Family Business

by S. J. Rozan

  “Covered them?”

  “With my little silver revolver. Plus,” she said, “they were handcuffed to the chair. Not that I don’t know how to use the gun. Believe me, I can take care of myself.”

  Was that a threat to use the gun on Jackson if I didn’t come through? “I’m sure you can,” I said. “Those sneaking-around skills—that’s what you used back when you were dating Jackson? To hide your relationship?”

  “God, no. That was half the point.”

  “What was?”

  She looked me right in the eyes. “Mel was beautiful and smart and athletic. She knew what she wanted, went after it, and got it. I was the other Wu girl. It felt like everywhere I went, Mel was there first, like everything in my life was secondhand. Do you know why she wears flats?”

  The switch in subject perplexed me. “She said she has gymnast feet and she can’t wear heels.”

  “Half true. I told you I broke my foot. When the cast came off I tried to go back to heels—it’s what the Winter Prep girls wore—but I couldn’t. Mel suddenly decided her feet hurt from gymnastics and she had to wear flats. If Mel Wu did it, it was cool, and the next thing you know all the girls are wearing them. So there I was, cool again, but it had nothing to do with me.

  “Then out of nowhere Jackson asked me out. He was in her class, and he asked me, not her. He was a spoiled little shit, but he was hot and rich, and every girl in school was jealous.”

  “Even Mel?”

  “No, like I said, she didn’t like him. She didn’t like me dating him. That was almost as good.”

  Families. I thought about my brother Tim, and Bill.

  “Does she like Paul?” I asked.

  Natalie shrugged. “Paul, sure. But when his family tried to talk him out of marrying me, that pissed her off. She said I should think about whether I wanted to be stuck with them forever.”

  “Why were they against it?”

  “A Chinese chick with a rep?”

  “You had a rep?”

  “I was never exactly Miss Priss. After high school I went to FIT. We all dyed our hair pink. Smoked dope, went clubbing, that kind of shit. You know.”

  I did know, but I wasn’t sure I was happy with Natalie assuming I knew. “And Paul?”

  “We met at CBGB when I was working and he was out with friends. He came with them to the club on a dare, for God’s sake. Not his kind of place, you can imagine. So you can guess. He fell hard for me even though he said my kind of life, my world, made him nervous. Me, I’d dated other guys before him who couldn’t keep up. It was amusing, but it never lasted long. With Paul it was different. I suddenly wanted to stop. Leave the craziness. I wanted to live in his world. Get married, have a family, be a soccer mom. SUV, house in the suburbs, someone to cook for. Someone who needed me, for a change.”

  “But his folks were against it.”

  “Yeah, them. He had to put his foot down.” She smiled. “I don’t know if you noticed when you were looking at footwear, but he has pretty big feet.”

  “So after he did that, it was okay?”

  She drank more tea before she answered. “It’s never been okay. After we were married, we had a hard time getting pregnant, and they were leaning on him that whole time.”

  “Leaning on him?”

  “To ditch me. ‘Don’t worry, everyone makes mistakes, you can still find yourself a nice blond girl who’ll give us White grandchildren.’ ”

  “They said that?”

  “I don’t know what they said. He wouldn’t tell me, and he told them to bug off, but they kept at it. Until we finally gave them a grandson. Matty’s only half White, but they’re deigning to put up with it.”

  “And a granddaughter.”

  “Poor Emily. She’s Cinderella as far as they’re concerned. Honestly, they’re not nice people. They wouldn’t mind even now if Paul and I split and he married the nice blond girl. I would, though. I would mind.” Her eyes hardened. “I finally found what I want, and I’m not going to let Jackson Ting take it away from me.”

  I believed her. “And you can’t tell Mel?”

  “If Mel blows up at Jackson, it’ll only make him madder. That would make her madder. It’ll turn into a war between the two of them. He might go public just to piss her off. It won’t be about me or even the building anymore.” Natalie took a breath. “It won’t help anything if she knows. No one can know. He said not to tell anyone. He can’t even know I told you.” She stared at me until I nodded. “All my life Mel has been saving my ass. I just need her to do it one more time. I just need her to sell Jackson the goddamn building.”

  I said nothing. Natalie must have taken my silence for reluctance, which it was, because she said, “Look, I know it wasn’t what Uncle Meng wanted, but really, a run-down building full of gangsters—why would Mel even want to be stuck with that? And where someone was just murdered? Why would she want that?”

  It wasn’t a real question, so I didn’t quote Mel’s character-of-Chinatown reasoning or her anti-gentrification analysis to Natalie. I also didn’t tell her that this neighborhood was my home, and Mel being willing to be stuck with that building was the key to its survival.

  “And it has to be soon,” Natalie said.

  “Why?”

  “There’s some kind of deadline at the end of this month. The other site owners can pull out. If he gets the building after that, he’d have to corral them all again, and even if he can, it would cost a fortune.”

  “More money than he has?”

  “This is real estate. The money’s not his. He says it would be more money than his investors are willing to pay. So. Can you get my sister to sell?” Natalie asked. “Can you do that?”

  12

  I sat thinking for a while after Natalie left. Then I called Bill, waved goodbye to my paperwork, and made my way to Shorty’s Bar. Going to Shorty’s was pretty much the same as going to Bill’s. He lives two floors above it.

  The bright sunshine didn’t hide the chill in the air. The trees, what few there were between Laight Street and my office, glowed in red, rust, and gold. When I pushed through Shorty’s door I slid my sunglasses up into my hair, looked around, and spotted Bill at the bar.

  “Hey,” he said. “Long time. Want lunch?”

  “How about just some guacamole?”

  “You got it, Lydia,” Shorty said from behind the bar. “You want a beer?”

  “In yer dreams.”

  I’ve been coming here since Bill and I met. Shorty knows I hardly ever drink. Can’t fault him for trying, though. It’s a bar.

  Bill swung down off his barstool, and we took a booth against the wall, under black-and-white photos of New York baseball heroes through the years. The bar’s two TVs were both tuned to the same sports channel, and the midday guys—mostly cops unwinding from the graveyard shift or on their day off—drank beer and watched three men in suits debating the meaning of charts full of stats. Every now and then the screen would switch to a shot of the Yankee Stadium grounds crew readying the emerald grass for a playoff game. Then would come a car commercial.

  “When does the game start?” I asked Bill.

  He checked his watch. “A little less than an hour.”

  “I promise I’ll be gone by then.”

  “You don’t have to leave. I’ll just ignore you.”

  Ella, the cabaret singer who moonlighted as Shorty’s daytime waitress—maybe that’s sunlighted—brought over chips, guacamole, and a seltzer I hadn’t ordered but Shorty knew I wanted. “Your burger’s coming right up, hon,” she said to Bill.

  We both thanked her and got down to business. I told Bill what Natalie had said, and what she wanted.

  “You think it’s true?” he asked.

  “Which part?”

  “Let’s start with, Ting says the kid’s his. They looked mixed-race to me, those kids.”

  “Natalie says the kids are Paul’s and the DNA would prove it. But she also says that’s not the point. People will talk. Nata
lie’s afraid of her in-laws. She says they hate her. Jackson’s going to play the rescuing-my-innocent-son-from-a-tong-family card. Oh, he’s not my son? Well, given how you and I were carrying on, he could’ve been. And by the way, it’s still a tong family.”

  Ella came back with Bill’s burger. “You want another?” She pointed a jewel-studded crimson nail at his half-finished beer.

  “Soon, but not yet.”

  “Okay, hon. You just let me know.” Ella flashed a smile and sashayed away, dreads swinging.

  Bill turned to me. “Is she flirting with me?”

  “She’s being your wing woman.” I scooped a chip through the guacamole. “She’s trying to help you out by making it seem to me like you’re desirable to other women, so I’ll step up my game.”

  “Is it working?”

  “No.”

  “Okay,” Bill said, doctoring his burger. “What about the part that says if Ting gets the building, he’ll go away?”

  “That’s a bigger problem. When do blackmailers ever go away? What if he needs more financing for some other project, or something? I don’t know what else he might want from the Wu sisters, but if there ever is anything and this works this time, he’ll know how to get it.”

  Bill put the top bun back on his burger and took a bite.

  “Also,” he eventually said, “and I say this at the risk of having a bowl of chips dumped on my head, you have a personal stake in this. What some might even see as a conflict of interest.”

  “You mean, it would be completely hypocritical of me to persuade client A to do something client B wanted if client A didn’t want to do it in the first place and if furthermore I believed that thing could actually destroy an entire neighborhood which just happens to be my hometown?”

  “That’s it in a nutshell, yes.”

  “You’re right, and there’s no way I’ll do it. In fact, if Mel were leaning toward selling the building, I’d try to persuade her the other way. But poor Natalie. Jackson Ting could seriously mess up her life.”

  I munched on chips and guacamole, thinking, while Bill ate his burger and, I hoped, thought too. The TV sets showed the stadium stands starting to fill. The camera split-screened to the bullpens, where the pitchers were warming up. I turned back to Bill when he said, “At the root of every great fortune is a great crime.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Balzac.” He wiped his hands on a napkin. “The original quote is longer, something like, ‘The secret of a great success for which you can’t account is a crime that’s never been discovered.’ ”

  “Cynical, but probably correct.”

  “Definitely correct. Life is full of little moments every day when you decide whether to do something you know is wrong. Do you leave the car at a hydrant for a few minutes? You weigh the pros and cons. Pro, you can do your business fast. Con, your car could get towed. Plus you could interfere with firefighters. How important is your business? How likely is the risk? You weigh all that and decide whether to go ahead.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Those are little moments. People aiming higher than their dry cleaning have the same moments, but bigger. Do I risk insider trading on the info I just got? Do I keep two sets of books? Bribe a congressman? Blackmail someone?”

  I finished my seltzer. “You’re suggesting we find out what’s behind Jackson Ting’s fortune.”

  “Blackmailers don’t go away. But it can be possible to play them to a stalemate.”

  “You’re a genius.” I stood to leave. “We’ll talk tonight. Enjoy the game.”

  Ella winked as I walked out the door.

  13

  I went back to Chinatown and sat on a bench in Columbus Park, near where the old men and women were singing folk songs to the accompaniment of an erhu, a bamboo flute, an accordion, and a banjo. Adaptable, the Chinese people. I took out my phone and made a call.

  “Hey, cousin! What’s buzzin’?” From the echo, I could tell Linus Wong had me on speakerphone.

  “Hi, Linus. Everything is finus,” I answered.

  “Seriously?”

  “I’ve been saving that one up.”

  “Throw it back. Hey, I hear Uncle Tim made partner, the old stiff. Your mom called my mom.” Tim, of course, was Linus’s cousin, as I was, not his uncle. “Uncle” had more to do with “the old stiff” than with their actual relationship.

  “She called everyone in Chinatown, so she had to start on the outer boroughs.”

  “Well, tell him congrats for me.”

  “Thanks, I will.”

  A woman’s voice asked, “Hey, is that Lydia?”

  “Yes. Hi, Trella,” I said to Linus’s girlfriend and partner. “How are you?”

  “Everything’s good. Hey, Woof, it’s Lydia.”

  I heard the thump of a tail. I could picture the big yellow dog curled up on the rug in the converted garage behind Linus’s parents’ house in Queens. That garage was the home of the business Linus and Trella ran: Wong Security, a cyber-defense firm whose slogan was ‘Protecting People Like You from People Like Us.’

  I said, “Hi, Woof. Arf arf arf. Listen, you have time for a job?”

  “You asking Woof?” said Linus.

  “Is he in charge of scheduling now?”

  “Only walks and biscuits. What do you need? And is it illegal?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Well, let’s do it anyway, what do you say, Trell?”

  “Maybe the illegal part will come later,” Trella said hopefully.

  “Not if I can help it,” I told them. “I just need to know some things about a guy named Jackson Ting.”

  “Jackson Ting?” Linus asked. “Who’s that?”

  “He’s a real estate developer, right?” Trella said. Trella’s a little more closely tied to the real world than my brainy but batty cousin.

  “Right. He wants to put a twenty-story tower at the corner of Bayard and Mott.”

  “Oh, wow,” said Linus. “Bet that gets Auntie Yong-Yun’s cheongsam in a twist.”

  His Auntie Yong-Yun, of course, is my mother. “A lot of people are unhappy about it.”

  “And so you want to see if this guy—Ting?—has skeletons in his closet. So you can blackmail him and stop him.”

  “Skeletons, yes. Blackmail, no.”

  “Right,” Linus agreed promptly. “Because that would be illegal.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Uh-huh. All right then. Trell, let’s get out the shovels and start digging.”

  “All I want from you”—I emphasized the “all”—“is to locate his bank accounts and that sort of thing. Not rifle through them, just find them. You have my password to the databases.” PI’s have access to databases not available to civilians, and Linus and Trella have access to skills not available to me. I could do this, but it would be much faster and probably more complete if they did. “And you will only do what’s legal, do we understand each other? Because for one thing, I don’t want you guys to end up behind bars, and for another thing, the passwords are mine, so I’d end up there with you.”

  “What if we accidentally find something juicy? Porn, drugs, arms deals, you know?”

  “Follow it until just before you start breaking the law. Before. Okay?”

  “You’re no fun.”

  “And while you’re doing that, run the same checks on my clients. Melanie Wu, Chinese name Wu Mao-Li, and her sister Natalie Wu, married name Harris, Chinese name I have no idea. And Natalie’s husband, Paul Harris.” I gave them Mel’s and Nat’s addresses.

  “Your clients?” said Linus. “Isn’t that, I don’t know, disloyal or something?”

  “You don’t run checks on your clients?” Actually, I’d already run a cursory search on Mel when she’d hired me, but Linus can dig deeper and I wanted Natalie checked out, so he might as well do them both.

  “Sure we do,” he said, “but we’re sort of in the double-cross business. We never want to find out we got hired to hide stuff from people
who had a legit right to see it.”

  “For a guy who’s disappointed when I say don’t do anything illegal, you have an interesting moral code.”

  “Legal and legit are totally different concepts. Isn’t that right, Trella?”

  Trella said, “I just work here.”

  “Okay, guys. Thanks, and let me know when you have something. Give my love to your folks, Linus. Bye, Woof. Talk later.”

  Next I dropped into the dojo. No classes were scheduled, but I needed a workout to clear my head. The place was empty when I arrived except for one of the other senior students whose cleaning day it was. He was sweeping the floor when I came in. After I suited up and helped him wash down the mats, we did form together for a while, worked the heavy bags, and finished up with some low-contact sparring. Low-contact is actually harder than full-contact, because you have to gauge the exact distance and power of each move. When we were done, we were both sweating and breathing hard, and we’d had a great time. We bowed to each other, locked the place up, and left.

  At home I took another shower, but not before my mother called from the kitchen, “Your brother’s coming for dinner.”

  I ran through the possibilities. Ted and Elliott each have wives and two kids. When they come, they swoop in here like flocks of pigeons, and my mother starts preparing days in advance. Andrew comes over pretty often because my mother’s teaching his fiancé, Tony, to cook Chinese food, but he usually lets me know when they’re coming because we enjoy hanging out together. That left one probable brother. I went to the stove to give my mother a kiss and take a sniff from the stewpot. “Smells great.”

  “I’m making ngau lam mein.”

  Noodles with braised brisket. One of Tim’s favorites. That clinched it.

  “Great. After I shower I’ll set the table.”

  “You’ll be staying home for dinner?” she said with extravagantly wide eyes. “It’s a good thing I made enough beef.”

  “Ma. You always make enough for an army.”