by Delia Rosen
“You sure? Like I said, there are other places.”
“I’ll be okay,” I assured him. “I’ll sleep in the walk-in freezer.”
For a moment he believed me. Then he snickered. “Just stay away from the doors, okay?”
“You don’t have to remind me. And you don’t need to sleep in your car.”
He snickered again. Now that he’d let down his guard, he was clearly on edge, not just about me, I suspected, or even the possibility of a rogue cop, but the fact that someone was shooting up the city and he had been powerless so far to make any headway.
We drove the short way in silence. He saw me to the door, shut it behind me, and spoke to the officer out front—perhaps sizing him up? Grant was nothing if not a good cop. Ironically, I think he was doing his own version of taking an etheric reading.
I retired to the kitchen, heard Grant crunching through the alley to the fence to talk to the cop there. Both officers were new to me; Grant obviously wanted to make sure I wasn’t being watched by the cops who had let a couple of bullets slip through and a gunman slip away. I shut the back door but did not bolt it. A minute later I heard Grant back around front, and I listened from my office as he talked to the forensics team that was just finishing up on the bullets and their trajectories. From his tone of voice—just the low, tense sound of it, not the words I couldn’t hear—I knew he wasn’t happy.
I shut the door and sat down to ponder the sketchy new information I had to work with: Chan’s ring and his wistful gaze, which didn’t seem to give me anything particularly helpful, especially if I wasn’t actually remembering it but imaging how I remembered it—perhaps prompted, subconsciously, by my abductor asking me what else Chan could have been looking it. Then there was a student at the deli and at the school, which hardly counted as a novelty in either place. And finally we had a possible leak in the thin blue line, which could be dangerous to all concerned and might also be what Agent Bowe-Pitt was keeping his eye on.
A night of information, but, on the surface, a whole lotta bubkes.
The more I thought about it, though, there could be something to that cop thing. And there might be a way for me to do some checking.
A “crazy” way.
Chapter 16
When everyone had gone, I went to the refrigerator with scissors and cut several lengths of rope that were used to bind the lettuce cartons. I formed them into two makeshift leashes and tied them around my cats’ waists.
We were going to go for a walk in the alley. And if not a walk, a drag. They were not outdoor cats and might not take kindly to going al fresco. But I needed to get out for a while and didn’t want the cops calling Grant.
Southpaw and Mr. Wiggles did not want to leave my office. Specifically, they were tucked deep under my desk, where the confluence of wires and dust created an alien world of monstrous plant tendrils and puffy spores. I pulled them out like sphinxes being drawn through a cloud of desert sand. I rigged the little nooses around each, behind their forearms, and we went out the back door.
The officer, a veteran with skin pocked like gefilte fish, gave me a look.
“They’re used to country living,” I said preemptively. “They need to be outside.”
He studied them as they were pulled past, then said, “They got no claws, ma’am.”
“Yes, I know. I have a pen for them at home. Very safe. The noises and lights here scare them.”
There was no traffic this late, and the fence blocked the lights from the surrounding shops. It wasn’t kosher, we both knew it, but it wasn’t as if I was under house arrest or anything.
“Would you like me to go with you?” he asked.
“No, I’m fine, really,” I smiled as I pulled the cords harder to get the mewing babies up on their farkakt paws.
We made it around the corner to the alley; the wails of my two companions actually scared the bona fide alley cats. When we were out of sight, I picked them up and put them under my arms like a pair of footballs. I scurried to the street, leaned out slightly, and when the cop out front was looking the other way, I headed left.
The parking garage had my keys, and I had my driver’s license and a credit card. I also had the two cats, but they would survive. The attendant knew me and waved—albeit with a strange look—as I hustled past with my two little lions.
A few minutes later I was outside Ken Chan’s school. I pulled up in front. I got hit with a spotlight from the cop car as I approached. Then it snapped off. No one got out. The door to the school was closed, but there was a light on in the office. The wake was over; the casket was gone, though the shrine remained. Leaving the cats in the car, I rapped on the glass door.
I had a sense of reverse déjà vu as a head looked out from the office toward the front door: it was usually me on the other end of that action. It was Auntie May. She emerged, still wearing her mourning clothes and the same neutral expression I had seen at the wake.
She turned the key in the door and opened it slightly—just enough to talk, not enough for me to enter.
“Hi, Auntie May. I was hoping to talk to you or Ms. Chan.”
She hesitated a moment, then stepped back to let me in. She locked the door behind her. “I am here alone, going through my nephew’s papers. How may I help you?”
“I remembered something about—well, about that morning, and I wanted to ask you about it.”
She extended an arm toward the back of the school.
“Is it customary for a wake to be so brief?” I asked.
“It was prudent,” she replied. “There has been concern.”
“About?”
She stopped and regarded me. “Murder requires a murderer. The students were watching to see who paid respects—and, more important, who did not.”
“But Sifu Chan may not have been the target.”
“Yet he was not without enemies,” the woman replied, “and he is not without friends, friends who are looking for an excuse to attack those enemies. As I told you the other day, that is not our way.”
We reached the chair by the shrine, Auntie May taking one seat and gesturing me to take the one to her right. I was aware of the smell of the flowers, which were more plentiful than they had been before. Roses, mostly, stacked in bunches before the shrine.
“What did you wish to ask?” Auntie May asked.
“Thinking back, I have this memory of Sifu Chan looking at his wedding ring moments before the attack. Is that something he did as a rule?”
“Look at it?”
“That’s right.”
“No,” she said. “He did not wear his wedding ring—as a rule. We discourage wearing jewelry here. It can cause injury.”
“Yes, Mrs. Chan told me that. What about at night? When he left here? Or in the morning, when he arrived.”
Auntie May looked to her left, toward the shrine. “Your questions are very personal, Ms. Katz.”
“I apologize. I need to know why his eyes on that ring stood out to me.”
“Why are you asking that now? What didn’t you tell us earlier?”
“The way he looked, what he looked at, was bothering me. It was the last thing he did before saving me—I wanted to understand. So I went to a hypnotist. She brought the memory out.”
There was no need to say any more than that. Either she was going to answer or not. I waited. Things were as tense as they had been back at the deli. I didn’t know if it was the culture clash, the topic, both, or something else. Such as secrets she didn’t want to share. I had some ideas about what those might be, such as his relationship with Ms. Mui and the paternity of her child.
“I will tell you,” Auntie May said after some consideration. It took nearly a minute before she drew a long breath and went on. “The man who was with you that morning was not Sifu Chan.”
Okay: that was not on my short list of ideas. It wasn’t even on the long list. I didn’t even have a response. Although it also occurred to me, then, that during our office meeting “widow”
Maggie had kept referring to the dead man not as her husband but as “the sifu.” I thought it was some kind of show of respect, but now I understood why. Because he was, in fact, no more than “the sifu.”
“The deceased was Lung Wong,” she continued, “my real nephew, one who was with Sifu Chan in New York since the founding of the school in 1988. He posed as Sifu Chan so that the master could stay behind and root out the gang members who had infiltrated our school. It was important that word get back that the master was gone, for good. The real sifu needed to be free to act without endangering his family.”
“A real ninja,” I said.
“That is Japanese.”
“Oh. Then—”
“A hidden snake,” Auntie May said. “That is the animal identity he embodied.”
“I see.” I did, too. And now the questions my abductors asked made sense. Perhaps they were northern gang members who knew, or suspected, that Lung Wong was not Ken Chan. “So the question, then, is would anyone have wanted to kill Mr. Wong—the real one?”
“Several individuals,” Auntie May replied. “Because he did have an affair—”
“Same deal with Ms. Mui, right?” I interrupted.
“—with Mrs. Chan.”
A brocha. This just kept getting richer.
“Lung Wong, pretending to be Ken Chan, was having an affair with Mrs. Chan,” I said.
“He lived in their home; it was inevitable. She was the love of his life. The deep, abiding, one and true love. Maggie is twenty-five years younger than Sifu Chan. Is it any wonder, even loving him, that being separated she might succumb ?”
“No,” I admitted. I’d done foolish things too, and then done them again. More important, such love could account for his wishful look at the ring, longing for what he could never truly have. It would also explain what I had noted at the time, the unusually astringent faces of the family at the wake. Why May wasn’t happy when Maggie took me aside. And why Lung’s remains were hustled away so quickly. He had shamed the school . . . or at least the sifu. The afternoon must have been utterly unendurable for Mrs. Chan.
I was watching Auntie May. Her lips were moving again, very slightly, as they had at the deli. It was as if she were getting ready to say, ‘But wait! There’s more!’ And sure enough, there was.
“The situation was dire enough,” she said. “But what made it worse was the fact that Lung was also seeing Chingmy Mui. It is, in fact, his child she is carrying. He had admitted that from the start.”
“Proven by DNA testing?”
“There was no need,” Auntie May said. “Chingmy was a virgin.”
“So says who?”
“Her OB/GYN,” Auntie May said.
“What, you just went in and asked?”
“I went in for an appointment and someone looked at her file.”
“Did Maggie know he was two-timing her?”
“You mean being unfaithful?”
“Yes.”
“When he learned Chingmy was coming to the belt test and his face glowed,” May said, “then Maggie knew. Women know when a man is no longer theirs.”
“The Chinese are wiser than I am,” I replied. “Did the Muis know that Lung was not Sifu Chan?”
“No,” Auntie May replied. “One of the judges at the competition had to be informed, since he knew Sifu Chan from years before. He understood why. But to everyone else, Lung was Ken Chan.”
“With all this Prince and the Pauper stuff going on, how did you propose to reintegrate the sifu when his work was finished?”
“We would have rejoined him in New York,” she said. “There would have been no questions.”
“So, to get back to the reason I’m here, the shooting,” I said. “If the gunfire were directed at Lung Wong, it could have come from someone defending the honor of the cuckolded Sifu Chan.”
“It is doubtful,” Auntie May said. “That was a closely held secret.”
“All right, then. From someone defending the honor of Chingmy Mui. Or someone from the gang in New York who believed he was the sifu and wanted him dead. Or someone from the gang in New York who somehow knew he was not the sifu and wanted to send a message to the real sifu that his school and possibly his family here were going to be attacked. There are a half dozen or more good reasons to have shot him, and probably a half dozen more bad ones I don’t know about. Maybe it was the Li family seeking additional payback.”
“Yes,” Auntie May replied. “All of those are reasonable.”
Her ledger-like mind served her well; I had already forgotten most of the things I had said.
“It’s quite a tale,” I replied thoughtfully, “but there is still one big problem with it. It doesn’t explain the second and third attacks.”
“Sadly, it does,” she said. “A transfer from another school and our first black belt, Yuen Hung, was out riding his bike not far from where you were sitting the other night,” May said. “He was heading in your direction, racing to get out of the rain, when the gunshots erupted. Yuen hid behind a tree and waited until the police arrived.”
That would explain the clattering I heard and had forgotten about. Also, “heading in your direction” would mean he might not have been close enough to be picked up by Banko’s vibrating doohickey wires. And given Yuen’s location behind me, it was possible someone was trying to shoot him.
“And tonight?” I asked.
“Tonight, Mrs. Chan was trying to contact you.”
“Then that was her on the phone?”
Auntie May nodded. “I warned her it was dangerous, but she felt that you needed to know the truth. This truth.”
“Why did she call from a public telephone?”
“She is afraid to use her cell phone in case someone might use it to track her,” Auntie May told me.
I was about to ask if gangs had that kind of triangulation technology, but that was stupid. Chinese hackers had been inside more American computers than Microsoft software.
I was mentally exhausted. And troubled by one thing more: while all of this fit, it did not necessarily bring us any closer to the identity of the shooter. Every Chinese-American on the dance card being pissed off at every other local Chinese-American did not necessarily mean they were trying to kill everyone else.
“How much of this have you shared with the police and the FBI?” I asked.
“They know that Lung Wong is not Ken Chan,” she told me. “Agent Bowe-Pitt was entrusted with that knowledge after the killing. The NPD knows as well. Sifu Chan is working with the police in New York to uncover the gangs. They were in communication when Maggie informed them of this danger.”
“Do you know if the NPD suspects that those New York gangs may have migrated south?”
“It must be the concern of someone or we would not have police protection at the school and at our apartments on Elmington Avenue,” she said.
That was true. I wondered if she knew I had been kidnapped and grilled about Ken Chan. I decided not to tell her. If she knew anything, she would have mentioned it. If she had been involved, she wouldn’t exactly be forthcoming. So—no point.
“Where is Mrs. Chan now?” I asked.
“At home,” she said. “She is safe. Students are also watching the residence.”
“Right. I’m assuming they don’t know that she was having an affair with a man who wasn’t really her husband . . . because they thought he was her husband.”
Auntie May nodded once. “He went home with them. He slept there. What reason had they to think otherwise?”
I sat there like a cold blintz as I let all of this seep into my tired brain. Then something occurred to me.
“Auntie May, with all that has happened over the past few days—do you know where the real Sifu Chan has been? Has anyone spoken to him?”
For the first time since I met her, a question made the woman squirm. “We have not spoken with him,” she replied. “We do not know where he is. Neither do the police. He has disappeared.”
&nbs
p; “Disappeared as in he stopped calling people? Or disappeared as in . . .” I let the silence finish the thought.
“Detective Daniels has been looking into that with the NYPD,” she said. “They have one clue.”
“Which is?”
She seemed close to tears. She shut her eyes. The woman’s tiny hands were resting on her lap. I rested one of mine on top, intending to give her comfort—and squealed with pain as she gripped my fingers with the chicken-claw digits of her left hand and twisted my hand so my palm was facing upward, my knuckles resting on her sharp knee and my fingers tortured backward over the side, toward the floor. My hand was pinned there, and my shoulder slumped toward her fast to relieve the awful, stabbing pain that poured up each finger into my wrist, where it exploded into something worse.
The entire thing took no more than a second. One second. Auntie May opened her eyes, gasped, released me, and sat back in her chair, recoiling from me as though I were a scorpion in a cigar box.
I grabbed my poor hand with the other and lifted it; my wrist was that weak and useless from what she’d done.
“I am so sorry,” she said. “So sorry.”
“Wow! That hurt!”
“Please forgive me. It—it was a reflex.”
“I noticed! So you know martial arts too! I didn’t realize—”
“Yes, our entire family was schooled in the Shaolin arts—I am so deeply sorry.”
Sensation other than anguish was beginning to return to a forearm, which felt, for lack of a better comparison at that pained moment, like a floppy rubber dildo. I shook it lightly to restore some calm to the jangled nerves. When I was done, I laid it back on my own knee, palm down. It still pained me around the wrist.
“You were about to say something about the one clue to Sifu Chan’s disappearance?” I said, wincing.
She regained her composure. “Telephone records show that he received a call from Nashville.”
“Do you know from whom?” I asked.
“We do not,” she replied. “We only know that it came from the main number at the Nashville Police Station.”
Chapter 17
When I reached the deli after a long “walk” with my cats, it occurred to me that I should send all the cops home and just have Auntie May stay at the deli. That tante was a badass. My wrist still hurt when I moved it.