This Is a Bust (4 page)

Willie twirled a pen in his left hand and squeezed his right
hand until there were red and white stripes across his fingers. I looked around for a chair on my side of the desk, but there wasn't one.

“Mr. Gee,” I said slowly, “They have every right to protest
here. They have a permit. They don't have to eat if they don't want to. There's nothing illegal going on. . .”

“They
are liars! They are liars and they're going to hell!
They can eat misery! They can eat their lies!”

“Mr. G
ee, if you have a problem with their signs, you can sue
them in court for slander. Get your lawyer and file a claim. I can't do anything here.”

“You're a policeman! You're Chinese, too! Whose side are
you on? How can you support the law when you let those goddamn liars sit out there in the street? You know how bad this looks for the Chinese people?”

I scratched my thigh. Don't let the Chinese people look bad
is beat into the head of every young Chinese kid. But the truth was that we made ourselves look bad, and look worse whenever we tried to make ourselves look better.

“We're a
ll Chinese here,” said Willie, even though we 
were
the only two in his office. He lowered his voice. “We could arrange something mutually beneficial.”

I took the elevator down and sauntered out of Jade Palace.
King Kong took two steps after me and then withdrew and stood still as the front door closed in his face. I continued up Bowery and took a quick glance back at the strikers, trying not to look sympathetic. A little less food never hurt anybody.

—

On Tuesday I was on a 1600 to 0000. Iced coffee and hot-
dog pastries are as good in the afternoon as they are in 
the morning. Maybe a little less fresh. Lonnie was at the counter trying to open the wax-paper bag with one hand, but she ended up ripping it.

“Lonnie, goddammit, you keep ripping bags! You're so
clumsy!” growled Dori as she snatched the useless bag and tossed it somewhere under the counter. “What a waste!”

“That bag wouldn't open, I think it was defective,” said
Lonnie, who looked away from Dori.

“It's defective now!” said Dori. “What a disgrace you are. I
think we need to have a training program here. Now watch me, little girl!”

Dori whipped her arm and snapped a new bag into a
crinkled pyramid. “See? Easy!” She extended the opened bag to Lonnie, who ignored it and grabbed her own.

Lonnie shook the next bag open and looked like she was
going to cry. Dori called out to the person behind me.

“What do you want? What!” Dori yelled. Her face couldn't
have been more defiant if she were holding a battle flag in one hand and a grenade in the other.

“See what she does to me?” Lonnie asked in a voice ready
to shatter. “Every time, every day, it's like this.” She stuffed two hot-dog pastries for me into the bag.

“Lonnie, you don't need this,” I told her. “You can get a job
anywhere else.” She creased the bag shut, put it on the counter, and turned around to make my iced coffee.

Here
was the girl
for the lead role
for the Hong Kong remake of “Cinderella.”
The hag for the wicked stepmother was here as well.

Dori was at the other end of the counter, reaching into a
rack of sponge cakes for her customer.

“Job doing what?” Lonnie asked, with her back to me. “Doing
hair, doing nails? Another bakery? There's always
going to be bitter, old women who hate everyone younger than them. Stupid, old, ugly women who don't know how to do anything else. Don't even know how to speak English. I'm not going to end up here the rest of my life.”

Then to Dori she said, “I'm graduating college in a year!”
Some of my coffee spilled over onto the counter when she
slammed it down.

“Hey college girl, wipe off that counter!” yelled Dori. “I can't
be responsible for all of your screw-ups!”

On my way out, I sa
w a few kids hanging out on the tables
near the door. A few of them were smoking, and one boy with spiky hair lifted his head up and nodded at me with a leer on his face. Two other boys twisted their heads to each other and laughed. One girl turned and spat on the floor.

I thought to myself, These kids are a waste.

—

I came into the Five and saw the thin man Yip sitting in a chair by Detective 1st Grade Thomas “English” Sanchez's empty desk. A cane lay flat on the floor between Yip's feet. His wife had died only two days ago, and I'd never expected to see him again. I pumped two Tic Tacs into my mouth before going up to him.

“Yip, what are you doing here?” I asked.

“The police told me to come. I couldn't understand what
they were saying. I'm not like you, my head was born in Canton.”

“I'm going to find out what's going on.” I checked with the
desk, but all he knew was that English had wanted to talk to Yip. I left to look for English and told Yip to stay put.

English was a light-skinned Latino who looked Italian and
loved that he did. He was about my height, with a meaty and heavily pockmarked face. Parts of him were bulky but he wasn't fat overall.

He'd
gotten his name because one day, when they were
looking for a Spanish speaker to talk to a hysterical man on the phone, someone had asked English if he were a native speaker and he'd said he was. But when he'd gotten on the phone, his face had slowly turned red.

“No habla Español,” he'd said awkwardly into the phone.

After that, someone had said, “I thought you were a
native speaker!”

“Of English! English!” Sanchez had said.

I ran into English outside the head.

“Chow,” said English. His hands were wet and he wiped
them across his stomach. “I was looking for you.”

“English. What's going on with the guy you brought in?”

“Can you translate for now? The community-board person
never showed up. The medical examiner ran a random blood test on his wife, uh, Wah, and found what could be poison. It's a suspicious death, and now they can't release the body for the funeral.” We went back to English's desk.

I looked at Yip. He was looking at me, expecting me to tell
him what was going on. His fingers worked at his knees.

Did Yip kill his wife? Motivation? There was no way. I
thought about it, and then I felt sorry for myself. Here I was trying to think like a detective. I should have been on the detective track by now. I wouldn't have needed a translator.

English had started talking to me again so I snapped back to the situation at hand.

“Chow, can you tell him?” English said. He faced Yip and
said, “Your wife Wah died from poisoning.”

I turned to Yip and began with, “I'm sorry to tell you,
something terrible has happened.”

“Was Wah working?” asked English.

I translated back for Yip: “She worked as a waitress at Jade
Palace even though she had arthritis. She pushed a cart of dim sum around six hours in the morning every day. She liked to play mahjong sometimes. Her head was always itchy, but she never wanted to get a new wig.”

“Do you work?” asked English.

“I work as a dishwasher at night at a small restaurant so
sometimes we'd go for a few days without seeing each other awake. I made her breakfast before she woke up because her arthritis was so bad in the morning.”

“What did she do at night when you were gone?”
English
asked.

“She liked to take a nap or read some books.”

“Can you give me a list of her friends?”

“Her friends were all the people she worked with. Go
down to the restaurant, talk to them. She liked her friends' children. She was sad she never had any.”

“Was she feeling depressed about it?”

“She wasn't happy.”

“Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

Yip's eyes grew unfocused and watery.

“I'm also sad she never had children. We were saving and
saving, and we grew old. Turns out all that money was for nothing. Why did we come here?”

When it was time for Yip to go, he said he was fine walking
by himself even though I offered him a ride.

“I don't have to hurry anywhere,” Yip said.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I still have my job, my health, and my apartment,” he
replied.
I picked up his cane.

“Did
you hurt your leg? You didn't have a cane the first time
I saw you.”

“It's
nothing, nothing. I'm old, Officer Chow. Things like this
happen.”

“You have to be careful,” I said.

Yip got up and took his cane. “Thank you, Officer Chow.
Don't worry about me.” He sighed and tapped his cane. “Just let me bury my wife.” I gave him my home number.

—

“Who would want to kill an old woman with no money who lived in a busted-up tenement?” I asked English.

“Why would anyone want to kill someone else?” he said,
rubbing his nose. “You been where I been, you see kids killing parents, parents killing kids, people killing parents and kids. So what the hell. Anyway, thanks for handling that, I'll take it from here.”

“You need me to go to the restaurant with you?”

“Nah, I'm going to call up that community-board translator
and chew his ass out and get him to go with me. Thanks again, Chow.”

“Anything else I can do?”

“I've got nothing for you. Thanks.”

“Sure, detective.”

There's
no formal process to get on the detective track.
You could do a decade on a footpost and never get on it.
Basically someone higher up had to hand you investigative
assignments before you could be on your way to a 
gold shield.

I s
huffled back up the stairs to my desk, took a pen out of my
vest pocket, and chucked it into the corner. Then I tore open my brown bag and bit off half a hot-dog pastry.

After a while, I threw out the second hot-dog pastry. On my
way back, I got my pen back off the floor and chewed on it.

I w
asn't getting anywhere thinking about the possible homicide or my career, so I put them both out of my mind.

I ran a quick check on my pad and cuffs.

It turned out to be a slow night. I handed out two parkers
and one mover. I watched a plastic frog swimming in circles in a tub of water at a vendor's stall. I wondered how long those batteries lasted.

—

To get to my apartment, you have to go east on East Broadway until you don't see any other Chinese people.
It's about an eight-minute walk from Bowery. I live in a slouching
walkup just past the southeast corner of Seward Park. At the turn of the century, it had been an all-Jewish neighborhood, but now a lot of Spanish live there. I took the apartment because we weren't allowed to live within the boundary of the precinct we served, but it was still close to the job. The building was a lot nicer than anything in Chinatown, anyway. The subway was right there, too.

My
mail was cooking on the radiator when I got back 
home. The mailman was so lazy that instead of sorting out letters by mailbox, he'd slap the entire building's mail on the lobby radiator.

I guess
you couldn't really blame him. About 20 beat-up, wall-mounted mailboxes at varying heights were crookedly nailed into the wall, their dented lids jutting out like shrapnel. You'd cut yourself sooner or later trying to fill all of them.

Most of the stuff was junk mail
. Sometimes I would get something
good, though. I lived for that. I liked getting
sample-sized toothpaste or cereal. Once there had been a package of tapes from the Columbia Record Club for someone in another building. The guy's name was Robert Chew, so I figured I had dibs on it. That was like the best day of my life.

I climbed four flights of shabby stairs that only fit one
person going up or down at a time. I put a key into the battered lock to #5A, and I was home.

My apartment was a sizeable one-bedroom that got too hot
in the summer and even hotter in the winter. I had to leave one of the windows partially open all the time. I was lucky not to have a window that opened up to a shaft. Instead, I got to see East Broadway in all its squalor by daylight and by street lamp.

As soon as I had my shoes off, I pulled a can of Sapporo
beer from the fridge and popped it. Japanese beer was pretty cheap in Chinatown because it was shipped in from a Chinatown in Japan. The busiest trading routes in the world were navigated with Chinese hands.

A Rangers replay game was on, and the blueshirts were
down two goals in the last period. They skated like tin men in need of an oilcan. The goalie, John Davidson, was caught out of position, and the goal light lit up. Now they were down three goals. They were strong contenders this year — not for the Cup, but for the basement of the division.