"Most of us don't have much life outside the company. You know? I mean Port City… really!"

"Did he go away much? Boston? New York?"

"Not that I can remember. Most of us are working most of the time. He'd go to New York a couple times when the theater was dark, make a commercial, he said."

"What commercials?"

"I don't know. I never watch television. And I don't ever want to do commercials. Craig said it covered expenses."

"He have an agent?"

"I don't know."

"Management of any kind?"

"I don't know."

"How'd he get the commercials?"

"I don't know. It wasn't a big deal. He'd go away occasionally and come back and say he'd made a commercial. It's not cool to ask a lot of stuff about things like that."

"Except when I do it," I said.

"Oh, anything you do is cool," Deirdre said.

"It's a gift," I said.

She grinned at me, full of herself, pleased with her body, enjoying her sexiness, glad about her vocation, optimistic about the future, younger than a new Beaujolais.

"So what do you think? You got any clues yet?"

"Not yet."

"Do you get a lot of cases that are hard to figure out?"

"Well, the process sort of selects them out. People don't usually call me if the local cops solve it promptly. Even then, though, most cases aren't complicated to solve. A lot of them are more complicated to resolve."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean sometimes I know who did what, but I'm not sure what I should do about it."

"What do you do?" Deirdre said.

"I normally have two courses of action. I follow my best instincts guided by experience, or I do what Susan says."

Deirdre grinned again.

"I bet you don't do what anyone says."

Without moving, she appeared somehow wiggly.

"Do you ever get a case where there are no clues? You know, when you can, like, never figure out who did it."

"I solve all my cases," I said.

"Some of them are just not solved yet."

Deirdre clapped quietly.

"Great line," she said.

"Thanks, I'm trying it out for my ad in the Yellow Pages."

CHAPTER 11

Wearing a spiffy white raincoat beaded with rain drops, and carrying a wet umbrella that looked like a Chinese parasol, Rikki Wu came into her husband's restaurant as if she were walking onto a yacht. The guy at the register jumped up and took her coat and umbrella and disappeared with them. No one had paid any attention to my coat, which I had hung on the back of a chair. She scanned the room looking for Susan. The place was nearly empty for lunch. Maybe it was the rain. Or maybe most people in downtown Port City didn't do lunch. Her eyes swept past me, and stopped, and came back and stayed.

I stood. She walked over to me.

"Mrs. Wu," I said.

"Where's Susan?"

"She had an emergency with a patient," I said.

I held Rikki Wu's chair for her. She seemed puzzled.

"So it's just the two of us?" she said.

"Yes, but I'll be twice as lively and amusing to make up," I said.

Rikki Wu looked uneasy, but she sat.

The restaurant had begun, in another time, before it was a pizzeria, as a store with glass windows facing the street. The windows were half curtained in some sort of accordion-pleated white paper. Above the curtains, the glass was fogged by the wet weather.

A waiter brought us tea, and stood quietly beside us. He was as close to prostrating himself as he could get while standing. Without looking at him, Rikki Wu spoke in rapid Chinese. He bowed and backed away and disappeared.

"I hope you don't mind," Rikki Wu said in a voice that sounded like she didn't care if I minded or not.

"I took the liberty of ordering for us."

"I don't mind," I said.

I watched her accept the fact that she was alone with me, and watched as her persona adjusted to the fact. She smiled at me.

There was a touch of conspiratorial intimacy in the smile. Rikki Wu was sex. I was pretty sure she was spoiled and self-centered and shallow. Maybe cruel. Certainly careless about other people. But she was sex. She would like sex, she would need it, she would want more of it than most people were prepared to give her, and she would be totally self-absorbed during it. I'd spent too many years looking for it, and occasionally at it, not to know it when I saw it.

And I was seeing it. She would be a hell of a good time once a month.

"Well," she said, "here we are."

"Sleepy-eyed and yawning," I said.

"See how late it gets."

"You're sleepy?"

"It's a song lyric. I have these momentary flights now and then."

"Oh, how interesting."

The waiter arrived, placed a large platter of assorted dim sum before us, and bowed himself away. Rikki Wu put several items on my plate.

"Thank you," I said.

"Did you know Craig Sampson very well?"

"Oh, no."

"You seemed very protective of him the other night."

"I admired him, his work," Rikki Wu said.

"He was a fine actor. And I did not like the innuendo of your questions."

Her English was perfect, and formal-sounding. Her Chinese had sounded fluent too, though I had no way to judge that, except that it had been rapid.

"Yeah. I'm sorry I had to ask. Were you born here?"

"In Port City?"

"In the United States."

"No. In Taipei

"So your English is acquired."

She smiled.

"Yes. It's interesting that you should notice."

"It sounds like your native language," I said.

"Yes. It is. So is Cantonese, which I just spoke to the waiter.

And Mandarin."

"You speak the Chinese dialects as well as you speak English?"

"Oh, certainly." + "What do you think in?" I said.

"Excuse me?"

"When you're alone, thinking about things, what language do you think in?"

She hesitated, and drank some tea. Maybe she never thought about anything when she was alone.

"I don't know… I guess it depends what I'm thinking about."

She smiled.

"Or who."

"Do you think much about Craig Sampson?"

"Yes, it's so tragic. Such a brilliant young man, his life cut short so suddenly."

"Did you think about him much before he died."

Her eyes widened. She sipped some more tea. Then her eyes narrowed a little and she looked sternly at me over the tea cup.

"What are you trying to imply?" she said coldly.

"Mrs. Wu, I'm just talking. I'm just looking for a handhold. I mean no innuendo."

"There was nothing between Craig and me. I barely knew him offstage."

"You live here in Port City?"

"On the hill," she said.

"Of course. Did he have any relationship with any of the women in town that you know of?"

"Why did he have to have a relationship? I know of no relationships he had in town or anywhere else. Why do you keep asking that?"

"Because most people have one, even if only of a fleeting sexual nature. And he seems to have had none. That's maybe a little unusual. If you don't know anything, you pay attention to the unusual."

"Well, why do you keep asking me?"