by Henry Chang
Savory steam leaked out near the swinging kitchen door as Jack slipped out of the booth. He felt he’d gotten enough for the meantime and knew he could always come back if necessary.
Turning up his collar, he went back out into the street, wondering what else he’d find when he got to the China Village.
IT WAS ANOTHER five-block march toward the river, and along the way Jack noticed condominium developments alongside rehabilitated prewar buildings. He half expected to see a deliveryman ride past and jiggled Chang’s bike key in his pocket.
The sign above a big picture-window front read CHINA VILLAGE in an Oriental font, braced on both sides by stencils of bamboo plants. Jack looked inside through the picture window, saw two big, empty round tables in the middle of the dining floor. Track lighting gave the setting a soft touch, like a theater set. Farther back, the booths and the small tables were all occupied, diners watching the big-screen TV on the back wall. A Knicks recap. The menu in the window offered bottled beer and charged an uncorking fee if you brought your own wine. Yankees and Giants posters hung just inside the entrance, giving the place a New York sports vibe.
China Village probably didn’t get a lot of turistas in the South Bronx, Jack knew, but the park waterfront and Yankee Stadium still attracted people to the general area. Maybe the restaurant attracted sports fans who wanted a quick, tasty meal on the cheap and a beer or two before the big game or match.
Jack’s focus came back to the front. Again, the Yankees championship team photo and the Knicks calendar at a cashier’s station by the wall near the main door. He imagined the dinner rush was probably better than the lunch crowd and wondered if people here wagered on sports events. And who might be handling the action.
Inside were two waiters and a cashier lady. He spotted a manager type who looked strangely similar to the one at Golden City. Maybe it was the all-black outfits?
Jack backed away from the window, drew a long cold shaolin breath, and closed his eyes. Trying to pull together the clues, the missing pieces.
When he opened his eyes, he saw what he’d been looking for—a Chinese deliveryman on a bike, pedaling quickly and empty-handed toward the China Village. Looks like a student, Jack thought, before badging the bike man over. The guy was probably in his twenties but looked younger, wearing a suspicious, wary look on his face.
“Dailo ah,” Jack addressed him in street Cantonese, giving the man face and putting him at ease. “You could be a big help, brother.”
“Mot’si ah sir?” the deliveryman answered respectfully in slang Cantonese. “What’s the problem?”
“Seen this man?” Jack asked as he held up the snapshot of Chang. Recognition and shock crossed the man’s face.
“Wah!” he said. “Gowsing gum yeung ah?”
Wow, was what Jack heard, he’s come to this?
“He worked here?” Jack followed. “What’s his name?”
“Singarette,” the man said softly, catching his breath. He smiled sadly and shook his head.
“Singarette?” Jack pressed.
“His name is Sing, but we called him Singarette.” He looked away from the photo. “What happened to him?”
“He was in the river,” Jack answered, holding up the photo again. “Why Singarette?”
“He was generous with cigarettes. Always offering during the smoke breaks. The men would say, ‘Here comes Singarette!’ And he’d light you up, too, flicking his lighter.”
“His lighter?”
“One of those Vietnam War lighters. Metal. Had a war eagle on it. He could whip up a flame with just a flick of his thumb.” There was a pause as he looked around before continuing. “I don’t want to get into any trouble talking to you. Let me get the bike into the alley, and I’ll call it a cigarette break.”
They went into an alley next to the restaurant, and Jack could see that the man’s bike lock and chain wouldn’t match up with the cylindrical key in his pocket. But there had been no lighter on the body. Had it fallen out somewhere, maybe in the river? Along with his ID and his money?
The man lit up a cigarette, offered one to Jack.
He declined. “What was his job here?”
“Like me. Deliveries,” the man said, answering between puffs.
“Only deliveries?”
“Well, they let him wait tables for one shift, but he wasn’t happy with that.”
“Unhappy? Why’s that?”
“They gave him one day a week off deliveries because he’d gotten robbed. He was nervous about deliveries.”
“What about the robbery?”
“We’ve all been robbed. Some got hurt.” He drew deep on the cigarette. “He didn’t like delivering to the projects. And he’d been robbed before, at his last job.”
“And where was that?”
“Gum Gwok, not far from here.” The Golden City was still fresh in Jack’s mind.
“Did he seem depressed?” Jack asked. “Or angry?”
“He was mad that the restaurant wouldn’t cover his losses from the mugging.”
“From working at Gum Gwok or here?” Jack continued.
“Both, I guess. He was angry with them all. They didn’t even offer him back what they took out of his tips. Then he quit.”
“When was this?” asked Jack, trying to get a read on the dead man’s recent frame of mind.
“It was in January. After Chinese New Year.”
“Know where he went?”
“No idea.”
The noisy clatter of kitchen work from inside the rear door interrupted them for a moment. “Do you know where he was from?”
“Not sure. He said he’d been a student, but needed to work and hoped to get something in Chinatown.”
“Why Chinatown?”
“He said his village association was there, and maybe they would help.” He worked his cigarette almost to the end. The Gee Association, Jack suspected, knew more than it was telling.
“What happened with the robberies?”
“You mean the police? Sing didn’t go. Said it was useless. A waste of time. He’d only lose another day’s pay.”
“So he didn’t report it?”
The man shook his head no as he finished his cigarette. “I don’t think so.” He answered Jack’s frown, saying, “I got robbed once. At knifepoint. Three guys against me, on a bike. The bosses didn’t help, but I reported it.”
“And what happened?” Jack asked.
“I went into the station and looked at photographs. But it happened at night. It was dark. They all wore hoodies, and they all looked about the same. I remembered the knives more than the faces, and I couldn’t pick out anyone for sure.”
“It’s good that you reported it,” Jack advised. “At least the cops know about it, could look out for crime like that.”
The man didn’t look convinced, changed the subject. “I lost two hundred dollars,” he said bitterly.
Jack redirected the talk. “Where did he live, this brother, Singarette?”
“Mox-say-go,” he said, grinning. “He was joking that he was living with Mexicans.”
“Mexicans?” Bronx immigrants from Mexico?
“Maybe one of Gooba Jai’s places.”
Gooba Jai was Chino-Cubano, one of the later waves of Chinese-Cuban immigrants who found their Spanish-speaking way to the South Bronx and bought blighted buildings in decaying neighborhoods, properties no one else wanted. Those derelict, rent-controlled tenements were set up as rent-a-bed deals for Chinese and Latino workers or visitors to the Bronx.
“I don’t know any addresses,” he said.
“Did he have any other problems?” Jack pressed. “Girlfriend? School?”
“No. But he mentioned a gambling situation, had to do with him getting robbed. Like he was trying to win back what he’d lost.”
“Gambling?” challenged Jack. “Up here? Where?”
“Don’t know, but everyone talks about Fay Lo’s.”
“Fay Lo?” Fat boy. “Where?”
Jack got the don’t know shrug again, just as the China Village manager that Jack had spotted earlier came out of the front door and peered into the alley.
“DEW NA MA GA HEI!“ he cursed in Toishanese as he spotted the deliveryman. Motherfucker! Your deliveries are getting cold!
Jack handed the man his detective’s card as he started moving his bike toward the front. He gave Jack a departing nod.
“Call me if you think of anything else,” Jack called out after him.
The manager cast a quick look in Jack’s direction and was momentarily puzzled. Then he shivered in the cold and ran back inside the China Village. Jack imagined him to be as glib as the manager of the Golden City, tactful, expeditious, but not very helpful. They volunteered nothing and spoke like they’d been pre-lawyered up.
Jack couldn’t recall much else on the Chinese-Cubans in the Bronx, but he felt like he’d struck a vein. He was pondering Mexicano Chino-Cubano crash pads and Fay Lo’s gambling operations when his cell phone jumped around in his jacket pocket.
He tapped up a number he didn’t recognize, but the phone voice belonged to Sergeant Cohen from the Three-Two.
“The report’s in,” he advised. “Report to the morgue, ASAP.”
ON THE WAY downtown, Jack tried to put together what he’d gathered. The dead man was a deliveryman/waiter/student named Chang, who’d been robbed and had a gambling problem. He’d been angry, maybe depressed. Maybe suicidal. The jumper/floater scenario was unreeling in his head.
He arrived at Manhattan’s West Side before he knew it.
Steel Cold Dead
HE STOOD IN the cold, stainless-steel stillness of the room, its wall of metal doors housing the dead, the after-world rendition of a Fukienese rent-a-bed. A female morgue assistant handed him the certificate of death. She said, “Dr. Jacobson will be right back,” before walking away.
Jack scanned the certificate. The decedent, John Doe, was listed as Asian. Under the section “COD,” the entry for cause of death stunned him: Sharp force piercing through heart. Manner of death: HOMICIDE.
But how? There’d been no blood and no visible trauma or defensive wounds. He imagined the frozen body in the frozen river again, was turning the image over in his head, when the medical examiner appeared. He looked like an Ivy League professor in a gray smock.
“A stab in the heart, Doctor?” Jack asked incredulously. “I didn’t see any blood.”
“It was easy to miss, Detective. A single thrust. A very thin wound.” Jacobson lifted a black hoodie sweatshirt, still wet, from one of the gurneys and held it open. He indicated a thin slit in the fabric where a sharp force had penetrated. “The sweatshirt and undershirt, everything was wet and black and bunched up. We didn’t see the wound until we got the clothes off.”
“But no blood?” Jack repeated.
“It’s possible, from floating in the cold water for hours,” the doctor suggested, “that any blood could have washed out. And it’s also harder to see blood on black.” He opened one of the metal drawers and slid out a rack with the decedent’s autopsied corpse. Chang, thought Jack. Jun Wah, aka Singarette. It comes down to a body on the slab at the morgue. A Y-cut where they’d opened him up ran from chest to navel, but what caught Jack’s eye was the single wound over the heart area, a thin vertical slit barely an inch tall, with matching bruises at either end.
“The skin normally contracts around the wound,” Jacobson said, “but the cold river water could have helped close it. But we can tell that it was a double-edged weapon, which is unusual.”
“Like a sword?” Jack asked.
“More like a dirk.”
Jack narrowed his eyes at the wound, trying to imagine the weapon. Like a Greek or Roman dagger, the kind you’d see in a knife collector’s mail-order catalog.
“Or a dagger,” the doctor continued. “In this case a short dagger, maybe a four-and-a-half-inch blade. See the rounded abrasions at either end of the cut? The dagger had a hand-guard. It pierced his heart but not through to his back. Severed the aorta and the veins around it.”
“It was driven in to the hilt then?” Jack said.
“With tremendous force. That’s what caused the hand-guard marks.”
Driven forward and held until the man was dead, the weapon could kill in less than three minutes.
“Given the angle of the thrust, I’d say it was a left-handed person, someone taller than the decedent. Maybe five foot ten inches, almost like yourself.”
“I don’t see any defensive wounds,” Jack said. “And you said only through the sweatshirt and undershirt, but not the jacket? So the jacket was open?”
“Yes.”
“So he never saw it coming?” Jack said as he gained clarity.
“We don’t know that.”
“He let his guard down. Or it was someone he knew.”
“That’s for you to find out, Detective, isn’t it?” Jacobson smiled faintly. He took from the gurney the knockoff Rolex that Chang had been wearing, laid it next to the corpse. It had stopped at 10:30 P.M.
“Estimated time of death is between nine thirty and ten P.M.,” Jacobson continued. “The casing and the metal clock mechanism freeze in the water and contract and slow to a stop. Within an hour or two.”
“Think he was dead before he hit the water?” Jack asked.
“Very possible,” Jacobson answered. “Or close to it. There wasn’t much water in his lungs.” He bagged the watch and gave it to Jack.
Ah Por, thought Jack. He’d want her to get a touch on the watch before it went into the crime lab. Maybe they’d get some prints off it. He took a last look at the corpse before Jacobson pushed the drawer back in.
“Good luck, Detective,” Jacobson said as he moved to the next body.
Jack thanked him and left the room of the dead.
Outside, the cold, crisp air revived him. His cell jangled with a familiar number.
“Find out anything, bro?” It was Billy Bow.
“Yeah, he’s Chinese,” snapped Jack. “Why?”
“Last name Chang, right?” teased Billy.
“And you know that how?” Jack countered.
“Ancient Chinese secret.”
“Stop fucking around, Billy. It’s a homicide deal now.”
“Meet me at Grampa’s.”
“What the fuck?” Jack started.
But Billy had hung up.
Golden Star
THE GOLDEN STAR Bar and Grill, also known as Grampa’s, was a revered Chinatown jukebox joint. Located on the far stretch of East Broadway, the hot spot was a big dugout basement three steps down from the street, far enough away from the core of Chinatown to escape the influence of the traditional old-line tongs.
Because Grampa’s mixed bag of Lower East Side regulars included Chinatown denizens, blacks and Latinos from the projects, and rotating teams of undercover cops, the popular bar was considered neutral turf even for the rival street gangs that rolled in and out. Hardheads looking for a beef usually took their differences down the street beneath the Manhattan Bridge or under the highway by the East River.
Inside, under dim blue lighting, a long, oval-shaped bar dominated the space. There was an arcade bowling game up front, a big jukebox set up in the middle, and a pool table in the back next to the kitchen.
Grampa’s was almost empty, with only a few late-afternoon stragglers looking for an alcohol fix before the dinner crowd drifted in. Billy sat at the far end of the bar, watching the door.
As he entered, Jack felt gnawing hunger and realized he hadn’t eaten since dawn. Between the river and the morgue, he’d lost his appetite and had been running on adrenaline. He signaled the barmaid and ordered a steak before Billy motioned him over to one of the empty booths.
Billy came over with two beers in his fist, slid in opposite Jack, and nudged across one of the bottles. They clanged glass, and each took a swig.
“So what do you have?” Jack asked eagerly.
“Slow down, kemosabe,
” Billy said, taking his sweet time lighting up a cigarette. “You first.”
Jack recounted the basic facts of the case, keeping the details close to his vest. He knew Billy was dying to spill. His steak arrived, and he sliced into it as Billy began his tale.
“It’s a paper deal,” Billy offered. “Your dead man bought the papers off a college student who had dropped out and returned to the village.”
Jack nodded his okay, tucking into the savory plate. Keep coming, he motioned with the steak knife.
“Jun Wah Chang is really Yao Sing Chang, one of the village orphans.”
Jack took a gulp of beer, trying to digest the new information. He wouldn’t be surprised if the Gees were running a paper operation like many of the other associations were doing—getting their members to America by any means necessary.
“He called, looking for work in Chinatown restaurants. They thought he was calling from Canada.”
“Wait.” Jack emphasized with the point of the serrated knife. “You’re getting all this from the guy at Gee’s who didn’t know nothing from nothing this morning? But somehow from then to now, he suddenly remembers the guy’s whole life in China?” He could almost see Billy blushing red in the dim blue light.
“Maybe he called the village, all right?”
“Why so helpful all of a sudden?”
“Maybe because I conned him into thinking it was better to have you as a friend than as an enemy.”
“He didn’t seem to care this morning,” Jack said.
“Maybe he realized you can fix some traffic tickets or something.”
“Funny. Ha-ha.”
“Hey, he volunteered it,” Billy mock groused. “What the fuck do I care? You want the rest of it or what?”
“Shoot.”
“Since Yao’s an orphan,” Billy continued, “the Gee Association will pay for the cremation and services, whatever, on behalf of the village.”
“When?”
“The wake is tomorrow morning at Wah Fook.”