Changes -- A Randall Lee Mystery Page 4

  Her legs were crossed at the ankle, her dress slid up to mid-thigh. The vast expanse of skin made the edges of my mind crackle and buzz with a kind of pleasant static. They were very high quality thighs. And I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable.

  I sat near the foot of the exam table and put one hand just above her knee. I pressed my fingers gently into the soft tissue, feeling for any swelling. Most of what I felt was a ridiculously strong case of butterflies in my stomach.

  "Can you move it?" I asked.

  She nodded and bent her knee. I pretended not to notice the momentary flash of black lace accentuating the perfect, pale crescent of her ass.

  Instead, I worked at two very difficult tasks – swallowing and breathing.

  "Is there any pain?" I croaked. "Any stiffness or soreness?"

  Yes.

  "No." she said. "It feels great."

  Yes, yes it does.

  I cleared my throat, fumbled her file from the desk, and made some notes in the margin. I thought of Mrs. Lhung’s thighs, riddled as they were with varicose veins, and attempted to regain my composure and professionalism. I kept looking at the box in Tracy’s file marked Date of Birth. Twenty-six was hardly a child, but still…

  I stopped that line of thought right away. The room felt very hot.

  Tracy sat up, slid those long legs over the side of the table and said, "Everything okay?"

  "Um?" I said. Smooth. Real smooth.

  "I said, is everything alright?"

  "Yes." I said. "Sorry, I’m just a little out of it today. My chi must be on vacation."

  She laughed and said something but my heart thrumming in my ears blocked most of it out.

  I finished the notes in her file and walked out to the front room while she put her stockings back on. I thought of herbs to occupy my mind in some kind of positive way. She came into the front room, paid for her visit, and was almost to the door when she turned and said, "Mr. Lee?"

  "Yes?"

  "This is probably, like, against the rules and stuff… but… would you ever maybe want to… have dinner with me?"

  Gulp.

  "Uh," I said, being a terrific conversationalist, "dinner?"

  Yes, Randall. That meal that happens in the nighttime.

  Jesus.

  Tracy winced. I saw her teeth closing in on her bottom lip and looked away before I had an aneurysm or something.

  "Yeah. I’m being inappropriate aren’t I?" She said. "I’m really sorry. It’s just…"

  She continued on with apologies she didn’t need to make, but I didn’t hear them. There was too much of a roaring thrum in my head. I knew I had to be the adult here. To take the moral high ground. I couldn’t start dating patients… if I did, Mrs. Lhung would want a shot, and I prefer not to know my date’s gastrointestinal history.

  But before I could muster the maturity to say no, my mouth opened and said yes.

  10

  Her middle name is Ann.

  She said that she’s a Scorpio. I didn‘t know what that meant until she told me. She listed off a number of characteristics common to Scorpios, and blushed fiercely when she mentioned that Scorpios, apparently, make great lovers.

  Yikes.

  Things were going too fast. It was all just too much.

  I asked her for her birthday. In Chinese astrology, she was born in the year of the snake and I told her so.

  "If I’m a snake," she asked, "what are you?"

  "I was born in the year of the rabbit." I said.

  She flashed a sexy, evil grin and said, "Snakes eat rabbits."

  I slammed another cup of plum wine. It provided a handy excuse for the color in my cheeks.

  She’d picked Wong’s BBQ for dinner. It was just two blocks from my shop, but

  I’d never been there before. I really can’t remember if the food was any good or not. The company was terrific. The wine was pretty decent too.

  She told me that she was a bartender at a club downtown, some place I‘d never heard of called the Outer Limit. She’d majored in dance and art in college; clearly a practical girl. Her father taught history; her mother, literature. Her favorite bedtime story as a child was The Odyssey. She told me how she used to look up at the night sky, as a child, looking for all the constellations from the myths, like Orion. She said that the city lights blocked out most of the stars. She said she missed the stars and shrugged, embarrassed, as if what she’d said was stupid. As if I wasn’t entranced by every word she said.

  "Your turn," she said, grinning.

  "Hm?" I said, sipping wine.

  "Don’t play innocent. Spill it. C’mon…"

  "What do you want to know?" I asked.

  She cocked her head and stared at me. "For starters, how does a white boy from St. Louis grow up to be an acupuncturist and all that?"

  "First off, I’m not from St. Louis. I just moved here around six months ago. I was born in Hong Kong."

  Her eyes widened. "Whoa, really?"

  I nodded.

  "So you learned all your stuff there?"

  "Yeah. My dad was a tax attorney for a big multinational import/export company. My mom died when I was five. I spent a lot of time cooped up in the apartment, with not much of anything to do. When I was old enough, I’d sneak out. The kids in the bay were tough; I didn’t know it at the time, but a lot of them had already been recruited into the Triad youth gangs…"

  "Hold it. Silly American question - what’s a Triad youth gang?" she said.

  "Triads are organized crime syndicates. Chinese mafia. They like to line up their recruits early. Anyway, those kids didn’t like any ‘white devil’ like me hanging around. So I used to get beat up. A lot."

  "Why didn’t you just stay home?" she asked.

  I shrugged. "I guess it was just one of those dumb boy things… even bad attention was better than nothing. Plus I had this weird idea that sooner or later they’d have to respect me for taking their crap, y’know? I’ve never claimed to be very bright.

  "Anyway, this one day a group of the guys chased me until I couldn’t run anymore, and they kicked the crap out of me. One of the kids had an aluminum baseball bat, and he hit me in the stomach a few times…"

  "Jesus!" Tracy said.

  "…Yeah, well, they quit when I started spitting up blood. This old woman saw what happened, and when the boys all left, she made her husband carry me inside while she went for help.

  "Turns out a famous doctor, Wu Cai, lived in the neighborhood. He came and checked me out. Did some acupuncture, some massage, gave me some herbs… that sort of thing. He did so well that I was able to hide the whole incident from my dad. So I started hanging out at his house a lot. Bugging him to show me stuff. Finally he did."

  She leaned forward and said, "He started teaching you acupuncture?"

  "No." I said, "He started teaching me how to stand."

  "What?"

  "Yeah. He said that if I wanted to learn from him, that’s what I had to learn. How to stand. So I’d show up at his house at seven in the morning and just stand by his front door. Whenever he felt like it, he’d come outside, adjust my posture, and go back inside."

  "How long did you have to stand like that?" she said.

  "Oh, I didn’t have to stand there at all. He made that very clear. He wasn’t looking for students; he didn’t care if I was there or not. But the longer I was there, the more I saw, and the guy was like a magician. He could do stuff I’d never seen anybody do. I wanted to learn to do what he did.

  "So I stood there. Ten hours a day, six days a week, for six months. Finally he let me come inside…"

  "What did he teach you then?" she asked.

  "Nothing. He just let me stand inside. The kids had caught on to the whole thing, see, and they’d started showing up to make fun of me and throw rocks and stuff."

  "Damn! What a bunch of little asshole delinquents."

  I shrugged. "Most of my ninth year was that way. Get up, sneak out, stand until dusk, and sneak back home. Whe
n summer rolled around again, Wu wasn’t correcting me anymore. In fact, he didn’t really pay much attention to me at all. I was starting to get discouraged. Since the weather was nice, he made me stand outside again, and the bullies were coming around again. I was determined not to let them get to me, so I just pretended that I didn’t notice them."

  "Didn’t they bother you?"

  "Yeah. But I bothered them more, by not reacting. Then one day something funny happened."

  I stopped to take a drink.

  "What? What happened?" she said.

  "A couple of the kids tried to shove me, and nothing happened."

  "What do you mean, nothing happened?"

  "I mean they pushed, and I didn’t move. And the harder they pushed, the more I didn’t move. It was like they were trying to move a building."

  She smiled and hunched her shoulders. "So they left you alone?"

  "No, they punched me in the face."

  "…Oh."

  "Master Wu brought me in, fixed me up, gave me some soup, and sent me home. The next morning instead of my normal standing, he showed me a different posture. He also made me do this weird exercise where I would just turn my waist and let my arms kind of flop around… I didn’t understand why at the time.

  "The next time I stood outside, the bullies came again. Following Master Wu’s instructions, I released all the tension from my body and just became loose. When one of the kids pushed my right shoulder, my body rotated around my spine –like a revolving door - and he got socked in the gut with my left fist. When another kid punched at my face, I raised my arm the way I’d been taught for the new posture, and he just sort of bounced off it. That went on until they were all too hurt or tired to keep it up, and then, yeah, they decided to pick on somebody else."

  "What was he trying to teach you, though? I don’t get it." she said.

  "To be still. In stillness, he said, all things are possible."

  "Is there, like, a rulebook of cryptic shit that these teacher guys are supposed to say? Because damn. I’m Mister Miyagi-ed out."

  I smiled and said, "Look at it this way – Master Wu spent his life learning and perfecting his knowledge. He didn’t want to give even a shred of that to someone who wouldn’t fully appreciate it."

  The waitress came and set the check on the table. Tracy moved to grab it, but I intercepted.

  "Hey, I asked you to dinner, remember?" she said.

  I gave her a wide-eyed, innocent look, slapped down enough cash to cover the bill and tip, and said, "What?"

  She glared playfully and rolled her eyes.

  We sat, finishing our drinks, until, blushing fiercely, she said, "So…what now?"

  The blushing was contagious, apparently.

  Christ, what was I supposed to do, ask ‘her place or mine’?"

  My cell phone rang. Saved by the proverbial bell.

  Knox shouted in my ear, "Lee? We need to talk." I heard bad techno music in the background. Never a good sign.

  I turned in my seat and said, "Detective, I’m at dinner right now, could I call you back?"

  "No. We need to talk now, Lee, or I’m sending a squad car."

  I frowned.

  "What’s going on?" I asked.

  "That’s what I want to know."

  He rattled off an address and asked if I knew it.

  I didn’t, but I told him I could find it.

  He said, "Look for the sign, you can’t miss it."

  11

  After quickly excusing myself from dinner, clearly disappointing and confusing poor Tracy, I went to my car, shook off the plum wine buzz, and drove.

  Knox wasn’t kidding about the sign… a lump formed in my throat at the sight of the giant, leering neon beaver.

  Who was dead now?

  I parked and walked in the ornate brass doors. A doorman stopped me and, over a thumping bass line, asked for my I.D. and a ten dollar cover charge. I told him that I was here to meet Detective Knox on police business; he didn’t care.

  I flashed my license, watched him do the standard double-take, slapped a ten in his hand, and entered the club.

  The music rattled my teeth and the lighting was a do-it-yourself epilepsy kit. Young women in various states of undress writhed on stages, molesting customers, or wandered about in search of an easy mark

  Knox hunched over the bar. I managed to get to him without getting overly pawed. Sliding onto the stool next to him, I said, "What’s going on? You screwed up my date."

  He took a long drag from his cigarette and stared at me.

  I waited.

  He stared some more.

  I felt the urge to burst into tears and confess something, but I kept it together somehow.

  "If you wanted to hang out and stare at strippers, all you had to do was ask…"

  "Where were you Saturday night, between eight and midnight?" he said.

  "Home. Why?"

  "Anyone around to back you up on that?" he said.

  "No."

  He nodded, blew smoke from his nose, and flagged down the bartender. He ordered a six dollar beer and an eight dollar shot of whisky.

  "Asked around about you," he said, lifting the shot, "and it seems you’re some sort of kung fu expert."

  He took the shot; his eyes never left mine. He didn’t flinch at the bite of the liquor.

  "I wouldn’t say I’m an expert."

  "Modesty? From you?"

  "I know. Weird, huh?" I said.

  He smirked and drank some beer. Knox lit a new cigarette from his old one and said, "We have a problem."

  "We do?"

  "Oh yeah."

  "As in, you and I?"

  "That’s right."

  "Tell me about it. Maybe I can help." I said.

  Knox stamped the cigarette out on the bar and turned to face me.

  "I have this dead hooker, see? She was killed by some obscure-ass Chinese kung fu technique… one that you knew about, no less. I have a dead madam. Somebody taped her to a chair and injected air into her veins… again, you knew...

  "Now, I like you, Lee. I do. But put yourself in my shoes for a second… It’s all pretty fucking fishy, right?"

  "So, wait… You’re trying to say that I did it?"

  "No, I’m asking you – if you were in my position, what would you think?"

  I waved to the bartender and ordered a beer. When she left, I said, "I’m not the only martial artist in town, y’know."

  Knox closed his eyes, rubbed the bridge of his nose wearily, and said, "Last night a kid was taken to the E.R. at Barnes. Broken hand, broken jaw, lost a bunch of teeth. His friends gave a description."

  "He had a knife. What was I supposed to do?"

  "What did Mei Ling have?"

  I sneered at him. "Oh, screw you. If I did it, why the hell would I offer to help you out?"

  "To throw off the scent maybe?" he said.

  The bartender returned with my beer.

  "What scent? You’d be out looking for some throat-crushing hooker-killer and you wouldn’t know dick about dick if not for my help. I did it? Way to break that case wide open, Detective. Good work."

  We both drank. A lot.

  And then, the awkward, techno music-filled silence.

  "Shit," Knox said finally, "I guess that was pretty fucking flimsy. Sorry, Lee."

  I shook my head and frowned. "You got one thing right."

  "What’s that?"

  "I’ll tell you later." I said, getting up.

  "Where you going?" he asked.

  "I’ll tell you later."

  Sure, I’d pissed him off, but what can I say?

  The bastard had screwed up my date.

  12

  I spent half of the next morning on the phone. First, I called Tracy to apologize and explain. She hinted that lunch in Forest Park would make us even.

  I told her that sounded nice.

  I have never told anyone that anything sounded nice.

  The other phone calls didn’t fill me with
glee, butterflies, or mild nausea. They also weren’t particularly helpful, but at least nothing else sounded ‘nice.’

  Knox was right, but his point was so obvious I wasn't going to admit to him that I hadn't already thought of it: if the killer knows a rare martial art, a super genius detective would, y'know, check out all the places where one might obtain that type of hard to find knowledge. Out of all the schools I called, only one would accept visitors. The others claimed to be closed-door systems, strictly invitation only. I'd deal with them later. I glanced at my appointment book; I had five appointments that afternoon. I scheduled my visit for immediately after lunch.

  Hopefully Tracy was as adventurous as I believed her to be.

  I met her by the St. Louis Art Museum, on the huge, sloping hill creatively known to locals as… Art Hill. She wore a black tank top, shorts, and tennis shoes. It was the most casual I’d ever seen her. Her hair was tied up in a loose ponytail, and wisps of blue-black flitted around her face with the breeze.

  She didn’t wear makeup. She didn’t need to.

  I spread a blanket and we sat overlooking the Grand Basin. Below us, joggers jogged, children played, and executives played hooky. Tracy brought sandwiches from a place across the street from her apartment. We talked and ate and laughed.

  My cheeks actually started to hurt from smiling.

  When the food was gone, she looked up at me and smiled shyly before sliding closer on the blanket and lying against me.

  I’ll admit it, I froze.

  I choked.

  I damn near soiled myself.

  Some people say that dating…or whatever this was… is like riding a bicycle.

  Some people are frigging idiots.

  She nestled her head into the crook of my arm and closed her eyes with a contented sigh. Looking down, her face dappled with the late summer sunlight, I couldn’t breathe. Because I had never seen anything as beautiful as that girl in that moment. And the feel of her in my arms? And the fact that she smelled the way that angels smell, in the best dreams you’ve ever had?

  What else could I do?

  Of course I kissed her.

  I kissed her until there was no air left in my lungs, and my lips burned and buzzed in protest. I touched her face and studied her while we caught our breath. And when I leaned down to kiss her again the corners of her lips lifted in the slightest of smiles, as if to say, "Yes. Again. Please."