by Henry Chang
He gave the old woman the remainder of the stack of posters and the roll of tape, along with his detective’s card.
She thanked him and offered him tea. He politely declined, imagining instead a shot of XO or Johnny Walker. They’d have to wait forty-eight hours, but he knew people with poor mental health often wound up in the East River before then.
He left the Hester Street tenement, and after thirteen hours on the job, decided to head home to Sunset Park. He caught a minibus back to Brooklyn.
On Eighth Avenue he bought a fresh six-pack of Heineken at the 24 Deli, and a new bottle of XO from Wah Fu Liquors. The night had cooled, and on the three-block walk home he imagined a hot shower followed by a cold brew.
The hot shower sucked the stress out of his muscles but didn’t dissolve the mess in his mind. That was what the boilermakers were for, he knew. He’d started the day out looking for a person of interest in an assault case no one admits happened, and ended it looking for a Missing Person who no longer remembers who he is.
The first frosty gulps settled him, and he noticed a message on his phone that had arrived while he showered. An unfamiliar number, something he’d expected from Alexandra, keeping him posted, like she’d promised.
Hearing due soon. You may need to speak to Judge.
It wasn’t the message he wanted but he was glad for the connection. He wanted to call her back but knew he’d promised not to. She was just protecting the kid and the custody deal.
He wanted to say I miss you. Miss the touch of your hand. The taste of your lips. The smell of flowers in your hair. The scent of you after.
The message had given him a heart rush that he needed to slow down. He wanted to reach out and touch the memories but couldn’t, reaching instead for the XO and another Heineken.
Thinking of the missing Alzheimer’s lo gung, he wondered if people still stayed together, losing themselves in each other, until they no longer even recognize who they are.
He downed half the mug, switched off the lights. Closed his eyes. The questions and contradictions brought him back around to:
Her long black hair. Her runner’s legs.
The pretty face belonged to May McCann. He remembered her question.
Is there anyone you can turn to?
He took a deep shaolin breath, heard himself answering out loud.
“No. There’s no one.”
He drained the mug, closed his eyes to darkness and waited for the swirl of surrender.
Red Lobster
Jojo knew the area and picked the Red Lobster in Valley Stream. It had a big parking lot and was used to serving groups of foreign tourists. Lucky’s new crew would be forgotten soon after their plates hit the table. More important, the location kept them off the NYPD radar. Long Island cops had their own routines and protocols.
Jojo knew about how places like the Temple Garden Spa operated. Friday and Saturday nights were the busiest. The tally and cash-out for the weekend usually took place on Sunday night, when the triad managers and dailos skimmed off and divvied up the proceeds before anything passed down through the ranks. Payday on the streets was Monday morning.
Hit the Spa in the wee hours early Sunday morning was the plan. An easy rip-off, on the face of it, robbing a pimp-and-pussy operation. Jojo knew some of the whores and gai wong pimps there. Everyone there looking to fuck but not to fight, especially against masked men with guns. Working girls were there to earn, not to get deported. Nobody wants a piece of a violent rip-off crew, knowing it was best to just disappear and let the alpha dogs settle matters.
They’d engage any Ghost crew that happened by, with both Lam brothers armed with the Uzi and the shotgun.
They arrived separately, within minutes of each other. Lucky in the Buick, Loo Ga in his Mazda. Say Low parked his Charger at the far end, across from the Lam brothers in their utility Suburban. Jojo and Jadine waited in a generic minivan. All the vehicles had tinted windows. Cowboy was the last to arrive, popping out of a see gay car-service sedan.
Once they were inside and seated, Lucky watched his Lucky Eight bond over the surf ’n’ turf and cocktails. He waited until the waitresses left before breaking down the plan.
“Cowboy,” he said, “you go in first, check it out. It should be busy, so ask for an hour on the table. Call me on the setup. Wait ten minutes, then ask for a half hour on the doughnut chair instead.”
Jojo and Jadine sipped their drinks, two grifters awaiting their marching orders.
“Loo Ga, you’re the lead. Go in with Jojo.” Both men nodded at each other. “I’ll be right behind you. Get the gai wongs and the manager to one side. They control the money.” Loo Ga grinned, drained his vodka. Jojo sneered contemptuously, imagining the pimps he was going to get his revenge on. Jadine was quiet, knew her place.
“Lam brothers, you follow us in, push all the hos and johns into the basement. Some of them may be butt naked, but make sure no one has a cell phone.” The Lam brothers nodded, chewing on their lobster tails.
“You’re the last ones out,” Lucky continued, stone cold. “Make sure you have that quart of gasoline. Send everyone a message.” He turned his attention to Say Low.
“Say Low will be waiting in the van. Around the corner.” Say Low raised his drink like a toast, drained it.
“Jadine, you’re the backup. Minivan, a block away. If all goes well, we won’t need you. Meet us back at College Point.” The Lam brothers had a garage there.
“Everyone clear on all this?” Lucky laughed at the murmurs of acknowledgment.
“Another round!” he called in the direction of the waitresses. The game has begun, he thought, and it won’t be over until I get back to Chinatown.
Death Do Us Part
The call came in at 5 a.m., a dispatcher’s voice cutting through the foggy static in his head.
“You got a body. MEs at the scene.”
“What’s the twenty?” was all he could manage.
“Fifty-four Bayard.” Chinatown calling again.
“Fifth Precinct.” Another detail he already knew.
“Five-four Bayard. Copy that.”
The six-story tenement walk-up at 54 Bayard was worse than the one he’d grown up in on Pell Street. These apartments shared a closet toilet in the exterior hallway, a frozen seat on the crapper in the winter, a stinking sticky seat in the summer.
The female uniform on post, what some of the older cops called a skirt, was waiting on the top floor. She looked white Irish and wasn’t wearing a skirt, and had a chiseled face and regulation-smart head to boot.
“Detective Yu?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he flashed his shield. “What have you got?”
“Sixty-one-year-old female,” her jargon precise. “Asian. Collapsed while ironing her clothes.”
“Ironing before five a.m.?”
“Husband called 911. EMS pronounced her dead twenty minutes ago. We’re waiting on the ME pickup.” She stared at him like he was the first Asian cop she’d ever seen, who outranked her but in her eyes there was something less. He’d seen it before, tried not to take offense.
Female officers faced sexism all along the chain of command, the notion that women weren’t up to the job. He knew, because he’d trained Alexandra to shoot, that a woman with a gun could be just as capable as a man. Sometimes more capable.
But at least she didn’t say meat wagon, he thought.
“Okay,” as he digested her information, “thanks for the cliff-notes version. Husband inside?” He met her stare.
She nodded. “He’s probably in shock.” He pushed the door, went past her.
The old Chinese man had to be over seventy years old, reminded Jack of his own Pa. From the last big wave of Cantonese stock, the old man sat on a milk crate, in a quiet solemn grieving more of words and gestures than tears.
He seemed to b
e talking to himself.
“She was getting her clothes ready. She takes the early train to Long Island, and has to rush in the morning.”
The room was a hoarder’s nightmare. Stacks of newspapers, mail-order goods, blocking off entire sections of the apartment. Pots and buckets placed strategically beneath the leaky ceiling. Candles arranged haphazardly throughout.
On a wall shelf were some photos, colorful ones of them together at a senior center, and old sepia-toned pictures of his army days from World War II.
The woman lay face up on the linoleum floor. The EMS techs had turned her over and tried to no avail to resuscitate her.
She looked finally at peace.
The husband shifted on the crate he’d placed next to her, the two of them framed in the yellow light of the lone bulb hanging down from the leaky ceiling.
“She was just trying to get ready for work,” he mumbled.
“Ah sook,” Jack consoled the senior. “Uncle, we have to honor her. Honor the lifetime of memories.”
The man nodded, accepting the wisdom from the young cop’s mouth.
“In this country,” he said, “you work until you die.”
Jack looked around at the stacks of boxes and shopping bags full of Chinatown junk. He wondered how the old couple had come to this.
“She died getting ready for work.”
Jack turned his attention from the sad scene when the female cop poked her head inside the door.
“Wagon’s here,” she announced quietly, near the end of her one-off dose of overtime in the Fifth Precinct.
He turned back to the old man.
“You may want to pick out a nice dress,” he suggested.
“Dress?”
“Something you’d want to remember her by. Like something she’d wear on vacation.”
“Vacation? Yes, she needed a vacation.”
“Sunny skies.” He forced a sad smile.
“Sunny skies,” the old man repeated as the morgue attendants loaded his wife onto the gurney.
“You don’t have to go to the morgue. You know the Wah Fook funeral parlor on Mulberry Street?”
“Everyone in Chinatown knows Wah Fook.”
“I’ll ask the medical examiner to make the transfer when they’re done.”
The man frowned and nodded his agreement as Jack followed the body out, pulling the door shut behind him.
He watched from the sidewalk as the black morgue wagon pulled off the curb and headed into the daylight leaking over the Lower East Side. Death was never pretty, he knew, but at least this was a natural death, not a homicide, as far as he could see. The poor woman worked until she dropped dead. She’d killed herself, in essence.
Did that make him care less? Pa had worked himself sick as well. Still, he was saddened, but without the added anger. He felt out of sync. At 6 a.m. in Chinatown, it was too early to call the Wah Fook parlor, too early even for Eddie’s Coffee Shop or the Tofu King. Everything closed, Chinatown a ghost town. And he wasn’t in the right mind or mood to bang out a report with the dregs of the overnight shift at the Fifth.
As he walked the deserted streets away from Mott, he heard May McCann’s, Doctor McCann’s, voice in his head.
“So you’re disaffected emotionally, detective?”
“I never said that,” he remembered answering.
At 6 a.m., even the whores are turning for home.
He changed course toward Tribeca and the all-night-diner hope of an early-bird breakfast special.
He reported to the day shift at the Fifth Precinct, typing the death report on a table in the back of the station house, where the detectives filed their cases. The old woman had succumbed to a heart attack, a natural death, so the paperwork was minimal, cut and dried.
The deceased was Mrs. Chun Yook Ha, age 61. She resided at 54 Bayard, Apartment 5B. EMS pronounced her dead and the morgue would classify the COD, or “cause of death,” as cardiac arrest and mark the time around 0530 hours. Five-thirty in the morning.
Once they released the body, the Wah Fook funeral parlor would take care of the rest. Jack needed to make sure the widowed husband, Kitman James Chun, followed up. Most Chinatown Chinese didn’t have much of a nest egg but pragmatically would have their burial insurance paid up.
He was hoping to catch a few minutes with CO Captain Marino but he hadn’t yet appeared.
Jack left the report in the captain’s tray.
When he got around to the Wah Fook parlor, the manager confirmed that Mr. Chun had indeed stopped by and signed off on the funeral package. Jack thanked the funeral director for his help and was on the way out when his cell phone jangled again.
“Ah Sir?”
Every time he’d heard the Chinese slang for cop it’d been followed by trouble. He took a small shaolin breath.
It was the old Toishanese woman who’d lost track of her equally old Alzheimer’s husband. He heard new life in her voice.
“They found lo-gung and he is resting now!”
“Where?” Jack asked.
“In Columbus Park.”
“He was okay?”
“He was feeding the pigeons.”
“The pigeons?”
“People said he was tossing them bits of two cha siew baos he had in a bag.”
“Where’s he now?”
“I had him checked at the Health Clinic but he’s home with me now. Strange, though.”
“Strange? How so?”
“When they asked him where he’d been, he said he visited his old buddies at the American Legion, on Canal Street. But nobody there remembered him. He did serve in World War II but wasn’t a member of the Kimlau Post.”
Jack momentarily pondered the mysteries of the mind.
“When I picked him up, you know the first thing he asked?”
“What?”
“What’s for lunch?”
Jack couldn’t help laughing.
“Like he never left.”
“Good,” said Jack, relieved. “Please, ah por, keep an eye on him now.”
“Yes. And I have something to give you. A small token.”
“Not necessary, ah por.”
“Yes, I will call you . . .”
“M’sai,” Jack cut her off, before hanging up. Not necessary. He’d promised Pa, as a cop, he’d never take anything while on the job, especially from Chinese.
A case that ended happily made him feel positive, better than how the brutal cases depressed him. Good karma flowed, and the rest of the shift was peaceful. For the time being, nobody killed anybody in Manhattan South.
Pussy Time
The Temple Garden Spa, No. 2600, was at the far end of the commercial strip on Thirty-Seventh Avenue, leading to and from LaGuardia Airport. The offices and small businesses at that end were closed after dark, and the Temple Spa was a destination point rather than a tourist discovery.
Cowboy wore a fuddy-duddy shirt with black slacks and sneakers, looking like Chinese-restaurant kitchen help out for some late-night excitement. He was used to the play johns gave to surveillance cameras, an I’m harmless jes wanna fuck vibe. Easy enough, they buzzed him in, just another hom sup low.
“One hour,” he said to the Chinese lady behind the counter. “On the table.”
There was a video monitor there that she glanced at occasionally. He’d need to get the videotape, especially since he was the only one of the crew not to wear a mask. She handed him a small card with a number on it.
“It may be fifteen minutes,” she said, motioning to a set of lounge chairs and padded benches where two men sat in dim light watching a TV screen.
He heard low-key music floating in the air.
“Sure,” he answered, taking a seat on one of the benches behind the men. They were both enjoying their drinks, and Cowboy figured t
hey wouldn’t notice the slight bulge of his ankle holster and the flat little .22-caliber Colt nestled there.
There was a tray table with plastic bottles of tea and water. He chose water and took a swallow. He could hear soft groans from the little stalls lined up against the wall behind the Chinese-style curtains.
After a few minutes, a satisfied customer came out from one of the back stalls and paid the woman at the counter. She put the cash somewhere beneath the counter. The satiated john departed, and Cowboy knew the crew would spot him and wait until he cleared the street before they approached. He took another sip of water and scanned the scene.
There was just the one guy at the door, an old-school geezer too old not to be armed. He’d probably earned the post and couldn’t be underestimated. The two men watching TV could be customers, a manager and pimp, or just backup. He couldn’t tell which, and since neither man spoke, he couldn’t venture a guess.
He put down the water bottle, watched to see if either of the men headed for the back stalls. He didn’t see any numbered cards in their hands. Or maybe there were a few minutes of rest between shifts for the working girls?
If it was his turn, Cowboy knew to ask for fifteen minutes in the doughnut chair instead. He knew, in the closing hour among the last dregs of the night crawlers, a short stint at the doughnut chair was a good deal for any massage girl. Better than having to polish off the knobs of the last hom sup lows. Also, the chair provided him an excuse not to be undressed, ready for action.
Another minute passed. Neither man moved, and Cowboy made the call as planned. He punched in the number 1 and then 2: 1 for one man at door, 2 for two men waiting. He knew Lucky and the others would get the picture.
He resisted the urge to touch his ankle holster.
The street was deserted.
The five men slipping out of the dark van appeared to have attended a celebration, with the party now drifting toward the Temple Spa around the corner.