Death Money (3 page)

Jing deng
, Jack remembered,
destiny
.

The Harbor boat had blocked off the view from the Manhattan shore, shielding and securing the scene.

Jack checked his watch, made a mental note of the time: 8:49
A.M
. There was a trace of salt in the wind, from far out where the river met the bay and then the Atlantic. He imagined the taste of salty seawater flowing off the sides of the Harbor boat as the sergeant rowed them forward. He noticed traffic sounds in the distance, from the shores of both north Manhattan and the South Bronx, highway traffic en route to another brutal winter day. He’d get the names and commands of the other cops later.

The river freeze seeped into Jack’s jacket as they angled for the stern of the waiting boat.

“We got a male body,” Sergeant Cohen offered, working the oars. “Maybe
Asian
.“ The word brought a cold pang of realization to Jack, knowing for certain now why he’d gotten the call.

“Snagged on a sunken tree,” the sergeant continued. “After the Harbor Unit arrived, the branches shifted in the water and the body got lifted a little.”

Jack nodded but was silent, taking a few
shaolin
breaths through his nose as they maneuvered around the bigger boat’s stern. He patted for the plastic disposable camera he
had in his jacket pocket. There was nothing else floating, nothing remarkable in the water surrounding the scene.

As they came around, Jack saw that the dragging and twisting of the submerged tree trunk had raised the body almost even with the surface of the water, caught on dead branches against large, jagged chunks of river ice.

Closer now, and Jack saw that the body wore a black bubble jacket with a black hoodie underneath. Blue jeans. The puffy bubble jacket was saturated and resembled a life jacket. The distant traffic sounds faded to the more immediate setting where Jack could now hear his own heartbeat as he lifted the head and shoulders out of the water. Male. Asian. He was already blue in the face but looked freshly dead. Jack felt for a pulse, but the man was clearly cold—frozen stiff. As hard as the body was, Jack couldn’t make a guess on rigor mortis, but there were no obvious signs of trauma to the head or face and no blood, disjointed limbs, or other injuries as far as Jack could see.
A jumper?
The guy looked young but was probably in his midtwenties, Jack guessed.
He fit the profile. Looked like a student, maybe. But up here in the Harlem River? Deliveryman
was Jack’s next thought. Black hair cut short at the sides, longer on top. Chinatown style, but he didn’t look like a first-generation immigrant.

Jack took pictures and headshots with his free hand. Finally, he took wide shots of the scene before giving the Harbor Unit the nod to haul in the corpse.

T
HE BOAT COPS
used the long hooks, pulled and grappled the stiff body onto a black rubber bag they had spread out on the deck. The man’s dark sweatshirt and jacket were waterlogged, soggy, and bunched from the handling.

The blond skipper had a trunk full of crime scene supplies on board and offered plenty of plastic bags to protect evidence.

The deceased, whom Jack suspected might be Chinese—meaning he could fall anywhere from Toishanese to Taiwanese, Cantonese to Shanghainese, or any of a dozen strains of ethnic Chinese—wore dark blue jeans and black Timberland-type boots and looked as generic as anybody in a Gap jeans ad. His jacket had been pulled up by the grappling hook, but just inside the cuff of the left sleeve was a fancy-looking wristwatch. Jack recognized it right away:
a knockoff Rolex
. A Canal Street copy that the Viet-Chinese moved thousands of every year.

Other than the wristwatch, no jewelry.

In his pants pockets, there were forty-four cents, a set of keys on a ring, a red plastic comb. There was a pack of Marlboros in his jacket, along with some soggy scraps of paper. One of the scraps looked like a Chinese receipt for fruit or produce, and the other was a torn piece of a Chinese takeout menu with Chinese numbers and words scribbled across the edges.

The ink on the scraps had started to run.

Jack took tight pictures of everything and then bagged the items, but also considered what
wasn’t
there. No wallet, no identification of any kind. No money to speak of, no cell phone, no jewelry.
Maybe the knockoff Rolex had gotten pushed up inside the jacket sleeve and hadn’t been noticed
. Except for the wristwatch, Jack suspected it could have been a robbery. The medical examiner would have something more later, Jack knew.
A vic? Or a jumper?
The body hadn’t seemed busted up at all, like it’d be if he’d dropped from a great height.

A call came over the sergeant’s radio, and they all looked toward Manhattan, where they could see the flashing lights of an EMS unit near the park seawall. The Harbor boat fired up its twin engines as the mate attached the rowboat to its towline.

The river wind gusted up again, and then all Jack could hear was the churning wake and the slapping bounce of the metal rowboat against the waves as they ferried the dead man back toward shore.

Jack scanned the horizon and saw they were past where the Metro-North trains crossed the river and headed north, through the Bronx, Yonkers, and Westchester, to upstate New York.

He wondered where the body had entered the river, but he felt certain it was north, in the vicinity of one of the four bridges spanning the Harlem River.
Statistically, the most common drowning victims are males in their teens through their midtwenties
. Most deceased carried ID or had left a goodbye letter behind. Some had already been reported as missing persons.

Of the annual suicide drownings in New York City, the group didn’t amount to more than a dozen or so heartbroken, overwhelmed people on the edge, or mentally ill, over-pressured students and folks caught in scandalous behavior. Unless there was a related catastrophic accident like a plane crash, it wasn’t a huge file.

The area bridges over the river now had guardrails and tall fencing along their walkways to deflect potential stunt leapers and suicides, after a spate of them in the 1980s.

The skimming metal sound from the towed rowboat began to slow as they approached the shore.

Smooth and Easy

EMS
PLACED THE
black body bag on a gurney and took it south to the morgue as a squad car drove Jack and the sergeant six blocks west to the Thirty-Second Precinct. The grittiness of Harlem rolled past until they got to 135th Street.

The Three-Two station house was modern looking, like it had recently gotten a facelift.
Three-two
, Jack remembered—
som yee
—propitious numbers that sounded like the Cantonese for “smooth and easy.” At least he was out of the cold, Jack thought, and could deal with the evidence more comfortably.

Sergeant Cohen commandeered a table away from the duty desk where they could review the morning’s events. He also provided coffee from the squad’s break room.

“Thanks,” Jack offered. “I’m also going to need the missing persons reports from the last two days.”

“Just the last two?”

“He didn’t look like he’d been in the water too long,” Jack said. “Let’s just see if his profile or picture turns up on the sheet.” He knew it was a long shot anyway, and the ME’s findings would be hours away.

“Got it,” the sergeant agreed, sounding like he’d almost had his fill of overtime. “It may take a little while because of the club fire.” Jack thanked him as he went off to the computer room with his coffee.

Jack focused back on the evidence.

T
HE MUSHY PACK
of Marlboros wasn’t much of a clue. Missing were two cigarettes, and the pack didn’t have any drugs or paraphernalia inside. The pack also didn’t have a New York State tax stamp on it, which wasn’t very unusual;
untaxed cigarettes poured into New York from neighboring states and from upstate Indian tribes. Given the local hustles, every gang in Chinatown, and every bodega and dive bar, had their fingers in it.

The keys were a mystery: four keys, including one with a rounded, notched cylinder that looked like it belonged to a bike lock.
Was the deceased a takeout-joint deliveryman?
A second key was the type that came in little envelopes, used for safe-deposit boxes at banks. The third key looked normal, like a house key, but the last key looked like the kind you’d find in a pay locker at the bus terminal.

The keys made him think of Ah Por, the old Chinatown wise woman from whom he’d sought clues in previous cases. She could face-read photos and items and provide insights that, eerily, often led to resolutions. Ah Por wasn’t clairvoyant, Jack thought. She just had her own touch of yellow Taoist witchcraft.

Pa had gone to her after Ma had passed away, in search of lucky numbers and advice from the
Tong Sing
, the Chinese almanac.

Jack jangled the keys and knew he would bring her his crime scene photos as well. He unzipped the plastic baggies containing the soggy scraps of paper, saw Chinese words at the ends of what appeared to be telephone numbers.

When he punched the numbers through the precinct’s computer directory, most of the 888 prefixes belonged to Chinese restaurants and takeout joints in the South Bronx.

The telephone number prefix 888 in Cantonese,
bot bot bot
, sounded like the Chinese word for “luck,” times three. Now the use of the 888 prefix could be found on everything from vanity license plates to Asian escort services.

Eight-eight-eight was the most-played number in the Chinese lottery and numbers rackets.

The last two numbers caught his eye. They were both Chinatown numbers, one belonging to the Gee Fraternal and Benevolent Association, and the other to the Dao Foo Wong, or Tofu King.

Inside the wet baggie, the scribbled words continued to run, blend, as he copied them into his notepad.

He called the South Bronx numbers first, found none of them open for business yet. Many takeouts didn’t open until 11, figuring that 11
A.M
. until 11
P.M
. was enough of a dangerous 12-hour day among the
gwai
—the devils, the ghosts.

His call to the Gee Association went to a Cantonese voice message, so he hung up. He’d get a better idea of what connection there was if he visited in person.

He called the Tofu King and asked for Billy Bow. He recognized the voice of the Toishanese counter lady. “
Bee-lee m’mo koy
,” she barked, telling him Billy wasn’t there. When he called Billy’s cell phone, it went to voice mail: “I’m busy. Leave a message or hang the fuck up.” Jack hung up.

He turned back to the evidence on the table. The second wet baggie held another paper scrap with lines across it that made it look like part of a receipt. Jack recognized the Chinese words for “apples,”
ping gwo
; “oranges,”
chaang gwo
; and “grapes,”
poy gee
. “Cherries” was written in English. He wondered about the Chinese fruit and veggie industry. Billy could be of some help with that.

With almost two hours before the Bronx Chinese takeouts opened, he decided to head downtown to Chinatown, where he could get his film processed while he checked out
the Gee Association. He’d try Billy Bow at the Tofu King and, with any luck, catch Ah Por at the free morning meal at the Senior Citizens’ Center.

Sergeant Cohen made entries into his log, documenting his overtime as he awaited the missing-persons information. Jack felt grateful for the sergeant’s help and knew he’d be back to thank him.
Never burn your bridges
, Pa had taught him.

On the way out of the station house, Jack made another call to Billy.

Jouh Chaan
Breakfast

B
ILLY HAD SWITCHED
his cell phone to vibrate, like the way he was feeling inside his balls. He refused to be disturbed while he got his hour’s worth of flesh from one of the newly arrived whores at Angelina Chao’s cathouse on Chrystie Street.

He was enjoying his
jouh chaan
, a breakfast blow job from a big-eyed Thai bar girl just in from Bangkok. He’d covered the earlybird rush at the Tofu King and was now an early bird himself at Angelina’s.

Billy preferred to get his pussy rush early, when the flesh was fresh, like just after a shower—clean, pristine—before the Chinatown
hom sup lo
s, the old horndogs, came around and slopped things up.

On the big bed in Angelina’s smaller room, Billy guided the girl onto her back and spread her legs wide. He took a breath and saw himself, all hard and slick and poised to enter her.

He heard his cell vibrating against the chair back where he’d draped his pants.

He ignored it.

Fuck it
, he thought, focusing on the fleshy folds that beckoned him.

“God”—he groaned as she slipped him inside her—“damn …” In his ecstasy, it was easy to not think about who was calling him.

Short Circuit

J
ACK CAUGHT A
screeching southbound 4 train back to Chinatown.

He’d always taken his disposable plastic cameras to Ah Fook’s for processing because he knew Ah Fook had worked as an undertaker in his native Toishan Province, and his family was used to viewing dead bodies. Ah Fook Jr. wouldn’t freak out over the usual gruesome or bloody crime scene images that would be printed out from Jack’s camera.

He arrived at Ah Fook’s 30-Minute Photo just as Ah Fook Jr. was raising the frozen metal roll gate. Jack gave him the plastic camera, promising him
yum ga fear
, coffee, on the return pickup. Junior knew the deal and would process Jack’s film first thing.

He continued south on Mott, hoping to check out the Gee Association before dropping by the Tofu King, where he figured Billy would turn up.

At 45 Mott, the Gee Association was nestled in a small building that it owned, with a narrow balcony above a gift shop on the street, one of the few buildings left in Chinatown that still featured a balcony view.