Bless the Bride

you’re keeping us all waiting.” There was no sign of Daniel as I came out again and merged into the crowd.
    One thing was certain, I wasn’t going back into that police station. If the young constable knew nothing of a Chinese woman, then it was fairly certain that she was not being held there, judging by the amount of interest she would have caused. The fact that a woman wearing Chinese dress would stand out as an oddity made me decide to try something else. Chinatown was essentially only three or four streets—Mott, Pell, Doyers, and Park. That made a limited number of ways out—five to be exact. Surely there were nosy or observant people at the entrance to each of those streets who would have noticed a young Chinese woman, in Chinese dress. Unless, of course, she had escaped in the middle of the night. Which didn’t seem very likely, given the locked doors and the houseboy sleeping at the top of the stairs. I wondered if she could have lowered herself from the balcony. But then she would have left the rope, or whatever she had used hanging there as evidence of her escape.
    A pretty puzzle. A young woman, vanished into thin air—unless … was I being set up? I had been used and duped before, being a little on the naïve side when it came to trusting humanity. What if the young bride had not proved satisfactory? What if he had killed her or had her killed and disposed of the body somewhere, then had hired me as his alibi? Judging by his attitude toward her, this was a good possibility. I should walk away now, I told myself. But I couldn’t until I had tried every avenue. I never like to give up on anything—and I was becoming increasingly worried about that poor girl. Coming from a village in China to the middle of New York City must have been a terrible shock. If she had tried to run away, I rather thought that she would find she had jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. I just hoped I wasn’t too late and she was already in the claws of a Bowery pimp.
    It occurred to me that I had once seen Mrs. Goodwin working on a case on Elizabeth Street. I looked up and down the street hopefully, but the only police presence was a stout constable with sweat running down his red face on this hot day. He was lingering near a fire hydrant, keeping a watchful eye on a group of young boys who were waiting their chance to set off that hydrant and play in the fountain it would cause.
    I approached him, asking him if he’d seen Mrs. Goodwin recently. But he was a Sixth Precinct man and he didn’t even know who she was. It seemed beyond his comprehension that the police were now using women as detectives. “And downright foolish,” he added. “If they’re using women on the force now, then that’s the beginning of the end.”
    So I went back toward Mott Street, noticing any business that was in a good position to observe people coming and going from Chinatown. There were street vendors aplenty and they were in the best position to notice a fleeing Chinese woman, if she hadn’t made her escape in the middle of the night. The aroma of roasting sweet potatoes and grilling corn from one of those carts reminded me that it was past lunchtime. I was luckily fortified with that soda bread, but buying a roasted sweet potato and an ear of corn was a good excuse to ask those vendors if they had seen a Chinese girl and showing her picture around.
    “Those stinking Chinamen know better than to come out here,” one of the vendors said in a heavy Italian accent. “We learn ’em good if they show their faces outside Mott Street.”
    “But if you saw a woman?”
    “They don’t have no women,” he said. “And we keep our girls well away from them.”
    I moved on, munching on my corn with satisfaction, around to the Bowery where I worked my way down toward Pell, asking questions along the way. One woman had seen a Chinese girl and my hopes rose until it transpired that she was one of the acrobats advertised at the vaudeville show at Miner’s Bowery Theatre. I continued on, past Pell to Doyers and then to the other end of Mott, then up Mott again to Park Street. I had covered all the exits with no luck. Plenty of people had seen the half-Chinese offspring of people like Aileen Chiu as they went to school outside the neighborhood or went to play in the park at Mulberry Bend. But nobody had seen a Chinese girl, in Chinese pantaloons and a brocade blouse from the old country.
    “Don’t tell me they’re letting