The Misfortune Cookie ed-6

by Laura Resnick

And speaking of being obsessed with sex . . . my phone rang, and when I looked at the LCD screen, I saw that Lopez was calling. My heart gave an unwelcome but undeniable leap.

  Maybe he was finally calling to apologize and explain. I wondered if Detective Quinn had advised him to adopt the alien abduction story when pleading with me for forgiveness. I was by now just so glad he was phoning me, I admitted to myself with a conflicted mixture of self-disgust and relief, that I might be flexible about his explanation (i.e. something less extreme than dismemberment or abduction might be acceptable), as long as he was humble and remorseful enough in his apologies.

  “Hello?” I said into my phone.

  “Oh, good, I’m glad I got you,” he said, his familiar voice flooding my whole system. I remembered him whispering against my skin as we made love, murmuring into my ear as I drifted off to sleep, talking softly with me at dawn as he dressed for work . . .

  “Can you talk?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, seduced all over again by those memories. “Of course.”

  In my head, I ran his lines.

  Seeing you today made me realize I would do anything to get you back. To be with you again. To make it all up to you.

  That was good. He could start there and then segue into how sorry he was, how he’d rather die than ever hurt me like that again.

  “I’m meeting my old partner first thing in the morning,” said Lopez. “The guy who’s in department’s movie unit now.”

  “What?”

  “And reading this thing, I’ve got a bunch of questions. Because I know he’s going to have a bunch of questions.”

  “What?” I said sharply.

  “I’m talking about Ted’s script,” he clarified. “ABC.”

  “What?”

  “Um . . .”

  There was a pause.

  So I filled it. “You’re calling me about Ted’s script?” I said in outraged disbelief.

  “Yes. That’s right.” Lopez sounded relieved, as if we were getting on track now. “And the thing is—”

  “Why are you calling me about this?” I demanded shrilly.

  “Because I can’t get a hold of Ted. Every time I call him, I get his voicemail. I just tried him again.”

  I glanced across the floor, to where Ted was still pacing and talking with his sister, trying to placate her and convince her of . . . whatever.

  Lopez continued, “And I really need to get some answers about this script before my meeting tomorrow morning.”

  “What?”

  “There are a couple scenes here that seem to be set in a city location, but the script doesn’t specify—”

  “What?”

  “Um . . .”

  There was a pause.

  I was beside myself. After weeks of not calling me—not after hours of steamy sex, not after I left a message asking him to call me, not even after he’d arrested me . . . This was why he finally picked up a goddamn phone and dialed my number?

  To talk about Ted’s script?

  “Are you okay?” Lopez asked hesitantly. “You sound a little . . .” He cleared his throat. “Are you okay?”

  I wanted to kill him. I wished he were here right now so I could commit a heinous crime of passion—for which any sane jury in the land would surely acquit me!

  “I can’t believe you!” I raged.

  “What?”

  “What did I ever see in you?”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re calling me about Ted’s script?”

  “Well . . . yeah.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” I demanded. “What could you possibly be thinking?”

  “There’s nothing the matt . . . I’m thinking the script . . . I mean, I thought . . .” He sounded absolutely lost. “Wait. Hang on. I thought you wanted me to help you. Didn’t you? Or has that changed since lunchtime?”

  “Don’t use that tone with me,” I snapped.

  “I’m not using a tone, I’m just trying to under . . .” He took a breath and tried again. “Do you want me not to help now? Did something happen?”

  “Oh, my God,” I said wearily, sitting down on a cushioned stool, suddenly drained of energy. “I am such a fool.”

  “Esther?” When I didn’t he respond, he prodded, “Esther, what’s going on? Where are you?”

  “I’m trapped inside Yee’s Trading Company,” I said, feeling exhausted. “Don’t send help. You’ll never find me.”

  “What?”

  “You’re calling about the script. About the locations.”

  “Yes.” He asked hesitantly, “Is that all right?”

  “I’m an idiot,” I muttered. “I’m pathetic, and I’m an idiot.”

  “Are you drunk?” he asked, sounding puzzled.

  “That’s a good idea,” I said vaguely. “Maybe I should try it.”

  “Huh?”

  “Oh, good grief.” I sighed, shaking my head.

  Lopez had said he would help with the movie, and so he was helping. That was the kind of guy he was. He did what he said he would do.

  With one notable exception.

  The one I couldn’t get over. The one I wanted to kill him for. The one that was turning me into a crazy person.

  I sighed. “Look, you should talk to Ted about this, not me. I’m not sure what he’s got in mind for each scene.”

  “I tried to talk to Ted, but—”

  “He’s right here with me,” I said, feeling ready to go home and have a long hot soak in the tub, followed by an early night in bed. Alone. Again. “Ted’s talking to his sister right now. It’s a phone call I think he’d welcome any excuse to end. So I’ll tell him to get rid of her so you can talk to him. Okay?”

  “Okay, good. Thanks. Because this meeting tomorrow will be a waste of time if I don’t have the answers I’ll need.”

  “Call him in five minutes,” I instructed.

  “Will do. And, um . . . I mean . . . This is what you want, right?” When I didn’t answer, he said, sounding as tired as I felt, “I’m trying to do what you want, Esther. But I don’t know what . . . Sometimes you . . . I can’t . . .” He sighed and said, “I’m just trying to make it right.”

  Of course. He was a man.

  He had come to my home, had his way with me, left, never called, arrested me, still didn’t call . . . and this was his way of trying to make it right.

  Of course.

  “Are you there?” he asked.

  Yin, yang, Mars, Venus, men, women . . .

  “Esther?”

  “We’ve got a new backer,” I said, “so we’re going forward with filming. Thanks for your help. We appreciate it.”

  “You’re welcome. I want to help you.”

  “It’s the honorable thing to do,” I murmured.

  “Well . . . if you say so.”

  “And you’d like to get laid again.”

  “Whoa,” he said in surprise, “that kind of came out of nowhere.”

  “Am I wrong?”

  “Of course you’re not wrong.” He said quietly, “But I’m not going to ask for payment in kind.”

  “Not if you value your life.”

  “Well, yeah,” he replied, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “I know who I’m dealing with, after all.”

  “And now it sounds like you need to deal with Ted.”

  “Not that way. He’s not my type.”

  “Ted!” I called. “Ted.” I caught his eye and pointed to my phone. “Detective Lopez says he’s been trying to reach you. It’s important. Get off the phone right now so he can call you, okay?”

  “Oh, excellent!” Ted gave me a thumbs-up. “Gotta go, Susan. Detective Lopez has news for me!”

  I had a feeling their conversation would take a while. Which was fine, since I decided I was by now in no mood to try on slutty dresses. I’d tell Ted to concentrate on Lopez tonight, and I’d go home. Choosing a costume from the store’s stock could wait a few days, since the scene where Alicia would wear a Chinese-sty
le outfit wasn’t in the coming week’s shooting schedule.

  “Mission accomplished?” Lopez asked me.

  “Yeah, Ted’s off the phone now,” I said, watching the director disconnect his sister. “And I’d like to find my way out of this place before dawn, so I’d better set off on my expedition now. Especially since I need to find Max, first.”

  “You’re with Max?” he asked, his tone carefully neutral. Max had often been a subject of discord between us, and I guess Lopez was trying to avoid more conflict at the moment. “Is he involved in the film, too?”

  “Yes, I’m with Max. No, he’s not involved in ABC. And I’m not answering any more questions tonight, officer.”

  “Just one more question. Please? So I’ll know.”

  “All right, one. What is it?”

  “Are you speaking to me?” he asked. “Seriously. I really don’t know, and . . . Well, I’d like to know. Just for informational purposes.”

  “Am I speaking to you?”

  “Yes.”

  I thought about it for a moment.

  “At this point, I don’t even know,” I said honestly. “I just don’t know.”

  15

  Yuanfen

  Fate, mutual destiny; the force that brings two lovers together or binds two people in a relationship.

  “Oh, yeah. This is the one. This is the dress,” said Danny Teng, dai lo of the Red Daggers. “She should wear this in the movie.”

  His reptilian gaze slid over me as I stood before a mirror in Yee & Sons Trading Company while wearing a short, tight, sleeveless, Chinese-style polyester dress. It was mostly black, with one red panel. Although the neckline was perfectly respectable, the side-slits in the skirt went up so high that I kept worrying that Danny could see my underpants.

  Then again, maybe my half-naked feeling was just due to the way he was undressing me with his eyes.

  With my hair hastily piled atop my head and a pair of black go-go boots completing this ensemble, I studied my reflection for a moment, then said to Ted, “I look like a Eurasian hooker.”

  “You look hot,” said Danny.

  “Does he really get a say in this?” I said in disgust to Ted.

  “Huh?” Ted, who had been studying my outfit, blinked and asked me to repeat the question. Then he responded mildly, “Oh. No. This is a directorial decision, Danny.”

  “Hey, just giving my opinion as a red-blooded male,” said Danny, relaxing in a chair with his feet up and his hands folded behind his head. “But if the reporter lady wants to keep trying on more dresses, no problem here.”

  For the past week—ever since Ted had announced he had a new backer—Danny had spent time on the set with us every single day. Sometimes he was there for over an hour; sometimes, to everyone’s relief, he left within twenty minutes. But at some point each day, he showed up and hung out for a while, making a nuisance of himself by smirking at the men and ogling me and Cynthia. And Ted wouldn’t get rid of him. Our director just asked us to tolerate Danny’s occasional presence and left it at that, offering no explanation for this rude, distracting thug hanging around our set each day.

  At first, I had assumed Ted must owe Danny money, and Danny had come to collect. But by the second day, I realized the truth: Danny Teng must be Ted’s new “silent” backer, and he was monitoring his investment.

  Oh, great.

  Danny sure didn’t look like a guy with money to invest, but I supposed that was probably normal in his line of work. I mean, being well-groomed probably wouldn’t fit in well with a Red Dagger’s daily tasks of extortion, assault, and loan-sharking. Danny’s sleazy appearance was much better suited to credibility when conducting that sort of business.

  And Ted, I now realized, was an even bigger idiot that I had supposed. No wonder Susan was always so angry at him!

  After all, it only took a very short acquaintance with Danny Teng to realize he would slit someone’s throat without a second thought just for getting on his nerves. So what would he do to Ted if the film lost money? Or didn’t get finished? Or turned out to be lousy (as seemed not unlikely)?

  We were all concerned about the situation, but Ted just vaguely kept assuring us that everything would be fine and there was no reason to worry. Since I was worried, though, I was pushing John about the investors’ event he had proposed. John, who shared my concerns about Ted’s (and everyone else’s) safety while Danny Teng was involved in the film, had by now introduced Ted to his NYU film contact. But until Ted took some of the necessary steps, such as preparing a budget and a sample reel, there wasn’t much for anyone else to do besides nag. Which didn’t really work on Ted; if it did, after all, then Susan or his mother would have gotten somewhere with him by now.

  We had so far endured more than a week of Danny’s daily visits to the set, and it looked like things would be this way for a while.

  Being none too bright, Danny wasn’t quite able to process the information that I was an actress, not a reporter—as he had assumed at Benny’s wake. So now he vaguely seemed to think I was an investigative journalist who was performing in Ted’s film in my copious spare time. I didn’t try to clear up this misunderstanding, since it sometimes meant I could get rid of Danny by asking him for personal quotes about his life of crime for my “newspaper.”

  This evening, alas, Ted and I had Danny all to ourselves. Earlier in the day, we had been filming on Hester Street with the regular crew and several cast members. But since tomorrow was the firecracker festival, the first day of the Chinese New Year, this was a busy time for everyone in the production except me. It was sort of like Christmas Eve was for gentiles, I supposed—and me, once again, spared the frantic bustle by virtue of being Jewish. (So at least there’s some advantage, once in a while, in being one of the Chosen People.) Ted had halted work shortly before dark and let everyone else go.

  John and Bill went off for their final practice before tomorrow’s big day of dancing in the streets in their elaborate lion costume, surrounded by firecrackers and dense crowds. Others went off to do their final grocery shopping for the holiday, prepare a family feast, or finish cleaning and decorating their homes in time to welcome in the New Year.

  And Ted and I walked over to his mother’s store, accompanied by Danny, to choose Alicia’s costume for the scene in which she would show up at a family event dressed in an inappropriately tiny cheongsam (so I was probably destined to wear this chilly dress for that scene, since it certainly suited the script), in a doomed attempt to prove to her Chinese-American boyfriend how “ethnic” she could be. Or something. By contrast, Mei would be dressed with simple elegance and good taste, behaving with modest dignity and grace while Alicia got progressively drunker, louder, and ruder.

  Although it was a pretty silly scene, with Alicia being more socially tone-deaf than a rock (or, to give another example, than Danny Teng), I was starting to look forward to doing it. One of the fun things about acting is the chance to do things you’d never get to do in reality (such as fight to the death with a rapier, rule England, or win an international chess tournament) and to behave in ways that you’d never dream of behaving in your own life—and to do it without consequences, either. Alicia would humiliate herself and lose her boyfriend for behaving like a gauche, drunken idiot in that scene; but I’d have fun being outrageously rude and clueless, get paid for it, and maybe go out for a pleasant meal with my colleagues afterward.

  Looking at my reflection again now, I asked Ted, “So this is the dress you like best?”

  Ted walked around me, a frown of concentration on his face and his hand on his chin, studying me as if I were an abstract sculpture. While waiting for his verdict, I ignored the icky kissing noises that Danny was making. Finally Ted said, “Yeah. I think it looks good on Alicia, and it’ll look good on camera. Are you okay with it, Esther?”

  “I guess so. But I’m a little worried about how high these side slits go.”

  “Hmm.” Ted examined one of them. “We could have about an inch of
it sewn together, if that would make you more comfortable.”

  Ignoring Danny’s protests, I said, “That would work.”

  To my relief, Danny’s cell phone rang, taking his attention off me. He answered the call while Ted said to me, “How does it feel apart from the side—”

  “Holy fuck!” Danny shouted, leaping to his feet.

  We both flinched and looked at him.

  “No fucking way!” Danny screamed.

  I grabbed Ted’s arm and started slowly backing away from Danny, heading for a long aisle down which we could escape this area. I found Lily’s store as disorienting as I had last time, but I didn’t care if I got lost now—I just cared about getting away from Danny. He was obviously a dangerous man to be around when something made him angry—and it was clear that something had just enraged him.

  Danny switched to Chinese and was talking rapidly now.

  “My Cantonese isn’t that good,” Ted said, “but I think he’s saying, ‘Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t go anywhere.’”

  “I don’t care what he’s saying,” I whispered. “Let’s get out of here before he takes it out on us, whatever ‘it’ is.”

  “Now he’s saying he’ll be right there,” Ted whispered to me as I continued slowly tugging him toward that long aisle nearby. “He says he’s leaving right away.”

  Oh, thank God, I thought.

  “You two! Don’t move!”

  We froze when Danny pointed at us. He had ended his call and was shoving his phone into his pocket, his movements angry and clumsy. His eyes were wild and his face was flushed. Something big had obviously happened.

  I had no intention of asking what it was. I didn’t want to know. Given his mood, I just wanted him to leave.

  “I gotta go,” Danny said roughly. “How the fuck do I get out of here? This place is like a puzzle!”

  “Oh. Well, uh . . .” Ted scratched his head. “You go back down that aisle behind you, turn left, then keep walking until you come to—”

  “Just fucking show me!” Danny shouted. “Now! Take me to the goddamn front door!”

  “Okay,” said Ted. “Okay. I’ll show you. Calm down and I’ll—” He flinched when Danny started screaming at him in Chinese. I had a feeling the gist of it was, Don’t tell me to calm down, probably accompanied by some choice epithets.