Death Money Read online

  Also by Henry Chang

  Chinatown Beat

  Year of the Dog

  Red Jade

  Copyright © 2014 by Henry Chang

  Published by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, to events, locales, or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Chang, Henry, 1951—

  Death money / Henry Chang.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-61695-351-5

  eISBN 978-1-61695-352-2

  1. Yu, Jack (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. New York (N.Y.). Police

  Department—Fiction. 3. Chinese—United States—Fiction. 4. Chinatown

  (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3603.H35728D43 2014

  813’.6—dc23 2013045378

  v3.1

  For Laura Hruska,

  Boss Lady at Soho Press (1935–2010).

  Thank you, doh je nei, for opening the gate to the streets of Chinatown. Rest in peace, always.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Flow

  Six Skirts, Ten Shirts

  AJA

  Floating

  North

  River

  Smooth and Easy

  Jouh Chaan Breakfast

  Short Circuit

  Yum Ga Fear

  Gee Whiz

  Speak No Evil

  Backtrack

  Steel Cold Dead

  Golden Star

  Muscle Mustang

  Rollin’ Dirty

  Trotters

  Lucky

  T. A. P. tits. ass. pussy.

  Fat Man’s Place

  Stinkin’ Badges

  Home

  Field of Dreams

  For Jong

  Old and Wise

  Eddie

  Engine

  Fifth

  Mox-Say-Go

  Daylight

  Back to the Future

  Fish

  O. G.

  On the Edge

  Flash-Forward

  Franky Noodles

  Night Rider 2

  Transporter 1

  Run DMV

  Golden City

  Mak the Knife

  Flight to Fight

  Knowledge Is Power

  Flow

  Senior Secrets

  Wah Fook

  Saints

  Fax Facts

  Jacked

  Golden Star

  Backup

  Come Back

  Acknowledgments

  Flow

  IT WAS 7 A.M. when Detective Jack Yu stepped into the frigid dawn spreading over Sunset Park. A slate-gray Brooklyn morning with single-digit temperatures driven by wind shrieking off the East River. He scanned Eighth Avenue for the Chinese see gay radio cars but saw none, only a couple of Taipan minibuses, sai ba, queued up a block away from the Double Eight Cantonese restaurant.

  The wind gusted fierce and he regretted not wearing one of his Army Airborne sapper hats. The minibuses were slower than the car service jocks, but with early morning rush-hour traffic already streaming into Manhattan, it wouldn’t make much difference. And although he’d wanted the quiet solitude of one of the black radio cars to review his thoughts for his appointment with the NYPD-assigned shrink at the Ninth Precinct, he’d also felt the need to be connected, wanted some proximity to Chinese people, his own people, civilians. The twenty-five-minute bouncy rush across the BQE to Manhattan’s Chinatown, an undulating ride to people’s jobs, schools, to whatever their piece of the Gum Shan, Gold Mountain, demanded of them, would work as well, he decided.

  “Leung kwai,” the driver said in Mandarin, and Jack handed him the two dollars.

  Jack took a window seat and shifted his Colt Detective Special along the small of his back so that it wouldn’t poke him when he sat against the worn seat cushions. A Hong Kong variety show played over a monitor behind the driver, more static than music, beneath the banter and cell-phone conversations of the other dozen passengers. Chinese-American life on the expressway, Jack mused. With Pa’s passing, he was alone at the end of the Yu family line.

  He could see the Verrazano Bridge fading in the distance, the guinea gangplank, as they swerved away from the Brooklyn Chinatown.

  The minibus shifted gears for the highway. From his window he saw broad residential tracts, industrial parks, high rises leading the way to the office buildings of downtown Brooklyn.

  Housing projects and ghetto neighborhoods rushing by.

  Jack took a deep shaolin boxer’s breath through his nose and tried to collect his thoughts. It had been six months since his return to the Chinatown precinct, before his old man passed away. His Fifth Precinct cases had taken him to West Coast Chinatowns and back to New York City, but along the way he’d processed a dozen dead bodies, had been beaten by Triad thugs, mauled by a pit bull, and shot twice. He’d also killed two men. All this, especially the last two, would be of interest to the shrink. He was advised that it’d be good to talk about it.

  Cemeteries, graffitied rooftops, whistling by. The minibus shifting gears again. Billboards beckoning poor people to Atlantic City to gamble away their monthly checks.

  And then, just as suddenly, the memory that there was a woman in his life now, a fiery Chinatown lawyer going through a messy divorce. They had become drinking buddies, then graduated to friends, and finally, they’d crossed the line. They’d shared a weekend together, and now he couldn’t keep Alexandra, Alex, out of his mind.

  The minibus made its gassy sprint through the edge of Brooklyn toward the Manhattan Bridge, and before he knew it he saw the icy East River below.

  He thought he’d have known better than to get involved with someone going through an acrimonious divorce, with a young daughter, sure to face custody and support issues. But in light of all that had happened in Chinatown, and after, when they’d been by each other’s side, there was no longer any need to tiptoe around their feelings. They’d crossed the line that separates friends from lovers, and in the back of his cop’s mind, he wondered what the consequences would be.

  The river wind reminded him of the salty scent of silk sheets, curled damp around Alex as she lay naked next to him.

  He wanted to bring her something sweet.

  Jack hoped to squeeze in an early bird meeting with Captain Marino, CO of the Fifth Precinct, before picking up some desserts from the Tofu King around the corner from the station house. He’d still have time to drop off the sweets at Alex’s Lower East Side storefront office, then catch a bus north for the shrink session at the Ninth Precinct. Half the plan was ambitious, touch and go. He decided to follow the possibilities and forgo whatever didn’t go with the morning’s plans.

  The minibus churned across the metalwork of the span and descended into Chinatown. It careened onto Division Street and dropped its passengers off beneath the desolate bridge.

  Division was a wind tunnel channeling icy gusts off the high-rise curves of Confucius Towers, whipping onto the streets below. Alex’s apartment at Confucius Towers was where they’d given in to intimacy.

  Jack zipped his Gore-Tex parka up to his chin, lowered his head into the wind, and went toward Bowery. The Fifth Precinct was four blocks away, close to the Tofu King. Alex liked the bok tong go and the dao foo fa treats, he knew. He marched on until he turned the corner of th
e Towers. His cheeks felt windburned, his lips frostbitten, but Bayard Street was just another block. He wondered if Captain Marino had arrived early.

  He exhaled steam through his upturned collar. The precinct was just a dash across Bowery now, the businesses on the empty boulevard still shuttered in the frozen Chinatown dawn. The Tofu King, however, would be open for the early bird special, a two-for-one deal on bricks of fresh tofu to kick off the day. Baker’s hours. The Chinatown grandmothers bought jong and tofu early, before the free bowl of congee breakfast at the Seniors’ Center.

  At the corner of Elizabeth Alley, Jack didn’t see the captain’s car outside the station house, but maybe one of the squad had already moved it to parking.

  “THE CAPTAIN IN yet?” Jack asked.

  The uniformed officer stepping out of the station house hesitated and regarded Jack with suspicion before answering, “Haven’t seen him, but we got CompStat this morning.”

  Fuhgeddaboudit, Jack imagined Marino saying. Computer statistics analysis, CompStat, could take the entire morning, if not the whole day, with Commanding Officer Marino answering to the issues and anomalies of the Chinatown precinct.

  So forget the early bird catch-up meet with the good captain.

  Jack turned and went down Bayard toward the Tofu King.

  From the corner of Mott he could already see the steamy air gushing out of the tofu factory, the morning belch from hot bean products cooking out of the vats and slats behind the front counter and refrigerator cases.

  He’d want to pay for the sweet desserts before Billy Bow, who’d inherited the third-generation family business, could dramatically refuse his money. Billy, his last neighborhood friend, eyes and ears in Chinatown, an embittered divorcé. It was just a few bucks that Jack was happy to pay, but Billy refused to value their friendship against the products of his lifeblood, tofu. So they regularly bought each other drinks at Grampa’s bar, fortifying their Chinatown bond. Two budding alcoholics feeding off each other.

  Billy had an interesting take on Chinese marriage and never needed much prodding to complain about his ex-wife.

  JACK STEPPED INTO the foggy shop front and grabbed two plastic containers of bok tong go and wong tong go, angling toward the hot dao foo fa and determined to pay before Billy Bow noticed.

  The cashier was on the phone, but after she hung up she refused his money in her guttural Toishanese and signaled to the next customers in line.

  “Saw you on the surveillance camera,” said Billy, stepping out from behind the steaming vats of beans. “You’re an early bird today?” He eyed Jack’s bag of desserts. “That for the lawyer chick again?” He grinned. “I warned you. Baggage.”

  He meant Alex’s grade-school daughter, Chloe, aka Kimberly.

  Homeboy Billy, Jack mused, his eyes and ears on the street but his nose always in other people’s business.

  “Tell me again,” Jack countered, “why you got divorced.”

  “Whaddya watching Oprah again? There’s a hundred reasons. How many you want?”

  “I got time for one,” Jack said, grinning.

  Six Skirts, Ten Shirts

  BILLY CHECKED THE steam vats as he began. “Okay, for one thing, we had laundry problems.” Jack narrowed his eyes skeptically.

  “No, really.” Billy continued, “You know my little girls went to Transfiguration, right? Catholic school.” Jack knew, as most Chinatown residents did, the Church of the Transfiguration on Mott Street had served the Chinatown area for more than a hundred years and was a popular alternative to the rough public-school education Jack had gotten.

  Billy continued, “So the girls got these school uniforms. Shirts, skirts, sweaters, like that. Two sets each, rotate from week to week, right?” Jack nodded, urging him on. “Well, wifey, she’s having everything dry-cleaned, dig? And after a while I see that it’s costing me more than the fuckin’ parking space at Confucius! And don’t get me started, that’s another fuckin’ matter. Anyway, so I took over the laundry duties. Got everything washed at Danny Chong’s Laundromat. Everything comes back folded, neat. Then I do whatever ironing myself, right? Cool.”

  Jack took a shaolin patience breath as he nodded again, still refusing to interrupt Billy.

  “So one day I’m ironing, right? Just the touch-up stuff. And she comes over to supervise, starts telling me I’m doing it wrong. ‘Collar first,’ she says. ‘Then the cuffs, and sleeves,’ blah, blah, right? This advice from the mother who never lifted an iron for her girls. Supervising me. ‘And you have to put a towel under the buttons,’ she says. ‘Yeah?’ I said, ‘Who says?’ ‘Martha Stewart,’ she says. She saw it on cable. ‘Fuck Martha Stewart,’ I said. ‘This is how I been doing it, not you. Between the yum cha with the ladies, and the da mah jerk, I don’t see you ironing shit.’ ”

  “What did she say to that?” Jack ventured.

  “Called me an ignorant Chinatown lowlife.”

  “No shit.” Jack laughed.

  “Not for nothing, Jacky,” Billy began, his jaw clenched, “our people got history doing laundry in America. So telling a Chinaman how to iron a shirt is like telling a nigger how to eat a watermelon.”

  Jack shook his head and snickered in spite of himself.

  A timer went off somewhere, and Billy turned to check the hot slats of tofu. Jack glanced at the wall clock and saw his chance to exit. Still, he felt bad for Billy, the bitter divorcé who found solace in loose women and the occasional whore at Chao’s.

  “Gotta roll,” Jack said.

  “Breeze, homeboy.” Billy grinned, looking up from the hot mist. “And remember. She’s baggage.”

  AJA

  THE FREEZING WIND seemed even more brutal as Jack stepped out of the steamy tofu shop, and he went east on Canal at a brisk pace, passing the firehouse and the Buddhist temple, going through the old junkie parks that led into Loisaida, the Lower East Side. He clenched his jaw against the cold, and soon the renovated bodega that had become Alex’s office came into view.

  The sign over the storefront read ASIAN AMERICAN JUSTICE ADVOCACY and a banner with the letters AJA fluttered in the wind. Jack could see Alex through the front window, in her back office. She wasn’t alone.

  Jack went in quietly and placed the bag of desserts on the receptionist’s desk. He recognized the man standing in Alex’s office as Assistant District Attorney Bang Sing, a prosecutor he’d worked with on a previous Chinatown case. Sing looked pissed off, and Jack overheard him say, “Look, I only got assigned this case because I’m Chinese. And you know it. They want to put a yellow face on it,” he groused. “What are you gonna do? So if there is a tape, I need to see it. And if I have to, I’ll drop the damn case. It’s a no-win situation for me.”

  Alex noticed Jack’s quiet arrival with a nod, but kept her game face on.

  Jack knew what ADA Sing was referring to. The city had resurrected an obscure ban on fireworks for future traditional Chinatown celebrations, like the Chinese New Year. Many residents and activists were outraged, but one Chinese-American Iraq War veteran had protested the ban by lighting up a strand of tiny ladyfinger firecrackers on the steps of City Hall. He got arrested and was charged with trespassing, disorderly conduct, inciting to riot, and resisting arrest. Then the sudden appearance of a home videotape of the incident put the lie to the NYPD charges of inciting riot and resisting arrest. The tape cast doubt on disorderly conduct and trespassing as well, and now ADA Bang Sing was going to have to eat one for the blue team. Jack knew it would be a hard pill to swallow for the driven Chinese ADA, and he sure wouldn’t be happy with Alex for taking the Chinese veteran’s side pro bono, along with the local American Legion Post. The incident had aroused a sense of pride in Jack, but as a cop he felt tainted by police misconduct.

  ADA Sing left Alex’s office in a huff and barely nodded to Jack as he passed, buttoning up his black trench coat on the way out.

  Jack took the desserts off the receptionist’s desk and went into Alex’s office. He could tell she was stresse
d even as she welcomed him with a small smile, knowing what was in the Tofu King bag.

  “What’s up, lady?” Jack said as he placed the treats on her desk.

  “Same old crap,” Alex answered sweetly. “You know, police misconduct, false allegations, trumped-up charges. The usual NYPD game.”

  Jack took a breath and teased, “There’s always three sides to every story.”

  “Don’t even try Rashomon on me,” Alex warned. “We have a videotape of what really happened at City Hall, made by a friend of the ‘perpetrator.’ And it’s going to exonerate my client, who, by the way, is a war veteran. A hero, mind you.”

  Jack shook his head, though he agreed with her.

  “This one’s going to be a slam dunk,” Alex said matter-of-factly.

  Jack took her hand in his, felt the warm softness there. “Cold,” she said. “You came a long way. How’s your morning going?”

  “Better, now that I’m here.” She rubbed his hand in hers, but they separated awkwardly as the receptionist entered the storefront.

  “Thanks for the sweet stuff,” Alex said quietly.

  “Sure,” Jack answered as the receptionist booted up her desktop computer. “Call you later.” He exited her office and left the storefront without conversing with the receptionist. Catch an M15 north, he was thinking, heading for the Ninth Precinct.

  Floating

  THEY CAME TO the railing that separates parkland from the seawall embankment, looking out over the Harlem River.

  “Jeez, it’s fuckin’ freezing,” cursed Patrolman Mulligan.

  It was an hour before the end of the shift in Manhattan North, and it wasn’t the first time that the Thirty-Second Precinct, the Three-Two, had to fish a floater out of the Harlem River.

  “Let’s get in the rowboat,” the taller man, Sergeant Cohen, said. “It’s only about fifty yards out.”

  At its narrowest point, the Harlem River was still almost a quarter-mile wide, about four city blocks across, and as the two cops squinted against the river wind, they could see a bulky shape entangled in tree branches near the middle of the river. The limbs were snagged up against some chunky ice floes.