The Misfortune Cookie ed-6

by Laura Resnick

  Quinn placed the order while I gave a friendly farewell wave to Officer Novak, who was on his way out the door, looking satisfied with the way things had worked out.

  “I’ll see you soon, Archie,” he called, so I supposed Archie had gained a new student today.

  Lopez went back to the ABC table and sat down with Ted, who handed him a copy of the script.

  Quinn looked at the two of them with a puzzled frown. “What’s he doing now? Auditioning?”

  “No.” I explained the favor Lopez was doing for me.

  “Man, as busy as we are, he’s taking time out to do that for you? He really is into you, isn’t he?” Quinn looked me over and added, “Not that it’s hard to understand the attraction.”

  “Seems the least he could do,” I said. “After all, I lost my job because of him.”

  “No, you lost your job because you were working in a mob joint that got busted. And everyone who worked at Bella Stella lost their jobs that night, Miss Diamond,” he pointed out. “But you’re the only one Lopez is doing handsprings for, to try to make sure her new job works out.”

  “Not handsprings,” I said, feeling a little uncomfortable. “It’s a simple favor.”

  “Right,” Quinn said. “Because a guy who’s putting in overtime on a major OCCB case and trying to keep some scumbag killer from getting set free by the TV lawyer who his tong-boss brother has hired . . . That cop has boatloads of time left over to meet with your dipshit director and walk the kid’s applications through NYPD’s movie unit. Uh-huh.”

  “I thanked him nicely,” I said defensively.

  “How about you do something nice for me,” Quinn said, “and cut Lopez some slack? Or work things out with him.”

  “What makes this any of your business?” I demanded, offended now.

  “Because I’m his partner. I have to put up with him every damn day. You haven’t been around. I have.” Quinn gave a weary sigh. “I’ve only known him a few weeks. They tell me he’s usually a pretty even-tempered guy. He’s just going through a bad patch, they say. He’ll pull himself together and get over it . . . But, I swear, there are days he’s so hard to live with, I’m not sure it’s a good idea for me to be carrying a loaded gun.”

  “Now you’re scaring me.”

  “I’m just saying, when a guy acts like this . . . it’s usually because of a woman.” Quinn’s attitude softened a little as he said, “Look, I know what he did to you. Well, okay, everyone who was at Stella’s knows what he did.”

  “Yes,” I said with resignation. “They do.”

  “And he should pay for it. If you ask me—”

  “No one did.”

  “—he is paying for it. But the problem, Miss Diamond, is that I’m paying for it, too.” Quinn looked imploringly at me. “So for my sake, couldn’t you give him another chance?”

  I thought about it for a moment. “Was he abducted by space aliens?”

  “Huh?”

  “That would be an acceptable excuse for not calling me,” I explained.

  “Oh.” Quinn thought it over. “I’m pretty sure the answer’s no. Would there be any other acceptable excuse that’s a little closer to home?”

  “I haven’t thought of one yet.”

  “Hmm. You know, sometimes—”

  “Ted!”

  We both flinched. The whole restaurant flinched.

  Susan Yee was standing in the doorway of the restaurant, her cheeks flushed, her eyes blazing as she stared at her brother. “Ted!”

  Ted waved to her casually. “Oh, hey, Susan.” Then he returned to conferring with Lopez, who (like everyone else) stared at Susan as she stomped angrily through the restaurant, making a beeline for Ted.

  “Are you getting arrested?” Susan demanded.

  “Nah, it’s cool,” said Ted.

  “I heard that a police officer stopped your filming today,” Susan continued, loud and furious. Everyone was watching with interest, including me and Quinn. “I heard that you were filming in the street without a location permit! Breaking the law!”

  Lopez rose to his feet and introduced himself, then said, “You must be Ted’s wife.”

  Oops.

  I recalled that he tended to have cynical views about marriage. Not due to his parents, who seemed to be very happy together after nearly forty years of wedlock, but rather due to crime statistics and his experiences as a cop in dealing with domestic violence.

  “I’m his sister,” Susan hissed.

  “Oh. Sorry. My mistake.”

  “I should say so!”

  “Susan, chill, okay? Detective Lopez fixed the whole thing for me.”

  “What?” Susan shrieked at Ted. “Did you bribe him?”

  “On the other hand,” Quinn said to me, obviously enjoying this, “working with Lopez is never dull. I gotta give him that.”

  “It was just a little misunderstanding and an honest mistake, Miss Yee,” Lopez said. “We’ve talked about it, and Ted knows not to do it again.”

  “How do you know about this, anyhow?” Ted asked her in puzzlement.

  “I know,” Susan said tersely, “because the whole damn restaurant knows, Ted. Even you must have noticed people coming and going while you’ve been here? And by tomorrow, I assume half of Chinatown will know that my little brother was arrested in the street today—”

  “I wasn’t arrested,” Ted protested mildly.

  “—because of his stupid movie!”

  Rushing in where fools would know better than to tread, Lopez said, “He wasn’t arrested, Miss Yee. Ted’s a good citizen who agreed to stop filming as soon as Officer Novak informed him that—”

  “That he had no business being there?” Susan said shrilly. “That he was breaking the law? And making a spectacle of himself?”

  “Man, we should turn her loose on Ning’s new lawyer,” Quinn murmured to me. “I’d sell tickets.”

  “And,” said Lopez, raising his voice, “we’re going over the script right now to make sure it won’t happen again. So it’s all under control now.”

  “That’s right,” said Ted. “Detective Lopez is going to help me with everything, Susan. He’s got a friend who handles the location permits for the city, so he’s going to walk my applications in there personally and make sure everything is shipshape from now on. Right, detective?”

  “Right,” Lopez said wearily.

  Quinn looked at me. “Can’t you see how desperate our boy is to get laid again?”

  “Oh, just eat your dumplings,” I said.

  “Detective Lopez is on top of this, Susan. So lay off, huh? Things are going to go smoother now that I’ve got him helping me.”

  Susan said to Lopez, “My brother needs to be taught a lesson. Can’t you just arrest him?”

  “I, uh . . .” Lopez looked in our direction and said vaguely, “I think my lunch is ready. Excuse me, Miss Yee.”

  “Here, take a copy of the script with you, detective,” said Ted. “And we’ll talk later, right?”

  “Right.” After he joined us at the counter, script in hand, Lopez muttered, “Does either one of you have something for a headache?”

  Quinn shook his head, then reached for his cell phone when it started ringing.

  “In my purse,” I said to Lopez. “I’ll be right back.”

  When Susan saw me, the woman whom she had warned away from her brother’s film, she cast a glance over my outfit and sneered, then ignored me. She was still berating Ted, making a scene that all of Chinatown would surely know about before long, when I returned to the lunch counter and handed Lopez some painkillers.

  “God, what a start this year has gotten off to,” he said morosely.

  Quinn finished his call and said to him, “We’ve got to go.”

  “Now?” Lopez looked sadly at the delectable dishes that had just been set before him for his lunch.

  “Right now,” Quinn said with a nod.

  Lopez sighed and asked the waiter. “Can you put this in a carry-out bag?�
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  12

  Fortune, luck

  “And that’s all Lopez said about being in Chinatown. So it looks like you got lucky again,” I said to the notorious Alberto Battistuzzi as I spooned a modest portion of steamed crab in spicy sauce onto my plate that evening in the Chens’ back office.

  “I’m trapped in a funeral home,” he said grumpily. “How lucky is that?”

  “You’re safely hidden in a funeral home,” I corrected, “which should be treated as good news, given that you were worried about being rumbled.”

  The old capo sighed and nodded in acknowledgement of this. “I’m a little cranky, I guess. I got word before you got here that OCCB has arrested a couple more of our guys. This is a grim time for the family.”

  “Has Don Victor been taken into custody?” Max asked, helping himself to some food.

  “No, that’s the good news,” said Lucky. “They still can’t touch the boss. Not so far.”

  “Your loyalty to the head of your famiglia does you honor,” said Max, which I thought was a tactful way of commenting on the situation.

  “It’s how I was raised.” Lucky looked at me again. “So your boyfr—uh, Detective Lopez really don’t seem to have any idea that I’m holed in up Chinatown?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “No hint of it at all. He seems to be in the neighborhood strictly to work on the Ning case.”

  “Then that’s one problem we are spared,” said Max, who had been apprised of Lucky’s concerns about Lopez before my arrival this evening. “Beef with preserved ginger, Esther?”

  “No, thanks, Max. I’ve got a costume fitting later, and I had a pretty hearty lunch today. So I’d better eat lightly.”

  Max had brought such a delectable dinner, though, that I was tempted to stuff myself despite how it would make me look in the tiny outfits that Ted insisted on for Alicia.

  “I thought you were done working for the day?” Lucky said as I handed him the container of crab.

  There was currently no one else (well, no living person) in the mortuary. John was still at the NYU lab, his father was playing mahjong this evening, and his brother had gone home for the night after letting me into the building and thanking me for preventing Benny Yee’s widow from committing a murder here during her husband’s wake.

  Nelli lay by the door, contentedly chewing on a bone that Max had brought to keep her occupied. He believed this activity helped her think. As Nelli made occasional happy little sounds while gnawing on her prize, I wondered what she thought about.

  “Well, yes, I am finished filming for the day,” I said to Lucky. Which was why I was now fully covered in layers of warm winter clothing, with my face clean of Alicia’s makeup. “But as I was leaving the set, Ted asked me if I’d meet him at his mother’s store later to try on some outfits for a party scene that we’re supposed to film later on.”

  To my relief, he hadn’t wanted me to do the fitting at that moment, since he had a meeting to go to right after the shoot; so I hadn’t had to cancel my plans to confer with Lucky and Max over dinner at the funeral home.

  “How is the filming going?” Max asked me.

  I waggled my hand. “So-so.”

  I started giving them a judiciously edited account of the day’s events while I served myself some steamed Chinese broccoli. Then I succumbed to temptation and put a dumpling stuffed with succulent shredded duck on my plate.

  After our eventful lunch on Doyers, which had concluded with Ted assuring a departing Lopez that we certainly would not attempt to film on location again without a permit, most of us had returned to the loft on Hester Street to shoot part of a different scene there, so the day wouldn’t be completely wasted.

  The loft, which was chilly and pretty bare-bones, had belonged to Benny Yee, and it served as Ted’s production base. This was where I had auditioned for my role. Ted used some of the space to store all his film equipment. Another part of the loft was set aside for the actors to get into costume and makeup. The rest of the space was a film set decorated to look like a small apartment; this was where the movie’s protagonist lived, and a number of scenes took place here.

  As we were setting up for the afternoon shoot there, I’d learned that Ted had an additional problem, besides losing Benny as an investor. It turned out that Benny had not left his widow as well-fixed as everyone assumed, and Grace Yee needed to sell this loft in order to solve the financial problems created by Benny’s recent business setbacks. These fiscal woes, she had explained privately to Ted, were why she couldn’t honor Benny’s memory by sinking more money into the movie which had been his last investment in life. Even for Benny’s nephew, Grace just couldn’t spare the cash—as her sons kept telling her.

  She was sympathetic to Ted’s situation and didn’t plan to kick him out of the loft, but she was going to have to put the place on the market soon. She was just waiting to be advised of an auspicious date for that.

  “Astrology is very important to Chinese people,” Ted explained in a quick aside to me, when telling us about the possibility of losing the loft as our production base and primary set. “She wouldn’t want to launch the sale on an unlucky day.”

  Fortune and luck, both good and bad, kept playing a big role in everyone’s fate here, including mine.

  Due to the economy, the loft might sit on the market for a long time. After all, although it was in a good location, it would probably need remodeling and updating to be useful to anyone besides an indie filmmaker or a tong underlord. (I was curious about what Benny had used the place for before loaning it to Ted, but I assumed I was better off not knowing.)

  “Or this loft might sell within days to a buyer who wants us out of here by the closing date.” Ted concluded with a shrug, “There’s no way of knowing.”

  “What’ll happen to the movie if we lose this space?” Bill asked anxiously. “I really need this film to succeed, Ted. My parents . . . you know.”

  I resisted the urge to give Bill a reality check. Even if the film got finished, which wasn’t a given, success was nowhere in this low-budget movie’s future. Not with Ted’s clumsy script and plodding direction.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll find another space,” said the ever-optimistic Ted. “Our fortunes are improving all the time. I’ve got a meeting later today with our new backer.”

  “We have a new backer?” I asked eagerly.

  “Well, I hope he’s our new backer,” said Ted. “Fingers crossed.”

  Indeed.

  Dressing, undressing, and sitting around waiting to work were uncomfortable in the frigid loft. So was touching each other, due to how cold our hands were. We wound up working on a love scene between Brian and Alicia today, during which my shirt kept getting hiked up (but stayed on); and every time Bill touched my bare skin, it was hard not to shriek.

  Cynthia wasn’t needed for this scene, since Mei wasn’t in it, so she had gone home after lunch. Archie was with us on set, though, since Jianyu came to Brian in a vision while Alicia was trying to seduce him.

  None of us had our lines down well for the scene, since we hadn’t expected to shoot it today, so progress was slow and we had to do a lot of retakes. Which meant that I spent much of the afternoon repeatedly flinging myself at Bill, who responded with comedic uncertainty to Alicia’s aggressive sexuality. The first few takes were a little uncomfortable between us, since we were scant acquaintances who’d never done more than shake hands before, and now I was in his arms and kissing him. But after we’d done this several times in a row while Ted asked me to tilt my head differently, the production assistant called out the lines we kept forgetting, and Archie was practicing moves nearby with his sword while waiting for his cue . . . the awkwardness faded, and Bill and I got pretty comfortable with each other.

  Kissing a fellow actor in performance isn’t like kissing someone in life. Your character may well have complex feelings about embracing the other person, but you’re just doing your job. So unless your relationship with the other actor is
making the situation complicated (which wasn’t the case here), once you get over the initial embarrassment of intimately touching each other, doing a love scene isn’t that much different than doing a close-contact fight scene or a dance routine together.

  It’s all physical acting, and in each instance, you have to rehearse together, develop trust and a comfort zone with each other, learn your mutual moves well enough to make the scene look spontaneous and natural, hit your marks, say your lines, and make sure your face can be seen when the director wants it seen. And whether you’re on camera or on stage, the whole time you’re touching and kissing each other while exchanging seductive dialogue and pretending to be turned on, lots of people are right there in the room watching you. When filming a love scene, the director may be within a foot of your embracing bodies, and the camera and microphone may be perilously close to hitting you in the head.

  So although Bill was the first man who had touched me this way since Lopez had left my bedroom Christmas morning, there was no similarity whatsoever between the two experiences, and one didn’t remind me of the other.

  Anyhow, as I now told Max and Lucky, we’d gotten a very late start on filming today because of the Doyers Street mess, and we hadn’t really learned our lines for the scene we wound up working on. (I didn’t tell my two companions that the scene involved a lot of kissing and fondling.) So we didn’t get much done today and would have to return to the same scene tomorrow.

  “And at some point,” I concluded, “we’ll also have to go back to Doyers to film the scene we should have filmed today.”

  Max reached for a second helping of noodles as he said, “It was most thoughtful of Detective Lopez to offer to help expedite the necessary paperwork for the filming to proceed more smoothly.”

  “Thoughtful, my elbow,” said Lucky. “He owed it to her.”

  I froze for a moment, feeling awkward as I realized he must know what all his colleagues who’d been busted at Bella Stella knew—that I’d had sex with Lopez (twice) after the arrests at Fenster’s, and then he’d never called me.