Murder on the Potomac by Margaret Truman

decay—did not fit into that category.
    Outside and away from his lunch guest, Cheong enjoyed the sun on his face. The day had started gray. When he’d arrived at the restaurant, cool, moist air wasone step removed from outright rain. But a front had arrived during lunch, dragging behind it a broom of cool, sunny weather.
    He looked at his watch: ten minutes past two. Lunch had lasted too long, but the Norwegian salmon had prospered at the hands of the anonymous chef.
    He adjusted the lapels of his black Armani double-breasted suit and watched a tall, statuesque blond woman walk past. Well, saunter by, to be precise. As his eyes lingered on the seductive sway of her body, a smile of appreciation formed on his lips. Cheong’s face seldom displayed thoughts and feelings. When describing him, friends and colleagues often said, “Not very expressive.” One said to him, “You ought to enter the World Poker Championship. You’d win hands-down with that face of yours.”
    He checked his watch again. Almost an hour before the call would come. He walked at a leisurely pace, stopped to admire offerings in the windows of men’s shops, bought a vanilla frozen-yogurt cone from a sidewalk vendor, and eventually reached Judiciary Square, yet another Washington monument, this to the nation’s law-enforcement officers who’d fallen in the line of duty. The square sat between D and F streets, a Metro entrance in its center. Lining the D Street side were courthouses: the United States Court of Military Appeals, the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, and other granite halls of justice and otherwise.
    At the opposite end, on F Street, stood the redbrick National Building Museum, its three-feet-high, twelve-hundred-feet-long facade of buff terra-cotta frieze depicting Civil War forces. Pension records were once kept secure there. The facade was a perpetual stone paradeof Union infantry, navy, medical units, artillery, cavalry, and quartermaster personnel returning from battle.
    Behind the museum was the General Accounting Office. And beyond that was the beginning of Washington’s “Chinatown,” small by San Francisco or New York standards but home to five thousand of the some thirty thousand Chinese-Americans living in the area.
    He paused in front of the Friendship Arch that marked its official entrance at Seventh and H streets. Three hundred garishly painted dragons mauled each other across its top. Cheong knew the arch had important meaning for Chinatown’s citizens, but it had no significance for him. He’d decided long ago that symbolism, like religion, only mattered to the poor, who needed something mysterious to ease dreary lives. “Dreary” was not a word Cheong would use to describe his life since coming to America.
    He walked another block, pausing occasionally to inhale the pungent odors wafting from small produce shops. Some things you never outgrew. Two elderly Chinese men argued on the sidewalk over a transaction gone sour. Something to do with a wristwatch. Cheong didn’t listen long enough to learn more details.
    He stopped again, this time to read a plaque affixed to a historical landmark— THE SURRATT BOARDING HOUSE . According to the Chinese-American Lions Club, which had placed the plaque, it was here conspirators had plotted the abduction of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865.
    Obviously before it fell into the hands of the Chinese, Cheong thought.
    A few doors down from the plaque was a restaurant.Cheong peered through the front window. Someone inside waved. He looked left and right, then entered, returned a greeting without breaking stride, went to the rear of the dining room, swung open doors into the steaming kitchen, slid past sweating cooks, and disappeared through another door, behind which was a narrow flight of wooden stairs.
    He exited two floors up into a carpeted corridor lighted by recessed ceiling fixtures with low-wattage bulbs. A series of doors lined the hallway. Cheong stood in front