Paper son, p.17
Paper Son, page 17
“Anna Rae Ferguson? And Johnny Ferguson?” Pete’s lips set into a tight line. “I don’t believe it.”
“Johnny and Jefferson went to school together, Pete.” I tried to say that gently.
“I went to school with a lot of no-accounts myself. You don’t find me hanging around with ’em now.”
“We don’t know what it means,” Bill said reasonably. “And maybe Darlaine at the Café Café was wrong and it’s not even Jefferson. But we have to consider that it might be. If Anna Rae Ferguson sicced Bert Lucknell on us, he’ll come around to the idea there’s a connection between Jefferson and the Fergusons eventually, too. Unclear what he’ll want to do about it, if he’s in their pocket, but I’d rather it was us who got there first.”
“If by ‘there’ you mean Burcell—”
“I think—”
“Pete—”
“Just hold your horses, both of you. I’ve actually been giving this some thought while you were out racing around annoying live people and finding dead ones.”
“Giving what some thought?”
“I didn’t get the feeling you were fixing to give up on the idea of talking to Johnny Ferguson, even before what happened today. Closing in on him in Burcell’s a nonstarter. But if you insist on exchanging words, some of them younger Fergusons like to take their breakfast out at Walid’s.”
“What’s Walid’s?”
“Lebanese diner out by the highway. Walid’s Oasis. Y’all are about to drop your jaws and say ‘Lebanese’?, aren’t you?”
“Okay, yes, I was.”
“Me, too,” Bill said. I didn’t know if that was true, but I appreciated the support.
Pete sighed. “Chinese and Jews aren’t the only folks who weren’t white or black and came to the Delta. Lot of Italians came a hundred fifty years ago, and a whole bunch of Syrians and Lebanese came in the sixties, after some war they had over there. They set up restaurants. Not many left, same as with the Chinese grocers, but out at Walid’s, you can still get a great plate of kibbe and grits.”
Kibbe was a Middle Eastern meat, wheat, and spices patty. I’d eaten them at New York street fairs, but two days ago, I’d have said you’d never find them in the Mississippi Delta. Of course, two days ago, I’d have said you’d never find me in the Mississippi Delta.
“We’ll go out there in the morning,” Pete went on. “If we’re lucky, we can eat before the Fergusons come in to spoil our appetites.”
“Moonshine and spaghetti for dinner,” Bill mused. “Kibbe and grits for breakfast. Remarkable place, the Delta.”
“Remarkable, yes,” I said. “But Pete. Jews, Italians, Lebanese—you wouldn’t call them white? Lebanese, I guess you could say they’re Middle Eastern, but still. I’m not sure Middle Eastern is a race classification.”
“It is in Mississippi. Like Jew. And Italian.”
The day had been exhausting, so after blue-frosted sugar cookies and fudge-swirl ice cream, Bill and I helped Pete clean up so we could all go to bed. “I’m sorry, Pete,” I said as we loaded the dishwasher. “I know things aren’t turning out the way you hoped.”
“Not your fault. You and Bill, you’re finding the facts. If they point to Jefferson not being the boy I thought he was, still, can’t argue with the truth.”
I knew someone who could, though. Once we were done, I headed to my room to call my mother.
“Ling Wan-ju. You are calling to report the progress you have made?”
“We haven’t made a lot, Ma.”
“It’s been an entire day since we spoke. You have done nothing?”
“We’ve done lots of things. It’s just that none of them have resulted in progress.”
“Have you at least been able to find your cousin Jefferson Tam?”
At least. “No, Ma.”
An exasperated sigh. “Ling Wan-ju, I didn’t send you to the Delta of Mississippi to enjoy yourself.”
“I get that, Ma. It’s just, like I said yesterday, things are complicated down here.”
“Things cannot be more complicated in the Delta of Mississippi than they are anywhere else. If they appear so, it is because you are looking at them the wrong way. Tell me, what is so complicated to you?”
I was not about to bring up the second homicide, much less that Bill and I had found the body; nor did I want to mention our fears that Jefferson was involved with the Fergusons’ meth business until I had to.
“For one thing,” I said, “there are a lot of people who seem to be connected but I don’t know how.”
“Do you mean connected to your case, or connected to each other?”
“To the case.” And in some ways, to each other: Lucknell to the Fergusons, or the Fergusons to Jefferson, or Trevor McAdoo to Reynold Tam. But I didn’t say that, either.
My mother made a wordless, but nevertheless easy to understand, sound. She said, “Have you discussed the situation with the White Baboon?”
Wait. Was my mother really asking me what Bill thought?
“Yes,” I said cautiously. “He’s—” I stopped myself before I said stumped. Why cap this new well at the moment it started to flow? “He doesn’t see the answer yet, either. But we’re working on it.”
“Please continue to work on it.” My mother paused, and I could have sworn her voice softened the tiniest bit as she said, “The Delta of Mississippi is no different from other places. Cuckoos do not hatch from robin’s eggs there. This is only a case, Ling Wan-ju. It’s more important than others because it involves family. Also because Jefferson Tam is innocent—” I bit my tongue. “—no matter how things look,” she finished, as usual reading my mind. “But for all of that, this is no different from other cases you have solved. You must use the same detecting methods you have used in the past. Please call me tomorrow when you have made progress.”
And she hung up.
I sighed, brushed my teeth, and climbed into bed. I was so tired I probably wouldn’t have noticed an entire army of cicadas if they’d suddenly massed under my window and started to sing.
30
I wasn’t destined to spend the long Southern night on the wings of sleep. Somewhere around 4:00 A.M., my phone rang. I’ve never known a wee-hours phone call to mean anything good, but I grabbed the thing, squinting at the screen to see who it was.
“Linus!” I half said, half coughed. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing! Did it!”
“Hi, Lydia!” Trella called.
“Hi, Trella. Did what? You guys, it’s four in the morning.”
“It is? Wow.” I imagined Linus fact-checking me against the digital outputs in his crammed garage office. He and Trella had covered the windows to keep Wong Security’s equipment from prying eyes. Plus, Cousin Linus had the family sleep-pattern genes. And he was a millennial with a taste for clubbing. I realized it was downright unreasonable to expect clock-time to mean anything to him at all.
“Did what?” I repeated, rubbing my face.
“Broke into your boy’s laptop.” His grin just about materialized in the air before me like the Cheshire cat’s.
“Oh!” I said, fully awake now. Maybe a 4:00 A.M. phone call could, in fact, mean something good. “Oh, Linus, that’s great! Thanks! What did you find?”
“A bunch of stuff. Not sure what you’re looking for. A lot of games, but no email, blog, photos, anything like that. Hasn’t accessed Facebook or Twitter or anything from here; probably does all that on his phone.” Like any self-respecting millennial, was the implication. “He does have FanDuel and DraftKings on here. You can play them on the phone, but it’s a pain.” Linus hesitated and said, “You know, online gambling?”
It was sweet of him, and typical, to want to explain if I needed him to, but be worried he’d offend me by stating the obvious—which, to Linus, was just about anything that happened in cyberspace.
“Yes, I knew he did that,” I said nonchalantly, as though online gambling were something that had floated into my awareness more than twenty-four hours ago. “Did you find anything else? Anything kind of private, personal? It seems weird he has no email on there.” I’d been hoping for something that would give us an idea what Jefferson was like and had been up to. That hope had given me qualms, but I’d squelched them. Violating Jefferson’s privacy, I reasoned, was better than letting him be sent up for a murder he didn’t commit. Unless, a qualm argued back, he did commit it, and his email helped prove that. Or, a different qualm stuck in, what if the email had nothing to say about the murder but proved Jefferson was involved in the Fergusons’ drug trade? Qualms everywhere. I tried to squelch them all, feeling like I was playing some bizarre game of Conscience Whac-A-Mole.
“Not so weird,” said Linus. “If he needed to access his email from here, he could always go through his provider’s website. Lots of people keep their business and personal accounts on different devices.”
Not people I knew; but Linus and Jefferson ran with crowds different from mine and similar to one another’s. I wondered if they’d like each other, and if they’d ever get a chance to meet.
“Are you looking for, like, who he emails with and who his friends are?”
“That would be handy, for sure. But what we really were wondering was why he took the trouble to hide it.”
“Hide who his friends are? No, wait, you mean hide the laptop. Couldn’t tell you. We did find one weird thing. But I don’t know what it means yet.”
“Weird how?”
“There’s a bunch of spreadsheets on here, and complicated algorithms.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. Some of the algorithms seem to, like, piggyback on others, but the others are conditional, too. They’re full of if/thens and necessary/sufficients. I can run them by plugging in values, but all they do is give me a bunch of other values. I can’t tell what it means.”
“I can barely tell what you’re saying. But listen, Linus.” Might as well come out with it. “Could it have to do with a drug operation? Formulas, like for making meth, or maybe for tracking ingredients, output, sales, that kind of thing?”
“Wow. Like Breaking Bad? You think that’s what cousin Jefferson’s into?”
“I hope not. But could it?”
“Hmm. I can’t see it. Unless each of these variables is a different ingredient, and if you use more of one you’d use less of another . . .” He trailed off, and I could hear him clicking keys. “No. No, it’s too complex and interdependent. You know? I mean, I guess it could be, if the variables aren’t just ingredients, they’re temperature and time, purity, all the stuff that would go into making drugs. But they’re not expressed that way. I mean,” he said earnestly, and I could tell he knew he was losing me, “math has symbols for that stuff. Time and temperature, rate of change, those things. He’s not using them.”
“What’s he using?”
“Letters. A, B, C. Numbers. If/thens, like I said. I need more time to work on this.”
“Couldn’t it be about sales? Suppliers, customers, dealers? You get more of A from B, you sell more of X to Y?”
“That would be even simpler, just a couple of spreadsheets. Maybe linked to each other or whatever, but nothing like this.”
I took his word for it, since I was only making wild guesses based on what I was afraid of finding. “Okay, that’s good news. Keep going, okay? And when you figure it out, let me know.”
Again, he didn’t comment on my when. “You got it. This is fun. See ya, cuz.”
“Bye, Lydia!” Trella called.
“Goodbye, guys. Thanks.”
My head full of complex, interdependent, and conditional algorithms, I turned over and went back to sleep.
31
I spent the next three hours in a slumber solid and peaceful. When I woke just after seven, I heard voices beyond my door, identified them as Bill’s and Pete’s, and realized, to my shock, that I was the last one up. Not that it mattered to anything but my pride. Our plan was to get to Walid’s and eat before the Fergusons showed, if they did. According to Pete, they tended to arrive around nine. We had plenty of time.
I crossed the hall and proceeded through my morning bathroom routine. Pulling on my robe, I ambled into the living room. “Gentlemen,” I said, “good day to you both.”
“Same to you, Cousin Lydia,” said Pete. He rose from his worn armchair and disappeared into the kitchen.
Bill, sipping coffee in the other chair, eyed me critically. “If I can’t have a connecting door to your room, I protest you walking around in a bathrobe looking so adorable.”
The bathrobe was a blue-and-white cotton affair that went to my ankles with a belt around the waist, and I had a tee shirt and running shorts under it, but as Pete came back carrying a mug of hot black tea, I said, “I’ll put your protest on the record.”
“No sugar in there,” Pete said, handing me the mug. “Yankees. What protest?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Yankee business. Listen, you guys, guess who I talked to last night?”
Pete sat and picked up his coffee. “You actually talked to someone? In the middle of the night? I heard you, but I thought you were talking in your sleep.”
“I started the conversation in my sleep, but it was on the phone. Linus called. He hacked into Jefferson’s laptop.”
Pete paused a moment before he said, “Is that good?” He looked like he was having the same qualms I’d had.
“It’s why we sent it to him.”
Pete shrugged. “I got HB next door to warn me about burglars, but I’m happiest when I don’t hear from him.”
The analogy wasn’t precise, but I got it.
Bill was more to the point: “What did he find?”
I told them about the games, lack of email, and folder full of algorithms and formulas.
“Maybe it’s got nothing to do with anything,” Pete said. “Some client of Jefferson’s, something like that.”
“Could be. Linus is working on it.”
Bill persisted. “He’s sure it’s not for a meth operation?”
“He’s sure. That doesn’t mean he’s right.”
“Well, here’s hoping he is,” said Pete. “Now we’d best get a move on. If we want to head out to Walid’s, one of us better get dressed.”
That had to be the only one still in a bathrobe, so I took my mug of tea and scurried off to my room.
Walid’s Oasis, its ’60s roadside sign promising American-Italian-Lebanese, sat back from a street that I’d bet hadn’t been nearly this built up or well paved when Walid planted his flag. That flag, Lebanon circa 1960, I spotted as we walked in. It hung on the wall behind the tinsel-draped counter, where a black-haired woman was pouring coffee for a man chowing down on a pile of scrambled eggs. The woman looked up and smiled at Pete.
Half past eight was late for a Delta breakfast, according to Pete, but Walid’s was close to full. Formica tables at no particular angle to each other dotted the checkerboard floor. Booths lined the two windowed walls, with the kitchen in the back. The air was full of the smells of toast and coffee, plus other more exotic, less diner-y scents. The pies in the glass cabinet included meringues so tall any New York eatery would be proud to display them.
We took the only empty booth. I slid in beside Pete, and it was a bumpy landing: decades of patronage had cracked and sagged Walid’s vinyl upholstery. The counterwoman brought over menus and her coffee-pot. “Good to see you, Captain Pete. I’m so sorry about Leland. And Jefferson, that’s nothing but nonsense. I’m sure they’ll get it all get straightened out real soon.”
After almost two full days with Pete, whose face was South China but whose accent was American South—not to mention my cousin Reynold, whose Mississippi speech was much more obvious than his half-Asian eyes—I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear the Delta drawl coming from this woman who could have been Tony Shaloub’s prettier sister. But the Deep South sound of her words caught me by surprise and I almost laughed. Luckily, she took the grin I wound up with as a friendly greeting.
“You got to be Jefferson’s cousin I heard was in town.”
“Yes, ma’am. Lydia Chin. This here’s Bill Smith.”
I didn’t get an eye roll from Bill for this here, but that was probably because we were in polite company.
“Welcome to Clarksdale, y’all. Can I get you some coffee?”
“You sure can, Lizzie, and tell me something,” Pete said. “Seen any of those young Fergusons today?”
“Not yet. Just about due, though. They haven’t been here in two, three days, and those boys do love their grits.” Lizzie poured coffee for Bill and Pete. When I shook my head she said, “You want sweet tea, hon?”
“Can I have hot tea?”
“Why, sure you can. Just be a minute.”
“Yankee,” Pete told her confidentially.
She smiled. “Takes all kinds.”
We inspected our menus, which included kibbe, tabouli, and ravioli. Bill ordered eggs, toast, kibbe, and grits. Pete ordered eggs, toast, bacon, and lemon meringue pie. I ordered eggs and toast. I mean, come on, it was breakfast.
Just as the food arrived, so did the Fergusons.
I might have known even if Pete hadn’t prodded me, from the way the three men rolled through the door. Twentysomethings, one with a thick mustache and a windbreaker, one balding, wearing a flannel shirt over a thermal, and one Johnny Ferguson himself. I didn’t need Pete’s additional poke to specify which he was. Johnny’s resemblance to his kid sister, Anna Rae, was striking, though he’d pulled his blond hair into a scraggly ponytail and wore a couple of days’ worth of stubble on that square Ferguson jaw. He moved with the same athletic confidence, nodding to Lizzie behind the counter, throwing some wisecrack over his shoulder that made the balding cousin grin. It struck me that these cousins, growing up together, playing in the grass and fishing in the river in their small Mississippi town, weren’t that different from my brothers and me, who grew up chasing each other down the stairs of Chinatown apartment buildings and riding the subway with our own cousins and friends. That the adults in Burcell were in a dangerous, destructive business was something these boys hadn’t known then, just as we’d known nothing about Chinatown’s tongs and gangs.
