by Henry Chang
“Time for a close-up,” the sergeant said.
Sergeant Cohen was in his forties, and his gray, ball-bearing pupils focused on the aluminum Columbia University rowboat at the water’s edge. The land part was operated by the Parks Department.
“Let’s go, kid,” the sergeant said to the patrolman. “The river’s half frozen anyway.”
PO Mulligan, twenty years younger, held the rowboat steady as Sergeant Cohen stepped in and squatted. Mulligan shoved off, jumping in as the rowboat skimmed in the direction of the submerged tree stump.
Mulligan pulled up his blue NYPD-monogrammed turtleneck. “Freezing,” he repeated, breathing evenly as he set the oars.
They could hear the distant crackle of radio broadcasts as he started rowing through the surface ice. The patrolman pulled on the oars, figuring the distance at a couple dozen strokes.
The radio sounds got louder, until out of the gray wash came the Harbor Unit, a twin-engine Detroit fast-boat, approaching from the Bronx side of the Third Avenue Bridge. Sergeant Cohen could make out two additional uniformed officers on board and figured it quickly: simultaneous calls and dispatch. Multiple calls must have come through 911 emergency, from both the South Bronx and Manhattan North precincts. Reports of a body snagged on a tree in the river.
The Harbor Unit had been docked on the South Bronx waterfront near Hunts Point and had taken aboard the cops from the Forty-Fourth Precinct when the dispatch went out. From the fast-boat they could see the two cops in the rowboat, out from the Manhattan side, rowing closer to the bulky shape now, which was looking more like a body as they approached. The NYPD boat cut its engines, maneuvering now as its arrival sent ripples though the chunks of ice.
Sergeant Cohen could see clearly as they came within ten feet: it was a body, with black hair, head and torso just under the surface of the water, its right arm raised, caught in the branches of the tree. Like he was a student, raising his arm in a classroom. The drag of the stump, and the ice floes that had drifted around it, had kept everything in place.
The Harbor Unit boat came about and bumped up against the ice, nudging the scene more toward the Manhattan side.
Overtime, thought Sergeant Cohen. Finally he was close enough to lift the head out of the water with his baton. Male, Asian, he thought. Twenty-something, maybe thirty years old. PO Mulligan worked the oars against the ice. A jumper? Or something else? There was no blood that he could see. “How’d he wind up in the river?” Cohen wondered aloud.
“Hey!” one of the blues on the Harbor boat deck yelled. “Whaddya think? Someone from your side? You had jumpers before …” He looked vaguely Hispanic and also wore the stripes of a sergeant.
Sergeant Cohen barked back, “Who knows? Could have been your side, too. Like the Bruckner, or Hunts Point. Plenty of vics from over there.”
The Harbor Unit skipper, a Nordic face, took a call over the boat radio.
There was a pause between the different cops, when all they could hear was the lapping of the currents against the ice and the whistle of the wind across the mouth of the bay. The Macombs Dam Bridge towered in the distance.
The second cop on the harbor boat, a white patrolman from the Four-Four Bronx Precinct, said, “Looks like a dead Chink to me.” His Latino sergeant agreed: “El chino.”
PO Mulligan countered, “Could be a Jap. Or Korean.” His Manhattan sense of diversity.
“They’re all the same,” the boat-deck patrolman said, shrugging.
“Asian,” Sergeant Cohen settled on.
“Whatever,” the Latino sarge said. “You want the case or not? All our dicks are working the club fire, anyway.”
All the cops had heard about it, an enraged partygoer had returned to the Happy World Social Club with a gun and a can of gasoline, and now thirteen Central American immigrants lay dead in the smoldering ruins.
“And besides,” the sarge continued from the deck, “the scene’s closer to your side of the river now.”
“Yeah, Manhattan.” The Bronx patrolman grinned. “There’s more Chinks in Manhattan anyways.”
“Come back, Harbor Two,” the boat radio crackled again.
“Negative, we don’t need scuba, copy?” the blond skipper answered. More static from the radio. “We’ve got an Asian in the water,” the skipper continued.
“Agent?” came from the radio. “What agent?”
“No, an Asian,” repeated the skipper.
“What agency? What agent, Harbor Two?”
“Negative.” The skipper paused on the open line, annoyed, when the Bronx patrolman yelled into the radio, “We got a dead Chink in the drink! Copy?”
“Oh,” responded dispatch drily. “Okay. Copy that. Ten-four.”
The patrolman smirked as his sergeant said toward Sergeant Cohen, “It’s all yours, Manhattan.”
“Wait for EMS, okay?” said dispatch.
“Copy that,” answered Sergeant Cohen. “Call the house,” he said to Mulligan. “Tell them we could use a Chinese, uh, Asian detective.”
North
THE BEATEN-DOWN LANDSCAPE of the Lower East Side flashed past the bus window as Jack’s cell phone sounded. It was a number he didn’t recognize, but he flipped open the phone and took the call.
“Detective Yu?” asked a female dispatcher.
“Correct,” Jack answered, keeping his voice even in the noise of the city bus.
“Report to Manhattan North,” she said under some static.
“Come back?” Jack quietly questioned.
“Report to One Hundred Twenty-Eighth Street and Lexington. East Hamilton Park.”
“Copy,” Jack answered, waiting. 1-2-8 and Lex.
“See Sergeant Cohen,” came the punch line, “Hamilton Heights precinct, copy?”
“Copy that,” Jack answered, anticipating the Union Square crossover in the distance. It had to be about a questionable death, he knew. But why assign a Manhattan South detective to something at the other end of Manhattan?
He watched the Ninth Precinct fade as the bus rolled north. At Union Square he dropped to the subway and caught a 4 train northbound; four stops on a twenty-minute bullet to Harlem and 125th Street.
The complexions of the passengers changed as the subway zoomed north of midtown, most people going in the opposite direction, more blacks and Latinos, minorities, bound for the Bronx.
Harlem? he wondered as the train thundered through the underground.
River
A TALL WHITE cop, a sergeant, was waiting for him at the gate to East Hamilton Park. Jack saw the insignia, with COHEN on his nameplate, and flapped open his jacket to show his gold badge.
“Detective Yu,” Sergeant Cohen acknowledged.
“What do you have, Sarge?” Jack asked evenly, preferring not to question the chain of custody or command involved until later, when they got to the Thirty-Second Precinct.
“In the river,” the sergeant said as he led the way to the shoreline.
Jack could see the Harbor Unit idling near the middle of the river. The wind kicked up as they went toward a metal rowboat bearing the Columbia University logo.
“After you,” Sergeant Cohen said.
Jack stepped into the rowboat, dropping smoothly into a wide stance to help level the boat before sliding forward and sitting down. Sergeant Cohen pushed off and hopped aboard as they drifted forward through the choppy water. The irony of it, Jack thought, a Jew rowing a Chinaman out to the middle of the Harlem River to take possession of the dead on its journey to the next life. That’s how Billy Bow would see it anyway.
Jing deng, Jack remembered, destiny.
The Harbor boat had blocked off the view from the Manhattan shore, shielding and securing the scene.
Jack checked his watch, made a mental note of the time: 8:49 A.M. There was a trace of salt in the wind, from far out where the river met the bay and then the Atlantic. He imagined the taste of salty seawater flowing off the sides of the Harbor boat as the sergeant rowed them forward. He noticed
traffic sounds in the distance, from the shores of both north Manhattan and the South Bronx, highway traffic en route to another brutal winter day. He’d get the names and commands of the other cops later.
The river freeze seeped into Jack’s jacket as they angled for the stern of the waiting boat.
“We got a male body,” Sergeant Cohen offered, working the oars. “Maybe Asian.“ The word brought a cold pang of realization to Jack, knowing for certain now why he’d gotten the call.
“Snagged on a sunken tree,” the sergeant continued. “After the Harbor Unit arrived, the branches shifted in the water and the body got lifted a little.”
Jack nodded but was silent, taking a few shaolin breaths through his nose as they maneuvered around the bigger boat’s stern. He patted for the plastic disposable camera he had in his jacket pocket. There was nothing else floating, nothing remarkable in the water surrounding the scene.
As they came around, Jack saw that the dragging and twisting of the submerged tree trunk had raised the body almost even with the surface of the water, caught on dead branches against large, jagged chunks of river ice.
Closer now, and Jack saw that the body wore a black bubble jacket with a black hoodie underneath. Blue jeans. The puffy bubble jacket was saturated and resembled a life jacket. The distant traffic sounds faded to the more immediate setting where Jack could now hear his own heartbeat as he lifted the head and shoulders out of the water. Male. Asian. He was already blue in the face but looked freshly dead. Jack felt for a pulse, but the man was clearly cold—frozen stiff. As hard as the body was, Jack couldn’t make a guess on rigor mortis, but there were no obvious signs of trauma to the head or face and no blood, disjointed limbs, or other injuries as far as Jack could see. A jumper? The guy looked young but was probably in his midtwenties, Jack guessed. He fit the profile. Looked like a student, maybe. But up here in the Harlem River? Deliveryman was Jack’s next thought. Black hair cut short at the sides, longer on top. Chinatown style, but he didn’t look like a first-generation immigrant.
Jack took pictures and headshots with his free hand. Finally, he took wide shots of the scene before giving the Harbor Unit the nod to haul in the corpse.
THE BOAT COPS used the long hooks, pulled and grappled the stiff body onto a black rubber bag they had spread out on the deck. The man’s dark sweatshirt and jacket were waterlogged, soggy, and bunched from the handling.
The blond skipper had a trunk full of crime scene supplies on board and offered plenty of plastic bags to protect evidence.
The deceased, whom Jack suspected might be Chinese—meaning he could fall anywhere from Toishanese to Taiwanese, Cantonese to Shanghainese, or any of a dozen strains of ethnic Chinese—wore dark blue jeans and black Timberland-type boots and looked as generic as anybody in a Gap jeans ad. His jacket had been pulled up by the grappling hook, but just inside the cuff of the left sleeve was a fancy-looking wristwatch. Jack recognized it right away: a knockoff Rolex. A Canal Street copy that the Viet-Chinese moved thousands of every year.
Other than the wristwatch, no jewelry.
In his pants pockets, there were forty-four cents, a set of keys on a ring, a red plastic comb. There was a pack of Marlboros in his jacket, along with some soggy scraps of paper. One of the scraps looked like a Chinese receipt for fruit or produce, and the other was a torn piece of a Chinese takeout menu with Chinese numbers and words scribbled across the edges.
The ink on the scraps had started to run.
Jack took tight pictures of everything and then bagged the items, but also considered what wasn’t there. No wallet, no identification of any kind. No money to speak of, no cell phone, no jewelry. Maybe the knockoff Rolex had gotten pushed up inside the jacket sleeve and hadn’t been noticed. Except for the wristwatch, Jack suspected it could have been a robbery. The medical examiner would have something more later, Jack knew. A vic? Or a jumper? The body hadn’t seemed busted up at all, like it’d be if he’d dropped from a great height.
A call came over the sergeant’s radio, and they all looked toward Manhattan, where they could see the flashing lights of an EMS unit near the park seawall. The Harbor boat fired up its twin engines as the mate attached the rowboat to its towline.
The river wind gusted up again, and then all Jack could hear was the churning wake and the slapping bounce of the metal rowboat against the waves as they ferried the dead man back toward shore.
Jack scanned the horizon and saw they were past where the Metro-North trains crossed the river and headed north, through the Bronx, Yonkers, and Westchester, to upstate New York.
He wondered where the body had entered the river, but he felt certain it was north, in the vicinity of one of the four bridges spanning the Harlem River. Statistically, the most common drowning victims are males in their teens through their midtwenties. Most deceased carried ID or had left a goodbye letter behind. Some had already been reported as missing persons.
Of the annual suicide drownings in New York City, the group didn’t amount to more than a dozen or so heartbroken, overwhelmed people on the edge, or mentally ill, over-pressured students and folks caught in scandalous behavior. Unless there was a related catastrophic accident like a plane crash, it wasn’t a huge file.
The area bridges over the river now had guardrails and tall fencing along their walkways to deflect potential stunt leapers and suicides, after a spate of them in the 1980s.
The skimming metal sound from the towed rowboat began to slow as they approached the shore.
Smooth and Easy
EMS PLACED THE black body bag on a gurney and took it south to the morgue as a squad car drove Jack and the sergeant six blocks west to the Thirty-Second Precinct. The grittiness of Harlem rolled past until they got to 135th Street.
The Three-Two station house was modern looking, like it had recently gotten a facelift. Three-two, Jack remembered—som yee—propitious numbers that sounded like the Cantonese for “smooth and easy.” At least he was out of the cold, Jack thought, and could deal with the evidence more comfortably.
Sergeant Cohen commandeered a table away from the duty desk where they could review the morning’s events. He also provided coffee from the squad’s break room.
“Thanks,” Jack offered. “I’m also going to need the missing persons reports from the last two days.”
“Just the last two?”
“He didn’t look like he’d been in the water too long,” Jack said. “Let’s just see if his profile or picture turns up on the sheet.” He knew it was a long shot anyway, and the ME’s findings would be hours away.
“Got it,” the sergeant agreed, sounding like he’d almost had his fill of overtime. “It may take a little while because of the club fire.” Jack thanked him as he went off to the computer room with his coffee.
Jack focused back on the evidence.
THE MUSHY PACK of Marlboros wasn’t much of a clue. Missing were two cigarettes, and the pack didn’t have any drugs or paraphernalia inside. The pack also didn’t have a New York State tax stamp on it, which wasn’t very unusual; untaxed cigarettes poured into New York from neighboring states and from upstate Indian tribes. Given the local hustles, every gang in Chinatown, and every bodega and dive bar, had their fingers in it.
The keys were a mystery: four keys, including one with a rounded, notched cylinder that looked like it belonged to a bike lock. Was the deceased a takeout-joint deliveryman? A second key was the type that came in little envelopes, used for safe-deposit boxes at banks. The third key looked normal, like a house key, but the last key looked like the kind you’d find in a pay locker at the bus terminal.
The keys made him think of Ah Por, the old Chinatown wise woman from whom he’d sought clues in previous cases. She could face-read photos and items and provide insights that, eerily, often led to resolutions. Ah Por wasn’t clairvoyant, Jack thought. She just had her own touch of yellow Taoist witchcraft.
Pa had gone to her after Ma had passed away, in search of lucky numbers and ad
vice from the Tong Sing, the Chinese almanac.
Jack jangled the keys and knew he would bring her his crime scene photos as well. He unzipped the plastic baggies containing the soggy scraps of paper, saw Chinese words at the ends of what appeared to be telephone numbers.
When he punched the numbers through the precinct’s computer directory, most of the 888 prefixes belonged to Chinese restaurants and takeout joints in the South Bronx.
The telephone number prefix 888 in Cantonese, bot bot bot, sounded like the Chinese word for “luck,” times three. Now the use of the 888 prefix could be found on everything from vanity license plates to Asian escort services.
Eight-eight-eight was the most-played number in the Chinese lottery and numbers rackets.
The last two numbers caught his eye. They were both Chinatown numbers, one belonging to the Gee Fraternal and Benevolent Association, and the other to the Dao Foo Wong, or Tofu King.
Inside the wet baggie, the scribbled words continued to run, blend, as he copied them into his notepad.
He called the South Bronx numbers first, found none of them open for business yet. Many takeouts didn’t open until 11, figuring that 11 A.M. until 11 P.M. was enough of a dangerous 12-hour day among the gwai—the devils, the ghosts.
His call to the Gee Association went to a Cantonese voice message, so he hung up. He’d get a better idea of what connection there was if he visited in person.
He called the Tofu King and asked for Billy Bow. He recognized the voice of the Toishanese counter lady. “Bee-lee m’mo koy,” she barked, telling him Billy wasn’t there. When he called Billy’s cell phone, it went to voice mail: “I’m busy. Leave a message or hang the fuck up.” Jack hung up.
He turned back to the evidence on the table. The second wet baggie held another paper scrap with lines across it that made it look like part of a receipt. Jack recognized the Chinese words for “apples,” ping gwo; “oranges,” chaang gwo; and “grapes,” poy gee. “Cherries” was written in English. He wondered about the Chinese fruit and veggie industry. Billy could be of some help with that.