Flower Net (Red Princess 1)

During his first week, Billy Watson had been caught throwing full beer cans at people attending a frat party. The dean of students wrote sympathetically that this episode showed bad judgment but that Billy had promised that nothing like it would happen again. Two letters from female teachers reported that Billy interrupted their lectures, made inappropriate comments in class, and had not turned in a single assignment. By the end of the first semester, Billy had racked up close to $500 in unpaid parking tickets. These were duly paid by his father before the second semester started. Apparently Billy didn’t learn his lesson, for in the second semester the total for tickets reached $625.

Private schools like USC accepted vast sums of money in the form of tuition and endowments from wealthy, influential families like the Watsons. Allowances might be made. Nevertheless, Billy Watson had taken it upon himself to voluntarily leave the school. In a letter dated August 14, he wrote that he would not, after all, be returning in September. He asked that his tuition be refunded promptly and that the check be made out to him. That was two years ago.

“So what was he doing?” David asked as they walked back to the car. “Where was he living?”

“I’m wondering why his parents didn’t know what was happening. Ambassador Watson said he sent a tuition check each year. But how can that be? How could he not know that his son wasn’t in school?”

“I don’t know, Hulan. There was a case a year or so ago that was in all the papers here. For four years, parents from Fort Lauderdale sent tuition and living expenses to their son at the University of Michigan. He wrote them letters each month, talking about the courses he was taking, reporting on his grades, detailing his plans for graduate school. Then came time for graduation. The parents flew up to Michigan for the ceremony. Their son’s name wasn’t in the program. Afterward, they looked through the crowd but didn’t find him. They went to the administration office and discovered that their son hadn’t been a student for three years. He wasn’t living where he said he was either. In fact, he was nowhere to be found. I don’t remember what happened after that—whether it was foul play or the kid had just come up with a scheme to dupe his parents.”

“You think that’s what happened with Billy Watson?” Hulan asked doubtfully.

“I’m beginning to think anything’s possible.”

David drove while Hulan learned how to use the car phone. She got information for Butte, Montana, asked for the number of the sheriff’s office, dialed again, and hit the button for the speakerphone. Of course Sheriff Waters knew the Watson family. Why, he’d known Big Bill since high school and had worked on all of his campaigns. When Hulan asked about Billy, there was a reluctant pause on the other end of the line. “Naturally we all knew Billy, too,” the sheriff said cautiously.

“You know he’s dead?”

“Yes, and it’s a tragedy. Must be hard on Bill and Elizabeth.”

“Listen, Sheriff,” David said, as he guided the car onto the Hollywood Freeway, “we’re trying to find out what we can about Billy. We think if we can understand him, then maybe we can learn about his killer—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, even an out-of-the-way law enforcement officer like myself has been back to the FBI behavioral science lab at Quantico.”

“So can you help us?”

For a moment David thought they’d lost the connection, then Sheriff Waters’s voice came back wearily on the phone. “You have to understand, the Watsons are good people. They didn’t deserve to have a kid like Billy. He was born to trouble and he died that way, too, I guess.”

“Tell us about him.”

“How can a guy like me pick on an innocent little kid? That’s what I used to think when the Watsons would bring Billy to the ice cream social and he’d do some crazy-ass thing like tip over the ice cream table or push little Amy Scott into the fountain. People around here used to say Billy was just spoiled; I used to say he’d grow out of it. But, man, that kid hit high school and it was nonstop pandemonium. Nothing life-threatening, nothing I could ever haul his ass in here on, just stupid pranks, just always pushing the boundaries to see how far he could go.”

“What kind of pranks?”

“Aw, hell, getting caught speeding with a six-pack on the front seat on prom night. Shooting an elk the day before hunting season started. One time—and you got to hand it to the kid for ingenuity—he filled the back of his pickup with old tires, drove to the center of town in the middle of the night, and somehow got those things on the flagpole. It took us days to figure out how to get those cussed tires off of there. See, he was just driving his mom and dad, and me, too, if you don’t mind my saying so, nuts with this crap.”

“When was the last time you saw him?” Hulan asked on a hunch.

“Fall, I suppose. He liked to come up here with that slant-eyed friend of his. They’d hang out at the ranch doing whatever the goddamn hell kids nowadays like to do. Seems to me it was one party after another.”

“Who were they partying with up there?” David asked.

“Aw, I don’t know. Pretty girls and cowboys. Hell, they couldn’t get enough of those cowboys. You’d have thought Billy was paying them to come over.”

Silverlake is one of L.A.’s oldest neighborhoods. The lake itself is a reservoir nestled in low hills between Echo Park and Burbank, close to downtown. Narrow streets snake up hillsides on which classic Spanish-style and newer overbuilt, high-tech houses cling. Most of the residents are older, original buyers who raised their families here. Many of them are Chinese, since Silverlake was one of the first neighborhoods in Southern California outside of Chinatown to bend its residency requirements after World War II. This enclave appealed to the Chinese sensibilities of feng shui—wind and water; the wind rustled through the bamboo, bodhi, and persimmon trees they had planted to remind them of home, and the water of the lake glistened outside their picture windows.

After David parked, Hulan went through her morning’s purchases and pulled out a tin of Danish sugar cookies, saying, “It wouldn’t be polite if we didn’t bring a gift.” They walked down a short flight of stairs and banged the heavy wrought-iron knocker on the dark-stained paneled door. They waited, hearing nothing. David used the knocker again. They waited some more.

Finally the door opened. A tiny, ancient man stood before them. He was Sammy Guang, Guang Mingyun’s eldest brother. David and Hulan introduced themselves and gave him the box of cookies. He shuffled very slowly to the living room and motioned for them to sit on the loveseat. He asked if they wanted tea, and when they said yes, he snarled an order in Chinese to someone in the k

itchen. His movements were painful to watch as he creaked to a sitting position on a straight-backed wooden chair.

As Sammy Guang did this, David and Hulan had time to take in their surroundings. The modest house had not been kept up. The living room had probably been decorated for the first and only time when the Guangs moved in. The low loveseat was covered in a practical but ugly fabric that had just barely held up for fifty years. The fireplace was composed of tiles in the muted colors so prevalent in the 1920s, but this was the only interior concession to the house’s original architecture. A few Chinese “antiques”—not good, just old—spotted the room. On the floor before the picture window sat several baskets of azaleas in full bloom and a potted kumquat tree draped with a red ribbon—the beginnings of the Guang family’s Chinese New Year celebration. On the mantel, in the place of honor, were graduation photographs of what Hulan presumed were Sammy Guang’s nine—if she was counting correctly—sons.

The old man squinted at them. “You want know about Number Four?” His accent was one of the densest David had ever heard.

“Is Guang Mingyun your fourth brother?” Hulan asked.

“Number Four is in China. I am Number One. Two brothers dead many years—one in America, one in China. One more brother, Number Five, he live over there.” Sammy raised a hand gnarled by arthritis and pointed across the lake. “You want to talk to Number Five, too?”