Family Business

by S. J. Rozan

  “Really?” I said, as the waiter returned. “That sounds promising.”

  We strolled west to Fulton Street, where a crew from DiMaio and Son were doing the brickwork on a restoration project. Bill ID’d us to the guard at the gate, who walkie-talkied, and a minute later Mike DiMaio came out to meet us. He was a short bowlegged guy, and his blond mustache spread over his grin when he saw me. “Lydia! Hi! Boy, you look great! Not like this mook here. He falls apart more every time I see him.”

  “Not as fast as you do,” Bill said.

  “Yeah, well, I got further to fall, you being older than dirt already. Hey, Luis, these guys are gonna buy me some coffee. Anyone needs me, call.”

  “Sí, you got it,” said the guard, and off we went.

  “Here,” said Mike, stopping at one of the food trucks that line the curb near any construction site in New York. “Smith, I know, you want black, no sugar, like a cowboy. Lydia, what’ll you have?”

  We got a tea, two coffees—light with three sugars for Mike—and contrary to what he’d told Luis, Mike paid for the lot. We took them across the street to a set of granite planters, which we used as benches. Bill sat across from me and Mike so he could smoke.

  “So,” said Mike, peeling back the tab of his coffee cup lid. “Jackson Ting, huh?”

  “Have you ever done work for him?” I asked.

  “Nope. We’re high-quality masonry work. Complicated brickwork, smooth-as-silk concrete block. Brownstone restoration. Smith, you remember. All that stuff you couldn’t do.”

  “Hey. I was the ace of spades.”

  “If that’s a bricklayer joke, it stinks. Anyway, what we do takes time and money. Not Ting’s cup of tea.” Mike grinned at the paper cup in my hand.

  “But you’ve heard of him.”

  “Everyone in the business has heard of him. But I wouldn’t get you guys over here just to say I’ve heard of him.” He sipped his coffee. “What’s your interest?”

  “We have a client who needs dirt on him,” I said.

  “Needs?”

  I shrugged.

  “Does he know?”

  “Ting? That we’re digging? I don’t know.”

  “Well, all I’m saying, you might want to watch your backs.” Mike drank more coffee. “Two, three years ago, guy I know was working on one of Ting’s projects. Doing the fixed glazing. Not the window work, but they had to coordinate, you know? Bids came in for the windows. Ting thought even the low bid was high. Low bidder came to see him.” Mike looked at us. “Smith, you probably know this, Lydia, I don’t know if you do, but the steel and aluminum window trade on the East Coast is totally mobbed up.”

  “Mobbed up,” I said. “The Mafia?”

  “Come on.” Mike DiMaio grinned. “There’s no such thing as the Mafia.”

  “Right, I forgot.”

  “So according to my buddy, this window guy suggested to Ting that his price was good and Ting should take it. Ting said he could get a better product cheaper from overseas. The guy said that would be a mistake. On and on, you know? Finally Ting threw the guy out of his office. He emailed the documents to some firm in Taiwan and asked for a bid. Told my buddy he should go ahead and coordinate with the Taiwanese.

  “Couple days later someone lobbed a few Molotov cocktails into the jobsite. Destroyed some equipment, damaged some steel, collapsed an excavation. Sent two steelworkers to the hospital. Set the job back a few weeks. Cost a pile to replace the equipment, repair the work. Insurance covered all that, but Ting’s premiums went up, and he paid out a lot of overtime to catch up.”

  “Seems like the guy to watch out for is the window guy,” I said.

  “Story’s not over yet. A week after that happened, the window guy was shot dead in his office. One bullet to the back of the head.”

  “That sounds as much like the nonexistent Mafia’s style as anything else,” Bill said.

  “Yeah, maybe. Except someone had carved the number four into both the guy’s hands. That’s bad luck in Chinese, right?” Mike looked at me.

  “Yes,” I said. “Because it’s pronounced like ‘death.’ ”

  29

  Mike DiMaio didn’t have much more for us.

  “What happened after the window guy was shot?” Bill asked. “That’s the kind of thing that could start a real war.”

  DiMaio shook his head. He drained his coffee and crushed the cup. “Ting told the GC that when the windows came—from Taiwan—he should get a union crew to install them. It wasn’t a union site. None of Ting’s projects are, and he’s always getting picket lines, the giant rat, you know. The GC told him he hadn’t bid it for a union shop and it would cost more. Ting said he’d cover it. The GC got the word out to the union that the job was going to be theirs. The window installers’ union is as mobbed up as the window manufacturers are. That was the peace treaty.”

  “Did they ever find the killer?” I asked.

  “Nope.” Mike jumped down off the granite planter. “Look, you guys, I gotta get back to work, but seriously, if you’re messing with Ting, I just wanted to tell you, take care of yourselves. Things don’t go his way a hundred percent of the time. But they do more than they do for a lot of guys, and around him, people get hurt.”

  We thanked him, walked with him back to his site, and continued on east.

  “I don’t know,” I said to Bill as we neared Chinatown. “What do you think? Jackson Ting called in a hit on a Mafia guy?”

  “Well, we know he’s a blackmailer.”

  “He threatened to out a secret. Not kill somebody. And”—I stopped myself in my own tracks—“we don’t actually know that.”

  Bill looked at me. “No, we don’t. You think Natalie Wu was lying? She has some other reason for wanting the building sold?”

  “I think at the very least there was more going on than she told me. You want to come see Jackson Ting?”

  “We’re going to ask him whether he’s a blackmailer?”

  “Probably not. Natalie would have a cow, and I’d hate to lose a client.”

  “Why? By my count you have four on this case already. It’s a good thing your license doesn’t require you to avoid conflicts of interest.”

  “Our licenses. You’re not in on this? Besides, there’s no conflict. They all have the same interests. They just don’t know it.”

  I called the office of Ting Ventures.

  There’s an interesting thing about being a private investigator. Some people won’t talk to you at all. You have to find some sneaky pretext to get in. Others, it’s like they’re fascinated with the idea. I think maybe they see themselves in a forties movie, matching wits with Sam Spade. I’d never met Jackson Ting, but I’d seen him around, and instinct told me he was the second type. I’m not always right, but this time I was: After as many different voices on the phone as it took me to get to my brother, I was told that Mr. Ting had a break in his afternoon schedule, and if I could get to the office in the next twenty minutes, he could see me. That, of course, was ludicrous. No one has a break in his schedule at the exact moment you call, unless he makes one because he’s intrigued by the idea of talking to you.

  Twenty-five minutes after I’d thanked the voice and hung up, Bill and I walked into Ting Ventures, in a Turtle Bay building the firm managed but hadn’t built. The building was thirty stories tall, but it was there on sixteen that it stepped back to give the full-floor office a wraparound terrace. I was prepared to argue a subway-delay case—every New Yorker’s go-to excuse—but Mr. Ting, it seemed, was in a magnanimous mood. The receptionist handed us off to Ting’s assistant, and we were shown in.

  Ting, in a gray suit—Armani, I thought—with jacket unbuttoned, stood from behind his glass-slab desk. His smile and his boyish good looks suggested ready welcome, but his eyes said something else. Their look was what I saw in the eyes of the gin-playing ladies in the park: Nice to see you, it’s just a game, doesn’t matter a bit, and I will destroy you.

  Ting stuck his hand out. In th
e window behind him the sun polished the East River. “Jackson Ting. You’re Lydia Chin? Good to meet you.”

  I introduced Bill while I shook Ting’s hand.

  “Your partner? I get the whole brain trust? Must be important,” he said in a tone that indicated we all knew it wasn’t. “Can I offer you something? Coffee, tea, water?”

  Having just been the beneficiaries of Mike DiMaio’s actual, as opposed to feigned, hospitality, Bill and I both turned him down. Waving us to an oxblood leather sofa, Ting sat in a matching armchair across a low glass table. On the walls hung awards and certificates, photos of buildings and photos of Ting: in a hardhat on construction sites, at receptions with important people, at ceremonial dinners beside a beautiful Asian woman I recognized from my research as his wife. The same woman and two little kids smiled from a photo on his desk.

  Ting crossed an ankle onto his knee and slid his hands along the chair arms. “So. What can I do for you? Are you investigating me?” He grinned, to show either that the question was absurd or that the answer, either way, wouldn’t worry him.

  “Not precisely,” I said, though, precisely, we were. “It’s just, every time I turn around these days, there you are.”

  Still smiling, he cocked his head. “I’m not sure what you mean. Have we met?”

  He looked from me to Bill. I saw his problem. Who better to elucidate: a fellow man, but White, or a fellow Chinese, but female? His gaze came back to rest on me. I had the feeling that was in answer to a sense of careful political correctness but against instinct.

  Bill caught my eye for an instant and then jumped in. Keeping the interview subject off-balance is PI 101.

  “I think what Lydia means,” he mansplained, “is that you keep cropping up in this case we’re working. Specifically your interest in the Li Min Jin headquarters building on Bayard and Mott.”

  Ting didn’t lose his smile, but it seemed to harden. He glanced at me and then spoke to Bill. “What case?”

  I took that one, just so he could exercise his neck muscles. “We’ve been hired by Mel Wu. To protect her interests. And her, if she needs it. You know her, right? You went to school together?”

  “Sure. I know her, and I know her uncle left her the building. I’ve made her a nice offer, and I hope she takes it. Is there a case in that?”

  “Maybe not per se”—there, I could talk lawyer, too—“but there’s been a murder in the building, an attempted one a few blocks away, fistfights, blackmail, buried treasure, all kinds of things, and it all seems to come back to the fact that you want that building.”

  He paused. “It may come back to that,” he said. “But none of it comes back to me. Is that what you think? That I’m behind it all? I don’t even know anything about most of what you just said.” He shook his head in amusement at our silliness. “Now, the murder, that was a man named Chang, right? I heard about that one. It was a botched robbery.”

  “Maybe.”

  He waited, but I didn’t go on, so he said, “And what was the so-called attempted murder?”

  “Chang was Choi Meng’s chosen successor as head of the tong. Yesterday someone took a shot at one of the men who’s in contention now that he’s gone. A fellow called Ironman Ma.”

  Ting nodded the way you would when a child tells you about the unicorn she saw on the way to school. “I know who he is. You’re not thinking that was me?”

  “Not really,” I said. “It’s just, there was that other murder. The window guy with the fours carved into his hands?”

  Ting flushed in anger. “For God’s sake! That had nothing to do with me! There was an investigation. They didn’t find anything because there was nothing to find. That bastard was a small-time shakedown artist. You run into them all the time in this business. He must have crossed some other Chinese guy. Maybe he didn’t tip for his food delivery.” Ting paused and pulled himself under control. “Really, that’s why you’re here? Because of that? That’s a level of racial profiling I wouldn’t have expected from you.” He pointed at Bill and smirked. “Maybe from him, but not from you.”

  “You can’t deny it’s interesting that it happened. And that you wanting the Bayard Street building seems to be causing a lot of destabilization in the Li Min Jin tong.”

  “Oh, come on. I’m a developer. I’m trying to put together a site. It’s not my fault if that brings out the worst in people.”

  “So murders and buried treasure and blackmail are par for the course in your work?”

  “Is that supposed to get a rise out of me? A hysterical denial or a confession or something? Give me a break. Look, where a lot of money’s involved, people sometimes behave badly. I can’t help that. Stop for a minute, though. You’ve said ‘buried treasure’ twice. What does that mean?”

  Bill and I exchanged glances. Bill asked, “You’re not aware of the rumors?”

  “What rumors?”

  “They say there’s a fortune buried behind the walls of the Bayard Street building.”

  For a moment Ting just stared. Then he laughed. “You really do mean buried treasure. Oh my God. No, I never heard that. Who’s supposed to have put it there? When? Why?”

  I said, “None of that is clear, and we’re also missing ‘exactly where.’ ”

  “In other words, you know nothing, but there’s buried treasure. Yeah, uh-huh.” A pause. “Hey, wait. Is that why Mel won’t sell me the building? She’s waiting until she finds the fortune first?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. Or that could be more about following her uncle’s wishes. Or not evicting people from their homes. Or preserving the historic nature of Chinatown.”

  “Oh, for shit’s sake. Do you have any idea how many times I’ve heard that crap from people like her over the years?” Ting blew out an exasperated breath. “Mel’s from Scarsdale. She lives on the Upper East Side. She wears Eileen Fisher and meets her girlfriends after barre class for brunch. But she’s got a glowing halo because she protects squatters and junkies and welfare cheats from anything that’ll upgrade property values and increase the city’s tax base. You can’t tell me she gives a shit about Chinatown. For God’s sake, if she sells me the building, I’ll evict the goddamn tong. Wouldn’t that be a good thing for Chinatown? But screwing with my site makes all her self-righteous friends think she’s on the side of the fucking angels. Pardon my French.”

  “Wow,” I said. “You don’t like her much, do you?” I guessed I’d gotten my rise out of him.

  “I never did,” he said. “Even back in school she was a sanctimonious bitch.”

  “Not like her sister, Natalie.”

  “No, you’re right,” he said, standing. “Not like her sister, Natalie. Well, it’s been nice chatting with you, but I have a meeting. Thanks for coming.”

  He crossed the room to open his office door.

  30

  I don’t think I like that guy,” I told Bill as we rode down in the elevator from Jackson Ting’s office.

  “Not going to take him on as a client?”

  “He didn’t ask. You know what else he didn’t ask?”

  “What you meant by ‘blackmail.’ ”

  “Bingo. He wanted to know about the attempted murder and the buried treasure, but he just let the blackmail slide on by. And then when I mentioned Natalie, he threw us out.”

  “Which means Natalie was probably telling the truth.”

  “Which doesn’t mean she’s not hiding something else.”

  “Bingo to you too. What now?”

  The elevator door slid open to let us into the lobby. Waiting to change places with us was the tall man I’d seen twice before, the first time at Big Brother Choi’s funeral and then again staring at the Li Min Jin building from a bench in Columbus Park.

  “Oh, hell,” I said to Bill. “I forgot the file. Wait a sec, I’ll go get it.” I jumped back in the elevator as the door closed. I pressed the button for twenty-three and started scrolling through my phone, ignoring the tall man and the other
three people who’d gotten in with us. At fifteen I raised my phone and stared intently, baring my teeth as though I had it in selfie mode and was checking for spinach. I didn’t have it in selfie mode, though, and I snapped a photo of the tall man in three-quarter profile as he got off. At sixteen.

  Bill was waiting when I got to the lobby for the second time.

  “You still forgot the file,” he said.

  “No, I have it, it’s just invisible.”

  “You know that guy?”

  “Who, the tall one? Just because he’s Asian you think he’s the one I was after? That’s a level of racial profiling I wouldn’t have expected from you.”

  “I didn’t say which guy. That’s a level—”

  “Oh, stop. I don’t know him, but he went to sixteen. Hold on, I’m calling Mary.”

  Which I did, and sent her the photo, but she wasn’t much help.

  “Yes, we noticed him at the funeral. Organized Crime doesn’t know him. He might just be a businessman who was paying his respects.”

  “Not a Chinatown businessman. You, or I, or Chris would have seen him around. And I bet you didn’t check out everyone at the funeral with Organized Crime. You focused on this guy because he’s got that gangster look, right?”

  “He does,” she admitted. “We thought he might be from some out-of-town tong trying to muscle in. He still might be, or he might be a businessman from one of the outer boroughs. We’ll have to wait until he makes a move. If he does.”

  “He might be making one right now. He just went up to Jackson Ting’s office.”

  “Did he really? And you know that how?”

  “I’m in the neighborhood doing some work for a client. Listen, I have to go. I’ll talk to you later.”

  As I put the phone away Bill asked, “Did she yell at you?”

  “She was revving up, but I didn’t give her the chance. They don’t know him.”

  We left the building. I was pondering Bill’s question—“What now?”—when my phone erupted into “Won’t You Come Home Bill Bailey.” I raised my eyebrows and put the phone to my ear. “Hi, Ma,” I said in Chinese. “How’re things in Queens?”