The Usual Santas

by Peter Lovesey

  Miller frowned at me. “Acute hemorrhaging of the lungs, an occulation of the blood vessels around the eyes and face, suggesting suffocation. General failure of the major organs due to severe blood loss and the ensuing shock,” Miller said. The words tumbled out of his mouth like he was reading from a textbook. “Wounds consistent with a number of drug related murders in a hundred different towns that aren’t Granite City. I’m sorry, Sheriff,” he said. “I really am.” He put out his hand, but I didn’t take it, so he shrugged, put it back in his pocket and started to towards the door. “Have a Merry Christmas, Morris. Take the day off. It would do you some good.”

  I watched Miller climb into his car, a beat up El Camino that had a bright green wreath on its front grill, and drive off. I knew then that I didn’t want to end up like Miller Descent: a hard man unable to shake the horrors from his mind. I also knew that I was halfway there and closing the gap. So, with an envelope filled with the pictures of a dissected family in my hand, I left Lolly’s Diner and headed home, where I knew what I had to do, and where I knew I would not sleep.

  It was cold and overcast the next morning, Yeach Mountain lost behind a thicket of low, gray clouds. A light mist of rain fell as I drove through downtown Granite City toward the station. The streets, slick with moisture, refracted the glow from the strings of golden bulbs that were hung on the light posts each year by the Soroptimists and 4-H. I saw my dead wife Margaret duck into the yarn store on Porter, saw her coming from Biddle’s Flowers with a bundle of poinsettias, watched her make a call from the phone booth out front of the library, let her cross in front of me on 9th Street, a ream of wrapping paper tucked under her arm. You live in a town long enough, the past, the present, it all occupies the same space.

  But when I walked into the station, all I saw were Mr. and Mrs. Klein and Mrs. Pellet sitting in the lobby. And I thought, seeing Mr. Klein in his black slacks and yellow v-neck sweater, everything about him out of place in my station, that maybe my time in Granite City was coming to a close; that I couldn’t bear to see despair in people’s faces anymore. That, most of all, I couldn’t keep on thinking about the daily rituals that still call to people even in their times of need: the soft pleat ironed down Mrs. Klein’s pant leg, the way Mrs. Pellet had put on a nice dress and gold earrings.

  “Been waiting long?” I asked.

  “No,” Mr. Klein said. His voice was low and I decided that he probably wasn’t long for this place either. “Didn’t get much in the way of rest last night.”

  “I’ve got the autopsies for your son’s family,” I said. “You can read ’em if you want to.”

  Mrs. Klein let out a short sob and squeezed her husband’s arm. Mr. Klein kissed her on the forehead and patted her hand. “Did he suffer, Sheriff?” Mrs. Klein asked.

  “No,” I said. “No, it looks like he died peacefully.”

  “What about my Missy?” Mrs. Pellet asked. “And the kids; what about the kids?”

  “The same,” I said. “I think they got lost in the woods is all. A real tragedy.” A look of relief passed over their faces, and though I believe they each knew that their children and grandchildren had died terribly, that in fact they’d been butchered, I had helped them in some way. Had eased something in them for at least a moment.

  Lyle walked out then and tapped me on the shoulder. “Dr. DiGiangreco called for you,” he said. “Needs you to call her right away.”

  I told the families to wait for just a little bit longer and I’d get the bodies of their loved ones released. Lyle followed me back to my office.

  “What the hell’s going on out there?” Lyle said. “I thought I heard you tell them their kids died peacefully.”

  “I did,” I said.

  “Morris,” Lyle said, “their damn hands and feet were cut off!”

  “I know that,” I said.

  “Lizzie said some DA called her,” Lyle said. “You aware of that?”

  I opened the door to my office and let Lyle stand in the hall. “You talk to your kids lately, Lyle?”

  “You know, Morris, when I can,” Lyle said. “Why?”

  “How about you take today off and drive down and see your daughter,” I said. “Shoot, take the whole week off. Fly out to California and see your son. When was the last time you spent the holidays with your kids?”

  Lyle squinted his eyes at me and rolled his tongue against his cheek. “Whatever this is, Morris,” he said, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  Lizzie answered on the first ring. “They’re all wrapped up and ready to go,” she said.

  “How do they look?” I asked.

  I heard Lizzie sigh on the other end of the line. “I had to use fishing line to sew the boys’ feet back on, Hawkins had some thirty-five pound test that worked great,” she said. “It should hold for a long time.”

  “I appreciate this Lizzie,” I said. “More than you’ll ever know.”

  “What do you want me to do about this DA who keeps calling?”

  “Tell him to call me if he has any questions,” I said. “The family hasn’t asked for anything and it’s not his case.”

  “You’ve got all the paperwork there?” Lizzie asked.

  “Right in front of me,” I said. “I’ll sign off on it and get you a copy.”

  “Would my dad have done this?” Lizzie asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if you should have.”

  “Hawkins said that if there was a problem he’d take the blame,” Lizzie said. “Said that’s how it’s always worked here in Granite City. ‘Let the shit roll downhill,’ we’re his exact words.”

  I thought then that my recollections of Lizzie’s father had grown opaque in my mind—my memories colored more for what I wished were always true than what actually was. We’d worked together for a long time and time spares no one.

  “Tell Hawkins I won’t forget this,” I said.

  “Sheriff,” Lizzie said, “can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why’d you stay here all these years?”

  After we hung up, I pulled out a piece of letterhead and scratched out a three-sentence letter of resignation. I held it in my hands and ran my fingers over every word, every period. I’d been the Sheriff of Granite City for thirty-five years and I’d never broken the law. I always did the legitimate thing, like telling men who beat their wives that they were going to hell when I didn’t even believe in God, and then letting them go on back home because the law back then said we couldn’t hold them. Like knocking on poor Gina Morrow’s door at 3 o’clock in the morning to tell her that her husband had been stabbed to death in a bar fight over another woman.

  I’d followed the letter of the law, no matter my opinion of it. What good did it do? Couldn’t I have lied to Gina Morrow and told her that her husband had been stabbed to death trying to protect an innocent woman’s honor? Couldn’t I have dragged some of those no-good wife beaters out behind the station and pounded them into submission?

  And yet, there I was with my letter of resignation in my hand and an autopsy report on my desk. Inside both documents were lies. Inside the autopsy report, Dr. Lizzie DiGiangreco, whose dead father I had carried to his grave, stated that all four members of the Klein family had died of exposure and acute hypothermia. She further stated that all members of the family were fully intact—that all hands and feet were connected. An accidental death, no note of foul play.

  In my official report, typed the night previous on my old Olivetti, I stated that it was my belief that the Klein family had succumbed during the night of November 11, 1998. The almanac noted November 11, 1998 as being the coldest day of the month during what became the coldest winter in record. Over a foot of snow fell that night.

  Case closed.

  Snow fell in Granite City the night I quit, t
oo. It was Christmas Eve, and though the roads were slippery and runny, I called Lyle and asked him to meet me at Shake’s Bar. We sat for a long time in a small booth sipping beer and eating stale nuts, an old Johnny Mathis Christmas song bleating out of the tape player Zep, the bartender, pulled out on special occasions. That next day I’d recommend to the Mayor that Lyle be named interim Sheriff, a post he would eventually keep for three years until he died from emphysema.

  “You know what, Morris,” Lyle said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about just closing up shop and moving to Hawaii. You know I was stationed out there, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “In those days, I raised a lot of hell,” Lyle said. He had a faraway look in his eyes and I thought maybe inside his head he was on liberty in Maui. “I don’t regret it, though. We all had to sew our oats at some point. Make bad decisions and then just close those chapters and move on.”

  “I never really did that,” I said. “I’ve loved two women in my life, Lyle, and both of them are dead now. From day one, I’ve tried to do right. What has it gotten me?”

  “Respect.”

  “They gonna put that on my tombstone? Here rests a guy people respected.”

  “That wouldn’t be so bad, when you think about it.” Lyle took a final pull from his beer, then coughed wetly. “You did right by everyone, Morris,” he said. “By everyone.” He slid out of the booth then, tugged on a knit cap and gloves. “I called my kids, like you said. Daughter told me I was about five years too late.”

  “Keep calling,” I said.

  “Yeah, well,” Lyle said. “The thing of it is, Morris, nights like this? You know, it’s arbitrary. Holidays? What are we celebrating? I don’t believe in God and finding those kids up there on Yeach, that didn’t make it any better, you know? I mean, what are we celebrating?”

  “That we made it through,” I said.

  Lyle considered that for a moment. “I shouldn’t have to be told to call my kids. I shouldn’t even have been at work today.” He shook his head. “My dad was a cop. And you know what he did on Christmas Eve?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing. He did nothing at all. He was just my dad. I don’t know how that got lost on me.”

  “Go home, Lyle,” I said. “You’re drunk.” Which wasn’t true.

  “I will,” he said. “I thought I’d just take a drive through the streets. Make sure no one’s stuck in the snow. You could positively die from the cold out there tonight.”

  Lyle smiled through his pursed lips and I knew that he had seen my report, had seen Lizzie’s autopsy report, and that he didn’t care. That he knew I’d made a judgment call not based on the nuts and bolts of the law, but on how people feel inside, on the mechanics of the human heart.

  “I’ll come with you,” I said.

  Bo Sau (Vengeance)

  by Henry Chang

  Henry Chang was born and raised in New York’s Chinatown, where he still lives. He is a graduate of CCNY and the author of five novels featuring Chinatown born and raised Detective Jack Yu: Chinatown Beat, Year of the Dog, Red Jade, Death Money, and Lucky.

  dinner before noon

  In late February, weeks past the Chinese New Year celebrations, the Chinatown mornings at last returned to normal. Gone was the four-deep crush of the crowds clamoring to buy chicken, for yook roast pig and duck. Missing were the flower vendors on every street corner, barking out offers of the gladiolas and carnations. There wasn’t an empty seat to be had in the Chinatown coffee shops then. Even early in the morning, the streets had been crowded with Chinese. Then the white tourists arrived in busloads—just as the area’s office workers broke for lunch—and the whole neighborhood seemed like it would burst with traffic, noise and bustle.

  Now the quiet mornings had returned. It was comforting, like the solitude of his overnight shift. Michael Mak was slurping his thousand-year egg congee, dunking a fried jow gwai cruller into the hot soupy rice mix. He was at a lone seat at the back table of Big Chang’s fai sik fast food restaurant. It was almost noontime, which for him was a late dinnertime, nearly four hours after the overnight security shift at Confucius Towers. The freezing morning wind had whipped up his appetite.

  He’d sat with his back to the wall, as usual, and was reading the sports section from the free newspaper he’d grabbed from the sidewalk box at Mott and Canal.

  There was a rush of cold wind and he looked up to see a crew of Chinese laborers enter Big Chang’s. For them, this was lunchtime and they took the large round table in the middle of the floor.

  Mak returned to his newspaper and cruller, occasionally sneaking a look at the group as they placed their orders with the red-vested waiter. The quick-eats restaurant started filling up, the lunchtime crowd driven indoors by the February breeze.

  He kept his head down, pretending to read the newspaper, when he heard one of the men use the phrase jook sing, the derogatory term for the American-born Chinese—empty piece of bamboo.

  Michael Mak himself was jook sing but was capable of speaking functional Cantonese and Toishanese, the main Chinatown dialects. He knew that native-born Chinese held the American-born in contempt, citing their ignorance of the great celestial traditions. He took no offense at the talk.

  Mak folded the newspaper, then raised a lazy glance at the men, a cup of tea at his lips. The laborers continued their chatter. They were oblivious to him, but he focused on one of them. It was a face he hadn’t seen in twenty years and now it was causing his blood to rise. The man was Tsi Mun, a former Chinatown gang member who, like Michael Mak, was in his forties now.

  Mak lifted the newspaper so as to obscure his face. Tsi Mun was an old enemy with whom he had a longtime score to settle.

  Twenty years before this congee morning, Tsi Mun has been a member of the Black Dragons street gang, a motley crew of Hong Kong hotheads and Chinatown discards.

  Tsi Mun was better known by his Cantonese street name, Doe Jai—Knife Boy. He had a reputation for being good with a blade.

  One hot summer night, Doe Jai had bugged out and, in a fit of inexplicable rage, stabbed Mak’s cousin, Leng Jai—Pretty Boy—so nicknamed because he was a good-looking flashy dresser, popular with the Chinatown girls.

  Pretty Boy survived eight hours on the operating table, and that was just the first of his surgeries. They had opened him up and stitched him back and the jagged scars left a roadmap across his torso ad back. Pretty Boy was never the same after the attack. He had all kinds of problems and was always in pain. The surgeons removed part of his bladder and he couldn’t even piss like a normal person.

  Pretty Boy wasn’t so popular after that.

  A few years later he committed suicide.

  Despite Michael Mak’s attempts to locate him, Doe Jai was nowhere to be found. He had disappeared from Chinatown.

  Mak’s family and relatives relocated to Seattle Chinatown soon after, but Michael stayed behind and took over the rent-controlled family apartment in the tenement walkup on Bayard. For the first few years, Mak kept a lookout for Doe Jai, but over time the idea of revenge diminished, distant but not forgotten.

  Now his target sat at the middle table, only fifteen feet away. Mak quietly clenched his fist, brought it under the table, trying to stay calm, trying to ignore the drumbeat in his chest.

  A half-dozen plates of rice arrived at the big table. The men tore into the assortment of saam bo faahn dishes, their waiter ladling out steamy bowls of chicken feet soup.

  Mak put his head down, appearing to read the table menu. He listened for the sound of Doe Jai’s voice. His face was expressionless as he cast a last glance their way, leaving a dollar tip under his teacup.

  He kept his back to the laborers, who were still gulping down their meals as he made his way out of Big Chang’s.

  Outside Mak crossed the street diagonally and went
into the May Wah coffee shop, where he bought a nai cha tea. Opening his newspaper at the window counter, he watched the door of Big Chang’s.

  He knew it’d take at least another fifteen minutes for the men to finish their meal. He blew the steam off the rim of the cardboard cup as he scanned the street and considered the twenty years.

  After almost half an hour, the construction crew came out of Big Chang’s. With full bellies, they sauntered across Mott toward Bayard, back to work.

  Mak followed at a distance, his breath white in the frigid air. They came to a worksite on Pell, where they were repairing the exterior of a walkup tenement belonging to the Chin clan. There was a scaffolding setup and a dumpster on the street.

  Mak knew the work gangs didn’t quit until six p.m., their crew bosses wringing the last ounce of sweat from the men before calling it a day. He watched Doe Jai go into the building as the men began to load the dumpster. He checked his watch. It was one p.m.

  As we walked home, feeling tired, he resolved to talk only a short nap behind the drawn afternoon shades of his dark tenement bedroom. Then he’d return to Pell.

  His nap was a fitful series of violent snapshots and when Mak finally awoke he felt groggy and nervous. When he got to Pell Street the gray afternoon was drifting into darkness and the work crew had turned on the light bulbs under the scaffolding.

  It had gotten colder, but Mak was toasting inside his down-filled jacket, his head covered by the black Mets cap he’d tilted down over his eyes. He went along the street and found a spot under Wah Kee’s awning, near enough to the dollar mini-can stop for him to be mistaken for a passenger awaiting the cheap ride.