Changes (3 page)

I nodded and went to the cabinet for my supplies.

This was Tracy’s first visit.  Well, as a patient, anyway.  I’d seen her once before, when she came through the neighborhood with a friend.  There are a few semi-touristy locations down the block from me: a rundown chop suey shack, a video rental store trying to cash in on the success of Jackie Chan and Jet Li, and HK Trading, a small grocery that carried incense, hell banknotes, and the sort of silly, mass-produced crap that westerners think of when they think of "the Orientals" - soapstone Buddhas, tiny gongs, that sort of thing. 

Tracy and her friend  had been amazed to find that I wasn’t selling any lucky bamboo kits, but they were more amazed to see that I was not Asian.  I remembered her smile, her funky hair and clothes, and the way she snatched one of my business cards with her black nail-polished fingertips.  I couldn’t tell you a single thing about her friend. 

When Tracy called to make an appointment, she made it very clear that she hated doctors, and that she really wasn’t too keen on needles either, but I was used to that.  Needles, I’ve heard, lie somewhere just below public speaking and death on the list of most feared things. 

 When I returned to her side, I said, "I promise you this won’t be nearly as bad as you think it’ll be… nothing ever is."

She bit her lower lip and nodded.  I tried not to notice the lip-biting, because Tracy was a very attractive girl… outstanding facial structure, big, dark eyes, full lips, a figure that a pinup model would kill for, long,
long
legs.  Really cute feet.  And I’m not into feet at all.  In fact, I haven’t paid any attention whatsoever to any part of a woman in a long time.  

I haven’t wanted to. 

A lot of that is because of Miranda, I know, but the rest of it is that I’m mostly used to dealing with elderly people.  They love to inform me of their bowel issues.  That is no fun.  But being paid to attend to this young lady’s legs?  Hell, I would do that for free.

I opened an amber jar, poured its smelly contents into a basin, and soaked some thin gauze strips in the liquid. 

"What’s that stuff?" she said, wrinkling her nose. 

"It’s an herbal mixture that’s good for joint pains.  I’m going to send some home with you and I want you to use it, even if it does smell like cat pee, alright?"

She laughed and nodded.

"On the bright side," I said, "unlike some of the prescription stuff you could get, this stuff will not cause weight gain, projectile vomiting, or persistent rectal seepage."

She giggled again.  I felt this absurd swelling in my chest, this ridiculous, almost overwhelming giddiness because
I
made her laugh. 

It was probably heatstroke.

I took a strip of gauze, shook out the excess fluid, and laid it on her injured knee.  I crisscrossed several more wet strips around the joint before wrapping her leg in a fresh, dry bandage. 

"How’s that?"  I asked.  "Not too tight?"

She shook her head and said, "It feels neat… and all
cold
inside."

I nodded and took a packet of needles from the glass jar at my side.

"Shit," she said with a frown, "I was hoping you’d forgotten that part."

I unwrapped the packet and tossed the paper in the trash.  With my left hand, I measured out the
cun
distance, from her kneecap, toward the outside of her leg.  I held the needle lightly in my right hand and looked up at Tracy; her eyes were squeezed tightly shut and she was biting her damned lip again.

I situated the tip of the needle directly over the spot, and held my left hand up a few inches from her face.  Simultaneously, I snapped the fingers of my left hand as a diversion and lightly tapped the needle home.

"You okay?" I asked.

Without opening her eyes, Tracy said, "Yeah.  Just tell me before you do it okay, because…"

"First one’s in, kiddo."

She opened her eyes and looked.  "Oh… Oh, wow."

"Cool, huh?"  I said.

She watched as I inserted the other needles.  Once she’d convinced herself that it really didn’t hurt, she allowed herself to relax. As I worked, she said, "So… do I call you doctor, or mister, or, like, master, or what?"

"You can call me Randall." I said, twirling the first needle a little.

"Okay, but what’s your title?" she said.

"Well, I'm a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine, but that doesn’t mean much here in the good ole U.S."

She cocked her head sympathetically and said, "I guess the powers that be want that whole medical school thing… seven years of schooling or whatever it is."

"Maybe," I said, "but, I spent ten years with my teacher before I was ever allowed to even sit in with a patient."

"Jeez," she said, "did you start when you were a little kid?"

I grinned and said, "I’m older than I look."

She flashed a quizzical look and grinned back.

When we’d finished up, there was a part of me - the bad part - that was thinking about telling her that part of her treatment involved taking her out to dinner, but luckily I was spared that moment of impropriety by the arrival of my next client.

Mrs. Lhung.

A sixty-eight year old Cambodian woman.

With bowel issues.

Christ.

6

That evening, after the rest of my appointments, I settled in to dinner.  My dining room consisted of a folding card table and chair, but I made the most of the evening – microwaveable Ramen noodles and Miller Genuine Draft. 

I like to keep it classy.

As I ate, I thought about Mei Ling.  I wondered why anyone would’ve wanted to kill her.  I wondered how a girl like that got into the life to begin with.  How had life failed her?  No answers sprang to mind, so I thought about Tracy, and her exquisite legs, instead.  That carried me through the rest of dinner.  I finished my beer, rushed through a little Tai Chi, and went to bed.

I only woke up a few times during the night.

Only twice did I scream.

Thank heaven for small favors.

In the morning, I got up, threw some cold water on my face, and did some stretching.  Once I was loose, I practiced the form - slow to make up for the hurried practice from the previous evening.  I focused on releasing the tension from all of my muscles.  It was a struggle not to fight against gravity, to  let go and allow the movements to happen.  I don’t know if it worked, but it kept my head quiet, and sometimes that was good enough.  I finished up, showered, and was getting ready to go downstairs to the shop when the phone rang. 

It was Knox.  He asked if we could meet in the park across the street.  I said sure.  I didn’t have much else to do - only two appointments, later in the day, and neither of them were with attractive young women, so I could do with a little diversion.

I walked down to HK Trading, picked up breakfast, and strolled over to the park.  Knox was messing up his nice suit sitting on a park bench.  As I approached, he said, "Didn’t know what you’d want, but I brought you some Dim Sum or whatever, just in case."

"Yeah?  I brought some of your native cuisine, too," I said, tossing him the box of donuts I’d bought.

"Nice." he said.  "Did you
think
about bringing coffee?"

I opened the paper sack I was carrying, took out a Styrofoam cup, and handed it to him.

"Well, damn.  I feel special."

"You should," I said.

He opened the box and took a glazed donut as I sat down.

"So what’s up?" I said.  I popped a ground pork dumpling into my mouth.  It was chewy, undercooked, and packed with enough MSG to make my brain bleed.  He must’ve picked them up from the chop suey shack.

Knox took a bite of his doughnut, dabbed at the corner of his mouth daintily with a napkin, and said, "Childerson checked out the girl…"

He took a fifty-dollar bill from his inside coat pocket and handed it to me.

"He also said the girl
was
pregnant.  Oh, and a special message just for you… he said, ‘Go fuck yourself.’"

I pocketed the money, blew on my coffee to cool it, and said, "Classy."

Knox nodded and said, "So, you want to tell me what that shit was that you and the madam were arguing about yesterday?"

"What?  Oh, right.  It was nothing."

"Bullshit.  She kept repeating that shit to our boys all night… ‘
Deem mock, Deem mock.’
"

I took a jelly donut from the box and said, "
Dim Mak.
"

"Whatever.  What’s it mean?"

I shrugged and said, "It’s hocus pocus, nothing but an old Chinese superstition.  ‘The Death Touch’… supposed to be some secret deadly art.  Y’know, where you touch certain energy points and cause a person to die hours later… they say that’s what got Bruce Lee… Madame Chong said that’s what killed Mei Ling.  I already showed you how she died, though.  So it’s crap."

Knox seemed to think about that as he popped the rest of his donut in his mouth.  He dabbed his mouth again, tore open the plastic lid of his coffee, and took a sip.

"Why?" I asked.

"Got the call this morning.  Chong’s dead.  Heart attack, we think."

"…Shit."

"Yeah.  And it looks like the case dies with her."

"What?  Why?"

"These massage joints… they get girls fresh off the friggin’ boat in California.  Ninety percent of ‘em are illegals.  They stick ‘em in a parlor and rotate ‘em out to another place whenever a new group arrives.  Keeps things moving, keeps the girls from getting any kind of criminal record in any one spot, and keeps things more or less anonymous."

"A kind of slavery, then."

"Basically."

"And with Chong dead, there’s no way to find out who Mei Ling was."

"Pretty much.  The girl’s a ghost.  No records of her anywhere.  Frankly, no one in the department is going to lose a minute‘s sleep over a couple of dead Chinese hookers."

After our cheery breakfast, Knox went his way and I went mine.  Before he left, he slipped me a copy of Mei Ling’s file, in case I could come up with anything else, and made certain I knew just how much trouble I’d be in if I was caught with confidential evidence files.

Touched by this show of camaraderie, I went home, tossed the file on my desk, and got ready for work.

Mrs. Lim had pain from an inflamed gallbladder, and Mr. Yeung was quitting smoking.  All told, it was about two hours out of my day.  The rest of the time I spent thinking about Mei Ling.  Something about all of this stunk like the back alley behind HK Trading, and that was pretty goddamned stinky. 

That girl was too pretty, too damned
clean
, to be giving twenty dollar hand jobs out of some chop-socky shit-hole on the east side.  Besides, she would’ve started showing before long and that would’ve been the end of her brilliant career. 

The whole ceremonial aspect of the scene bothered me too.  Did it mean that Mei Ling was a Taoist, or was the killer?  Or both?  I’d known a lot of Taoists, back in Hong Kong, and they were the most peaceful people I’ve ever known.  Did this guy really hate her that much, or was the room made up that way for someone else’s benefit.  Was she made into some sort of an example?

Then there was Chong. 

I checked my files.  Turns out, she’d been in to see me a total of eight times in six months.  The last time was three weeks ago.  Minor arthritic pain in the hands, hips, and feet.  In Chinese medicine, we take a pulse diagnosis to gauge the strength of each organ.  I’d noted the pulse diagnosis for each visit, and there was no mention of any weakness or imbalance in the heart.  In fact, there didn’t seem to be much of anything wrong with her besides the arthritis.  Must’ve been all that clean living.

I called the station and managed to catch Knox.  I asked him for a double or nothing shot with Childerson.  He told me to meet him in twenty minutes.

The morgue was as upbeat and cheerful as it was the last time I’d visited.  Childerson was just as fat.  Madame Chong’s body occupied the steel table this time around.  She’d seen better days.  Knox distracted Childerson with sports talk while I gave the body a quick once-over.  I noticed a dullness to some of the skin on her face.  I touched her lips briefly and rolled my fingertips together.

"Any preliminary findings?" I asked.

Childerson was rambling about the size of some cheerleader’s tits.

I repeated myself.

"Wha…?" he said.  "Nah.  Nothing, yet."

"There’s that sterling work ethic I know and love." I said.

The man adjusted his straining belt against a tidal bulk of gut flesh and crossed his arms.  Brownish pit stains peeked out from underneath his arm fat.

"I suppose you’re going to throw out some bullshit theory about ninjas and
chi
and shit like that, right?"

"Ninja are Japanese." I said.

"Whatever.  You gonna show me which aura points the killer whacked to magically cause an elderly woman to have a massive coronary?"

"Sure." I said.  "And it’s really comes down to just one point."

"Oh, really."

"Yep, this one."  I said, raising the woman’s arm and pointing to the puckered hole situated neatly between folds of skin in the crook of her elbow.

The M.E.’s face fell.  He immediately started sweating.  It wasn’t pretty.

"Maybe it’s my mystical new age bullshit talking," I said, "but that looks an awful lot like an injection site to me.  What do you think?"

He nodded.  Droplets of sweat hit the floor with loud little splats. 

Even his sweat was fat.  Whoa.

"Now, I’ll leave the details to you and your medical expertise," I said, "but you and I both know that just about anything could have been shot into this woman’s veins, right?"

He nodded again.  The tile floor received another flash flood.

"Awesome.  You might want to try X-raying her before you slice her open, alright?  And if you don’t have the cash on you right now, I understand.  You can always have Knox drop it off later."

Childerson gathered his senses; it only took him a second, which was a surprise.  With an arrogant certainty he said, "You still don’t know she was murdered… an injection site by itself means nothing."