“Shanghai Police Bureau doesn’t sending me here to sleep. From now, going to meeting with-Midtown Squad?” She pronounced the words as though their meaning were esoteric.

“That’s right,” said Mary, returning with a pot of hot water, another mug, and a handful of teabags. “Inspector Wei is about to have the privilege of meeting Detective Mulgrew.”

“Detective Kee telling about him also.” Wei’s predatory smile nearly made me feel sorry for Mulgrew.

“Before we go up there, though,” Mary said, “there’s something I want you to hear. From the inspector. Have you talked to Alice lately?”

“No, she’s ducking me. She fired me twice. She’s afraid I’ll get hurt.”

“Is that what she said?”

I looked from Mary to Inspector Wei. “Hey. What’s up?”

Mary nodded to the Shanghai cop. Dipping a teabag as though she were fishing in her mug, Wei said, “Assistant Deputy Minister Wong Pan working in Shanghai Culture Bureau, Modern History Section. Has responsibility, artifacts, relics, all recent antiquity of Shanghai.”

Now there’s a government concept, I thought: recent antiquities. But apparently, that wasn’t the problem.

“How Wong Pan is flying off to United States after stealing jewelry?” Inspector Wei asked. “Why not gets stopped leaving, or at Customs arrival? Why no record, passenger list, exit paper?”

“How could he get out so cleanly is the point, Lydia,” Mary said. “The theft was noticed within hours.”

“Because,” Wei answered her own question, “Wong Pan has false passport, visa. New identity. Wu Ming. Stupid name. How he gets identity papers?”

I said, “I imagine it’s as easy to get those things in Shanghai as anywhere.”

“No. Not so easy.” Wei gave me a steely look. Then she laughed. “Not so easy because some way, China still backwards. Technology some things hard to find. Easy in Europe. Easy in Switzerland.”

“Switzerland? Wait-you’re not saying you think Alice Fairchild had anything to do with it?”

“Shanghai Police Bureau information, very fews in Shanghai capable making papers, none of these did. In U.S., say, ‘word on street?’ ” She looked to Mary with evident pride in her American slang. “Word on Shanghai street, Wong Pan getting papers from Europe. One other word, getting help from European woman. Small, good clothes, short hair with gray.”

“Well, that… but it could-”

“Be anyone,” Mary finished for me. “Except as far as we know, there’s no one of that description connected with this case but Alice Fairchild.”

“Attorney Fairchild leaving Shanghai immediately after Wong Pan,” Wei pointed out.

“She was chasing him. Because he stole her clients’ jewelry.”

Mary said, “Or because he skipped out on whatever deal they had.”

“Uh-oh,” I said.

“Uh-oh, what?”

Mary and Wei both leaned forward, eyes identically glowing.

Reluctantly, I said, “The phony heirs.”

“What is ‘phony heirs’?” Wei leaned closer.

“Yes, Lydia, what?” Mary demanded.

I caught them up fast, so their matched cop eyes wouldn’t drill holes through me.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” Mary’s voice edged toward the danger zone.

“Tell you what? My client’s clients were lying to her?”

“You didn’t think it was a problem I should know about?”

“What I thought was, it was a problem for my client that I didn’t understand. My job isn’t the same as yours.”

“Catching Joel’s killer?”

“Joel hired me to work for this client. Until I’m sure she’s involved in something-”

“And when you’re sure? What are you planning to do when you’re sure?”

“If I’m sure,” I said, “you know I’ll tell you.”

Mary and I locked eyes. “I know how stubbornly loyal you can be. Your clients-”

“If I were you, I’d be grateful for how stubbornly loyal I can be. Like to my best and oldest friend, for example.”

Wei De-xu frowned. Whatever was going on between Mary and me wasn’t helping her catch her killer. She cleared her throat. “I have theory of crime.”

Mary sat back. “Go ahead.”

“In Europe, peoples hear about jewelry. Go to Attorney Fairchild, make scheme together. Attorney Fairchild flying to Shanghai, suggest scheme to Wong Pan. Corrupting official, bad crime in China.”

Ah, the wily lo faan, tempting the naive Servant of the People. Wei practically smacked her lips at the thought of bagging such a fiend.

Grudgingly, I said, “Also…”

“Also?” Mary repeated.

“I hate this!”

“So?”

“Yes, yes, all right. Is there still hot water in that thing?”

“Are you stalling?” Mary passed me the pot and a mug.

“Probably.” I unwrapped a teabag. “It’s just, the clients may not be lying. Alice may be lying. About having clients.” I added milk and waited to see if it curdled. “Last time I talked to her, I told her three things. That the clients were phony, that Rosalie and Kai-rong had a son and I’d met him, and that it looked like Wong Pan had tried to call her. She said the call might be coincidence-which is true, by the way,” I added, just to keep their minds open, “and she told me she’d call the clients and get back to me. And she fired me. But beyond one ‘Oh, my God,’ when I told her about Rosalie’s son, she didn’t say anything else. She didn’t ask his name or what woodwork he crawled out of, how I found him, anything.”

“So what are you thinking?”

“Well, he’s a genuine heir with a strong claim on Rosalie’s jewelry. If she’s actually doing asset recovery for real clients, she’ll need to contend with him. And if her clients are phony, I’ve inadvertently found an heir anyway. So she should have been more interested.”

“But if it’s not recovery, it’s theft-”

“Then she wouldn’t care who Mr. Chen is. The fact that he exists and knows the jewelry was found could make the pieces harder to sell. That could be a problem later on. But her problem right now hasn’t changed. She needs to find Wong Pan.”

Mary and the inspector traded gratified looks. I drank my foul tea and tried to calm down. If Alice Fairchild was a liar, a thief, and a swindler, it wasn’t Mary’s fault, or Inspector Wei’s.

They just didn’t have to be so damn happy about it.

Leaving the Fifth Precinct’s wheezy air-conditioning for the muggy air of Elizabeth Street, I called Bill. I got his voice mail, which told me nothing. I already knew enough nothing. I left a message to call me and headed to my office, to try to think.

If Alice was chasing Wong Pan for a whole other reason than what she’d told Joel and me, it set a lot of things in a new light. Maybe the pay-phone call to the Waldorf meant Wong Pan had changed his mind about running out on her. Alone in the big city, he’d called to make up. Maybe I kept getting fired because they were once again thick as, well, thieves, and my searching for him was now a liability. And maybe Joel had been somehow onto Wong Pan. If so, maybe he’d also been onto Alice.

And in that case maybe Alice knew something about Joel’s death she wasn’t saying.

But the question still was, if Joel had found anything definitively dirty, why didn’t he say that, instead of “fishy”? The impression I’d gotten was that something unexplained was bothering him. Not good, but nothing worse than that.

When the light changed and trapped me on the corner, I thumbed David Rosenberg’s number into my phone. Before the light changed back, I’d asked him about Alice Fairchild. “How sure are we that she’s what she says she is?”

“What do you mean?”

“A lawyer who specializes in Holocaust assets.”

“As far as I know. The magazine follows recovery cases from time to time, and we wrote up one of hers a few years ago. I found her impressive. Straightforward and well prepared.”

“Did she win?”

“I believe that one’s still in litigation. You know these cases are hard to win.”