Chapter Four
Lois wore a light blue brocade blouse with white laces on the collar and in the front, blue pants and navy blue flats, looking like the color blue had started growing on her in shades from top to bottom. If you looked from bottom to top, the color blue had been fading. She made a secret vow that she would catch the person who had murdered Uncle Charles. Tricia had on a light pink T-shirt and jeans while Sally wore a white tank top and stonewashed jeans with frayed edges and “windows” on the knees, as if the knees would have been suffocated without these “windows” and needed air to breathe for their own sustenance. They were back from their separate investigation trips. They made no progress whatever on their case. This was the way with investigative work. Many times when people went off on sleuthing tours, they could dig up nothing worthwhile, but they never gave up. Maybe, some day, they would make a breakthrough and crack the case.
Now they sat in their office, exchanging information. The sudden tragic death of Uncle Charles was like a heavy stone pressure on their minds. It suppressed all the mirth in life into a tiny corner in their hearts and filled almost their entire hearts with lamentation and rancor. The weeping stage was over, but the feelings of loss would prevail for a long, long time.
“From now on we won't accept any new case until the murderer of Uncle Charles is caught,” Lois said to her two sisters. She rested her elbows on her desktop and sank her head between her hands. Their office was not big: three dark brown wooden desks with three black leather swivel chairs behind them and three armchairs before the desks for the clients. A half-old brown leather-upholstered sofa sat along one wall near Sally's desk and two fresh grass-green iron cabinets, containing files, against another wall behind Lois. There were almost no decorations on the walls except for their licenses in simple wooden frames, and nothing anywhere as ornaments. They never believed that the size and decoration of the office should be kept in proper proportion with the fame of the establishment. If so, they should have an office as big as Woodbridge Mall and adorned like an art gallery. They didn't hire anybody as a secretary. They did everything themselves to save the expenditure. They believed that people came to seek their help because of their efficiency and ability to solve cases, not to judge them by what luxury ornaments they had or didn’t have. Besides, they were really too busy to give their office any decorative consideration.
Tricia leaned back in her swivel chair with her right elbow on the arm of the chair and her head propped on her fist. She shut her eyes in depression, having nothing better to say. Occasionally, she would adjust some stray locks of her sunstreaked blond hair into their proper places.
“I will kill the thug with my own hands,” cried Sally, sitting upright in her chair, sweeping down her right hand as if the killer were kneeling right before her and she were bringing a sword down to chop off his head, like the execution of a prisoner on the guillotine in medieval times. Almost knocking over the desk lamp, she rescued it in a dexterous change of hand motion from a cutting gesture to a snatching move. She sighed, seeing her two sisters in agony and anguish.
***
Their single house was located slantingly opposite the public library with a sheltered front porch and a not too big backyard. It had four bedrooms on the second floor. Part of the basement was furnished as the family room in which stood a big TV set in a corner and two sofas with backs to the walls at right angles, a small end table squeezed in the corner space. Robert and Louise slept in the biggest room. Each of the girls occupied a small one. Now Alida came to live with them. She had to sleep on one of the sofas in the family room. Alida had to be transferred to the Highland Park School. Since Louise didn't work and did not go to the video store to help, she could take care of Alida, who continued to learn kungfu from her.
“Dad, can you make me a list of all the masters you know, even only by name, living within a radius of one hundred miles?” Lois asked her father one evening after dinner when they gathered in the living room.
“Not many of them I can think of.” He sat back on the sofa, closing his eyes and working hard with his brains. He entwined the fingers of his hands on his lap. Lois got a pen and a slip of scrap paper ready. Then her father opened his eyes, which sparkled with a flash of lightning for a moment, a phenomenon denoting the highest level of kungfu. He mentioned quite a few names, which Lois jotted down.
“I can't remember the addresses. You can check my address book later. If the name's not in my book, it means I don't have his address,” said her father.
Lois counted the names she wrote down. They amounted to eight. Then she took his address book from his briefcase and got some addresses. She looked at the list and decided that she would check every one of them to see who was the most probable stranger, or killer, of Uncle Charles. If no one on this list could be a suspect, she would expand the radius.
She called the detective, Sam Dawson, and asked him about the results of the autopsy. They had cooperated in several previous cases. Sam was twenty-six and had graduated from the police academy. He lived in a studio in an apartment building on Montgomery Street in the same town. It was a typical bachelor's home, a very busy police bachelor's home: bed rarely made, clothes everywhere on the floor or on the desk or draped on the back of the chair before the desk. There was also a blanket on the sofa, because sometimes when he came back too late and too tired, he just collapsed on the sofa and slept there overnight. As for the bathroom, no one wanted to look at it. Once in a while he had to ask for some cleaning help to straighten his studio a bit. He had dated a few girls, but he was so busy that he practically had no time for dating. All the girls he had dated left him after a very short time. Now he lost confidence about dating. He liked Lois. They had a few meetings in some coffee shops or fast food restaurants like McDonald's, but these were only for talking over business, not really as dating in every definition of the word.
“Lois, listen,” Sam said eagerly on the phone, “we got something very weird. We need to discuss it. Will you meet me in Friendly's on Stelton Road in half an hour? We can talk it over a work lunch.” That was the name they used for their lunch rendezvous to distinguish it from dating.
“Sounds good. See ya.” She hung up.
***
Traffic on Stelton Road was not too heavy at lunchtime, but when coming from south to north, they needed to make a u-turn and it took some time, because there were two shopping centers on the north side from which cars pulled out from time to time.
It was cloudy that day. The gray clouds looked like gigantic pieces of dirty white sponge piled together and floating in the sky. The chance of rain was, maybe, half-and-half, according to the weather forecast. With a little breeze occasionally and no sunshine at all, people would not feel too hot. When Lois got there, Sam already sat at a table, in a canary T-shirt and jeans. Lois approached. Sam felt his eyes brightened. Her beauty would put the Goddess of Moon to shame. Which Goddess of Moon? Greek, or Roman, or Chinese? All of them. Combined together.
She wore a white short-sleeved cotton blouse with pale pink flowers embroidered on the front and thin white khaki pants. She never liked T-shirts and jeans, which in her opinion was not professional attire. Sam bought food for both Lois and himself: two hamburgers, two large French fries and two medium-sized cups of Sprite. He carried the food on a tray to the corner table at which they sat down face-to-face. Though no one was at the nearby tables, they still talked in a low voice.
“The results are that two ribs in the front chest were broken, but that's really not what killed your uncle. They found a needle in the backside of his head. It was hard to see because of the hair. On the needle there is an unnamed poison. The needle shows a blue color and so does the skin of the deceased on that part of the head and neck. According to the coroner who signed the autopsy papers, it's the poison that killed your uncle.” Sam laid all the facts on the table before Lois.
Lois nodded. “Just as I guessed. How about the dead dog?” She held his eyes for a few heartbeats.
“They didn't bother with the dog. They just disposed of it like an ordinary stray dead dog.”
“I guess it was killed the same way, by the poisonous needle.”
“Do you have any lead?” queried Sam.
“Not yet. If I have any, I'll let you know.”
Then conversation went on a little idly. Lunch finished, and before they came out and parted in the parking lot, Lois gave Sam the money for her share of the food. They always went Dutch at this stage of their delicate relationship.
Lois didn't want to mention the list her father made for her. She intended to check the masters all by herself. It was not that she didn't trust Sam, but that Sam was not familiar with the kungfu world, with the taboos and eccentric behavior of some masters, so that he might miss something very important if he was to deal with them. Besides, some people in the kungfu circle were really unreasonable and would kill anyone when instigated wrath, no matter who the person was, police or not. She didn't want to put Sam into such a risk.
***
At dinner, Lois filled the others in on the conclusion of the autopsy. Robert observed, “Your grandpa once told me about a very poisonous weird-shaped viper, called Egg Snake by the natives, blue in color, a meter long, with a third of its body looking like an enormous ostrich egg at the tail part. Its habitat is among the mountains in the southwestern region of China. Some of the bad kungfu people will go there to catch one and extract its poison. They will put the densified poisonous substance on the tips of needles, arrows, bullets or on the blades of knives to kill people quickly, without fail.”
“Do you know, Dad, who possesses such a substance?” Lois asked eagerly.
“No idea. But good people never use it, nor do the famous masters, because they think it beneath them to use such ignoble means, except bad masters.” Her father continued, “Have you checked anyone on the list yet?”
“Not yet. I'm wondering how best to approach them.”
“Better be straight. If you want to sneak up on them, you will surely be caught. They aren't known as masters for nothing.” He had on a short-sleeved shirt and khaki pants, his daily outfit. He was a quiet, calm person. If a bomb exploded right under his nose, he wouldn't even blink his eyes, they said.
“I can go if you need some sneaking job,” Sally offered while chewing gum. She finished her dinner already and every time she finished a meal she would put gum into her mouth, saying that her dentist said gum chewing would help to keep her teeth clean and healthy. Now it was her habit that whenever she was between meals and snacks, she would chew gum, living up to her trust in her dentist. Her mouth never got tired of chewing or talking, resting only when asleep, sometimes even talking in her dreams. “Since you are given a mouth, why don't you make the most use of it? No waste here, too,” she often said.
“That's the gossiper's doctrine,” Tricia would say.
“Even if I get caught, they won't hurt a young girl like me,” Sally continued. She was a tomboy type with an adventurous spirit. When a little girl, she had been fond of climbing trees and had scared away many birds from their nests. Tricia liked to call her Chimpanzee whenever she saw Sally in a tree, but Sally never failed to yell back, “You are a china doll only. Chimpanzees were created by God, but dolls by humans. So who has a greater value?”
“That's true,” Tricia agreed. “Masters always want to maintain their dignity and won't deign to hurt a young girl.” She just finished a drumstick and put down the bone on the plate before her.
“We are not considering whether you'll be hurt or not,” Louise voiced her opinion as she held a fried pork chop between her chopsticks and put it in Alida's bowl on top of the rice. “You'll get nothing by sneaking on them. Besides, someone may come to us if he knows you are our daughter, or he will detain you and notify us to go there for a fight. Your father doesn't like to be known as a master and doesn't like fighting, either. Since we moved here, we have lived like ordinary people. No one in the neighborhood knows that we are kungfu masters.”
“I won't slip out your name or Dad's name. Besides, as you and Dad are hermit masters, no one even knows who you are even if I happen to mention your names.”
She had been adopted at the age of two years and nine months. Her parents had died in a severe car accident. Their car had been on the highway, traveling at a very high speed. Suddenly a front tire had exploded and the car had veered into the next lane. A big truck, also traveling at high speed, had hit their car at the door of the driver's side and sent it nose-first across two lanes right under another truck passing by. The front half of their car had entirely been crushed. Her parents had lived in a rented house in the neighborhood. As Louise didn't work, she often babysat the children of the neighbors. Sally had been at her house that very day. As Louise had already liked and was endeared to the girl, the couple had adopted Sally. But it was a different story with Tricia. Her father had often come to the video store owned by Robert. When Tricia had been two, her mother had died of a lethal disease. Later her father had married another woman, her stepmother. The stepmother hated her just like Snow White’s stepmother. She wanted her own children, not the child left by the deceased ex-wife. She had forced her father to give her away, threatening that she would have killed the child, maybe using a poisoned apple, if he didn't comply with her wish. One evening when her father had come to the video store, looking very sad, Robert had struck up a conversation with him. Her father had offered the grievous information about the child. Out of compassion, Robert had said, “We have a daughter, but my wife loves girls. If I can have your daughter, she will be ecstatic.” So to the delight of the father, the couple had adopted Tricia. Her father had come often to see her, but then the stepmother found out, decided to move to California, and forbade her father to come to see her.
“No more arguments,” Lois broke in. She finished eating and pushed back the chair. Standing up, she turned to walk away from the table. “I'll take care of it. You two go on with your cases.” Concerning business, the big sister had the final say. Tricia was the mid-sister and Sally the little sister. These were their code names. Sam often joked with them that they were the Three Sisters of the Fate.
Lois wore a light blue brocade blouse with white laces on the collar and in the front, blue pants and navy blue flats, looking like the color blue had started growing on her in shades from top to bottom. If you looked from bottom to top, the color blue had been fading. She made a secret vow that she would catch the person who had murdered Uncle Charles. Tricia had on a light pink T-shirt and jeans while Sally wore a white tank top and stonewashed jeans with frayed edges and “windows” on the knees, as if the knees would have been suffocated without these “windows” and needed air to breathe for their own sustenance. They were back from their separate investigation trips. They made no progress whatever on their case. This was the way with investigative work. Many times when people went off on sleuthing tours, they could dig up nothing worthwhile, but they never gave up. Maybe, some day, they would make a breakthrough and crack the case.
Now they sat in their office, exchanging information. The sudden tragic death of Uncle Charles was like a heavy stone pressure on their minds. It suppressed all the mirth in life into a tiny corner in their hearts and filled almost their entire hearts with lamentation and rancor. The weeping stage was over, but the feelings of loss would prevail for a long, long time.
“From now on we won't accept any new case until the murderer of Uncle Charles is caught,” Lois said to her two sisters. She rested her elbows on her desktop and sank her head between her hands. Their office was not big: three dark brown wooden desks with three black leather swivel chairs behind them and three armchairs before the desks for the clients. A half-old brown leather-upholstered sofa sat along one wall near Sally's desk and two fresh grass-green iron cabinets, containing files, against another wall behind Lois. There were almost no decorations on the walls except for their licenses in simple wooden frames, and nothing anywhere as ornaments. They never believed that the size and decoration of the office should be kept in proper proportion with the fame of the establishment. If so, they should have an office as big as Woodbridge Mall and adorned like an art gallery. They didn't hire anybody as a secretary. They did everything themselves to save the expenditure. They believed that people came to seek their help because of their efficiency and ability to solve cases, not to judge them by what luxury ornaments they had or didn’t have. Besides, they were really too busy to give their office any decorative consideration.
Tricia leaned back in her swivel chair with her right elbow on the arm of the chair and her head propped on her fist. She shut her eyes in depression, having nothing better to say. Occasionally, she would adjust some stray locks of her sunstreaked blond hair into their proper places.
“I will kill the thug with my own hands,” cried Sally, sitting upright in her chair, sweeping down her right hand as if the killer were kneeling right before her and she were bringing a sword down to chop off his head, like the execution of a prisoner on the guillotine in medieval times. Almost knocking over the desk lamp, she rescued it in a dexterous change of hand motion from a cutting gesture to a snatching move. She sighed, seeing her two sisters in agony and anguish.
***
Their single house was located slantingly opposite the public library with a sheltered front porch and a not too big backyard. It had four bedrooms on the second floor. Part of the basement was furnished as the family room in which stood a big TV set in a corner and two sofas with backs to the walls at right angles, a small end table squeezed in the corner space. Robert and Louise slept in the biggest room. Each of the girls occupied a small one. Now Alida came to live with them. She had to sleep on one of the sofas in the family room. Alida had to be transferred to the Highland Park School. Since Louise didn't work and did not go to the video store to help, she could take care of Alida, who continued to learn kungfu from her.
“Dad, can you make me a list of all the masters you know, even only by name, living within a radius of one hundred miles?” Lois asked her father one evening after dinner when they gathered in the living room.
“Not many of them I can think of.” He sat back on the sofa, closing his eyes and working hard with his brains. He entwined the fingers of his hands on his lap. Lois got a pen and a slip of scrap paper ready. Then her father opened his eyes, which sparkled with a flash of lightning for a moment, a phenomenon denoting the highest level of kungfu. He mentioned quite a few names, which Lois jotted down.
“I can't remember the addresses. You can check my address book later. If the name's not in my book, it means I don't have his address,” said her father.
Lois counted the names she wrote down. They amounted to eight. Then she took his address book from his briefcase and got some addresses. She looked at the list and decided that she would check every one of them to see who was the most probable stranger, or killer, of Uncle Charles. If no one on this list could be a suspect, she would expand the radius.
She called the detective, Sam Dawson, and asked him about the results of the autopsy. They had cooperated in several previous cases. Sam was twenty-six and had graduated from the police academy. He lived in a studio in an apartment building on Montgomery Street in the same town. It was a typical bachelor's home, a very busy police bachelor's home: bed rarely made, clothes everywhere on the floor or on the desk or draped on the back of the chair before the desk. There was also a blanket on the sofa, because sometimes when he came back too late and too tired, he just collapsed on the sofa and slept there overnight. As for the bathroom, no one wanted to look at it. Once in a while he had to ask for some cleaning help to straighten his studio a bit. He had dated a few girls, but he was so busy that he practically had no time for dating. All the girls he had dated left him after a very short time. Now he lost confidence about dating. He liked Lois. They had a few meetings in some coffee shops or fast food restaurants like McDonald's, but these were only for talking over business, not really as dating in every definition of the word.
“Lois, listen,” Sam said eagerly on the phone, “we got something very weird. We need to discuss it. Will you meet me in Friendly's on Stelton Road in half an hour? We can talk it over a work lunch.” That was the name they used for their lunch rendezvous to distinguish it from dating.
“Sounds good. See ya.” She hung up.
***
Traffic on Stelton Road was not too heavy at lunchtime, but when coming from south to north, they needed to make a u-turn and it took some time, because there were two shopping centers on the north side from which cars pulled out from time to time.
It was cloudy that day. The gray clouds looked like gigantic pieces of dirty white sponge piled together and floating in the sky. The chance of rain was, maybe, half-and-half, according to the weather forecast. With a little breeze occasionally and no sunshine at all, people would not feel too hot. When Lois got there, Sam already sat at a table, in a canary T-shirt and jeans. Lois approached. Sam felt his eyes brightened. Her beauty would put the Goddess of Moon to shame. Which Goddess of Moon? Greek, or Roman, or Chinese? All of them. Combined together.
She wore a white short-sleeved cotton blouse with pale pink flowers embroidered on the front and thin white khaki pants. She never liked T-shirts and jeans, which in her opinion was not professional attire. Sam bought food for both Lois and himself: two hamburgers, two large French fries and two medium-sized cups of Sprite. He carried the food on a tray to the corner table at which they sat down face-to-face. Though no one was at the nearby tables, they still talked in a low voice.
“The results are that two ribs in the front chest were broken, but that's really not what killed your uncle. They found a needle in the backside of his head. It was hard to see because of the hair. On the needle there is an unnamed poison. The needle shows a blue color and so does the skin of the deceased on that part of the head and neck. According to the coroner who signed the autopsy papers, it's the poison that killed your uncle.” Sam laid all the facts on the table before Lois.
Lois nodded. “Just as I guessed. How about the dead dog?” She held his eyes for a few heartbeats.
“They didn't bother with the dog. They just disposed of it like an ordinary stray dead dog.”
“I guess it was killed the same way, by the poisonous needle.”
“Do you have any lead?” queried Sam.
“Not yet. If I have any, I'll let you know.”
Then conversation went on a little idly. Lunch finished, and before they came out and parted in the parking lot, Lois gave Sam the money for her share of the food. They always went Dutch at this stage of their delicate relationship.
Lois didn't want to mention the list her father made for her. She intended to check the masters all by herself. It was not that she didn't trust Sam, but that Sam was not familiar with the kungfu world, with the taboos and eccentric behavior of some masters, so that he might miss something very important if he was to deal with them. Besides, some people in the kungfu circle were really unreasonable and would kill anyone when instigated wrath, no matter who the person was, police or not. She didn't want to put Sam into such a risk.
***
At dinner, Lois filled the others in on the conclusion of the autopsy. Robert observed, “Your grandpa once told me about a very poisonous weird-shaped viper, called Egg Snake by the natives, blue in color, a meter long, with a third of its body looking like an enormous ostrich egg at the tail part. Its habitat is among the mountains in the southwestern region of China. Some of the bad kungfu people will go there to catch one and extract its poison. They will put the densified poisonous substance on the tips of needles, arrows, bullets or on the blades of knives to kill people quickly, without fail.”
“Do you know, Dad, who possesses such a substance?” Lois asked eagerly.
“No idea. But good people never use it, nor do the famous masters, because they think it beneath them to use such ignoble means, except bad masters.” Her father continued, “Have you checked anyone on the list yet?”
“Not yet. I'm wondering how best to approach them.”
“Better be straight. If you want to sneak up on them, you will surely be caught. They aren't known as masters for nothing.” He had on a short-sleeved shirt and khaki pants, his daily outfit. He was a quiet, calm person. If a bomb exploded right under his nose, he wouldn't even blink his eyes, they said.
“I can go if you need some sneaking job,” Sally offered while chewing gum. She finished her dinner already and every time she finished a meal she would put gum into her mouth, saying that her dentist said gum chewing would help to keep her teeth clean and healthy. Now it was her habit that whenever she was between meals and snacks, she would chew gum, living up to her trust in her dentist. Her mouth never got tired of chewing or talking, resting only when asleep, sometimes even talking in her dreams. “Since you are given a mouth, why don't you make the most use of it? No waste here, too,” she often said.
“That's the gossiper's doctrine,” Tricia would say.
“Even if I get caught, they won't hurt a young girl like me,” Sally continued. She was a tomboy type with an adventurous spirit. When a little girl, she had been fond of climbing trees and had scared away many birds from their nests. Tricia liked to call her Chimpanzee whenever she saw Sally in a tree, but Sally never failed to yell back, “You are a china doll only. Chimpanzees were created by God, but dolls by humans. So who has a greater value?”
“That's true,” Tricia agreed. “Masters always want to maintain their dignity and won't deign to hurt a young girl.” She just finished a drumstick and put down the bone on the plate before her.
“We are not considering whether you'll be hurt or not,” Louise voiced her opinion as she held a fried pork chop between her chopsticks and put it in Alida's bowl on top of the rice. “You'll get nothing by sneaking on them. Besides, someone may come to us if he knows you are our daughter, or he will detain you and notify us to go there for a fight. Your father doesn't like to be known as a master and doesn't like fighting, either. Since we moved here, we have lived like ordinary people. No one in the neighborhood knows that we are kungfu masters.”
“I won't slip out your name or Dad's name. Besides, as you and Dad are hermit masters, no one even knows who you are even if I happen to mention your names.”
She had been adopted at the age of two years and nine months. Her parents had died in a severe car accident. Their car had been on the highway, traveling at a very high speed. Suddenly a front tire had exploded and the car had veered into the next lane. A big truck, also traveling at high speed, had hit their car at the door of the driver's side and sent it nose-first across two lanes right under another truck passing by. The front half of their car had entirely been crushed. Her parents had lived in a rented house in the neighborhood. As Louise didn't work, she often babysat the children of the neighbors. Sally had been at her house that very day. As Louise had already liked and was endeared to the girl, the couple had adopted Sally. But it was a different story with Tricia. Her father had often come to the video store owned by Robert. When Tricia had been two, her mother had died of a lethal disease. Later her father had married another woman, her stepmother. The stepmother hated her just like Snow White’s stepmother. She wanted her own children, not the child left by the deceased ex-wife. She had forced her father to give her away, threatening that she would have killed the child, maybe using a poisoned apple, if he didn't comply with her wish. One evening when her father had come to the video store, looking very sad, Robert had struck up a conversation with him. Her father had offered the grievous information about the child. Out of compassion, Robert had said, “We have a daughter, but my wife loves girls. If I can have your daughter, she will be ecstatic.” So to the delight of the father, the couple had adopted Tricia. Her father had come often to see her, but then the stepmother found out, decided to move to California, and forbade her father to come to see her.
“No more arguments,” Lois broke in. She finished eating and pushed back the chair. Standing up, she turned to walk away from the table. “I'll take care of it. You two go on with your cases.” Concerning business, the big sister had the final say. Tricia was the mid-sister and Sally the little sister. These were their code names. Sam often joked with them that they were the Three Sisters of the Fate.
