by Ed Lin
A picture of me and Vandyne the first week we were partners. We both looked tired.
“Is this some kind of fucking joke!” thundered English, throwing the pictures into my box.
“Hey, I don’t want to take those with me!” I protested. “That’s police property.”
“What are you trying to pull here, Chow? You took pictures of your feet!”
“You have to admit that that right big toe does look like it’s up to no good.”
“What the hell is this!” English said, surprised as if my box had just materialized. “You’re cleaning out your locker? You’re quitting?”
“Now I get why you’re the top detective, English.”
He nodded a few times and sucked in his lips.
“Come over here, Chow,” he said quietly, walking over to a window by the landing.
“What is it?”
“Just come over here!”
I went over to the window, which started at about knee level and went up a foot above my head. There was chicken wire running through it and some paint had dripped onto it before being sloppily wiped off, but you could still see the street pretty well.
English opened the window a few inches so we could hear the noise from the street.
“What do you see out there, Chow?”
“Chinatown.”
“No! Look at those kids over there, crouching on the corner. What are they doing?”
“Just waiting for something or somebody. Maybe a bus for a field trip.”
“Over there. Why are those two boys yelling at each other?”
“Sounds like yelling, but they’re just talking. Those three girls down there. They’re not in school because they’re going to work in a sweatshop. They all have one small container of barbecued meat from a restaurant because the sweatshop has its own rice cooker.”
“They get the rice for free?” asked English.
“Benevolent of them, isn’t it?” I kept looking out the window. I focused in on a skinny kid crouched on some stairs in front of a door. He was looking up and down the street. “That kid,” I said, pointing. “He could be a lookout for a gambling outfit up in that association building.”
“Are you sure?”
“I don’t know for sure. He could be.”
“Chow,” English said turning to me. My upper right arm was growing warmer and I realized it was because he had his hand on it. “The guys I have taking pictures now would have shot all of those kids.”
“Why?”
“Because they all look the same to the cops. You know what I mean,” he said. I did know. He went on. “Those good kids don’t deserve to be lumped in with the bad ones. They should get some credit. And you’re the only one who can give them that.”
“So it’s a good thing that we only single out the kids who might be troublemakers.”
“You know the deal, Chow. We get a victim who identifies someone in our unofficial mug books, they could land in a world of trouble. And they could be completely innocent, too.”
“They’re all innocent until proven guilty. Aren’t they?”
English stood his ground. “Don’t tell me how it’s supposed to be. You know how it is.”
“I suppose you’re going to beg me not to quit.”
“I’m not going to beg you anything, Chow. I mean, either way, I don’t care. Innocent Chinese kids going to jail won’t mess my sleep up at all. I just want to know if you care.
I think you do, because you took out Paul’s picture.
“What’s going to happen if Paul or someone like him gets tagged on a bullshit charge? He can kiss college goodbye and any chance of having a real job.”
I thought about Paul at my age, years from now, sitting in a chair in Martha’s, smoking a cigarette and looking for trouble.
“I was just cleaning my locker,” I said, kicking my box.
“I wasn’t going to quit.”
“Oh, and another thing. Who do you know, Chow?”
“What are you talking about?”
“We got orders from the top that because of your investigative assignments, you can’t go to those opening-day ceremonies anymore. Too high-profile. You’re strictly going to be on plainclothes duty going forward.”
“Doing more than just taking pictures, right?”
“Yeah, don’t worry. We’ve got more action than you can handle. You can even work with Vandyne, again. Anyway, the Brow wants to see you. He’s ready to take your head off.”
“I don’t want to see that guy. It’s bad enough hanging out and talking with you.”
“Let me tell you something, Chow,” said English. “I think you have a bad attitude and lousy hygiene, but I wasn’t the guy holding you back from detective track.”
“Like hell,” I said.
“Hey,” he said, crossing his arms. “It was the Brow. He kept telling me I couldn’t put anything else on your plate.”
I thought about that for a moment. Another thought hit me.
“English,” I said. “How did you know it was me who ripped out Paul’s picture from the mug books?”
He smiled. “The other guys, if they found out that someone was really a good kid, they wouldn’t have bothered to take out his picture.”
—
The Brow was cleaning out the bowl of his pipe with the sharp end of a metal envelope opener. His blue eyes flashed up at me and went off to the side.
“I suppose your banquet was your last public event for us, Mr. Chow.”
“Now I know why I never got those investigative assignments.”
“Given the easiest most mindless task in the world,” he said through gritted teeth. “Eat, drink, and make merry for the cameras. Still, you managed to make a mess of everything.”
“I’ve been your little soldier boy long enough,” I said, pointing to the woodcut print of Andrew Jackson on his wall. “I’m not shining your boots anymore.”
He threw his pipe into the corner and pointed at me menacingly with the letter opener.
“You’re nobody, Chow! You think you’re above and beyond walking a simple beat now! You think you’re going to get
a gold shield!”
“Someday, yeah.”
“You’ll not see smiling eyes ever again from this mick! When I see you, you’ll get nothing but hate, and more than you can stand!”
“When I’m in civvies,” I said slowly and evenly, “you won’t even recognize me from the other chinks in the street.”
—
On the street, the smell of freshly laid-out garbage hit me. You could see the drizzling rain against the glow of the streetlamps, but it was almost too light to feel.
I shifted the box I was carrying from one side to the other. I had decided to take home all the baseball caps that had been crammed in my locker. Paul might like them.
The rain got harder. I put the box down on my feet and zipped up my coat. A wet cat ran by.
The light was on in my apartment window. Paul was home.
I had to call Lonnie and tell her I wasn’t going to be going to any more dumbass dinners. The pay would still be the same in the near term, but it was still a step up for me. Probably my first step up ever.
I got into the lobby and looked for my mail on the radiator, but there wasn’t any because Paul had already grabbed it.
I raked some fingers through my soaked hair. Then I hoisted the box onto my shoulder and went upstairs to see if I had gotten something good.
Ed Lin’s first novel Waylaid was based on his childhood of renting out motel rooms. Published by Kaya in 2002, Waylaid was universally praised in a broad range of publications including Booklist, Asianweek and Playboy. Waylaid also won the Members’ Choice Award from the Asian American Writers Workshop in 2003.
Lin, who is of Taiwanese and Chinese descent, lives in New York with his wife, actress Cindy Cheung.
Photo: Cindy Cheung
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