Death Money

by Henry Chang

  “And I still got a funeral in the morning,” he spat out, steely when Billy hesitated, scanning the room.

  “Okay, chill,” Billy acknowledged, spotting the Ghosts. “But I was on a winning streak.”

  “Me too,” Jack lamented. “Me too.”

  “We the two sorriest winners ever had to leave a place because motherfuckers paying too much attention to us.”

  They exited Fay Lo’s back alley with the baleful glare of the door goon following them.

  They doubled back to the corner where Billy had parked the car.

  Stinkin’ Badges

  JACK SAW IT in the flash of surprise and fear that crossed Billy’s face. Turning, he reached for his Colt as two men appeared from the shadows near the Mustang. One black guy, one white, wearing ghetto street gear and approaching with swagger in a way that he couldn’t see their hands.

  Guns cleared holsters simultaneously as Jack and the men barked in unison.

  “POLICE!”

  “DROP YOUR WEAPON!”

  The yelling froze them all with guns pointed in a standoff, hard faces not backing down but recognizing the same cop language.

  Billy leaned away from Jack and kept his Beretta trained on the black man.

  “Lower your weapon!” the white one demanded.

  “You lower your weapon!” Jack responded. He sensed nervous fingers on triggers.

  “Whoa, hold up!” the black one eased. “We’re cops!”

  “I know I am,” Jack challenged. “Where’s your shield?”

  “Where’s yours?” the white one shot back.

  There was a moment’s silence until Jack said, “Okay, easy does it. Show you mine. You show me yours.” He slowly flapped open his jacket with his free hand, letting his gold badge glint in the night light.

  The black man unzipped his Raiders sweatshirt so Jack could see the silver badge dangling off a beaded chain.

  “What precinct?” Jack asked tensely.

  “The Four-One, Bronx,” the white man answered, pulling open his jacket to expose his own shield. “You?”

  “Manhattan South,” Jack answered, like the designation had more weight than the Ninth or the Fifth Precincts.

  The men lowered their guns cautiously, except Billy.

  “Put it away,” Jack growled. Billy reluctantly complied, and the cops holstered their weapons as well.

  Everyone took a breath.

  “Wait, your partner’s badge?” the black cop said.

  “He’s a civilian,” Jack explained. “But he’s got a permit.”

  Billy smiled and shrugged, showed his New York City license.

  “Civilian? You pulled a piece on us?” the black cop complained.

  “I’m carrying fat cash, bro. What the fuck? You think I’m just gonna give it up to someone looks like you, in a hoodie, moving at me? You got the wrong Chinaman, nigga.” Billy had said nigga in a tone between street-brother acknowledgment and racist dagger.

  The black cop shot Billy a fuck-you look, not liking being addressed that way by a Chink.

  “Wait in the car,” Jack told Billy, who stood defiantly for a moment. The way Jack repeated it to him made him back off and get into the Mustang.

  “Why’d you pick us?” Jack asked the black cop pointedly.

  “Wasn’t you, or your homie,” came the answer. “It was the car.”

  Billy’s hoodmobile.

  “Tinted windows, chrome wheels,” the white cop added. “All the bad boys roll that way.”

  “You didn’t expect two Chinese though?” Jack asked.

  “Whatever. It’s the South Bronx. Anything rolls, anything goes.”

  “What’re y’all doing around here?” the black cop asked Jack.

  “I’m working a homicide. We pulled a body out of the river.”

  “Wait a minute,” the white cop said. “Was that the one came over the radio this morning?”

  “Right,” Jack answered.

  “Two of our uniforms were on the Harbor boat. First on the scene,” the white cop added. “They said it looked like a jumper.”

  Jack didn’t comment, said, “I caught a lead. Anyway, you guys got any problems in this sector?”

  “Sure, lotsa problems here. Prostitution. Drugs. All the fuckin’ drunks after Yankee games. Whaddya looking for?”

  “Anything around these adjacent blocks?” Jack scanned the empty streets.

  “Why? You got something happened around here?”

  “Not sure,” Jack hedged. “Anything related to robberies, gang activity, or violent crimes?”

  “Just punk asses from the projects,” the black cop said, “snatching handbags and chains from the subway. Or beating up white students from the Catholic schools.”

  The white cop thought for a moment. “You mean Asian-related incidents, don’t you?”

  “Right,” Jack said. “Anything?”

  “We don’t keep records that way.”

  “Yeah, but you know what I mean,” Jack pushed.

  The two undercover cops exchanged glances before the black one answered.

  “Matter of fact, a coupla months ago,” he said, smirking, “there was a fight or something just around the block. A truck driver called it in. A Chinese kid got beat up pretty bad. We found him laying in the street. But he claimed he didn’t know who assaulted him, couldn’t press charges.”

  Going to settle it himself? wondered Jack.

  “There were a few Chinese on the street,” he continued, “but nobody witnessed anything.”

  “How was it called in?” Jack asked. “Did the truck driver describe the fighters?”

  The white cop hesitated before answering. “He said a bunch of Chinks were kung fu fighting.”

  They all turned as Billy fired up the Mustang, keeping the lights off.

  Jack’s face twisted from a sad smile to a frown as he asked, “What else?”

  “Some of the kid’s friends came by, said they’d take him to Bronx Medical.”

  “You get a name?” Jack asked.

  “He said some bogus name, Dew Lay or something.”

  Dew lay meant “fuck you” in Cantonese, the assault victim blowing off the white gwai lo cop.

  “That’s it?” Jack said. “Right. No charges, no case.”

  Yeah, just some crazy Chinks kung fu fightin’ on a Saturday night in the Four-One, thought Jack, but he backed his gratitude with a handshake as the two undercovers moved off.

  The adrenaline from the armed face-off was draining off now, and he slipped back into the Mustang, watching the plainclothes cops in their unmarked car roll off into the dark Bronx distance. Lucky they were cops, thought Jack, it could have been a trigger-happy nightmare. There had been a spate of shootings of black off-duty cops by white off-duty cops.

  “Lucky for them,” Billy said, firing the headlights and driving in the opposite direction. “I woulda iced them if they weren’t cops.”

  Exactly, thought Jack. He’d had enough of Billy’s help for one night.

  “C’mon,” Billy said, “enough is enough. I’ll drive you home, bro. Unless you want to go for siew yeh snacks.”

  “Home sounds good,” answered Jack.

  “I bet.” Billy nosed the black car back toward Brooklyn.

  THE RIDE BACK was relatively quiet—no Steppenwolf, no rock ‘n’ roll—with just some generic news station that Billy had switched to. Neither man spoke, watching the highway and the night beyond.

  Jack knew Billy was savoring the flavors of his night’s exploits, and Billy knew Jack was preoccupied, turning over whatever clues he had in his mind. Cop work. He had a homicide, a body with two names, a set of keys, and an unknown motive. They passed that section of the Harlem River where Sing’s body was discovered earlier in the morning. Where the victim worked, where he gambled, maybe. Was it just over a gambling debt? Billy worked his way through traffic. But who collects from a dead man? It didn’t make sense to kill him. Was it a robbery? But why go through the trouble to d
ump him in the river? How much of a debt costs someone his life? And how come no ID?

  Traffic thinned out, and Billy had them rolling through Sunset Park before the weight of the day’s events could finally settle, take hold.

  Money—Ah Por’s words—the root of all evil.

  Home

  JACK SAT ON the edge of his bed and stripped, thinking he’d get a few hours’ sleep before the visit to the Chinatown funeral parlor where Sing’s pre-cremation wake would be held. He didn’t know if it was the fatigue from the twenty-four-hour murder shift or the cheap beer at Booty’s or the drinks at Grampa’s and Fay Lo’s that was dragging him down.

  He closed his eyes, saw glimpses of Alex’s naked curves, the lean angles of her arms and legs. He took another breath, imagining an herbal scent in her hair. Hips, thighs, breasts, firm and soft where he’d caressed them. Places that became hard upon his touch.

  He remembered taking a deep cleansing breath, still remembering Alex’s wet and tender places. Then his head hit the pillow, and he went down for the count.

  Field of Dreams

  THE COUNT DIDN’T go to oblivion, but to a series of disjointed dreams and images.

  He saw himself, nighttime at the racetrack. He’s in the grandstand watching a racing filly named Alexandra pulling a sulky around the oval track. She’s hopelessly boxed in along the rail by the other horses and their rigs.

  The dream jumped to:

  Naked women cavorting to a remix of “Sukiyaki” in a strip club. Cascading money, with Billy throwing folded-dollar airplanes at the topless dancers.

  Cops silently lingering over a dead body floating in the river.

  The sequence jumped again to:

  Gritty piles of money for bets on a pair of colorful fighting fish separated in a square tank at Fay Lo’s gambling joint. An explosion in the water, bloody fins and organs flying as the frenzied fish tear each other to shreds.

  Silence over Yao “Singarette’s” corpse on the steel slab at the morgue, from possible suicide to homicide in a single thrust.

  The root of all evil. Ah Por’s words breaking the silence.

  Following the dreams was a dizzying kaleidoscope of images. Freudian stuff he’d prepared for the NYPD shrink.

  A pit bull lunging at him out of the ghetto project’s darkness.

  A Chinese tong enforcer bearing down on him as he frantically tries to reload.

  His Colt revolver clicking on empty chambers.

  Lucky, Chinatown ex–blood brother and Ghost Legion street-gang boss, suddenly sitting up out of his hospital coma.

  The last image jolted Jack awake in his bed. He tried to get back to sleep but wound up drinking green tea and thinking about the Wah Fook funeral parlor as morning light crept into the bedroom.

  For Jong

  THE WAH FOOK still had the nineteenth century baroque façade from when it was the Bacigalupe Funeral Home, with the relief columns and sculptural decorations still visible on old buildings throughout Chinatown and Little Italy.

  Jack remembered the Italian mob in Chinatown used to store its illegal Fourth of July fireworks that it hawked on Canal Street in the Bacigalupe basements.

  Plastic signage in Chinese covered over the Bacigalupe name that had been carved into the stone above the portico entrance.

  There were two old lanterns above the bronze entrance doors on which seven death notices—white tickets with the Chinese names of the dead—had been posted. Jack saw the one closest to what he was looking for, Jun Wah Zhang, and went inside. He badged the manager, who led him past the two wakes in progress to a smaller room at the end of the corridor and turned on the ceiling lights. There was a closed casket there, but the room hadn’t been set up for a wake yet.

  On a small table to one side, there was an urn. An inexpensive one you could find in any of the Chinatown curio shops. Dark glazed ceramic, featuring bronze mountains and green scenery of leaves and trees. Colors of the earth. Big enough to hold all the remains of what was once a man.

  No picture.

  Nothing but a Chinese name in black ink on a white scrap of paper. A name that wasn’t even really his, a name he’d purchased.

  “What can you tell me about him?” Jack asked.

  “The association paid for the urn, the for jong cremation, and the burial in their field at the cemetery.”

  “It’s empty now?” Jack asked, looking at the urn. Fire interred.

  “Yes. When we receive the ashes we’ll repack them in the urn. Then it goes out for burial with the next procession.”

  “That’s it?”

  “As far as we know.” The manager shrugged.

  The urn was set on the side in a dark room because Jun was an orphan, and though there’d be an obituary posted quickly in the Sing Tow Journal, no one really expected anyone to come.

  The manager dimmed the lights and left Jack sitting on a solitary folding chair near the back wall.

  Jack thought he’d visit Ah Por next for more clues, since he was only two blocks from the Seniors’ Center. He figured he’d also check South Bronx hospitals for recent Asian victims of assault.

  He was looking toward the closed casket, hoping it was empty, when he caught her out of the corner of his eye: a woman in a cherry-red down jacket coming into the room, stopping, and looking toward the urn. She hadn’t noticed him in the dim light by the back wall.

  She’d surprised him, not only because he didn’t expect anyone to come—except maybe Billy’s friend from the Gee Association—but because no Chinese ever wore red to a wake. So it must have been a surprise to her, too. She couldn’t have expected to come here.

  She looked to be in her late twenties, short hair, a rugged red windburn on her cheeks. A sad face now as she approached the urn table. From the bottom shelf of the table she grabbed a stack of paper, death money, lit it, and dropped it, flaming, into a blackened brass bucket. A bribe to the gods for mercy in the next world. She plucked three sticks of incense and lit them, bowed three times before the urn, and stuck the incense sticks into a cup there. She shook her head, whispered a few quiet words.

  Before Jack could move, she rushed out.

  She was already out the front door when Jack stepped from the room. He zipped up his jacket and went out to Mulberry Street after her.

  He followed her north toward Canal Street, keeping a half-block behind so as not to spook her. Stepping quickly, she wore a black turtleneck sweater under the bright jacket that meant she was still celebrating the Chinese New Year.

  Almost to Canal, he saw her slip into the driver’s side of one of the Ford vans parked along the street, the vans carrying the cardboard crates of fruits for the day’s sidewalk market.

  Jack stopped, waited at a distance. The simple rub-on letters on the van’s front doors identified them as Chong Vihn Produce, a warehouse address in Brooklyn. Vietnamese Chinese.

  He considered the two new Vietnamese noodle joints on the street, knew the Viets all supported one another’s businesses.

  The curbside market vendors on the Mulberry-Canal corner were the only ones open for business in the bitter cold and slushy mess. They’d shoveled off the curb, stacked out the crates on folding tables, and took turns warming up in the vans.

  Jack knew the sidewalk merchants supported the local restaurants in exchange for use of the toilet facilities whenever needed.

  A street community, Jack knew.

  Business was brisk considering the light traffic on the streets. He figured a couple of tour buses must have rolled in, visitors to the fabled neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan. He was about to move to where he could get another view when the young woman in the red jacket stepped out of the van and took over one of the fruit stands from an older woman, who then retreated into the van.

  The stands offered melons, pineapples, strawberries and grapes, cherries—fruits from the global season kept fresh in the New York City cold.

  She’d relieved the cherry stand, her red jacket the perfect pitch for the c
herries she started to bag for grab-and-go customers. Chinatown people snapped them up as tasty treats for the extended families, and tourists grabbed them for quick snacks.

  Jack took a deep breath and exhaled into his hands. He wondered what her connection was to the orphan Yao Sing Chang, deliveryman, who was soon to be a pile of ashes in a Chinese urn.

  He went toward the stand thinking he’d start the conversation by buying a bag of cherries, that, if he got the chance, he’d bring to Alex’s office.

  “One bag, please,” he said with a small smile, handing her the dollar bills and watching her face.

  She barely noticed him as she bagged the cherries and took his money.

  “I saw you at the Wah Fook,” Jack said quietly, not sure if she’d understand his English. He was ready to say it in Chinese when she glanced at him, saying, “Chaai loh ah? You’re a cop?” in Cantonese.

  He was gauging her face, flashing her his badge as he answered, “Yes.” She’d made him right away, immigrants seeing with sharper eyes, especially if they might be illegal.

  “What happened to him?” she asked.

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out,” Jack answered.

  “Another day”—she sighed—“another struggle.”

  “What?” Jack asked, hearing, Biggie Smalls? Rap?

  “He had a tough time here,” she said. “But he saved me once.”

  “How did you know him?” asked Jack, trying to hold her eyes.

  She continued to bag the loose cherries. A group of Scandinavian tourists appeared and bought up all her bags.

  “I can’t talk now,” she said, her cheeks darkening as she started bagging cherries again.

  “When’s better?” Jack asked, handing her his NYPD detective’s card.

  “I usually break for lunch at two,” she answered.