by Henry Chang
In the hallway outside the back door, the sergeant pointed upstairs.
“One on the steps,” he sounded winded. “And one on the roof. Can’t miss ’em.” He started back down the stairs.
“Gotta check on the meat wagons,” he continued. “See if anything else turned up.”
“Good,” Jack answered carelessly. He continued up the stairs alone, which is what he preferred anyway.
The third body was sprawled across the steps in the stairway between the third and fourth floors. He’d been shot front and back, caught in a cross fire. Sucka fire. Jack stepped around him. More snapshots. His handsome face looked familiar, Jack recalling JoJo’s driver’s-license photo from the Queens precinct. Find JoJo and you’ll find Lucky, he remembered thinking. SOS. Shoot on sight.
There was one more body on the roof.
On the top landing, he took a deep monk’s breath, and then shouldered his way through the roof door.
At 1:30 a.m. the Chinatown rooftops were mock ink-black, the slang way they described it when they were teenagers. He flicked on his pocket Maglite and started across the tar. He kept to the middle, swinging his light left and right.
He’d crossed three buildings when he saw it, a bulky shape, twisted back and half-seated, a dead Chinese with an empty pistol in his hand. It wasn’t Lucky.
More snapshots front and back.
In the open darkness there were no bullet holes that he could see. Some bullets might be embedded in the nearby structures but he’d have to wait for daylight to get a good look. Another follow-up.
He decided to go back downstairs to check the video recorder and construct his report on the carnage. He imagined the Daily News and the Post having a field day with sensational bloody headlines but hoped that Chinatown’s United National would provide an honest Chinese point of view.
The videotape recorder was cracked in two places but was still working. The tape itself hadn’t fared as well. He rewound it as far as it would go—not far, only back to 11:50 p.m.—a wide view on Chinese men gathered around tables. A grainy black-and-white picture. The scene was punctuated by a blinding flash, followed by fractured and pixelated images of a tall man firing a short shotgun, and then another man, with cropped hair and thickset body, jamming off a burst of automatic gunfire. He resembled Lucky, the bravado in his movements.
The audio had been disabled, so the violent chaos, the panicked people dashing about, the sporadic gunfire and the overturned tables, was silently understated. He imagined the large bursts of gunfire sounding like fireworks on Chinese New Year.
The tape captured the raiders retreating through the back door, with Lucky carrying a duffel bag, then pandemonium before the screen went to snow and static.
He swept the scene again.
For his cop transgressions, he’d been sent to mop up a Chinatown bloodbath, assigned to tally up and explain the body count. A Chinese detective managing a major crime investigation. He knew they were putting a yellow face on it.
Forensics would map and detail the hundreds of rounds fired, the different-caliber bullets involved, the types of firearms recovered.
The medical examiner would autopsy the dead and explain how they died.
But what was clear from what he saw, and knew, was that the cause of all the deaths and injuries was a robbery gone bad. A robbery of an illegal gambling hall by a Chinatown gang led by an ex–Ghost Legion dailo nicknamed Lucky Louie. That Lucky was a boyhood friend, a Chinatown blood brother, wasn’t supposed to matter.
He knew the surviving members of Lucky’s crew were in the wind, and he was sure the Hakkanese Tsun Jin, along with the On Yee posse, the Wo triads, and the Canton Group with the Ghosts, would all be in the hunt for them.
When more bodies turned up, the Chinese will have settled it their way once again.
“Crime Scene’s here!” the sergeant yelled up from the street door.
He was ready to turn the scene over to them, set it up and break it down. It was 2 a.m. and he knew they’d take a couple of hours.
He pocketed the throwaway camera and wondered how much longer the morgue wagons would take. They’d have the body bags for the dead faces etched in his mind.
As the technicians trooped up the stairs, he was already planning another report that he knew Captain Marino wasn’t going to be happy with.
Bad to Worse
He wasn’t expecting the coroner’s report until midafternoon at least, but by the time he finished detailing the robbery shootout, it was daylight.
Still too early for the good captain. He left the report on the CO’s desk.
He caught a short ride with a sector car to Downtown Emergency.
The wounded Hakkas had been treated and released hours ago. What took you so long? Neither had any health insurance and he was skeptical of the names they left. Som Yung Kai. Dong So Wai. Addresses he knew were Chinatown supermarkets.
He hadn’t expected anything useful from them anyway.
Eddie’s Coffee was open for the 7 a.m. early birds.
He nursed a nai cha and a steamed bao at the short counter, waiting for Fook’s 30-Minute Photo to open. He’d drop off the throwaway camera, and for the promise of a bao, Fook Junior would process his pictures first, da jeem, letting him cut the queue of orders.
When he got back to the Fifth station house, Captain Marino was in his office seated behind his desk. Jack’s report was flapped open and dog-eared, and the Italian face the captain gave him was one you’d give to a rude child.
“I told you,” he reminded, pointing his finger. “Keep him outta my precinct. Remember?”
“The Seventh Precinct was there first, I heard.”
“Don’t be a fuckin’ wise guy. Already IA wants your ass on a deluxe just for knowing this guy in the first place. And you let him go? Turned him over to you don’t know who?”
“It didn’t happen that way.”
“’Course not. Never does. But now people are dead because of that.”
“Not true.”
“Maybe could have prevented it.”
“With what? After-school basketball programs?”
“The case is being turned over to OCCB anyway. And Immigration. So, you’re gonna be humping a desk.”
Jack took a shaolin breath through his nose. Giving the case to Organized Crime Control, and ICE? Reassigning me to a desk?
“And shutting the fuck up.”
Jack’s eyes went long distance and he heard Pa’s bitter words. Cop? Chaai lo ah? They use you against your own people. Like a running dog. A jouh gow.
And Lucky’s contempt—that badge don’t make you no better. Chinaman cop, first sign of trouble you’re the one they throw under the bus.
He wanted to say, That’s fuckin’ bullshit, captain, with all due respect, when the captain’s desk phone rang. Marino listened briefly, handed the phone angrily to Jack.
“Dispatch. They found another body.” He clenched his fists. “JesusMotherMary from bad to worse.”
Jack listened intently. Dah soopa at 107 Eldridge. Dah Soopa? You know, the janitor. Oh, copy that. The super.
Eldridge Street near the crime scene.
Captain Marino gave him a get the fuck outta my office look so he obliged.
He left the station house without looking back.
Garbage Removal
Number 107 was the last tenement building on the block, at the corner of Eldridge and Grand Streets. A small walkup, it nevertheless offered a convenience store on the street level. The building shared a backyard and a side alley with 222 Allen Street, a much bigger building at the other end of Grand. Parts of the common areas were fenced off and locked to keep out the feral cats and the occasional stray dog, Chinese or otherwise.
Number 107 was around the corner and down the block from the Tsun Jin building.
The
super wasn’t a big man but looked wiry and fit. Fiftyish from his thin gray hair. He lived in the building and acted as janitor and maintenance man, occasional painter and plumber. A Chinese jack of all trades.
He led Jack through a narrow hallway lined with grimy garbage cans. The smell of years of Chinatown waste had leached into the floor and walls and got more pungent as they came to the back door. He could hear Cantonese opera music from one of the apartments upstairs.
Fusing his broken English with his guttural Toishanese, the super complained.
“This one small building. Only eight apockment. Still too muchee garbage.” He unlatched the back door.
“Keepee too muchee garbage here.”
The super usually swapped out the full garbage bags at 9 a.m., Jack understood, but later on weekends. The weekend accumulation was bigger and always overflowed into the side alley waiting on the evening pickup.
“Too muchee,” he repeated. “No good.”
They came to a big pile of black garbage bags.
“So, I moving the bags, see the leg. The foot, the shoe, sticking up.” He stepped to one side of the pile and pointed.
Jack followed, taking a monk’s breath. It was a hiking boot, black, and lightweight with a rugged tread. Reminded him of military footwear. It wasn’t the shoes that got him killed.
The super lifted away two bags that had fallen inward and covered the rest of the body.
Jack’s heart sank immediately, his lips suddenly dry. The dead man was Lucky. Or unlucky.
He swallowed the sad metallic taste of his back teeth. Dead bodies didn’t shake him anymore, but seeing the crumpled and broken body of his Chinatown brother hammered his toughness.
Lucky’s face had a purplish tint. His eyes were open and the discoloration underscored the look of surprise. What the fuck? he seemed to be asking.
He had a chest wound.
Jack felt for a pulse as the super watched, and of course there wasn’t one, the wrist stiff.
He glanced skyward. It looked like Lucky had fallen backward off the roof, landing on his head and shoulders five stories down, to the concrete of the side alley, behind a mound of garbage that scarcely broke his fall. The topmost bags had fallen back over him. Maybe that was why the uniforms had missed him on the perimeter canvas. In the dark, even if they’d gotten past the locked gates, they wouldn’t have seen him. The exposed leg was propped on garbage and his body was doubled over and disjointed at the shoulder.
Jack’s nightmares come true. In the back of his cop’s mind he wanted to take pictures, but remembered he’d deposited the throwaway camera at Fook’s Photo.
There was a webbed shoulder strap that wrapped behind Lucky, attached to an empty Uzi machine pistol. Gangsta to the end. In the raw stench, Jack took shallow breaths, shook his head, and held back the tears. What a waste of life. He’d always hated that helpless, hopeless feeling of being too late. The Chinatown blood brother, the cop, always after the fact.
The Cantonese opera, a lament, drifted out of a high window.
He checked around Lucky’s body but didn’t see any other items that might also have fallen from the rooftop.
“Too bad,” the super said.
“Yeah, too bad,” Jack said. “I can take it from here.”
The Super took a last glance at Lucky, at the Uzi. “He a bad guy?”
Jack couldn’t answer that, instead put on a frown and shook his head.
The super retreated back into the building, happy to have the cop clean up the mess.
Jack called the medical examiner’s office. They’d send a wagon and conduct an autopsy. He couldn’t help straddling the line between cop and friend. A burial somewhere? Or a memorial? Thoughts that would never have crossed his mind. No one will claim the body, and the city would front for the cremation.
Maybe Lucky had been right—being a cop hadn’t changed anything. Chinatown criminals still settled matters their own way. Cops just got in the way.
He remembered Lucky’s words on that dark night in Sunset Park. Stay the fuck outta Chinatown business. You’ll just get hurt.
He went up to the roof.
The daytime view from above exposed the labyrinth of connecting backyards and side alleys that ran between buildings, fenced off or barricaded from the street.
“Keeps out the bums.”
“The homeless?”
“No, the bums.”
From the position of Lucky’s body below, Jack figured the likely area where Lucky fell backward, trying to imagine what happened in the dark?
How had Lucky been shot? Staggering back before falling over the ledge?
Did Lucky kill the Hakka man on the adjacent roof?
What happened to the duffel bag he’s seen carrying out of the Tsun Jin hall on the videotape?
He continued the police report in his head, Lucky’s death an asterisk to the Tsun Jin robbery. He left the roof, bound for the medical examiner’s office. He’d decline to sit a desk at the Fifth and would request two weeks’ vacation time instead. The captain would approve it, everyone glad to see him out of there. Himself included.
He’d wrap the case and leave the paperwork on Marino’s desk.
Rooney’s Pub was just two blocks from the morgue, and would give him space to finish the report.
The initial coroner’s report categorized the deaths of the two Hakkanese men, and Jojo, as gunshot homicides. The death of the old man in the little room, however, was ruled a natural heart-attack death. They didn’t rule it accidental, caused by external factors. The heart attack could have happened anywhere, anytime. Insurance payouts were often affected by these rulings, Jack knew.
He added it to the sobering paperwork.
The report on Lucky came later, with the alcohol still medicating his pain. Lucky had suffered two gunshot wounds; a .380-caliber through and through in his left calf, non-life-threatening, and a nine-millimeter chest wound, in the heart area. They’d found traces of gunshot residue on his shirt and slicker, meaning he’d been shot at close range.
The ME ruled it a homicide but hadn’t made an entry as to COD, the cause of death. Was it the five-story plunge that killed him? Or the nine-millimeter bullet still lodged near his heart?
Jack read a ballistics notation from one of the crime-scene technicians: 9-mm bullet is of East German origin, a hotter and heavier load best used in German Lugers.
A German Luger? Who the hell carries a German Luger these days? In Chinatown? The answers eluded him. He couldn’t picture how Lucky could’ve been shot twice, then fell, or was pushed, off the roof.
As usual in Chinatown, he had a lot more questions than answers.
He knew they’d keep Lucky on ice for three days. If no one claimed the body, they’d incinerate him. Cremation was a nicer word for it. Pack the ashes in a carton smaller than a shoebox. Ashes to ashes. Another thousand dollars secured a one-foot square hole in the potter’s field at Queens Calvary. They’d throw in the little footstone for free. Dust to dust.
He paid for the arrangements at the Wah Fook funeral parlor. He declined the optional Chinese-language newspaper obituary; with all the enemies Lucky had acquired, it was best not to publicize where he’d be buried. Lucky had no family so who else is gonna burn incense for a Chinatown gangsta anyway?
Even with the five-hundred-dollar cop discount they gave Jack, the deal still cost a few thousand he really couldn’t afford but felt obligated about, the least he could do.
He left the Wah Fook, lighter in his wallet and heavier in his heart. By the time he got back to Sunset Park it was late and he was exhausted. He quenched his thirst with a cold can of beer as his bed beckoned him. He was unofficially on vacation as far as he was concerned, and the Tsun Jin reports were already a wrap on the CO’s desk.
Seventy-two hours before cremation?
His t
houghts swirled and pounded but didn’t keep him from oblivion when his head hit the pillow.
The only escape he had left.
Oblivion
He wasn’t sure if it was part of a dream or outside the oblivion—a 4 a.m. call from the mommy of the cathouse on Broome Street. Lucky’s first stop.
“Meet me at Bamboo Garden, eleven o’clock.” “Yum cha” was how she put it. He couldn’t remember how he’d come to know her as Angelina or Angel Chao. Something Billy Bow might have said?
He crashed again, only short hours but out deep.
When he awoke, feeling well rested, he checked his phone. Angelina’s call at 4:44 a.m. The worst numbers a superstitious Chinaman gambler could get. It wasn’t a dream after all.
Chinatown calling.
The Bamboo Garden was a known Hip Ching dim sum palace, which made him wonder if sister Chao was protected by the Dragons, whom the Chings sponsored, and by Lucky’s Ghosts as well. Rival gangs protecting the same joint? It was unheard of.
At 11 a.m. the place wasn’t crowded yet and he took a table in the back that gave a good view of the big dining room.
The waiter brought a pot of tea.
He watched her enter, looking a lot different than how he remembered her, in a bathrobe with a towel on her head. Her hair fell shoulder length and she wore a simple black suit—no jewelry—giving a businesslike appearance.
The guy who escorted her looked more like bodyguard than pimp, and she clearly had juice here judging by the way the waitstaff practically kowtowed to her.
He decided to be polite, treat her with courtesy, and give her face.
She came to his table like a dai gar jeer “Big Sister” and seated herself. The muscle guy took a seat out of the way.
Jack politely poured her some hot tea as the steam-cart ladies deposited plates of dim sum. As soon as the carts rolled away and the obsequious manager’s attention had died down, Angelina casually took an envelope from her LV shoulder bag and handed it to him.
