by Ed Lin
“No, thanks.”
“Don’t thank me. It’s on the house and so is anything else you want to drink. You know that, right?”
“Naw. I’m not hungry.”
“You will be, though. Better eat now while the kitchen’s open.”
“I’ll eat when I get hungry.”
“That’s a novel idea.” Bad Boy smiled and puffed on his cigar. “So what’s on your mind, kid?”
“I’m trying to get the outside numbers called on a pay phone.”
“That’s easy.”
“But even if I could get them, I don’t think I have enough to make it stick in an affidavit.”
“Is that all?”
“It’s enough of a problem.”
“What condition was the phone in?”
“It was broken.”
“Smashed up?”
“No, it’s a phone booth inside a diner in Midtown. It looks fine except the line is down.”
“It doesn’t look fine.”
“What?”
“Go back there and pry off the dial. The phone’s been vandalized. Destruction of public property. You have to trace outgoing calls to help determine who could have committed such a crime. You can go through me to speed up the number retrieval. But don’t let anyone in the Midtown precinct know. They might come after your ass for destruction of public property.”
“You do things like this regularly?”
“No no no! This is kids’ stuff, Chow. You get the bobcat badge for this one. You can even give me the phone number now so I can get a head start on it.”
“I don’t know the number, but the diner’s on the corner of Fifty-eighth and Sixth.”
He scratched his chin. “Funny. I think I know that place. A bookie was working that line, right?”
“That’s what I heard. But I’m not after the bookie.”
“Yeah, stay away from them. Could know a lot of people higher up, and a young guy like you hasn’t got much cover. So are you looking for any particular number?”
“Just one over three nights. The murdered Chinese guy was using the phone, I think.”
His mouth tightened. “Aw, fuck. Not that. Are you good with Izzy?”
“Yeah, I am.”
“Okay. You scared me for a second. So. What am I going to get out of this?”
“You’re going to get to give me a bobcat badge.”
Bad Boy smiled. “I like you. I mean that. So, really, no steak for you?”
I was actually pretty hungry. It would have been so easy to sit down and put a napkin in my lap.
It took me a while to get back to the diner because the train schedules were all messed up due to a track fire. I ate a Hostess apple pie while waiting on the subway platform, but it only made me a little hungrier and thirsty on top of that.
I was worried that the counter guy would want to chat again, but luckily, a guy I didn’t know was behind the counter talking to two goofy girls in short skirts and big heels. In the phone booth, the dial came off surprisingly easy with just a cheap screwdriver. I shoved the dial in my jacket pocket.
I left and the guy didn’t notice. I could’ve walked in with a flamethrower and he wouldn’t have looked away from the girls.
Bad Boy had the list of calls for me the next morning; there was Teresa’s number twice.
I gave what I had over to Izzy. I told him I was going to bring in a witness who could place Mr. Chen at the diner. Izzy looked at me and said I was going to get credit for working on the case. I said I wanted Vandyne on it, too, and he agreed.
I didn’t think you had any white friends!” Vandyne said. He almost had to yell even though he was sitting next to me on a wooden bench against a wall.
“Anyone who will voluntarily take the time to head over to Manhattan South and make a statement is a friend of mine,” I said. “Walt from the diner helped make us part of the investigation. Looked good for the affidavit, too. That arrest warrant should be here any second.”
“Now you’re going to officially get credit for your hard work!”
“This wasn’t about work for me, man! It was personal!”
We looked around the room. Manhattan South’s homicide bureau was as loud as a carnival that served booze. Phones were ringing everywhere. Down the hall, suspects who were locked up in temporary cells were screaming and banging themselves against the metal bars. The bureau was staffed with people who were hired based on how loud they could slam drawers and their ability to scream through layers of sound.
I didn’t know how anyone could take it. My ears were ringing after about an hour. We had to wait for a warrant that could come any minute, hopefully before my hearing went.
Izzy stopped by and we huddled. “Everything cool, you two?”
Vandyne nodded and I gave a thumbs-up.
“That was good work, Chow.”
“It was a lot of guesswork that paid off.”
“Won’t be long now.”
“Any idea?” asked Vandyne.
“Ask Chow to guess.” Izzy peeled off and did a cannonball into the teeming masses. Waves of people rippled away from him.
“I get it.” I said.
“Get what?”
“This is what it’s about. Being a detective. Having a gold shield. I used to think it would be just something for me, you know, what I would get out of it. Really, though, it’s about being part of a larger organism.”
“Let’s see how you feel when you’re figuring out your pension and you’re not getting enough overtime in your last year to pad it out!”
“Vandyne, there aren’t going to be pension funds left by the time we retire.”
He smiled. “There’s going to be pensions. Or there’s going to be tensions.”
I pounded the bench to show my approval. “Vandyne, I was wondering something.”
“Shoot.”
“What have you done that was out of the black bag?”
“I’ll tell you. Someone broke a window in the backseat of a car and anonymously reported it to the police. I happened to be in the area so I responded. As I investigated the incident, I found an unregistered and loaded gun in the glove compartment. I arrested the car owner and that was the start of that heroin ring bust about a year ago.”
“I thought the midget had fed you some tips for that case.”
“He did, but it wasn’t enough.” Vandyne turned to me. “You can’t tell me what I did was wrong. That was nothing compared with the shit you and I were doing in Nam and nobody stopped us there.”
I nodded. Among other things, we had also each killed a little boy out there. Mine was holding a ball and wouldn’t stop walking up to me. Vandyne’s was inside a hollowed-out tree, shooting up a camp from inside the trunk.
I felt my kill was worse because the boy had nothing on him, but I never told Vandyne that.
“That case set you up for a gold shield, right?” I asked.
“Yeah, it did. If everything breaks the way it should in this case, it could do the same for you.”
“Was that gun already in there?”
“It was there when I found it.”
“Did you put it there?”
“No.”
“Did someone else?”
“Yeah, someone else did. The suspect.”
“Are you sure?”
“If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to type up that report.”
“You can’t type anyway, partner.”
He shook his head.
I said, “Let’s make a rule right now. Just you and me, Vandyne.” I looked around. “We don’t pull out the black bag for money.”
“Absolutely.”
“Otherwise we’re no different from those scumbags Serpico wrote about.”
“You’re dead right.”
We reached out to each other and shook hands. After making the promise I felt a little better.
“So, tell me how Paul is doing with the guitar.”
“He’s terrible!”
&n
bsp; “Really?”
“Yeah.”
“I think this could be the first thing he’s having trouble learning.”
“I don’t think it’s that. You have to suck at it for years until one day your experience pays off and you reach a point where you know what you’re doing.”
“It’s like anything else, then, isn’t it?”
On the other side of the room, Izzy held up a folded piece of paper that cut through the crowd like a shark fin headed for us.
“Looks like we’ve got action,” I said.
I gently pressed my finger to the apartment button. A wave of static shot back and the front door buzzed open. I looked back at Izzy and he nodded. We both went up.
When we got to Teresa’s door, she looked shocked that we were there.
“Hi, Teresa. Have you met Izzy? He’s one of the top guys at Manhattan South.”
“Oh, what are you guys doing here?” she asked.
“Surprised?” asked Izzy. He pushed his way in and I followed.
“Yes,” said Teresa. “I mean no. Have you found out more about who killed Lincoln?” She closed the door behind her and stepped into the living room. Teresa was wearing slacks and a blouse and no shoes.
“The thing is, Teresa,” I said, “did you happen to speak to Mr. Chen at any time on the phone?” As I was talking, Izzy slowly walked along the walls of the rooms.
“Me? Why would I talk to Mr. Chen?”
“It seems that he had called here a couple times.”
“He did?”
“Yeah, seemed pretty late at night, too. I think you would have been in, as you are now.”
“How did you know he called here?”
“I talked to him.”
“You talked to him?”
“Bodies always talk, don’t you know that?”
Izzy stepped in from the kitchen. “Nice apartment,” he said. “By the way, how did that blood splatter get on the wall? They never seem to come out completely, do they? I have the same problem in my house. Anyway, I think we can match some of your prints on the bloody rolling pin we’ve got.”
“Why did you kill Mr. Chen?” I asked Teresa quietly.
Suddenly she was a blur. Teresa rushed out the door and ran up.
“We’re covered, right?” asked Izzy.
“Oh, yeah.” I said.
Two minutes later, Vandyne brought Teresa down in handcuffs with a Manhattan South detective behind.
“Why do people run up to the roof?” Vandyne growled. “Her feet are all cut up now.”
“She wanted to say hi to Santa Claus,” I said. We all laughed at her and her stupid bloody legs.
The story came out that Mr. Chen had been calling Teresa from a pay phone. He could have called from his room, but he didn’t want anyone to know that he was trying to reach his illegitimate daughter who had fled China years ago.
The lobby tapes had shown that Mr. Chen left the hotel temporarily the first two nights, coinciding with the phone calls at the pay-phone booth in the diner.
Teresa had grown up in near poverty with her mother, and Mr. Chen had sent them money only rarely. She saw his picture in the newspaper from time to time but didn’t believe that he was her father until he visited very late at night on her tenth birthday. At the time, she had picked up a kitchen mallet and hit him on his arm as hard as she could with it.
He should have known not to come looking for her fifteen years later, after she had taken a train south and snuck into Hong Kong and then entered the United States through a sponsor family.
Teresa admitted that she had talked to Mr. Chen on the phone and even told him the cross streets of where she lived. He had come over and they were simply going to eat.
But then he had asked her if she could help bring his family over to America. After all, they were her family, too.
She thought about all those years of struggling with her mother while Mr. Chen and his wife and kids lived in luxury in condominiums built for provincial officials.
Her hands moved on their own and she hit him with whatever was handy. Repeatedly. When she saw her phone number and address on his finger, she took a Chinese kitchen knife and hacked it off.
Teresa insisted again and again that she acted absolutely alone and that Lee had been trying to cover for her with his story.
I met Vandyne next to where Mr. Chen’s body was found in the park.
He turned the lapels up on his leather jacket and said, “If you’re comfortable with Teresa being the murderer, then maybe this isn’t necessary.”
“I’m not. You know, Lonnie says that if I don’t think a woman has the strength to carry a man, then I don’t know how strong a woman can be.”
“Teresa is a strong woman. I could tell she had a lot of upper-body strength when I was cuffing her.”
We stepped over the tape and walked around. There could be something to tie Lee in with the murder.
“Still, though,” I said. “I find it hard to believe that she could have dragged or carried a body six or seven blocks.”
“I know that Chinese hardly ever call anything in, but a woman pulling a body in a shower curtain would have attracted some attention, right?”
“The guy with the mole is the key. He was actually the last person who spoke with Mr. Chen, not Lonnie.”
“They probably put the body in his car and then dumped it off here,” said Vandyne.
“But how do we find mole-man? Can’t very well look through Heavenly Horse’s employment records. They don’t record the physical features of their drivers.”
“What about the voucher Lonnie signed? Can’t you track her driver from it?”
“The drivers are paid in cash when they turn in their vouchers and then they’re alphabetized by the customer’s last name. The desk clerk makes sure that the customer has signed but not that the slip is filled out completely. The driver’s name was left blank, and that might be standard operating procedure in a largely cash business.”
Vandyne nodded. “Looks like they pulled all the cigarette butts, soda cans, and needles from this area already.”
“Yeah. So all this paper trash you see here is new. What makes people want to litter at a crime scene?”
“I think the wind could’ve blown all this into the area. Do you seriously think someone would have walked here to throw away a wig?”
“Where?”
“Right there, man. I thought it was a dead squirrel at first.”
Vandyne’s discovery made me think of something.
“What if there is no man with a mole?” I asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“What if that driver doesn’t exist?”
“Didn’t Lonnie say a man with a mole picked her up?”
“Yes.”
“That means he’s real, partner.”
“The man is real, but the mole isn’t!”
I saw Bad Boy standing near the top of the stoop of the Fifth Precinct. He stood perfectly still while trying to read the minds of passersby. I went up the steps and stood on the opposite side of the door as him. Neither of us looked at each other.
“I’ve been thinking about something,” I said.
“Trying something new, eh?”
“It’s something that could get Pete mad.”
“What do you mean ‘mad’?”
“I mean this involves one of his guys.”
“Which one?”
“Lee.”
“Oh. He’s gonna be pissed.”
“Should I tell him what I think I got?”
“How bad is it?”
“Something to hang for.”
“You better tell him now. His mood’s only getting worse.”
I ran into Pete in the squad room’s kitchenette. He was sitting at the table. A paper plate in front of him held the skeletal crusts of what used to be three pizza slices.
“I thought you weren’t working as the pizza man anymore,” I said.
“Go fuck yourse
lf, Chow!”
“What the hell’s your problem?”
“This fucking scumbag reported me to the Civilian Complaint Review Board and they want to ask me some questions. He said I sprained his arm and neck. Motherfucker was resisting arrest!”
“Aw, shit.”
“He’s got all these bullshit medical bills and he’s saying he missed work for a few months. Yeah, he missed standing on the corner and pushing junk on kids.”
“Did he go to jail?”
“Suspended sentence. The trial was a complete sham. They brought up his traumatic childhood and lousy parents. Like that’s an excuse. It only proves that it runs in the fucking family, if you ask me.”
I thought about Paul. If he had stayed with his abusive father, where would he be now? I couldn’t rule out selling drugs and getting arrested by a volatile cop.
“And anyway,” said Pete, “this was two years ago, so fuck it!”
“Nothing’s going to happen. The CCRB’s got no teeth.”
“You don’t know, Chow. These things are so goddamn arbitrary. Yeah, most people, nothing happens to them. But if there’s a cop they want to make an example out of, they stick it to him. I don’t care if they go through my record with an infrared scanner. I’ve got nothing to hide.”
“Speaking of which, I think someone’s been holding back on you.”
“What?”
“I think there’s something about Lee.”
“Is this still about the Chen murder thing? We got our man already. Uh, woman.”
I told him what I suspected and what made sense to me. Pete didn’t say anything or even interrupt to ask questions. When I was done, he rolled his head on his shoulders to crack his neck.
“Let’s get a plain car and go for a little ride,” he said. “Get Bad Boy, too.”
“Right now?” I asked.
“Yes, right fucking now. I’ll see you downstairs. There are some things I want to get first.”
Bad Boy drove us out just east of Seward Park. I sat in the front passenger seat. Pete was in the back. He held up a small, old cushion that probably used to top a bar stool. It was thinned out by age.
“Remember this?” Pete asked Bad Boy.
“How could I forget the hot seat?”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“You’ll get to see it in action,” said Pete.
“We’re in the Seventh Precinct,” I said. “Is this going to be a problem?”