Death Money (2 page)

“So one day I’m ironing, right? Just the touch-up stuff. And she comes over to
supervise
, starts telling me I’m doing it
wrong
. ‘Collar first,’ she says. ‘Then the cuffs, and sleeves,’ blah, blah, right?
This
advice from the mother who never lifted an iron for her girls.
Supervising
me. ‘And you have to put a towel under the buttons,’ she says. ‘Yeah?’ I said, ‘Who says?’ ‘
Martha Stewart
,’ she says. She saw it on cable. ‘
Fuck
Martha Stewart,’ I said. ‘This is how
I
been doing it, not
you
. Between the
yum cha
with the ladies, and the
da mah jerk
, I don’t see you ironing
shit
.’ ”

“What did she say to that?” Jack ventured.

“Called me an ignorant Chinatown lowlife.”

“No shit.” Jack laughed.

“Not for nothing, Jacky,” Billy began, his jaw clenched, “our people got history doing laundry in America. So telling a Chinaman how to iron a shirt is like telling a nigger how to eat a watermelon.”

Jack shook his head and snickered in spite of himself.

A timer went off somewhere, and Billy turned to check the hot slats of tofu. Jack glanced at the wall clock and saw his chance to exit. Still, he felt bad for Billy, the bitter divorcé who found solace in loose women and the occasional whore at Chao’s.

“Gotta roll,” Jack said.

“Breeze, homeboy.” Billy grinned, looking up from the hot mist. “And remember.
She’s baggage
.”

AJA

T
HE FREEZING WIND
seemed even more brutal as Jack stepped out of the steamy tofu shop, and he went east on Canal at a brisk pace, passing the firehouse and the Buddhist temple, going through the old junkie parks that led into
Loisaida
, the Lower East Side. He clenched his jaw against the cold, and soon the renovated bodega that had become Alex’s office came into view.

The sign over the storefront read
ASIAN AMERICAN JUSTICE ADVOCACY
and a banner with the letters
AJA
fluttered in the wind. Jack could see Alex through the front window, in her back office. She wasn’t alone.

Jack went in quietly and placed the bag of desserts on the receptionist’s desk. He recognized the man standing in Alex’s office as Assistant District Attorney Bang Sing, a prosecutor he’d worked with on a previous Chinatown case. Sing looked pissed off, and Jack overheard him say, “Look, I only got assigned this case because I’m Chinese. And you know it. They want to put a yellow face on it,” he groused. “What are you gonna do? So if there
is
a tape, I need to see it. And if I have to, I’ll drop the damn case. It’s a no-win situation for me.”

Alex noticed Jack’s quiet arrival with a nod, but kept her game face on.

Jack knew what ADA Sing was referring to. The city had resurrected an obscure ban on fireworks for future traditional Chinatown celebrations, like the Chinese New Year. Many residents and activists were outraged, but one Chinese-American Iraq War veteran had protested the ban by lighting up a strand of tiny ladyfinger firecrackers on the
steps of City Hall. He got arrested and was charged with trespassing, disorderly conduct, inciting to riot, and resisting arrest. Then the sudden appearance of a home videotape of the incident put the lie to the NYPD charges of inciting riot and resisting arrest. The tape cast doubt on disorderly conduct and trespassing as well, and now ADA Bang Sing was going to have to eat one for the blue team. Jack knew it would be a hard pill to swallow for the driven Chinese ADA, and he sure wouldn’t be happy with Alex for taking the Chinese veteran’s side
pro bono
, along with the local American Legion Post. The incident had aroused a sense of pride in Jack, but as a cop he felt tainted by police misconduct.

ADA Sing left Alex’s office in a huff and barely nodded to Jack as he passed, buttoning up his black trench coat on the way out.

Jack took the desserts off the receptionist’s desk and went into Alex’s office. He could tell she was stressed even as she welcomed him with a small smile, knowing what was in the Tofu King bag.

“What’s up, lady?” Jack said as he placed the treats on her desk.

“Same old crap,” Alex answered sweetly. “You know,
police
misconduct, false allegations, trumped-up charges. The usual NYPD game.”

Jack took a breath and teased, “There’s always three sides to every story.”

“Don’t even try
Rashomon
on me,” Alex warned. “We have a videotape of what
really
happened at City Hall, made by a friend of the ‘perpetrator.’ And it’s going to exonerate my client, who, by the way, is a war veteran. A hero, mind you.”

Jack shook his head, though he agreed with her.

“This one’s going to be a slam dunk,” Alex said matter-of-factly.

Jack took her hand in his, felt the warm softness there. “Cold,” she said. “You came a long way. How’s
your
morning going?”

“Better, now that I’m here.” She rubbed his hand in hers, but they separated awkwardly as the receptionist entered the storefront.

“Thanks for the sweet stuff,” Alex said quietly.

“Sure,” Jack answered as the receptionist booted up her desktop computer. “Call you later.” He exited her office and left the storefront without conversing with the receptionist.
Catch an M15 north
, he was thinking, heading for the Ninth Precinct.

Floating

T
HEY CAME TO
the railing that separates parkland from the seawall embankment, looking out over the Harlem River.

“Jeez, it’s fuckin’ freezing,” cursed Patrolman Mulligan.

It was an hour before the end of the shift in Manhattan North, and it wasn’t the first time that the Thirty-Second Precinct, the
Three-Two
, had to fish a floater out of the Harlem River.

“Let’s get in the rowboat,” the taller man, Sergeant Cohen, said. “It’s only about fifty yards out.”

At its narrowest point, the Harlem River was still almost a quarter-mile wide, about four city blocks across, and as the
two cops squinted against the river wind, they could see a bulky shape entangled in tree branches near the middle of the river. The limbs were snagged up against some chunky ice floes.

“Time for a close-up,” the sergeant said.

Sergeant Cohen was in his forties, and his gray, ball-bearing pupils focused on the aluminum Columbia University rowboat at the water’s edge. The land part was operated by the Parks Department.

“Let’s go, kid,” the sergeant said to the patrolman. “The river’s half frozen anyway.”

PO Mulligan, twenty years younger, held the rowboat steady as Sergeant Cohen stepped in and squatted. Mulligan shoved off, jumping in as the rowboat skimmed in the direction of the submerged tree stump.

Mulligan pulled up his blue NYPD-monogrammed turtleneck. “Freezing,” he repeated, breathing evenly as he set the oars.

They could hear the distant crackle of radio broadcasts as he started rowing through the surface ice. The patrolman pulled on the oars, figuring the distance at a couple dozen strokes.

The radio sounds got louder, until out of the gray wash came the Harbor Unit, a twin-engine Detroit fast-boat, approaching from the Bronx side of the Third Avenue Bridge. Sergeant Cohen could make out two additional uniformed officers on board and figured it quickly:
simultaneous calls and dispatch
. Multiple calls must have come through 911 emergency, from both the South Bronx and Manhattan North precincts.
Reports of a body snagged on a tree in the river
.

The Harbor Unit had been docked on the South Bronx waterfront near Hunts Point and had taken aboard the cops from the Forty-Fourth Precinct when the dispatch went out. From the fast-boat they could see the two cops in the rowboat, out from the Manhattan side, rowing closer to the bulky shape now, which was looking more like a body as they approached. The NYPD boat cut its engines, maneuvering now as its arrival sent ripples though the chunks of ice.

Sergeant Cohen could see clearly as they came within ten feet: it
was
a body, with black hair, head and torso just under the surface of the water, its right arm raised, caught in the branches of the tree.
Like he was a student, raising his arm in a classroom
. The drag of the stump, and the ice floes that had drifted around it, had kept everything in place.

The Harbor Unit boat came about and bumped up against the ice, nudging the scene more toward the Manhattan side.

Overtime
, thought Sergeant Cohen. Finally he was close enough to lift the head out of the water with his baton.
Male, Asian
, he thought.
Twenty-something, maybe thirty years old
. PO Mulligan worked the oars against the ice.
A jumper? Or something else?
There was no blood that he could see. “How’d he wind up in the river?” Cohen wondered aloud.

“Hey!” one of the blues on the Harbor boat deck yelled. “Whaddya think? Someone from
your
side? You had jumpers before …” He looked vaguely Hispanic and also wore the stripes of a sergeant.

Sergeant Cohen barked back, “Who knows? Could have been
your
side, too. Like the Bruckner, or Hunts Point. Plenty of vics from over there.”

The Harbor Unit skipper, a Nordic face, took a call over the boat radio.

There was a pause between the different cops, when all they could hear was the lapping of the currents against the ice and the whistle of the wind across the mouth of the bay. The Macombs Dam Bridge towered in the distance.

The second cop on the harbor boat, a white patrolman from the Four-Four Bronx Precinct, said, “Looks like a dead Chink to me.” His Latino sergeant agreed: “
El chino
.”

PO Mulligan countered, “Could be a Jap. Or Korean.” His Manhattan sense of diversity.

“They’re all the same,” the boat-deck patrolman said, shrugging.

“Asian,” Sergeant Cohen settled on.

“
Whatever
,” the Latino sarge said. “You want the case or not? All our dicks are working the club fire, anyway.”

All the cops had heard about it, an enraged partygoer had returned to the Happy World Social Club with a gun and a can of gasoline, and now thirteen Central American immigrants lay dead in the smoldering ruins.

“And besides,” the sarge continued from the deck, “the scene’s closer to
your
side of the river now.”

“Yeah, Manhattan.” The Bronx patrolman grinned. “There’s more Chinks in Manhattan anyways.”

“Come back, Harbor Two,” the boat radio crackled again.

“Negative, we don’t need scuba, copy?” the blond skipper answered. More static from the radio. “We’ve got an Asian in the water,” the skipper continued.

“Agent?” came from the radio. “What agent?”

“No, an
Asian
,” repeated the skipper.

“What agency? What agent, Harbor Two?”

“Negative.” The skipper paused on the open line, annoyed, when the Bronx patrolman yelled into the radio, “We got a dead Chink in the drink! Copy?”

“Oh,” responded dispatch drily. “Okay. Copy that. Ten-four.”

The patrolman smirked as his sergeant said toward Sergeant Cohen, “It’s all yours, Manhattan.”

“Wait for EMS, okay?” said dispatch.

“Copy that,” answered Sergeant Cohen. “Call the house,” he said to Mulligan. “Tell them we could use a Chinese, uh,
Asian
detective.”

North

T
HE BEATEN-DOWN LANDSCAPE
of the Lower East Side flashed past the bus window as Jack’s cell phone sounded. It was a number he didn’t recognize, but he flipped open the phone and took the call.

“Detective Yu?” asked a female dispatcher.

“Correct,” Jack answered, keeping his voice even in the noise of the city bus.

“Report to Manhattan North,” she said under some static.

“Come back?” Jack quietly questioned.

“Report to One Hundred Twenty-Eighth Street and Lexington. East Hamilton Park.”

“Copy,” Jack answered, waiting.
1-2-8 and Lex
.

“See Sergeant Cohen,” came the punch line, “Hamilton Heights precinct, copy?”

“Copy that,” Jack answered, anticipating the Union Square crossover in the distance. It had to be about a
questionable death, he knew. But why assign a Manhattan South detective to something at the other end of Manhattan?

He watched the Ninth Precinct fade as the bus rolled north. At Union Square he dropped to the subway and caught a 4 train northbound; four stops on a twenty-minute bullet to Harlem and 125th Street.

The complexions of the passengers changed as the subway zoomed north of midtown, most people going in the opposite direction, more blacks and Latinos, minorities, bound for the Bronx.

Harlem?
he wondered as the train thundered through the underground.

River

A
TALL WHITE
cop, a sergeant, was waiting for him at the gate to East Hamilton Park. Jack saw the insignia, with
COHEN
on his nameplate, and flapped open his jacket to show his gold badge.

“Detective Yu,” Sergeant Cohen acknowledged.

“What do you have, Sarge?” Jack asked evenly, preferring not to question the chain of custody or command involved until later, when they got to the Thirty-Second Precinct.

“In the river,” the sergeant said as he led the way to the shoreline.

Jack could see the Harbor Unit idling near the middle of the river. The wind kicked up as they went toward a metal rowboat bearing the Columbia University logo.

“After you,” Sergeant Cohen said.

Jack stepped into the rowboat, dropping smoothly into a wide stance to help level the boat before sliding forward and sitting down. Sergeant Cohen pushed off and hopped aboard as they drifted forward through the choppy water.
The irony of it
, Jack thought,
a Jew rowing a Chinaman out to the middle of the Harlem River to take possession of the dead on its journey to the next life. That’s how Billy Bow would see it anyway
.