Page 7 of Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers

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.”Thisshe 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’tactually 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.

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