The Blue Dragon by Ronald Tierney Read Free Book Online Page B

The boy smiled back. He reached out his arms, pulled her down so low she almost fell, and hugged her.
    I stopped in at a small noodle joint. How out of touch I felt. When I’d finished eating I walked back out into the Chinatown street and its constant river of people, feeling that sense of not belonging more intensely than ever.
    Norman Chinn was coming toward me. I brought the brim of my hat and my head down. I was sure he didn’t notice me. A quick glance indicated that he had freshened up. He’d changed shirts and walked more briskly than before.
    About four, as I began thinking about giving up, Steven Broder came out of the building. He was wearing a white shirt, black pants and shiny black shoes. Again, he carried a black jacket over his arm. I followed, but it was a long walk to a building that housed a catering firm. Others dressed like Steven entered or lounged around the doorway, smoking cigarettes.
    Before he went inside, Steven turned in such a way that I could see him more clearly. The harsh light of the sun revealed a face more ravaged by time than I had realized when I’d seen him earlier in the hallway at the apartment building. He was even younger in the framed photograph in his and his lover’s apartment.
    Should I go back to the Blue Dragon or go home? Who else should I watch out for? The Wens would come home from work sometime after six. I decided to go see Ray in the evening and ask to go through—as ghoulish as it sounded to me—Ted Zheng’s possessions or what was left of them.
    Ray was there. When wasn’t he? Initially, he pondered my request with consternation. But his obsession with participating in the investigation eventually won out in his quandary about the ethics of showing me Ted’s things.
    “I promised to box this stuff up for his parents,” he said, still wary.
    “Then I’ll help,” I said.
    He smiled. Nodded. “Nothing wrong with that.”
    We went inside. Apartment 1B was in shambles. What else could anyone expect? Sandy Ferris had just extracted her life. That’s what it looked like. There were empty spaces now, the physical manifestation of the emotion of leaving.
    “Did Sandy Ferris leave you with an address?” I asked him.
    “Oh yes. Forward mail. Phone number.”
    She wasn’t running—or if she was, she certainly wasn’t running smart.
    “Why did she leave?”
    “Couldn’t pay rent alone. Have friend to stay with.”
    Ray went to find boxes. I went to the small battered desk and rummaged through the drawers. The first thing I found of interest was a bunch of old ledger sheets. These words were scrawled at the top: Debt, parents .
    Underneath were dozens of entries, dating back several years. Simple addition and subtraction. It didn’t take a professional accountant to make sense of them. Ted Zheng was more than fifty thousand dollars in debt to his parents. There were entries showing payments to them. But there were more frequent entries of larger amounts that only added to an ever-increasing debt.
    I put these pages aside for later, more serious evaluation. I looked for letters. None. No diaries. I found a jewelry box. It had a velvet interior with specific places for cuff links and tie clasps and a space for other jewelry or mementos. The box was old and of European tradition, not Asian.
    Inside the box were a couple of cuff links that didn’t match, from a era that probably predated Ted Zheng. A plastic tortoiseshell ring, some rhinestones and two pins, one the shape of California. I found two keys as well. One still had its shine. The number 314 was etched in the shiny metal. It didn’t look like a key to a serious lock. The other could have been a key to just about anything. Perhaps it was a spare to his apartment or to the front door. Or to another apartment.
    At any rate, I wasn’t sure I had found anything of value. Yet, since these items were in a lower drawer and in the back of that drawer, it seemed they were intentionally hidden.
    I looked at