by Ed Lin
“Naw,” said Bad Boy. “They know he’s our guy.”
We found Lee outside a day-care center on Clinton Street.
Pete popped out of the door and walked up to him. “We gotta talk.”
“My cousin’s daughter—” started Lee.
“I know, I know. Now, this part is for your own good.” Pete gave him a rough frisking, then pulled Lee’s arms around and cuffed him in the back. “I don’t want it to look like you’re an informant.”
Lee nodded. There wasn’t much else he could do.
Pete opened the other back door.
Lee shifted nervously. He bent down and looked at us. “Hello,” he said to me in Cantonese. “Do I have to get in?”
“We want to have some words with you,” I said.
“Talking only, right? I can’t leave here.”
“We’re not going anywhere.” In English, I asked Pete and Bad Boy, “We’re just going to talk to Lee in the car. We’re not going to drive him somewhere, right?”
“We’re staying right here,” said Bad Boy. “We’re going to keep him safe right in the car.”
“See, look at this,” said Pete. “I got this nice cushion for you to sit on because I don’t want you to get hurt. I’m always looking out for you.” Pete pushed Lee in, slammed the door, and came around to the other side. Bad Boy couldn’t stifle a giggle.
As soon as Pete was in, Bad Boy tore the car away from the curb and did a U-turn against the one-way direction.
As we roared away, Lee cried out, “Robert, you said we weren’t going anywhere!”
“Oh, well,” I said. “You can’t blame me. I’m only a passenger like you.” It was true. I had no idea where we were going.
“What is going on here? Is something the matter?”
I said, “I was just thinking that it was good that we’ve picked up Teresa for the murder of Mr. Chen.”
“That’s a real shame.”
“It sure is. But it made me wonder why you told me that bullshit story about you waiting with Teresa at her apartment the night Mr. Chen was murdered.”
“I believe I made some sort of mistake,” Lee said. Chinese people are good at smiling hard while talking. “I confused that night with another night that I couldn’t find Lincoln. There were a lot of nights that he was missing, if you have to know.”
“So it was all one big mistake, huh?”
“Something like that.” He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Pete watched Lee like a snake about to strike at a mouse but Bad Boy kept chuckling and glancing at the rearview mirror.
“Let me ask you about something else, Lee,” I said. “There sure are a lot of drivers with moles on their faces, aren’t there?”
“Quite a few, I guess. It’s a natural thing. A lot of people have them.”
“So how do you keep your mole from falling off?”
“My mole? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“When you put on that fake mole, how do you keep it from falling off?”
“You’re crazy, man!” At this point, Lee tried to lift his butt from the cushion, but with his hands cuffed behind his back it was impossible for his bent legs to sustain his weight.
“We got a wild bronco, here,” said Pete. He put his arm around Lee’s shoulders and forced him to stay still on the cushion. “Chow, I think you’re saying something to upset this guy.”
“Seat is a fire!” said Lee in English. He was so distraught, he stopped speaking Cantonese.
“Listen to this guy,” said Pete.
“The guy who drove Lonnie home had a mole and a hat pulled down low. Sounds like a disguise for a guy who was up to no good,” I said.
Lee said, “Help me! He hurting me! Hot! Hot!”
“Don’t get Pete excited. If you just confess what you did, he won’t get any madder.”
“Let me out!”
“You were in the office when Lonnie came in and arranged for the car service back home from Midtown, right? She let it slip that she was doing an important interview. You figured out right away that she was going to see Mr. Chen. You grabbed that ticket as fast as you could but you didn’t know yet how you would get to Mr. Chen.”
“Maybe I only want to fucking your girl,” said Lee. I reached back and punched him in the ribs. Pete took the cue and dove into Lee with an elbow.
“Bad Boy, you gotta watch those sharp turns!” he called out. “I almost took this guy’s head off!”
“Hey, you know how rough these streets get,” said Bad Boy. “I might have to hit some curbs, too.”
“I get lawyer. Sue you. Police brutality,” Lee managed to say.
I said, “You’re going to need a lawyer when you explain in court how you decided to combine Teresa’s motive to kill Mr. Chen with your idea to frame Lincoln for the crime. You wanted to be the sole leader of the Union of the Three Armies.
“You came to pick up Lonnie in disguise, hoping to find some way that you could get closer to Mr. Chen. You probably hoped that you could figure out some way that you could talk to one of his guards and convince them to let you take Mr. Chen for a ride to the airport or somewhere else in the city.
“When he came out with Lonnie and talked to you, you couldn’t believe your luck. He asked you, probably in Mandarin, how to hire one of your cars and you replied in Hakka that you would come back to pick him up! You whipped out the Hakka dialect because you knew Mr. Chen would instantly trust a fellow Hakka.
“Lonnie doesn’t know Mandarin that well and almost no Hakka, so she thought you guys might have been speaking some dialect of Mandarin the entire time! She had no idea what you guys were saying—and you counted on that!”
Lee stared at the back of Bad Boy’s head and didn’t say anything.
“You told Mr. Chen to wait in the diner for you to come back. Then, after you dropped off Lonnie, you changed the ticket to say there were two passengers. It was easy: you simply added another line to the character for ‘one.’ You figured that it would cause more confusion. You also alerted Teresa to get ready because you were going to be dropping off some fresh meat. You also probably got a shower curtain from your apartment and threw it in your trunk. You went back to pick up Mr. Chen and you pretended to need the address he was going to. You knew where he wanted to go, all right: Teresa’s apartment.”
Bad Boy eased the car into the entrance of a below-the-sidewalk garage and took us down two levels.
“I don’t know when you went up to Teresa’s apartment, before or after she killed Mr. Chen, but I’ll bet you helped mash around Lincoln’s shirt in Mr. Chen’s blood. Then you wrapped up his body in the shower curtain and dumped it as Teresa cleaned up all the blood as best as she could.”
We were idling in the shadows and the only things I could hear were my breathing and Lee’s handcuffs clinking.
“How does it sound, Lee?” I asked. “Feel free to add in any extra details that I missed.”
He was in tears from pain but he managed to chuckle a little and said, “You have nothing. Teresa say nothing.”
“That’s so brave of you to let this woman take the entire rap by herself. You’re such a man.”
“I am survivor. You don’t know.”
I felt the front door slam. Bad Boy had gotten out and left the engine running.
“Hey, where are you going?” I asked.
“I have to swing by to pick up some dry cleaning,” he said. “It’s just a few blocks from here.”
Pete still had his arm around Lee’s shoulders. Lee looked like he’d been through twenty rounds of boxing, fully panting and soaked in sweat.
“You’re not looking too good,” I told him. “I think a confession will help get this weight off your chest.”
He shook his head hard.
“I don’t think he’s up for confessing,” I said.
“I think we can do something about that,” said Pete. “I know the guy who runs this garage. He’ll swear none of us were around today when he’s found on th
e third level.”
“Who is found?” asked Lee.
“I get it,” said Pete. “You understand a lot more English than you let on.
“Let me explain, Lee. When you get down to that level, your ears play tricks on you. You might think you hear screaming, but you’re really only hearing noisy brakes and tire squeals.” Pete reached down around his feet and came up with a crowbar. He rubbed the curved side of the hook across Lee’s lips. “The teeth should be the first thing to go. Just to make sure they can’t match up the dental records. You haven’t missed any checkups lately, have you?
“Chow, I think you might need to give Bad Boy a hand with his dry cleaning. Make sure he doesn’t strain himself.”
“No!” said Lee. “He’s going to kill me!”
I got out of the car and walked to the entrance. Bad Boy was leaning against a wall, drinking a cup of coffee from across the street. Nobody was around.
“Is it going to be rough for Lee?” I asked him.
“With Pete? Naw, Pete never really hurts anybody. The hot seat is the only thing he uses.”
“What is the hot seat?”
“It’s got Mace sprayed on it. When someone sits on it, the body temperature activates the Mace. Burns up your asshole and your balls.” He chuckled. “I can laugh because I’ve been Maced by a suspect before and I know how bad that shit can be.”
“It’s not funny to me.”
“What, you feel bad for Lee? He’s a miserable fucking rat. He turns his friends in like poker chips.”
“Oh, you got me wrong. I wouldn’t give a shit if I picked up the paper tomorrow and saw that he’d been severed on railway tracks. This piece of shit fucked over my girlfriend in a big way.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“The stuff pulled from the black bag.”
“Aw, you got a problem with the hot seat? That is completely harmless compared to what they used to pull.”
“Still. I don’t feel real good about it. Honestly, I feel worse about the phone dial.”
“You got the number you needed.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“It’s not like that call was not placed from there, right?”
“That’s true.”
“And if it wasn’t there, then nobody would have been hurt. Hell, nobody would’ve even noticed. And the hot seat is nothing, too. So there are some burning sensations. Nothing a few showers can’t get rid of.”
I looked across the street. Two little boys were throwing a red rubber ball to each other as they walked.
“Look at it this way,” said Bad Boy. “Let’s say there was going to be a soapbox derby. One team is allowed to use only what they have in their garage but the other is allowed to use an entire hardware store. Who has more options? Who do you think would win every time? Sometimes extra tools come in handy. We don’t frame innocent people. We want to make sure the guilty get put away.”
“A soapbox derby? It’s been a lot of years since this was explained to you.”
Bad Boy smiled. “Anyway, didn’t I see you sneak in a punch on him?”
“I just poked him.”
“Hey, it doesn’t look that way to the CCRB. That’s assault against a suspect in handcuffs.”
“Speaking of which, isn’t Pete worried about this with the CCRB thing coming up?”
“That thing is bullshit and Pete worries way too much about it.”
Lee broke down. We took him back to the precinct and he made a confession. He could be tried together or separately from Teresa or maybe one could be turned against the other. I didn’t worry about it because that wasn’t my call.
We had Peepshow guard the plain car. We had to leave it on the street with the windows down to air out the piss smell.
As I was coming up the stairs, I heard Paul playing guitar. It stopped as I walked up to the door. When I came in, I found Paul sitting on the couch, reading a book. The guitar was already zipped up in its bag on the floor.
“I heard you playing,” I said. “Why did you stop?”
“I didn’t want to bother you.”
“How are those lessons with Vandyne going?”
“I’ve only had two so far. It takes forever to get to Elmhurst and back.”
“If you don’t pay your dues, don’t expect to get good at anything.”
“It’s harder than anything I’ve ever tried. I’m used to learning things in school quickly, but this isn’t going to be one of them. Have you seen John play up close? That guy’s a natural.”
“He’s not. His mother used to kick his ass if he didn’t play right. You actually have an advantage over him because you have someone showing you how to play. He had to teach himself.”
“I asked what kind of things I should listen to and he said to get forty-fives and play them at thirty-three revolutions per minute to figure out the guitar parts. He gave me some records to listen to.”
I looked at a scratched-up Chuck Berry single on the turntable and wondered if it was one of the originals that Vandyne learned to play with. The Ramones album was gone.
“I see you got rid of that punk-rock record.”
“I loaned it to John. He said he wanted to listen to it.”
“I used to have a high opinion of his taste in music. What do you think of ‘Rock and Roll Music,’ Paul?”
“It’s pretty tough. I’m having trouble with the chords.”
“I meant do you like it?”
“I like it. You can see how it is an ancestor of what the Ramones do. Even the beat is about the same.”
I put the needle on Chuck Berry and listened hard. The surface noise on the record made it sound even closer to the Ramones.
“Damn,” I said. “I can hear it.”
“So you’re okay with the Ramones now, right?”
“No way. Chuck Berry was rock and roll. Comparing him to the Ramones is like saying La Choy is real Chinese food.”
“Brilliant as usual.”
“Are you keeping up in school and work?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you expand a little bit on that?”
“Just wait for my report card to come in. You’ll see I’m doing fine.”
“You have any tests coming up?”
“What do you think I’m studying for?”
“So since you have to study, I guess you should go to the bedroom while I watch TV.”
Paul grunted and left the room. I snapped on the television.
The Communist channel had a program about how much better life was for the people of Tibet province with improved access to education and health care.
The Taiwan channel was showing a concert with a squeaky clean, light-skinned man singing about a girl to a neutered version of “Rock and Roll Music.”
The American channels gave me a choice of $25,000 Pyramid, The Bobby Vinton Show, and a repeat episode of Adam-12.
I thought about those goody-goody cops on Adam-12. No wonder they got canceled. They wouldn’t have lasted a minute in New York City. They wouldn’t have pulled out the hot seat, either.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about it now. I didn’t feel bad for Lee, but I wasn’t laughing with Bad Boy, either. I think on the outside of it, I saw myself pushing around and beating Vietnamese to try to get answers out of them. I didn’t feel anything about those memories, so I really shouldn’t have been upset about the hot seat.
Yet it bothered me.
My eyes drifted to the guitar bag. I pulled it over and unzipped it.
The guitar had nylon and metal strings on it. I pulled the fattest one and two seconds later Paul yelled out, “Stay away from my guitar!”
I looked through the mug books, something I should have been doing on a more regular basis. Then my phone rang and I didn’t recognize the voice.
“Officer Chow?” asked an older man in English.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“My name is Byron Su. I’ve met you a few times already, although we never really had for
mal introductions done. We’ve never had tea.”
“Where have we met?”
“Oh, pardon me. I first met you around Columbus Park a while back. I told you about my children. Later on, I met up with you late one night at a broken phone booth.”
“Now I remember! How are you, Mr. Su?”
“Officer Chow, I was wondering if I could come in to see you for a little bit. I have a couple hours left in Chinatown before my daughter will pick me up, so I was wondering if I could come in and talk with you. I know something you may find interesting.”
I looked at the mug books on my desk. “Do you know how to get to the precinct?”
“Yes, over on Elizabeth, right?”
“That’s the one. It’s the only one, as a matter of fact. When you get to the desk sergeant, tell him you’re looking for me. He looks scary and his name is Rip, but he’s a really nice guy.”
I hung up and went to the kitchenette to wash out two mugs and to fix a pot of coffee. A few minutes later, the old man was in the squad room. I didn’t bother to introduce him and nobody asked who he was.
“How do you take your coffee?” I asked.
“I don’t. It’s bad for my stomach and my heart. It’s a case of two birds with one stone. My late wife once made me a cup of decaf and it hurt my stomach even more.”
“You don’t mind me drinking mine, do you? If the smell bothers you, I’ll pour it out.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, please drink up. You’re a young man. Now is when you should indulge because you can’t later.”
I looked at him and couldn’t help smiling a little bit.
“You’re giving me a pretty wide license there,” I said. “But because of my profession, I can’t fully give in to the permissiveness of the age we’re in.”
“That’s very true! Moderation is probably the best track. The Taoists were right in a way.” He looked down at the mug book open on my desk. “I’m not interrupting you, am I?”
“Not at all. I’m just staying abreast of some of the bad guys out there. This particular book features people who didn’t bother to show up for court. We have warrants out for their arrest on sight. If I see them, I can take them in right off the street. Do you want to have a look?”
Mr. Su made a sheepish face and said, “Um, do you remember that I had something to tell you?”