Chinatown Angel

by A. E. Roman

  “Flesh wound. It was a letter opener.”

  “Twelve stitches in your chin ain’t no flesh wound, Santuna.”

  I inhaled deeply, and the burn of fresh air in my chest traveled to my belly. “I need a small favor.”

  “You haven’t been awake for the last six months, I hope? How’s the insomnia?”

  “What’re you, my shrink? I’m working a case. Guy named Kirk Atlas. He’s a wannabe Hollywood actor.”

  “Kirk Atlas? Sounds made up,” said Joy.

  “You think? His real name is Marcos Rivera. Same animal.”

  “How’s it pay?”

  “Money’s good.”

  “What’s his malfunction?”

  “Missing girl. Dead girl. The usual.”

  “How do you meet these people?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it just comes natural.”

  I stopped at a lonely bodega for a pack of cigarettes and a cup of coffee. Marc Anthony sang I Need to Know on a small radio. I pointed at the Newports and a pot of freshly brewed beside it and the thin grocer poured. I dropped the money owed and went back out before the five spoons of sugar even settled at the bottom of my cup and Joy said: “When’re you coming in?”

  I sighed and walked. I could see people and traffic and civilization in the form of the Bruckner Expressway. “I need some help.”

  “I got a possible Westchester case if you’re interested.”

  I sighed again.

  “You’ll never get rich turning down work outside New York City, Chico. There is life beyond Van Cortlandt Park, you know?”

  “I wear a Timex. I light my cigarettes with a silver Zippo and my shoes are Rockport.”

  “You’re a ballbuster.”

  “Takes one to know one.”

  I sipped my coffee.

  “We got a nice Jamaican girl working the phones here on the weekends. I could put in a good word for you.”

  “Now you’re my pimp?”

  “Somebody’s gotta take care of you, boy.”

  “Good luck. Listen—”

  “Why didn’t you at least show up at the Christmas party?”

  “I don’t like parties.”

  “Sometimes I wanna punch you in the head, Chico.”

  “Stop flirting.”

  At the green light on Garrison, finally surrounded by other living souls, I walked through the shadow of the Bruckner Expressway overpass, past the stopped traffic of cars, through a small crowd toward the Hunts Point train station.

  “Is there anything you do like?” said Joy.

  “I like to be left alone, mostly.”

  “Why do I even think about you?”

  “Because you’re secretly in love with me.”

  “Right. I love the idea of living in a basement in the Bronx, waiting for you to stop working long enough to notice I’ve left you. That must be it. Poor Ramona.”

  “Ouch.”

  “You can take it. Come back to work.”

  “I’ll stop by soon,” I said, walking. “Can you have Kelly do some criminal background checks on the computer for me?”

  “What’s wrong with your computer,” she said.

  I came to a full stop on the Hunts Point plaza, opposite a necklace of shops and storefronts running along the crowded streets of Southern Boulevard. “You know I don’t own a computer.”

  “Time to join the twenty-first century, Porto Rico,” said Joy. “Let me have it.”

  “Albert Garcia,” I said. “Marcos Rivera aka Kirk Atlas. Samuel Rivera. Tiffany Rivera. Olga Rivera, Hannibal Rivera the Third, and throw his wife Josephine on the grill too with some Pilar Menendez.”

  I finished my coffee. A bus rumbled by and the wind started to blow so cold it felt like the skin on my face was being peeled back. A tiny old woman cursed the weather in Spanish. An African man selling bootleg DVDs out of a blanket on the sidewalk agreed with her in French. Two burly red-faced men in thick winter coats were hustling street money on a numbers game they were running off a folding table. A Latino holy roller in a dark suit, across from the plaza, outside Kennedy Fried Chicken, announced to disinterested Southern Boulevard shoppers that Jesus Christ cured AIDS.

  “Anything else, your highness?” asked Joy.

  “I especially need anything and everything you can get on Tiffany Rivera. Criminal records, last known address, school records. Tiffany Rivera is the missing girl and Pilar Menendez is the dead one. So any orders of protection for Menendez would be great.”

  “What do you mean she’s dead?”

  “I think she was pushed off a roof. Long story. I will owe you big time.”

  I walked toward the entrance of the underground Hunts Point station.

  “Okay. But don’t make me come get you,” said Joy. “I wanna see your brown butt in here asap.”

  “Joy?” I said, going down the stairs for my train back home to Pelham Bay.

  “Yes, Chico?”

  “We’ll always have San Juan.”

  “Sayonara, Santuna.”

  “La cucaracha, Joy.”

  I hung up and considered going to see Albert or Kirk Atlas.

  Nah. I needed some rest.

  Let the cops have this quarter. If they got nothing, I got next. Maybe by the time I woke up, Samantha or Mimi would have some news about the Greek.

  I wanted to go home. Really. I did. But all I kept thinking about as I went down those concrete steps to my six-train platform, was a pool of blood and white furry slippers with their little white hairs blowing in the cold winter wind. Pilar.

  EIGHT

  Murder?” said Albert. Seven A.M. He was slumped in a battered brown armchair under a black-and-white movie poster—Out of the Past—in his cramped apartment on the Grand Concourse. The armchair was an island surrounded by a mess of milk crates full of old VHS cassettes and film scripts.

  Albert shared the one-bedroom apartment on Grand Concourse with his grandfather, Uncle Dee. Albert worked as a waiter at the Chinatown Angel on Fordham Road. Uncle Dee worked as executive chef in the dining room at HMO Financial, owned and operated by the Rivera family. Albert and his grandfather did not just love movies; they had a fourteen-film-a-week habit. They were movie junkies, black-and-white, the hard stuff. Albert’s grandfather was in love with old films like Marty, Harvey, and It’s a Wonderful Life. Albert was more about The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, and The Big Sleep. Albert was a thirty-seven-year-old City College film student by day, a waiter by night, a wannabe movie director 24/7. Albert Garcia was an interesting and complicated cat.

  I was sipping on a cold bottle of Bahia like beer had just been invented, looking through the milk crates for any tape marked “Car.” I complimented Albert on his amazing film collection. I wondered aloud if I could look around a bit and maybe borrow something. He said he’d love to loan me any movie I wanted. Marty played on the TV as I leisurely searched the milk crates and talked to my old bud about my theory of murder.

  “Was Tiffany’s life in danger when she ran away?” I asked. “Was she a danger to herself?”

  “No,” said Albert.

  “Is she a drug addict? A thief? Did she steal something or kill somebody?”

  “None of the above,” Albert said. “She’s a good citizen, healthy, sane, eighteen years old, Julliard student, musical prodigy, beautiful, and smart as a whip.”

  “All right already,” I said. “She’s smart. God bless her. But is she or isn’t she in danger?”

  “No,” said Albert.

  “So lemme get this straight,” I said. “You guys sent me to track a girl who doesn’t want to be tracked. Who is not a teenage runaway, a drug addict, a thief, or a killer. Who has money. Who writes to say she’s safe. Who is no danger to herself or others and I just happen to stumble into a murder?”

  “C’mon, Chico,” said Albert, still wearing his red polyester pajamas. “Accident. Suicide. Yeah. But murder? Jesus!”

  “I saw two suspicious thugs outside Pilar’s building. The nex
t thing I know she’s doing a Mark Spitz from the rooftop. I saw somebody up there.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. It was dark.”

  “It was dark. Maybe it was your eyes playing tricks on you.”

  “Maybe,” I said, examining a cassette. “Tell me more about your Kirk Atlas.”

  “I know that kid since forever,” Albert said. “He owns the Chinatown Angel. He’s my boss. He’s my writer, my actor, my producer. I don’t like it. I’m shooting a science fiction flick for God’s sake. I wanna make crime pictures, heist movies, things like that. But beggars can’t be choosers.”

  “I thought Kirk Atlas was your buddy?”

  “Buddy?” Albert said in disgust. “The kid’s a shark. There isn’t one sincere bone in his body. Kirk’s the kinda guy who laughs twice at a joke. Once when everybody’s watching and then later in the week when he finally gets it. But he wouldn’t kill anybody. Especially not Pilar. I wouldn’t call it love. But they had a thing.”

  “Plenty of guys,” I said, “kill girls they have a thing with. Tell me more, Albert. A girl is dead.”

  “Goddamit, Chico!” Albert yelled and jumped out of the brown armchair. “You don’t think I know that Pilar’s dead? It’s a suicide. Everybody’s messed up over it. My girlfriend Olga collapsed when she heard. Marcos sends Pilar home every night by cab. Why are you complicating this? Why did you have to drive her home?”

  “I had a hunch.”

  “I bet you did,” he said, fiddling with a framed movie poster on the wall. “Do you usually keep hunches in your pants?”

  “Be nice,” I said, leaning on a milk crate and looking around the room.

  “Aw, c’mon, Chico,” said Albert, waving his arms. “I knew Pilar. She was a pretty young thing who wasn’t afraid to use what God gave her. Don’t tell me you went home with her in the best interests of your client.”

  “I was looking for clues,” I said. I didn’t think it was too smart to tell Albert about Hannibal Rivera the Third, or that I suspected he was holding something back from me.

  “You were looking for clues,” Albert said. “And you thought the clues were in Pilar’s brassier? Don’t lie to me, Chico. I don’t have a vagina.”

  “We’re talking about murder, not lust.”

  “Murder? Pilar slipped and fell from her roof. Or she jumped. She’s dead. It was a freak accident or an intentional suicide. That’s all. That’s the conclusion the police came to. I knew Pilar, you didn’t. The girl was depressed, on a cocktail of Prozac and who knows what else? Always threatening to kill herself after some big fight with Kirk. You’re just lucky the police didn’t think you did something to her. Am I wrong?”

  I stood up.

  “Did you find anything you like?”

  “Nah,” I said. “Nothing I haven’t already seen. Who is Irving?”

  Albert looked annoyed by my question and shook his head. “Everything looks suspicious if you think about it long and hard enough, Chico.”

  “Who is Irving?” I repeated.

  “Irving is a friend,” said Albert. “We used to all hang out at Kirk’s parties. Me, Olga, Tiffany, Irving, and Pilar. So what?”

  “Do you know a Greek in Astoria that was also friends with Pilar?”

  “No,” said Albert. “I don’t hang in Astoria. And Irving doesn’t know where Tiffany is. He’s harmless. Don’t think so much, Chico. Concentrate on one case and one case only. Just do this job for Atlas. Keep following Samuel. Find Tiffany. And try to control your urges. Help me. Don’t work against me.”

  “Where’d you go after you left Atlas that night?”

  “Here. Watching movies. Olga was with me. She was studying. I fell asleep. I drank too much. Why?”

  “No reason,” I said. “Can I talk to Olga?”

  “No,” Albert said. “I don’t want Olga involved. She and Tiffany don’t get along. This thing with Pilar has knocked her on her ass. She’s staying with her aunt Josephine. I can hardly get in there. It’s like Fort Knox. She’s got school, exams, constant pressure from her mother and father. I’m trying to explain this to you in a clear way, Chico. You don’t get it.”

  “Explain it slower,” I said.

  “My grandfather busted his ass to pay for these four years of college while I worked part time at the restaurant. Paid for every short film I shot. He’s expecting great things from me. He lost my mother. He lost my grandmother. I’m all he’s got. I’m not gonna let ’im down. I’m not gonna break his heart. He doesn’t deserve that.”

  “I look forward to meeting him,” I said.

  I remembered a summer morning, many years ago, outside on the stone stairway to St. Mary’s. Twelve of us kids back then called ourselves the Dirty Dozen. It was Nicky, Rob, Gabriel, Leroy, Bryan, Tito, Fitzroy, Michael, Terry, Joey, Albert, and me. We were religious kids, good kids.

  There were only eleven of us that day on the steps in blue blazers and striped ties, arguing about where to go after Father Gregory’s Mass.

  Sister Irene had come down earlier with some bad news and some good news. The bad news had been that Albert Garcia was gone. The good news was that Albert’s long-lost grandfather from El Salvador and another man in a gold Cadillac had come to reclaim him.

  We were all glad for Albert. Of course, that meant there were only eleven kids left in our gang. We had to keep the name, though; the Dirty Eleven just didn’t sound as good.

  “You’ll love Uncle Dee,” said Albert. “You’ll see.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Atlantic City,” said Albert. “Getting his gamble on.” He looked away at the TV. “I’m just a simple guy trying to make a film.”

  He fierce eyes were glowing. His black hair was thick, oily, and standing on his head as if electrified.

  “I work,” Albert said, “I shoot my film. I come home and eat Chinese take-out and then go up on the roof and whisper and sometimes yell to nobody and everybody on Grand Concourse: I’m not a waiter! I’m a filmmaker!”

  “Anybody ever answer back?”

  “Yeah,” Albert said, disgusted. “Kirk Atlas.”

  “So he’s not that bad?”

  Albert shook his head. “Desperate times, amigo. Like I said, beggars can’t be choosers. He’s got money. I need money. But don’t let my ass-kissing fool you. The kid’s a punk. Take my word. But he’s no killer.”

  “Why did you ask for my help if Atlas is such a punk?”

  “He wanted you to help him. He’s like a child. He meets you. You’re a private eye. He gets it into his head he needs a private eye. Night we met, I could tell you didn’t like Atlas. I know you. You’re honest. Like Nicky. You don’t like a guy, you don’t waste your time.”

  Albert sat on the edge of the brown armchair and pleaded. “You gotta understand, Chico, this is gonna be my first full-length film, even if it is science fiction. Kirk’s giving me an opportunity, and I’m helping him look for Tiffany and I’m helping you get some money in your pocket so you can get that wife of yours back.”

  “She’s not like that,” I said. “You’ve never met her. My wife didn’t throw me out because of money.”

  “That’s what you think,” said Albert.

  I shook my head. “This whole case stinks.”

  “Chico,” said Albert. “I’m not gonna twist your arm. Give Atlas back his money. I don’t blame you. We’re still friends. No hard feelings.”

  Albert put out his hand as if to shake. I ignored it. I sipped some more Bahia.

  “What if I can’t find this Tiffany?”

  “Who cares?” said Albert, dropping his hand. “You still get paid, Chico. I do my part. You do your part. That’s the deal. That’s business. Kirk ain’t much of a human being but he’s a businessman.”

  “So even if I don’t find the girl, Atlas still gives you the money to finish your movie?”

  “Man, we’re almost finished with the movie,” Albert said. “We only have a few scenes left to shoot. Then we edit. Submi
t to film festivals. Get it sold. After that, I’m free.”

  “And you don’t want anything to stop that from happening?”

  “Sacrifice, Chico. That’s what this is about. Sacrificio.”

  In my coat pocket I carried a paperback, Driving Lessons, written by Ramona Guzman Balaguer. My Ramona. It was about a half-Dominican, half-Haitian librarian and her crazy ten-year marriage to a private investigator who was obsessed with his father’s murder. Fiction. Right. The word sacrifice turns up a lot in that book.

  “If this movie’s any good,” Albert said, “I could be on my way.”

  “On your way where?”

  “Anyplace but here,” said Albert, and stretched his arms out.

  I started walking across the room to get a better look at something.

  Tacked on the wall, under a real but dusty Uzi machine gun and a movie poster for Farewell, My Lovely, was a photograph of the Willis Avenue Bridge marked:

  BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF EMERGENCY

  Willis Avenue Bridge, Harlem River, New York City, 25 feet

  “What are these about?” I said, pointing.

  “The Uzi is a leftover from my grandfather’s days as a cop in El Salvador,” said Albert. He pointed at the Willis Avenue Bridge photo. “I swim like a brick. Worse comes to worse, I can always jump. Just like Pilar.”

  “Cheerful,” I said. “I hope that’s a really bad joke.”

  “Of course,” said Albert, with a sardonic smile. “That would be littering.”

  I glanced at the Uzi. “Gun work?”

  “No,” said Albert. “It’s an old piece of junk. But it looks badass on the wall like that, don’t you think?”

  “What’s your grandfather’s real name?”

  “Daniel,” said Albert. “Daniel Diego. But everybody calls him Uncle Dee, a nickname he got in El Salvador as a child on account of being such a quiet and serious kid. It stuck. Don’t let his taste in movies fool you, he hates people.”

  “You ever get to meet your grandmother?”

  “She died in El Salvador.”

  “Your mother?”

  “I found out that my mother and father died in a fire. Get this, it was here in the Bronx. I was there.”