by S. J. Rozan
“This is so sad,” she said, turning away. “Who’ll visit him now? As long as Li Min Jin members get buried over there, there’ll be people to greet Uncle Meng, but Mr. Chang was the only person besides Uncle Meng I ever saw come over here. I suppose I can sweep the grave at Qing Ming when I come to do Uncle Meng’s, but I’m not family.”
“Does Nat come with you on Qing Ming?”
“When we were kids we all used to come for Aunt Mei-Mei—Uncle Meng, Mom, Dad, Nat, and me. These days Nat brings her kids to do our parents’ graves, but she doesn’t come all the way down here afterwards. The last couple of years I came alone with Uncle Meng.”
I thought of something and looked around. “Mel,” I said, “where are the children?”
“What?”
“Your aunt and uncle had a baby son who died. Long Lo had a three-year-old daughter. Where are their graves?”
“You know,” she said, “I never thought to ask.”
“With the parents?” Bill asked. “Just not marked?”
“But why not mark them?” I said. “In older cemeteries children are mostly buried in a separate area. But I don’t see one here.”
“Oh God,” Mel said. “That’s even sadder. I never asked, and now we’ll never know.” After another few moments, she smiled. “Who’s irrational now? I’m certainly being morbid, aren’t I?”
Bill said, “Well, it’s a cemetery.”
“Yes.” Mel looked around silently for a while, then said, “Whenever you’re ready, we can go. I need to get back to the office anyway.”
I asked, “You’re not going to the funeral meal?”
“I have a feeling I wouldn’t be welcome. Though I’d like to be a fly on the wall. Maybe they’ll all try to poison each other.”
“You’re not serious.”
“No. What I’d really like is to be there tomorrow when they start opening doors and knocking holes.” She looked from me to Bill. “If I decide to actually go, will you come with me?”
“You know it,” I said.
We headed down the hill to where Bill’s car was parked. As we walked through the fallen leaves, Mel’s phone rang. She stepped away from us and took the call. It was brief and she returned with a bemused smile. “That was your brother.”
“Tim?”
“He wants to meet me for coffee.”
“Better you than me.”
“Don’t be mean.”
“I’m serious. He’ll be nice to you.”
“I wonder why.”
“Because he likes you?”
“Not why he’ll be nice. Why he wants to meet.”
“Same,” I said. “Because he likes you.”
Just as we reached Bill’s car my phone sang “Bad Boys.”
Mel laughed. “Oddly appropriate, here.” She gestured toward the tong’s hillside.
“Totally appropriate,” I said. “It’s my cousin.” I answered the phone. “Hey, Linus.”
“Hey. You on the street? I hear a subway.”
“Life in the midst of death. I’m at the entrance to Cypress Hills Cemetery. The elevated runs right by here.”
“Convenient. Anyone I know?”
“The deceased? No, a professional acquaintance.”
“You know they bury gangsters there?”
“No kidding. Did you call to tell me that?”
“No, I have intel. Since you’re so close by, want to come up here when you’re done? We also have coffee.”
“Of course you do.” Coffee was what fueled Wong Security. After the trestle tables that held up the tech, the second item installed in the converted garage—before the tech itself—had been the De’Longhi espresso machine.
“As it happens,” I told Linus, “we’re already done. Twenty minutes?”
Mel ordered herself an Uber. Bill and I waited with her until it arrived to whisk her off to coffee with my brother. Then we got in Bill’s car to whisk ourselves off to coffee with my cousin.
36
A chain-link fence ran around my aunt and uncle’s lot in Flushing, on Magnolia between Ash and Beech. A hundred years ago this area of Flushing used to have a couple of big plant nurseries; there’s not much left except the street names, but they go alphabetically all the way to Rose. The fence enclosed the brick-and-siding house, the lawn, the driveway, and the garage. After I’d opened the gate for Bill, I went to ring the bell at the garage’s side door, but before I got there the door swung open. Woof came charging out, tail wagging furiously, almost knocking me down in an effort to lick my face. He abandoned me immediately, though, when he saw Bill getting out of the car. They’d gotten to be best buds on a case that still gave me nightmares. While Bill wrestled with Woof, Trella appeared in the doorway.
“Hey.” She grinned. At five foot eight, she’s taller than I am, and taller than Linus by a couple of inches also. She wore a short tartan skirt, a black sweater, black tights, and heavy black boots. Her blond hair spiked in all directions.
“Hey.” I hugged her and proceeded inside.
The cluttered, cable-draped, computer-crowded garage seemed to not have changed since the last time I was here, though I was sure it had. Linus kept not just the software but also all the hardware on the bleeding technological edge, so some of these machines with their red or blue diode lights were bound to be new. The room was chilly as usual, the AC always on except in the depths of winter to keep the equipment cool, the windows covered to keep out prying eyes. If it weren’t for Woof needing walks and games of Frisbee, my cousin might never see the light of day.
“Hi, cuz!” Linus spun around in his ergonomic chair. “Saw you coming!” He launched his stocky self out of the chair and hugged me.
“What do you mean?”
“Couple of weeks ago I stuck cameras on half a dozen light poles.”
“City light poles?”
“Tiny little cameras. Not bothering anybody. I told the program to look for a gray Audi. The system beeped when it picked you up.”
“It didn’t say, ‘Yo, Linus, your peeps are here’?”
“I didn’t put in a speech protocol. You think I should?”
“Hey,” Bill said to Linus and Trella. He came inside with Woof, who was still bounding with joy at having us for guests. Bill reached into the biscuit jar and got him a treat. I walked over to the counter where the espresso machine stood and found a plate for the polvorones we’d picked up at a Dominican bakery on our way over. What I’d told Mel Wu about citrus notwithstanding, I knew pastry would go over better here. Trella went to the espresso machine itself, her particular charge. “The usual?” she asked, and on our nods she hissed up a double espresso for Bill and a latte macchiato for me. She made Americanos for Linus and herself, his black, hers with cream and about a quarter cup of sugar.
“So,” I said to Linus, who’d plonked back down in his chair. “What’s the good word?”
“Don’t know how good it is. I can tell you it’s not complete. We could find out more if—”
“No.” I rolled another chair over. Bill opened a folding chair, and Trella brought us all our coffees and sat cross-legged on the rug next to Woof.
“Okay then. Here’s what we have.” Linus looked to Trella.
“First, your boy Ting,” Trella said. “We already told you his financials look in order. But bad things seem to happen around him. Including one murder. You know about that?”
I nodded and tried my latte. Excellent, as always.
“They happen around him, these things, but no one’s been able to tie any of them directly to him. Either he’s really good, or he’s just unlucky.”
“Or,” Bill said, “lucky. These bad things are good for business, am I right?”
“Totally. The homicide, I guess you know, was a window supplier. Ting had trouble with the guy, the guy sent a mug to blow up stuff, and then the guy was dead. A couple of other things like that, nobody else dead, but suppliers suddenly lowering prices after their truck tires were all slashed, subcontractors putting
on the extra crews Ting wanted after someone ended up in a hospital from a mugging. None of this”—she grinned—“is all that unusual in the construction world. It is unusual to get away with it for as long as Ting has without anything sticking to you.”
“But he has?” I asked.
“Teflon.”
“But,” said Linus, “there’s something else kind of interesting about these bad things.”
“If you look backward,” Trella picked it up again, “you can find them all in the industry press. Before they happen, I mean. There’ll be an article about a strike at one of Ting’s projects, for example. Then a week later the union rep’s wife breaks her arm and the strike gets settled. But he’s had other problems that don’t make the newsletters or the blogs, and that stuff doesn’t always get fixed as fast, or necessarily in Ting’s favor.”
“How did you find out about all this?”
“I have a couple of cousins in the construction business.”
“Of course you do.”
“You know,” Bill said, “Mike DiMaio told us something similar. That Ting doesn’t always come out on top, just more often than other developers.”
“That’s interesting,” I said. “And that difference seems to depend on whether or not the problem made the industry news?”
“Seems to,” Trella agreed.
“Hmm.”
“But wait!” Linus intoned, in the voice of a late-night commercial. “There’s more!”
“I thought there might be. Fascinating as all that is—and it is—I didn’t think you’d ask us to come all the way here just to tell us that.”
“Sure I would,” said Linus. “Because I knew you’d bring cookies.”
“Seriously?”
“No. The cookies are good, though. We do have something else. Not about Ting. About Wu Mao-Li and Wu Na-Li. A.k.a. Melanie Wu and Natalie Wu Harris.” He slugged back some coffee.
“Their financials are all normal, too, as far as we can tell,” Trella said. “Including the husband. No huge debts, no big infusions or outflows of cash. Good credit reports, all that. Natalie seems to have married well, as they say. She also seems to have been in and out of trouble when she was younger, including a fairly spectacular motorcycle accident on a stolen bike when she was fifteen.”
“Ha,” I said. “She told me it was a bike accident. I thought bicycle.”
“The motorcycle was a friend’s, so no charges, et cetera. Doesn’t seem to have slowed her down. Looks like she kept living la vida loca until she met her husband. Then she settled down.”
“You sound like you feel bad for her. For settling down.”
“Me?” Trella’s innocent wide eyes, wrapped in her punk look and given her choice of boyfriend/employer, were downright ridiculous.
“Is there more?”
“I wanna have more more more more more and more!” Linus warbled. “Don’t wanna stop more more more and more!”
“Excuse me?”
“Twice. They’re a K-pop girl group. Of course there’s more. Not actually dirt, but interesting. Five years ago, and again two years ago, they went to a place in Woodbury called Gold Coast IVF.”
“IVF? Well, Natalie said they had trouble getting pregnant. It’s not surprising they’d try—oh. Oh!”
Everyone turned to me. Even Woof raised his head.
“Ting’s threat,” I said. “What if those kids aren’t Ting’s, but they’re not Paul’s, either? What if they used donated sperm?”
“You mean hubby was shooting blanks?”
Trella said, “Linus! Ew.”
“Sorry.”
I said, “That would explain why Natalie’s so desperate to keep her son from taking a DNA test. According to her, her in-laws would cry tears of joy to find out those kids weren’t actually their son’s. They’d file his divorce papers themselves.”
“Wow,” said Trella. “Stinkers.”
“No kidding. And—”
My phone chirped out the client ring. I hadn’t given Mel her own tone, but the readout told me that’s who it was.
“Excuse me a minute,” I said to the coffee klatch. “Hi, Mel. What’s up?”
“Something really bad. I’m sending you a video. Call me back after you watch it.” Mel’s voice sounded barely under control. She clicked off.
“That was Mel,” I told the room. “Trouble.”
A few seconds later a video arrived by text. I tapped it on and we all watched.
Natalie, looking into the camera, fear in her eyes. “Mel?” she said. “Please. Sell Jackson the building.” Her gaze shifted, maybe to the person behind the camera. She said nothing else and the camera slowly pulled back to reveal a shadowed, overhead-lit room with nothing visible in it except Natalie, tied to a chair.
“You heard her,” growled a male voice off-screen. “You heard her, so do it.” I didn’t recognize the voice, its accent heavily Chinese. “No cops, no one else, no trouble. No trouble, Ting gets the building, she goes home. Trouble, she’s dead.”
The screen went blank.
37
What the hell?” said Trella, while Linus sat wide-eyed. I looked at Bill and pressed “call back” on my phone. Mel answered immediately.
“When did it come?” I asked.
“Just now. A blocked number.”
“Do you know the male voice?”
“No.”
“Or the place? Anything familiar about it?”
“No. Where are you? You have me on speaker? You’re not on the street or something, are you? So everyone in the world could see that?”
“No, no, I’m with Bill. I wanted him to hear.” I held up a warning finger to Linus and Trella and didn’t go further. Mel was already disobeying the “no one else” demand by calling me, and boy, did she sound right on the edge.
“Mel,” I said, wondering exactly how to put this, “is there any chance this is… staged?”
“Staged? You mean, by Nat? Are you crazy? Did you see how scared she looked? I know her. That’s real fear. And besides, she’s not a good liar. That’s why I had to back up all her stupid stories when we were kids. And why? What does she care whether I sell the building? Uncle Meng left her and her kids plenty of money. If she does care, why not just tell me? Dammit, I called you for help, and that’s it, you think Nat’s doing this?” In a more muffled voice, as though she’d turned away: “You were wrong.”
“Wrong? About what?”
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
A familiar voice said, “Give me that.” A second later my brother Tim came on the line. “She was talking to me. I told her to call you because I thought you could help. She was telling me I was wrong about that. I better not have been.”
“Tim?” Of course. He and Mel were having coffee. “No. No, you weren’t wrong. Tell her to trust me. I’m on it.”
“And you’re not going to the police, right?”
“No,” I said. “That’s not where I’m going.” Which was very lawyerly of me. That wasn’t where I was going. But he hadn’t asked me who I was going to call.
I hung up, but I didn’t call Mary right away. I kept my right to do that in reserve, but we might not have to. “You guys,” I said to Linus and Trella. “Can you learn anything from that video?”
“Maybe,” Linus said, all business now. “Send it to me.”
I forwarded the video. “Call me if you find anything. Come on,” I said to Bill.
“Sure. Where?”
“To see Jackson Ting. I’ve had it with that guy.”
* * *
From Flushing to Turtle Bay took us twenty minutes. I had a feeling it was usually a longer trip, but Bill’s the surest, least-likely-to-get-caught fast driver I know. I googled parking lots near Ting’s building, so when we got there we’d know right where to go.
“You really think Ting’s behind this?” Bill asked as we drove.
“Who else? Someone just doing the guy a favor? Who benefits if Mel sells the building to him? He do
es, and Nat does because he leaves her alone. If Mel’s right and this is real, not Nat’s idea of a good idea, then it’s got to be him.”
“Or maybe, old man Loo?”
“What?” I looked over at him.
“Loo wants the building sold, isn’t that what you said? Both he and Ironman want to trim the deadwood from the tong and start again, even though they have different ideas about who that is. Loo thinks the building’s holding them back.”
“Oh,” I said.
“And Loo’s actually a gangster. I might put money on him for a kidnapping before Ting.”
“Damn.” I thought for a minute, then, “No. They’re going to lose the building either way. Whether Mel sells, or keeps it and evicts them. All Loo has to do is wait. Ting’s the one who has a deadline and can’t wait. This is about him.”
“Okay, you’re probably right. I just…”
I glanced over sharply. “You just what?”
Bill said nothing.
“You just don’t want me to screw up because I’m so blown away that my brother told Mel to call me that I may not be thinking straight?”
He kept his eyes on the road as he said, “Something like that.”
I blew out a breath. “Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”
* * *
I didn’t want Ting to know we were coming, but I did want to make sure he was there. “If he’s not?” said Bill.
“Then we’ll just track him down. From the developer-smell.”
But he was. As soon as we emerged from the tunnel I called his office.
“Good ay-eff-ternoon,” I said to the receptionist in my best Southern drawl. “This is Lucinda St. Clair from the Junior League? Mr. Ting made such a lovely donation and I’d just like to thank him personally. I won’t take up much of his valuable time.”
“Just a minute, I’ll see if he’s in.”
As soon as she put me on hold I hung up. “He’s there,” I told Bill. Receptionists know whether the boss is in or out. “If he’s in” is code for “will take your call.”
We pulled into the lot I’d found. Bill gave the attendant a twenty to put the car right up front, nose-out. The guy didn’t even blink. We quick-walked to Ting’s building.