Chinatown Angel

by A. E. Roman

  He plunges the needle into his arm, injects himself and says, “That’ll teach me.”

  His eyes close and he begins to rock back and forth. The lethal dose of heroin is taking effect. He is dying. It’s over.

  His eyes shoot open.

  You point the gun.

  He laughs. “You want this to look like I overdosed here by accident. You can’t shoot me! You can’t even afford a scuffle.”

  He stands up. You stand up. He totters from left to right, filled with the drug.

  He moves back and stumbles over his chair. He goes down on the floor and lies there, looking up at you with defeated eyes. Then he hacks and coughs and spits and flails his arms and legs, gasping for air. He rolls over on his back, choking and cursing.

  The dose of heroin is in his veins, the demon of permanent sleep at work, perpetual midnight falling. Not so smug anymore. Let the good people live. Let him be dead and rotting, a guilty thing on the floor of the kitchen.

  You stand and watch him, lying there on the floor, slumped under the chrome counter. His green eyes close.

  You look at him and you know the bastard’s dead and there is a release of everything, of years and decades of anxiety and hate. You know it won’t be long before they find the body and lower it into a grave and shovel it out of the world. They’ll play Hendrix at the funeral.

  You look down at your hands. They’re no longer shaking.

  SIXTEEN

  I drove into Manhattan along 135th Street and Lenox past the Schomburg Center. Before she met me, Ramona had fallen in love (in her bookish imagination) with Arturo A. Schomburg, a black Puerto Rican scholar. A black Puerto Rican named Schomburg? Tell me about it. An egghead with the largest collection of books on anything and everything African. Ramona had been researching materials for her master’s when she fell in love with the idea of the dude, who was long dead by 1960. She had a picture of Arturo pasted to our bedroom mirror. It was the first time I found myself jealous of a dead guy. It wouldn’t be the last.

  I turned left at 124th street and parked my car outside the offices of St. James and Company. It was housed in a three-story brownstone.

  I entered the lobby with its dark oak walls, swiped in at the electronic door, and said hello to Kelly Diaz, the office manager, who lived with her kid and a husband in Sugar Hill. Kelly Diaz was twenty-five, a big-boned, big-breasted, Colombian girl with short purple hair. She stopped typing at her computer and came out of her large office area, a converted kitchen and living room. “Welcome back, handsome,” she said, kissing my cheek and pressing her hand against my chest.

  “Sometimes you give me ideas,” I said.

  “Wanna share?”

  I stared into Kelly’s big blues. “I would, but you’re married. And I got many bad men to catch before I sleep.”

  I went past Kelly up the staircase to the second floor.

  As I entered the second-floor office, Joy looked up at me and slid a folder across her glass desk. Her office was down to bare essentials: two chairs, a file cabinet, and fresh flowers.

  Hank was standing by an open window eating a jelly doughnut. He had a red Irish face, thinning brown hair, and brown eyes.

  There was this about him, too: the man was as honest as the day was hard. In the eighties, when Hank was still a homicide detective, he tracked the murders of two Puerto Rican teens to a couple of members of the NYPD, named names, and sent some rotten apples to court for indictments. The case never made it to trial, and that was the end of his police career.

  I looked back at Joy.

  “Hello, boss lady,” I said.

  “You remember Chico,” Joy said, glancing at Hank.

  “How are you, buddy?”

  “Hank served as head of the research team on your Benjamin Rivera request,” Joy said.

  “You need any information, leads, permits, Hank Murphy’s your man.”

  Hank bit into his jelly doughnut. It dripped red filling onto his white shirt and Joy’s spotless glass desk.

  Hank excused himself and went out.

  “You know, I asked for that Benjamin Rivera info a while ago, Joy. You guys sure took your time. What’s up with that?”

  “Sorry it took so long, sir. You know, it’s that little obstacle we like to call paying customers.”

  “Paying customers get served first?” I said. “Where’s the love?”

  “My mama didn’t raise me right,” said Joy.

  “You need Jesus,” I said.

  “I got Jesus. Who you got?”

  “Richard Pryor?”

  “Sit your brown butt down and start reading.”

  “You talk about my butt a lot,” I said. “I’m starting to feel objectified.” I grabbed the report and sat down.

  “What’s it look like?” she asked.

  “Looks like I got pulled into waters I can’t swim.”

  “Money still good?”

  “Great. Can’t live without it. But too many people are trying to play me. I got a roof-jumping waitress, a socialist poet, and a dead junkie millionaire.”

  “Why are you helping this Kirk Atlas, anyway?”

  “I told you. Albert. He’s a filmmaker.”

  “I thought he worked in a restaurant.”

  “He does. Albert’s one of those guys who doesn’t want to work in a restaurant all his life.”

  “Ah,” Joy said, wiping her desk. “I get it. This Albert Garcia has dreams. Goals. Aspirations.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Boy, I told you to stay away from people like that.”

  “You know me. I’m hard-headed.”

  “So what about this Kirk Atlas?”

  “Kirk Atlas? He’s an ass. But he’s a rich ass. And, according to Albert, he’s about to become a famous ass. He’s agreed to help Albert with his first film if Albert helps him find this Tiffany Rivera. That’s where I came in.”

  “Okay,” Hank said, entering, his face glowing. “What did I miss?”

  “Not much,” said Joy.

  “Did you read my report?” said Hank.

  “Not yet. Did you guys get my fax?”

  “Yeah,” said Hank, holding up a copy of Irving’s “Chinatown Angel” story.

  “You wanna hear what I got?”

  I leaned back in my chair. “Bring it on.”

  “Benjamin Rivera,” Hank began, proudly flipping open his report, “fifty years old at time of death, five-foot-six, 250-pounds, middle son of the late Hannibal Rivera the Second, who inherited one of the largest privately owned agricultural concerns in the Caribbean.”

  Joy said nothing and kept looking out the open window.

  “Benjamin Rivera got a law degree from La Plata University but apparently never took the bar exam or worked as a lawyer.”

  “One less lawyer,” Joy said. “Tragedy.”

  “It gets better,” said Hank, his eyes lighting up like a schoolgirl’s at a prom. “He spent two years in a psych hospital in Up-state New York. It was discovered that he had embezzled one point two million dollars with the help of an accountant at HMD Financial. Benjamin was involuntarily committed by his brothers, Hannibal and Samuel, and then cut out of his inheritance from the family’s businesses. He was arrested twice for running a prostitution and drug ring from his apartment in a building that his family owned in the Bronx.”

  “What about his death?” I asked.

  “Oh, it was an open and shut case, apparently. The medical examiner’s office determined that the cause of death was a drug overdose. They found reasonable traces of antidepressants in his blood and unreasonable amounts of alcohol and heroin. The examiner wrote that the dose of heroin Benjamin Rivera took was so large that he might as well have injected himself with poison in the Chinatown Angel.”

  “What was Benjamin Rivera doing in the Chinatown Angel?”

  “He owned the place,” Hank said, riffling through his report again. “He bought it over twenty years ago from a Mr. Andrew Kwan. It used to be in Chinatown before And
rew Kwan moved it to the Bronx.”

  “So Benjamin Rivera owned the new and improved Chinatown Angel?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But I thought you said Benjamin Rivera was completely disinherited?”

  “Well,” said Hank. “Not completely. Benjamin Rivera got himself into rehab, got clean, got some family assistance, and all was forgiven; bygones were bygones.”

  “The comeback kid,” I said. “Anything else?”

  “He had ham for dinner,” said Hank.

  “Any signs of foul play?” I said. “Besides the ham, I mean.”

  “No. The place was clean. No signs of forced entry. No physical trauma to the body. No signs of struggle at all. They found five hundred dollars in cash in his wallet and a locked safe full of more cash.”

  “Where exactly was the old Chinatown Angel?” I asked.

  “Mott Street,” said Hank, handing me a slip of paper. “It’s called the Wing Wok Restaurant now.”

  One of the details that I underlined in Irving’s story was his taking the Chinatown Angel out of the Bronx. Maybe it was nothing.

  Or maybe, bingo was his name-o.

  “Anything else I need to know?” I asked Hank.

  “Rivera’s niece found the body.”

  “His niece? Tiffany?”

  “No,” Hank leafed through his report. “His body was found at around two A.M. by Olga Rivera.”

  SEVENTEEN

  It was freezing as I walked through Chinatown with its red and gold dragons, past shops with Chinese vendors setting up to sell roots and fish and herbs, TVs and cell phones and stereos. I walked up Canal toward the Manhattan Bridge gateway, turned right at Mott Street, and went into the Wing Wok Restaurant—formerly known as the Chinatown Angel.

  I sat at the counter as I had done for two days in a row. Mr. Wing and his waiters had claimed they had never heard of Tiffany or the Chinatown Angel. I ordered tea and a warm bun, waiting for someone to appear. Who? I didn’t know. But I would when I saw them.

  The restaurant was still mostly empty when she entered.

  She wore a pink winter coat, pink hat, pink snow boots and a pink Powerpuff Girls backpack. She carried a violin case plastered with cartoon angels.

  Her blue jeans were tight on her tall, slender, shapely figure. Bright and smiling, she entered and I could smell her as she came toward me, confident as a young panther, all lilac perfume and promise. She wore a Mickey Mouse watch and a silver bracelet with an angel’s head hanging from it.

  Her hair was no longer dyed blond. It was black and silky and down to her hips almost. Her face was all high cheekbones and flawless skin, and almond-shaped eyes filled with green lightning. I’d been thinking Tiffany’s green eyes were contact lenses. They weren’t. They were the real deal.

  “Hello, angel.”

  “Hello, Mr. Santana,” she said.

  She knew who I was.

  I felt something stir in my chest as Tiffany removed her pink coat and hat and I saw her wrapped like a gift in a tight T-shirt, a row of letters across her breasts: BORN TO RUN.

  “I want you to listen to me, Mr. Santana. I know you work for my cousin Marcos.”

  I glanced around. “How did you know?”

  “A friend called and said that you were looking for me, suggested that I move out of Chinatown as soon as possible.”

  “So this friend knew where you were all along?”

  “Please go away. I can pay.”

  “Not that easy.”

  Tiffany touched my hand and said, “Don’t be mean to me.”

  I melted. I melted and eased off like some chump.

  Compose yourself, Santana.

  “Do you have any idea what you’d be doing to me?” she asked. “If I had to leave Chinatown? Do you have any idea?”

  “I don’t get ideas,” I said. “I had one once. It was small and had a little bell. It broke. It was my last one.”

  She made a quizzical face. “Are you a detective or a comedian?”

  “I’m a detective by profession. I only dabble in comedy. It’s a defense mechanism. But my real passion is interior design.”

  “I see,” she said, and smiled.

  “I can put on my deadly serious face if you’d like.”

  “No,” she said. “Life is already too deadly serious.”

  “I second that emotion.”

  “I just want to be left alone,” she said. “Will you please help me?”

  Isn’t that the way it always starts, Chico?

  Later, we walked, arm in arm, along Mott Street. Her idea. She wanted to explain why I should leave her alone, happy and undisturbed in Chinatown. She said that she wouldn’t let me go until I was convinced that letting her be was the right thing to do. She dragged me inside a store filled with giant golden Buddha statues, candles, bowls filled with cooking oil, and oranges, and little yellow slips of paper.

  “Are you happy, Chico?”

  “I’m not miserable. You?”

  “I’m trying to be happy,” she said. “The longer I live in Chinatown, the more I see how easy it is to stay afraid. Sometimes fear looks like protection. Sometimes fear feels like home. Some people never leave it.”

  “Is that why you left home? To get away from fear?”

  “Yes.”

  I stared at the fat Buddha statue. We went back out and walked along Canal.

  “The morning I decided to run away,” Tiffany said, “I woke up without much hope in humanity, my family, New York, Julliard. It all seemed so pointless, you know? All that money. All those opportunities. All that potential. For what? Everybody’s miserable. And it all ends so soon. Is it any wonder Pilar Menendez killed herself?”

  “You know about that?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you feel about Pilar?”

  She said: “I’m sorry Pilar is dead. It made me sad when I heard she killed herself. I know my sister Olga was close to her. I’m sure she’s suffering.”

  “Pilar didn’t seem to like you much.”

  “Oh,” said Tiffany. “Pilar was like a lot of girls. You should’ve seen the way she looked at me sometimes. You either love me or hate me. I used to care about stuff like that. Since I’ve been in Chinatown, since I ran away from my family, here among working people, my spirits have lifted and hope has come back and I don’t care about girls hating me. I feel sorry for them.”

  “Good for you.”

  “I’m happy,” she said. “Can you say that? Forget me. Forget you ever saw me. I know you were paid to find me, but you seem like a good man. I hear you’re a beautiful person.”

  “You’ve heard too much about me,” I said. “What’s the name of your crystal ball?”

  She grabbed my hand and traced what she called my “life line” and said, “Do you understand what bliss is?”

  “A breakfast cereal? A floor cleanser?”

  “No, Chico. Be serious now.” She talked like she knew me. “I’m following my happiness. My bliss.”

  “Is bliss another way of saying Irving?”

  “No! Irving and I are just friends.”

  “He’s in love with you. I’ve heard his poetry. It’s bad but maybe his love is good.”

  “My music is my whole world now. My one and only love.”

  “So there isn’t any guy in the picture?”

  She paused and pushed a lock of dark hair back from her face. “No.”

  “How about a girl?”

  “No,” she huffed. “I’m not a lesbian if that’s what you mean.”

  “Take it easy,” I said. “Some of my best lesbian friends are lesbians.”

  “I’m not a lesbian,” she huffed again. “I like boys.”

  “Okay, okay, Miss Hetero-Cuban-Chinese-American. Slow your egg roll.”

  “I’m not going back,” Tiffany said. “If my mother and father find out I’m here, they’ll make me come back. Please don’t make me.”

  “If your mother and father don’t support your be
ing here, how do you support yourself?”

  “I teach violin.”

  We stopped again on the short stoop outside the Wing Wok Restaurant.

  “Would you like to come up?”

  “Okay,” I said. “But no funny business.”

  “I’ll try to control myself,” she said.

  Just as she said that, a girl in brown khakis and a brown winter coat appeared out of nowhere. Short. Skinny as the drawing of a stick figure. Big glasses. Boy’s haircut. She charged over and suddenly SMACKED! Tiffany harder than I had ever seen any human being smacked and ran off.

  “Hey!” I yelled.

  “No,” said Tiffany. “Let her go.”

  “Who the hell was that?”

  “My sister,” she said, in a distressed voice. “Olga.”

  So that was Olga.

  “What was that about?”

  “She hates me,” said Tiffany. But her face was not sad. She smiled. It was as if she deserved the slap and the slap had helped her. “She really hates me.”

  ________

  We went into the four-story building and stopped at a green door on the third floor.

  “Shoes,” she said.

  I took off my Rockports and entered the apartment. It was a one-bedroom that smelled like dumplings.

  “I saw this apartment,” Tiffany said, switching on the lights, “and I knew I had to have it. People here live in their own world. They work and never notice me. They couldn’t care less. No pressure. To play Carnegie or marry a rich handsome man. Nothing. I am nobody here. I like being nobody. The Wing Wok is not The Lodge in East Hampton, but it’s good food. I’m learning Cantonese and Mandarin. Life is simple here. My parents probably think this is a phase I’m going through. Especially my father. It’s not. I have found my life. My place. I’m alive here.”

  I looked around the living room. A big pink sofa occupied almost the whole of one wall. The kitchen area was filled with postcards. The apartment walls were covered with cartoon clouds and angels, pink and brown cherubs with wings, playing violins, smiling cheerfully, on fat white clouds.

  Beneath two tall windows was a golden cage filled with screeching birds.