Four
FOUR
VERA
It is 8:55 p.m., almost a whole half hour past Vera’s bedtime. She can’t remember the last time she failed to fall asleep at eight thirty p.m.; Vera goes to sleep very promptly every night. She’s never understood people who have difficulties sleeping. For Vera, sleep, like most other things in life, is a matter of discipline and willpower. Every night, as she slaps on her numerous moisturizers, she tells her body that it is almost time for it to retire for the night, and it never disappoints.
Except for tonight. Tonight, Vera finds herself lying in the dark, rolling the hem of her blanket between her thumb and index finger restlessly. For the sixth time, she takes a deep, forceful breath and mentally demands that her brain shut down for the night. Like a surly teenager, her brain ignores her, remaining stubbornly awake.
When the red numbers on the clock turn to nine p.m., Vera gives up trying to beat her consciousness into submission and rises. She gives an annoyed huff and shuffles out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. She turns the kitchen light on and winces at the sudden brightness. When her eyes finally adjust to the light, Vera potters about, making herself a nice cup of caffeine-free chrysanthemum tea. As she works, she chides herself for being silly. Why should the mere discovery of a dead body in her little shop make her lose sleep? She’s being indulgent, that’s what she’s being.
But then again , a small voice pipes up, it’s not the dead body, is it? It’s the other thing.
Vera sighs. Sometimes, she hates her own mind for being so astute. The kettle boils then, so she pours the water into her mug and watches as the dried chrysanthemum flower unfurls gently before toddling over to the dining table. She sits down and automatically, her eyes flick to the tissue box in the middle of the table. Unbidden, memories from earlier that day flood her consciousness.
···
By the time the police arrive, Vera is relatively calm. Well, her heartbeat is a little bit elevated, but since the dead man is lying just two paces away from where she sits, Vera supposes this is acceptable. She’s prepared for the cops—she’s boiled enough water for three whole teapots and prepped each pot with a pinch of Longjing tea paired with ginkgo leaves, a combination known for sharpening the mind and ensuring that the police officers will do their best investigative work here. Maybe they will be so impressed by how clearly their minds are working after just one sip of Vera’s magical tea that the station will become regular customers. Maybe they might even spread the word to other precincts and she’ll soon have to fulfill regular bulk orders to all of the police departments in the whole of the Bay Area.
She’s also tidied up the shop a little. Well, around the body, of course. Vera has watched enough CSI to know that she mustn’t touch the body itself in order to preserve any traces of the culprit’s DNA, but she’s not about to let a whole swarm of police officers into her tea shop without sprucing the place up a little. She’s gone upstairs to the apartment and fetched a particularly pretty vase, as well as an ancient framed photo of herself in her twenties, just so they know that she used to be quite the looker in her time. She almost swept up the broken glass from the front door but remembered that it was probably evidence. She’s very proud of her crime scene; it must surely be the most pleasant crime scene the cops have ever been to.
When the cops arrive, Vera greets them at the door with a tray of freshly brewed tea, but they actually push her aside—gently, of course, but still—and tell her, “Ma’am, please stand out of the way.”
“But—” It takes a second for Vera to gather her mind as three officers tromp into her tiny shop. “I have prepare some tea for you. You better drink it now, before you start investigating. It is Longjing and ginkgo leaves, known for clearing your mind.”
The first police officer, the one who pushed her aside like she was a child, barely spares her a glance. “Ma’am, we’re not going to eat or drink anything here. Gray? Can you?” He gestures at another officer and cocks his head at Vera.
Officer Gray, a kind-looking Black officer who looks about Tilly’s age, walks toward Vera. She’s wearing a polite smile. “Ma’am, can you step outside for a moment? I need to take your statement.”
“Oh, no, thank you,” Vera says quickly. “I need to stay and make sure your friends don’t miss anything.”
“What the—?” the first officer mutters. “Hey, ma’am, who drew the outline around the deceased?”
“Ah.” Vera swells with pride. They have noticed just how helpful and resourceful Vera is. “I do it. I save you some work.” Vera knew what was supposed to happen at crime scenes—the police would draw an outline around the body using tape, but unfortunately, Vera was rather short on tape, so she had to make do with a Sharpie. She had been ever so careful as she drew the outline, making sure to leave about a half-inch gap between the Sharpie tip and the body so she didn’t come into contact with it. The resulting outline is, if she may say so, excellent—both accurate and clear. She should tell the cops to switch from tape to Sharpie.
But the cops don’t seem impressed. In fact, they seem really annoyed. “Get her out of here,” the first officer barks.
“Ma’am, come with me,” Officer Gray says, and Vera frowns but does as Officer Gray says.
On her way out, Vera turns to the first officer and calls out, “I haven’t move anything, Officer. Everything just the way it was before this man is murder.”
One of Officer Gray’s eyebrows rises. “Murder? What makes you think it’s murder?”
Vera sighs at Officer Gray. Why is she asking such an obvious question? “It just... I can sense the aura, can’t you? Very bad aura. Ah, maybe your generation will know it as ‘vibes.’?”
“Because the victim has... bad vibes?” Officer Gray says.
Vera has the feeling Officer Gray doesn’t believe her. Why be a police officer when you can’t even count on your instincts? This is why these officers need her tea. She lifts her tray up higher, hoping Officer Gray will be able to smell the delicious tea. “Come, you drink this tea now. You need it. It will clear your mind and improve your memory.”
“Ma’am.” Officer Gray sighs. “Stop trying to make us drink tea. Put that tray down and come outside with me. Now.”
Vera is aghast. She’s old enough to be Officer Gray’s mother, for god’s sakes. Officer Gray should not be talking to her elders like this. Still, they are police officers, so Vera supposes she needs to follow the law or whatever, but as a sign of rebellion, she keeps hold of her tray as she walks out of her teahouse. She can’t believe she’s being shooed out of her own teahouse. Given that the man died in her teahouse, one would think that she has the right to follow every step of the investigation and offer up her many theories on what might have killed him. (Her current favorite theory is that he and his would-be killer had come to Vera’s for a nightcap and, upon finding the shop closed, had been so disappointed that one was driven to kill the other. Hey, if people can kill each other over road rage, why not tea rage?)
Outside, Vera is disappointed and surprised to see that there are no additional cops. Where is the CSI team? Where are the blood-spatter guys with their huge, bulky cameras and hazmat suits, and the bright yellow-and-black police tape, and the curious crowd pressing in, eager to see the murder victim? Where are the young and voracious reporters disguising themselves as detectives so they can steal into a crime scene?
But no, her street is just as quiet as ever, with the exception of—ugh—Winifred, whose head is peeping out of her cake shop. Every time Vera calls Winifred’s shop a “cake shop,” Winifred is quick to correct her.
“It’s a patisserie,” Winifred would say primly. “Insisting that I can’t call it a patisserie just because I’m not French is racist, Vera.”
“It’s not because you’re not French, Winifred; it’s because you don’t serve French pastries. Your cake shop serves Chinese pastries.”
“Many of them are French-influenced!”
“Just because you call your taro bun petit pain au taro does not make it French influenced.”
Anyway, now Winifred is watching from her definitely-not-French cake shop and Vera can just imagine what must be going through Winifred’s mind. Hah! Well, she can wonder all she wants; it was Vera’s teahouse that the man chose to be murdered in and not Winifred’s faux patisserie.
“Ma’am?”
It takes Vera a moment to realize that Officer Gray’s asked her a question. “Yes?”
“I said, can you tell me exactly what happened, starting from what you were doing before you found the body.”
“Yes, of course.” Vera is prepared for this. “So, at four thirty this morning, I wake up as usual. No alarm clock, you know. I wake up at four thirty exactly every morning, this is call discipline. What time you wake up every morning?”
Officer Gray closes her eyes for a moment. “Ma’am, this isn’t about me. Continue, please.”
“Hah.” Vera sniffs. “You young people always waking up late, is very bad for your health.”
“So you woke up...” Officer Gray says, waving her hand with what Vera thinks is more impatience than is called for.
“I wake up, then after I brush my teeth, etcetera, I go to the kitchen and first thing I do is drink a big glass of water. Every morning I do that. It cleanses the kidneys, you know, and—”
“Right, drank a glass of water, and then...?”
“I put on my visor—you know, California sun is so strong, no sunscreen is enough, not even SPF 90 sunscreen is enough. You must wear a hat, you understand? Protect your skin from the sun, otherwise you will get cancer.”
“Wear a hat, yes, got it. So as you were saying?”
“Then I go downstair, and that is when I see dead body.”
“Do you know the identity of the deceased?” Officer Gray’s pen hovers over her notepad.
Vera shakes her head. “Never see him before. But judging from his face, I think he is in early thirties, or maybe he is actually older. Asians have very good skin, you know. Yes, I would say maybe late thirties.”
To Vera’s immense disappointment, Officer Gray doesn’t write any of this down.
“Aren’t you going to write that down?”
Officer Gray ignores the question. “So you don’t know the deceased.” This she writes down. Not all of Vera’s wisdom, but Vera’s lack of knowledge about the victim. “Did anything strike you about the body?”
“Well, yes.” By now, Vera is desperate to be of help.
Officer Gray perks up.
“It was dead, for one,” Vera says wisely.
Officer Gray deflates. “Yeah, that’s... yeah, I got that. Anything else?”
“I leave it alone. I don’t touch it, because I know you will be wanting to check for DNA and fingerprints and all that,” Vera says with a touch of pride. She cranes her neck and looks pointedly around them. “Speaking of DNA, where is your CSI team?”
Officer Gray’s mouth thins into a line. “I’m afraid we don’t actually work like that, ma’am. God, I hate those shows,” she mutters. “Right now, my supervisor’s looking for signs of foul play, and forensics will be called in if he finds any signs.”
“What?” Once again, Vera is aghast. Everything she watched on TV has prepared her for nothing short of a small army of hazmat-suited professionals. “Well, there is clearly sign of foul play.”
“Oh?”
The tray of tea in Vera’s hands stops her from pointing, so she jerks her head at her front door. “Look, the killer break the glass!”
Officer Gray nods slowly. “That could be a sign, though I would really urge you to not jump to conclusions. There could be a dozen reasons why the glass was broken. Is there anything else you can think of that might be relevant to this investigation?”
“What about drugs?” she blurts out.
Officer Gray stares at her. “Drugs? What do you mean? Ma’am, did you touch the victim? Did you go through his belongings?”
Only very carefully , Vera wants to snap out, but she manages to hold herself back and say, “Of course no. I just think he look like the kind that have drugs, you know? I can tell, very bad sort.”
Officer Gray’s eyes narrow and Vera feels like a wayward child being reprimanded by an elder. Oof, she hasn’t had that feeling in a looong time, and she is not a fan.
“We’ll see about the drugs.”
Doubt bubbles up from the pit of Vera’s stomach, but she swallows it back down. She peers into her teahouse, where from her dusty window she can see two officers looking around the shop. She’s further disappointed to find that neither is brushing the shop carefully to collect prints, nor doing any sort of fancy investigative work. Shouldn’t they be radioing it in and calling for backup? Can’t young people do anything right these days? Must she do everything?
The answer to that is, of course, a resounding yes. And that is why Vera sighs and shakes her head. “No,” she says to Officer Gray. “There is nothing else.”
Later, after the police have left, and much later still, after the medical examiner has retrieved the body and taken it away, Vera stands in the unsettling quiet of her teahouse, looking down at the spot where the body was. Aside from the broken glass, there are no signs of a dead body having been there. Well, there is Vera’s very helpful outline, of course, but other than that, nothing. Not even a drop of blood.
The medical examiner hadn’t even been that perturbed when he came to take the body away. His team had refused Vera’s tea as well, but she’d managed to corner one of the underlings and terrified the poor kid into telling her that they’re just going to take the body to the morgue, but right now it looks like a heart attack, no foul play involved.
“No foul play?” Vera barked. “It’s clearly murder!”
“Uh, no, I don’t think—uh—it doesn’t look like it? But we are unable to—uh—confirm until further—uh—investigation,” he’d said before scampering away.
Oh, honestly. It seems she must do everything herself, including find the man’s killer. Though, Vera admits to herself as she sips the untouched Longjing and ginkgo tea, maybe she isn’t being fair. She drinks her mind-sharpening tea every day, after all, so can she blame everyone else for not being as astute as her?
Okay, perhaps the fact that she’s taken something out of the dead man’s clenched fist has given her a bit of an unfair advantage.
But no, it’s likely to be the tea.
···
Now, as Vera sits in her kitchen, she takes out the thing she’s hidden in the tissue box. It’s a thumb drive, its casing black and shiny. What came over her to take it out of the dead man’s hand like that? She should’ve left it for the cops to find, then maybe they would’ve taken it more seriously.
But, Vera argues with herself, we all know how useless the cops are. Just look at them today, so casual and dismissive. Vera knows they won’t do anything. Well, okay, she doesn’t actually know that. But she’s sure she would do a better job than they possibly could, because nobody sniffs out wrongdoing quite like a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands, and what does Vera have but time, now that Jinlong is gone and Tilly is off doing god knows what?
Yes, she did the right thing by taking the flash drive. And she knows, of course, that the killer will be back for the flash drive. In fact, Vera is going to take out a space in the local paper to put out an obituary ASAP. And she will post about it on the TikTok and the Twitter. No doubt the killer will be watching. They will know that it’s strange for an obituary to come out so soon after the death. They will know it’s a message. And when they come, Vera will be ready for them.