I was. They’ve got a better network.”

“God help you if you’re lying. She still has friends from the old days.”

“I thought she was nonviolent.”

“She is. They’re not.”

She went out through an arch while I put my hands in my pockets and took the tour. She had nice prints on the walls, abstract nudes with their skins still on, not like back at the office, a fistful of remotes in a miniature tin washtub on a table beside the recliner. The Zenith behind the wardrobe doors was a twenty-seven-inch tube, steadily going obsolete above a CD changer, a TV/VCR combo, bookshelf speakers, a collection of discs and VHS tapes that told me nothing about her beyond an interest in easy listening, action movies, and comedies. Art books on the coffee table, bestsellers and children’s books in a knee-high case, all heavily browsed. It all looked like the package they gave you when you went into witness protection.

I liked it fine. Bland is comforting. Bland is safe. I’d had my fill of scarlet and black. Harry Potter and Meg Ryan make for a good place to bolt after a day of cops and cadavers.

“I gave away all my Nine Inch Nails after I got my MA,” Lee Tan the Younger said behind me. “Patients don’t react well to piercing and tattoos.”

“I lost all my R-and-B in the divorce.” I turned around.

She’d kicked off the flats and put on flip-flops, which for her appeared to be strictly house wear. It didn’t take much off her height. She was tall for an Asian, if not especially so for a woman. Her chin came to my collarbone. She had pretty feet, with high arches and clear polish.

“Unfaithful?” she asked.

“Impossible to live with.”

“All ex-husbands say that.”

“I was talking about me.”

She smiled without showing teeth. They were good teeth, too, what I’d seen of them, but she wasn’t generous with them. I had the impression they were a gift she reserved for later. I’d had too much to do with what I’d had to do with to inspire complete trust at the gate.

“You go now,” I said. “I didn’t buy that ‘I made more money’ chestnut.”

“It’s a postlib face-saver. The real story’s even less original: work two jobs to put someone through school, then when the diploma’s on the wall and the offers come in, it’s good-bye, baby.”

“You called him baby?”

I only got to see the teeth when she laughed. “Bob, actually. You guessed right. He was a nice man, supportive, but dull as a putter, which was all he talked about when he wasn’t talking about construction. He did well, but I didn’t take a cent when we split, mostly because I’d treated him so badly. You don’t accept anything at face value, do you?”

“You’re the one married Bob the Builder.”

“I got a lot of that. It didn’t help matters.” She seemed to remember where she was suddenly. “I suck as a hostess; not enough practice. I should offer you something. You’re not a sundowner, are you?”

“It’s dark in Alaska half the year. That can’t be good on eskimo livers.”

“I have a bottle of very good brandy, courtesy of a patient with a mortgage and just an HMO to keep him warm.”

“He should dump the HMO and stock up on brandy.”

“We have time. Lee’s primping. She doesn’t get many visitors.” She crossed through the room to another arch beyond where stainless steel gleamed. “How do you take it?”

“Just as it comes.”

She passed out of sight. Glass tinkled against glass. She came back carrying a pair of small snifters and handed me one. A swallow of honey-colored liquid lay on the bottom.

“You should’ve brought the bottle. You shook up my nerves back at the office.”

“I said I was bluffing. Try sipping the stuff for once. It has a more beneficial effect when you let it do all the work. Good brandy is like hickory firewood, burns slower than poplar. You don’t have to keep getting up and feeding the hearth.”

“I don’t have a fireplace.” I took the recliner while she sat on the end of the love seat.

“The rocker’s for show,” she said. “Another tradeoff from a patient without a plan. I draw the line at livestock. Lee sits there sometimes when she’s feeling matriarchal. She never rocks. That’s character, don’t you think?”

“That or motion sickness.” I leaned sideways to clink glasses. “Just how many people did it take to put you through school? I count two so far.”

“I was an awful leech. Lee was up to her neck in legal fees when I was studying for my master’s. That’s when Bob stepped in. He put in ten hours a day at construction sites. I couldn’t bring myself to look into a part-time job with my courseload. I ought to have offered him a settlement later, but he’d have been insulted. Men are a lot more sensitive than women when it comes to money.”

“You couldn’t tell it by me. Nobody’s ever insulted me that way.”

She nipped at her brandy. I took a stab at mine. It went down on rollers and tingled at the back of my throat like hot peppers marinated in vanilla. “This is smooth stock. You must be a very good therapist.”

“Van Gogh was a very good artist. He sold one painting in his life.”

“Whoever bought it ought to have had a book written about him.”

A voice called from the back of the house. The language sounded like someone plucking a guitar string.

Lee answered in the same tongue and put her glass down. “She’s ready for us. She calls me child.”

“Yeah, I noticed.”

I finished my drink and got up and followed her. We passed photographs on walls, including a snapshot in a matted frame of a glum-faced Chinese couple standing in front of a low cinderblock building with a cow painted on the front. When the picture was taken it hadn’t been the scene of a double murder yet.

At the end of the hallway she knocked on a door. Someone spoke on the other side and we entered a large bedroom that had been transported from the Forbidden Palace and dropped into metropolitan Detroit. A pagoda print papered the walls, colored silks hung from the rail of a red-lacquer bed piled high with pillows in satin cases, incense burned in the lap of a terra-cotta Buddha on a low stand with two cushions on the floor in front of it; one for the knees, the other for the forehead. The thin column of smoke gave off a gingery scent.

Two cane chairs and a sturdy club with embroidered arms completed the set, with a carved ivory footstool before the club to keep the woman who sat there from dangling her feet.

Aunt Lee was tiny and burnished-looking, all porcelain and enamel with hair as black as her niece’s pinned flat to her head. She wore no makeup, but her brows were plucked as fine as silk thread and her lips curved gracefully. Her hands on the armrests were doll’s hands with tiny perfect nails and nothing to indicate they’d ever been used. She wore a one-piece thing with wide sleeves and a long hem that glistened red, then gold when the light shifted. Paper slippers covered her feet. They might have been bound in infancy; but that was another generation entirely, and we were contemporaries.

Sitting there in no other light than what came filtering through pink blinds on the windows, she looked like a statue—the Dowager Empress in younger years, only not quite life size. She wore her niece’s veiled smile. She was looking in our direction, but with the emptiness of eyes intended for display only. Knowing her troubles with the law I’d had my doubts about that part, but it wasn’t a stall. Blindness is almost impossible to fake.

When Lee Tan closed the door her aunt turned her head a millimeter, but her eyes didn’t move. Macular degeneration destroys frontal vision first, but I couldn’t tell how much she saw from the periphery. I was suddenly glad I’d left the ordnance behind. She didn’t look like the type that would grant a second interview if the first went bust.

Her niece said something in which I heard my name. Aunt Lee sat motionless until she stopped. Then she lowered her head, about half the distance she’d turned it to take me in.

It was an invitation. We took seats in the cane chairs, which weren’t nearly as uncomfortable as concrete bleachers. We didn’t cross our legs.

The older woman’s voice was clear and youthful, well modulated so far as I could tell in the presence of a language that had stopped developing when Confucius was in short pants; had stopped because it had no more improvements to make. The niece translated.

“She wants to know if you have any connection with the police. I assured her you did not, but she wants to hear it from you.”

“As little as possible. I’m not here to ask her about the details of the business she was in.”

I waited through the exchange.

“She says she’s glad, because she doesn’t like to put people to the inconvenience of a long trip for nothing.”

“She said it that way?”

“It’s prettier in the original. She’s invariably polite with strangers. The tradition is seldom observed today.”

“Tell her our cultures aren’t so different.” I was pretty sure she’d understood the side conversation, but house rules are house rules.

From there it went this way, with the younger Lee interpreting:

“You speak for Joseph Michael Ballista?”

“I’m part of his defense team.”

“I’ll help as far as I am able. The incident you have come to discuss took place many years ago.”

“I trust your memory better than Joey’s. He isn’t well.”

“I am sorry to hear this, but I am not surprised. He was always”—the niece hesitated, searching for something suitable in English—“incautious in his habits. His father died of the same failing.”

“Old Joe couldn’t keep it in his pants. His son was better, but he wasn’t any luckier with women. The case against him was constructed on evidence provided by an inside informant.”

She greeted this with a twist of a beautifully molded lip, without waiting for the translation. She understood, all right.

“A woman,” she said. “This too does not surprise me. Females are treacherous creatures.” The niece turned my way. “The term is much stronger in the original. A vile oath, actually.”

I nodded. “ ‘Bitch’ doesn’t go as far as it used to. Tell her it’s the name of the informant I came for.”

“I am not she.”

“I made up my mind about that the moment I laid eyes on you. I was already pretty sure of it when your niece threatened to turn me into a vegetable just for asking about you.”

The younger woman looked at me again. “I didn’t tell her that part.”

Smiling, the aunt spoke. The niece’s cheeks stained red. It looked nice against the ivory. She responded in rapid Chinese. The language can be pretty, like raindrops on silver, or harsh, like strokes from a lash. In this case it was just flat. I couldn’t tell if she was apologizing or defending herself. After a little pause the aunt spoke briefly in the same tone.

“Something?” I asked.

The niece shook her head. “It was private. Nothing of interest to you.”

“Wrong. I’m curious as hell.”

“It’s one of those times I disappointed her.”

“She didn’t look disappointed. If I had to guess, I’d say she was telling you she didn’t know you had it in you. She’s just about the wickedest woman I ever met.”

“I doubt that, Mr. Walker,” Aunt Lee said. Her English carried a Midwestern accent. “You don’t strike me as the wallflower type.”

Young Lee Tan swallowed a gasp. I returned the aunt’s gaze, directed at me from the glittering corner of one eye. “Was I right about the other?”

“You were close enough.” So it was English now. “I knew Lee was loyal, but I could never tell how far her loyalty extended before today. It’s reassuring to know someone else is looking out for one’s best interests regardless of consequences.”

“I’ll take your word for it. I’ve narrowed the search for the snitch to three women including Joey’s wife.”

She shook her head slowly. “I never had the pleasure of meeting Mrs. Ballista. She wasn’t present when we discussed business. I have to assume the same was true on the other occasions where his livelihood was involved. Sicilians have quaint notions about the women who share the marital bed. In that they are very like the men of the country of my birth, only without the open contempt.”

“That was a different China,” her niece said automatically. “The China of the emperors.”

“Child, do not speak of things of which you know nothing.”

I bore on. They could dissect history on their own time. “There was a girlfriend. She was sixteen when she took up with Joey. She did plenty of living in the meantime, but that came to an end night before last. The cops in River Rouge pulled her out of the drink yesterday morning.”

I’d turned a little in my chair to watch both of them. Lee the Younger stiffened. I’d broken my promise to be gentle. Lee the Elder went on smiling. I was glad I was meeting her in retirement. In her prime she must have been like a warrior princess in a video game. “Her name?”

“Frances Elizabeth Donella.”

She lapsed back into Chinese. Her niece stirred herself as if she’d been slow to listen. She asked a question, and when her aunt replied there was impatience in her voice for the first time.

I looked to the niece. She spoke without turning my way. “She said no, it was the one before who sat in on meetings. The English whore.”