The Misfortune Cookie: An Esther Diamond Novel (13 page)

He shrugged and said something to the woman whom I now took for his mother, but I couldn’t hear him above all the shouting.

Whatever he’d said, it caused his mother to turn away from him with an expression of resigned disappointment that I had a feeling Ted saw often on her face.

Then a pretty woman in her twenties started saying in American-accented English, loudly enough for everyone to hear, “Aunt Grace is right. That woman has some nerve showing up here!”

The beautiful woman in the cheongsam said firmly, “Susan, please.”

But Susan—Ted’s sister, whom I remembered John mentioning earlier—ignored this. She said directly to Benny’s secretary, “Get out of here! Can’t you see you’re upsetting my aunt? Show some respect!”

The secretary’s grief turned to anger, and she started shrieking at Mrs. Yee and Susan.

Apart from Susan, who continued using English, everyone was still speaking Chinese, so I didn’t understand what was being said; but it didn’t take much imagination to guess what Benny’s wife and mistress were shouting at each other over his dead body while his offspring and relatives watched with horrified embarrassment. I looked around and noticed that virtually all the visitors I could see were also focused on this scandalous scene, watching the players with riveted interest—and very glad, I suspected, that they had braved tonight’s rotten weather to pay their respects at what was turning out to be quite a memorable wake.

I returned my attention to the shouting match—which was when I realized what should have occurred to me before: If Benny had been murdered, then Mrs. Yee was an obvious suspect. I had watched enough episodes of
Crime and Punishment
to know that the spouse often turned out to be the killer.

John had said that Benny Yee had a lot of enemies; but closer to home, he had a wife he was cheating on—and based on the determined way she was advancing on Benny’s mistress right now, she didn’t seem like a woman you could expect to cross with impunity. Mrs. Yee roughly shook off the restraining hands of her anxious young male relatives (her sons, I assumed), stopped at the altar near Benny’s coffin to pick up a bronze incense burner, and then leaped vengefully at Benny’s screeching secretary.

“Hey!” Without conscious thought, just acting on reflex, I jumped into the fray and threw myself bodily against the secretary, slamming her sideways so that Mrs. Yee’s deadly swipe at her skull with that heavy object missed its target.

Inevitably, the girl and I flew straight into the coffin and landed facedown on top of Benny’s corpse. We were both winded for a moment. Then she realized where we were and started screaming and flailing. I had landed on Benny’s embalmed legs, in their well-tailored trousers. The body didn’t feel particularly eerie—mostly, it felt like landing on a very solid mannequin—but falling on top of a
dead
guy was still pretty disturbing. So I gasped in startled revulsion and vaulted backward—straight into a broad chest and a pair of strong arms.

“Did you
intend
to fling yourself on the corpse?” John asked.

Dangling from his arms for a moment, I said breathlessly, “No! I was trying to . . . Trying to . . .”

“I know. I saw.”

He set me on my feet, waited to make sure I wouldn’t sway, then let go. Then he went to assist the woman who was flailing and floundering atop the open coffin, still screaming her head off.

Mrs. Yee had apparently struck herself in the leg when she missed her nemesis’ skull. The bronze incense burner lay on the floor while she limped back to her chair, moaning in pain and supported by two sons.

“Esther! Are you all right?” Max asked, appearing at my side. Nelli was with him, panting anxiously.

“I’ve been looking for you,” I said, getting my breath back. “Where were you?”

“Due to the demands of Nelli’s corporeal form, we had to step outside for a few minutes.” I assumed he meant she had needed a little walk. Max looked at the injured woman who was limping toward a chair, then he looked at the hysterically shrieking woman who was still flailing atop the corpse while John tried to disentangle her. “What manner of cataclysm occurred in our absence?”

“Benny’s mistress showed up. His wife attacked her.”

“Ah, and you rescued the young woman? I see.”

“I don’t think
she
sees,” I said, looking in her direction.

Benny’s mistress, now back on her own two feet, was pointing at me and shouting angrily. John, who was speaking to her in English, with a few Chinese phrases thrown in, was not having any success with trying to calm her down. When she saw me gazing her with a bemused frown, that was evidently the last straw. She took off one of her high-heeled shoes and, holding it overhead like a weapon, lunged for me.

Max stepped into her path and, with a quick gesture and a word in Latin, caused the shoe to fly out of her hand. Due to the woman’s uncoordinated movements and her hysteria, it almost looked natural, despite her startled reaction. I wasn’t sure anyone else saw it happen, anyhow, since Nelli had started barking ferociously the moment the woman’s attack began, and a dog that size is pretty distracting when she behaves that way.

John grabbed the woman, restraining her, while Max soothed Nelli.

A nice-looking, neatly dressed man who appeared to be in his thirties rushed to the coffin and started tidying up Benny’s appearance. He looked over his shoulder and said, “Get her out of here, John!”

I realized that must be John’s older brother.

“Right.” Speaking calmly to her, John retained a firm grip on the woman as he started dragging her away. “Let’s go find a taxi for you.”

As they started making their way through the crowd, the woman now sobbing again, I said to Max, “I’ve never been to a Chinese funeral before, but you have. Are they usually this eventful?”

Rather than answering, he said, “We were able to examine the corpse earlier. Nelli exhibited no peculiar reaction to it.”

Watching John’s brother fuss over Benny’s body, I asked, “How did you get Nelli close enough to the coffin to—”

“John has told his family and the Yees that Nelli is a therapy dog and that I brought her here to comfort those who have trouble expressing their grief. Since we are in America, this explanation was received without the incredulity it would produce in most societies.”

I looked at Nelli. She drooled a little.

“I gather she hasn’t noticed any demonic entities at this festive gathering?”

“No,” said Max. “Have you noticed anyone suspicious in your perusal of the visitors?”

“Well, there’s a gang member here. He knew Benny a long time, so he must have known how superstitious he was. But I think street gangs usually go in for something more direct than murder by cookie.”

“Hmm.”

John’s brother finished repairing the damage to Benny, then went to check on the Yee family.

Realizing I was a little mussed after my tumble across the room, I patted my hair and straightened my clothing. Then I turned to Max to continue our conversation. I was about to suggest Mrs. Yee as a likely murder suspect when a woman said in an American accent, “Oh, my God, that was the best
ever!
I have to thank you.”

I turned to find Susan Yee greeting me. A pretty woman with a short, chic haircut, she wore black slacks and a simple black silk blouse. She exchanged introductions with us, pointed out that Nelli was an impractical size for a therapy dog in Manhattan, and then said to me, “Jumping in the way you did, you saved my aunt from an aggravated assault charge.”

“By happy coincidence, I also saved the other woman from a crushed skull.”

“Oh, she deserved it. But I wouldn’t want to see my aunt go to prison over trash like that. And watching that disgusting woman go flying into the coffin that way, and then getting dragged out of here by John!” She laughed, then covered her mouth and looked around, apparently remembering she was at a wake. She leaned forward and said in a low but enthusiastic voice, “It was priceless!”

“She seemed to be, um, close to your uncle,” I said.

“Close? That’s one word for it, I suppose,” Susan said with a sneer. “But no one expected Aunt Grace to blow her top like that. We thought she didn’t know.”

“Didn’t know that her husband was, er, personally involved with that young woman?” Max asked.

“Well, Aunt Grace certainly had her suspicions that there was someone. Especially since it’s happened before—Uncle Benny keeping a woman, I mean.” Susan seemed to be as indiscreet as she was harsh. Maybe she noticed the surprise in our expressions, since she said, “Yeah, I know, I know. Don’t speak ill of the dead, and all that.
Especially
not if you’re Chinese.”

“Ah.” Max nodded. “Reverence for ancestors.”

“And for elders,” she added with a courteous nod to him. “But in all honesty, my uncle was kind of a pr . . .” She hesitated, looking at Max, then said to me, “Uh, not a very nice man.”

“That must have been hard on your aunt,” I said.

“Well,
I
sure couldn’t be married to a guy like that,” she replied. “But you know the older generation. Benny was a good provider, gave Grace three sons, and didn’t ever come home drunk or violent. So she thought he was a good husband.”

“Despite his infidelities?” I asked. If Susan was willing to gossip about her relatives, then I was certainly willing to encourage her.

“That upset Aunt Grace, of course. She got really furious with him a few times—well, you’ve seen her temper. But she’s also got an old-fashioned ‘men will be men’ attitude, and she never threatened to divorce him for playing around.”

I wondered how to ask tactfully, only a few feet away from Benny’s coffin, whether his wife had ever threatened to kill him for it.

Susan said with a puzzled frown, “Anyhow, I know she suspected lately that Uncle Benny was having another affair, but I was sure she didn’t know who it was. In fact, just this morning, she was saying to my mother that maybe the family should try to help Benny’s secretary find another job. Man, did I have trouble keeping a straight face when I heard her say
that.
”

“It didn’t occur to her that your uncle’s secretary might be his girlfriend?” I asked.

“It sure didn’t seem like it. But then, Uncle Benny had a lot of practice at this sort of thing, so I guess he covered his tracks well. I can remember Grace telling my mother about how stupid and vulgar Benny said his secretary was, the ignorance and mistakes he put up with, all so he could earn merit by keeping this uneducated immigrant girl from turning to prostitution because she’d never find another decent job. Stuff like that.”

I figured that if Mrs. Yee had really accepted that story from a serial adulterer, then she wasn’t the first woman who chose to believe whatever improbable fiction would help maintain stability in her marriage.

Or, as an alternate explanation, maybe she just wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier.

“So this morning, your aunt wanted to help the young woman?” Max mused. “Yet this evening, she attacked her when she showed up here.”

I said, “I guess all that weeping over the casket gave the game away, and Aunt Grace realized the woman was more than just a grateful employee.”

“Maybe,” Susan said with a shrug. “Or maybe someone blabbed. Half of Chinatown knew what Uncle Benny was up to. He kept Aunt Grace in the dark, but he wasn’t discreet.”

“Telling her about the affair now would so unkind, though,” I said. “She’s a new widow, after all.”

“Even so,” said Susan, “people gossip.”

“How true,” Max said gravely.

“Anyhow, Esther, you flinging that awful woman into the coffin like that—it was the best thing I’ve seen all year,” Susan said with a grin.

“Well, the year’s only a few days old,” I said modestly.

“Your year,” she said. “But ours is nearly over.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “That’s coming up soon, isn’t it?”

She nodded. “Two weeks.”

The traditional Chinese calendar is lunar, like the Jewish calendar, and none of the annual milestones coincide with the Gregorian solar calendar that’s used throughout the West. Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, usually occurs in September, but occasionally it falls in October. The Chinese New Year is sometimes celebrated in January, sometimes in February.

So as Susan had just noted, in the Chinese calendar, the old year was in its final days now.

The Lunar New Year is always a big event in Chinatown. It kicks off with the firecracker festival, in which impressively costumed lion dancers roam the streets, accompanied by musicians. They go from shop to shop throughout the neighborhood, dancing outside the doorways (and sometimes going inside) to demand “lucky money” in red envelopes for the New Year. They’re also fed big heads of cabbage, which they “chew” up and “spit” out at the gathered crowd, to share the good luck and abundance that the green vegetables represent. If you don’t mind getting cabbage and firecracker confetti in your hair, it’s a fun day out. The famous Dragon Parade, which is usually on television, wends its way through Chinatown a week later.

Given what a bust the recent New Year had been for me, starting off jobless and in jail, maybe I’d aim for the Chinese New Year as my chance to start over, shed bad habits, and get a certain man out of my system.

“So how did you two know Uncle Benny?” Susan asked us. “If you’re two of his dearest friends, then,
boy,
am I embarrassed. But, no, I guess I’d have seen you around before now, if you were close to him. Did you do business with him or something? I know he did business with a
lot
of people,” she added, looking around at the dense crowd.

Max and I exchanged a glance, realizing at the same moment that we hadn’t prepared an explanation for our presence at this wake. Susan had just handed us a good reason for being here, but I wondered what sort of business we should say we had done with Benny.

Then inspiration struck me. “I’m an actress. Benny told me he was backing a film and there might be a part in it for me.”

“Seriously?” Susan rolled her eyes. “Oh,
no.
”

People in New York often react that way to meeting actors, so I ignored it. “He said there’s a female Caucasian character, about my age, in the story. I guess the actress who originally had the role recently broke her leg?” I hoped I was right in thinking that had happened before Benny died, rather than after.