“Hombre.” Ruben nodded respectfully.
“When did you see him last?” Jack asked.
“Dos noches,” said Miguel. “Two nights ago.”
“We dropped him off,” added Ruben, “on a delivery.”
“Delivery?” Jack asked. “For what?”
“Abba-lone-nay,” Ruben enunciated, “abalone” in Spanish. “He say Chinese love it. Very expensive.”
“He sold two cases,” Miguel added, “and two carton cigarettes.”
“Two cases of abalone?”
“Si, he say someone buy two cases, cash up front,” said Ruben. “Sing, Chino, he tie a rope around each case so he can carry one in each hand.”
“We dropped him off,” offered Miguel. “It was only two blocks’ walk. And he was supposed to meet us after, for cerveza.”
“Where?”
“At Chino’s.” He hesitated. “But the real name is Booty.” The word set off another bell in Jack’s head. “This was what time?”
“About eight P.M.,” answered Ruben, checking his watch, “like now.”
“Can you drive us there?” Jack asked Luis. “I’ll pay for gas and cerveza.”
“No problema,” Luis said.
“Sure,” added Miguel. “Anything for el chino amigo.”
THEY WENT BACK out into the night, four men in a big truck rolling west to the Highbridge section. They pulled over near a one-way street, with Booty’s in the opposite direction, and dropped Jack off.
“He go down that way,” Ruben said, pointing. “He say customer waiting for him by the end.”
Definitely somebody was waiting, thought Jack, maybe with a dagger in hand. He’d given twenty dollars for cerveza to Luis, told them to get started at Booty’s without him.
He waved them off and began walking toward the smell of water.
The growl of Luis’s truck faded around a corner, gone. Jack continued down the street, following the dim and stranded pools of lamplight to the river. He tried to imagine Sing’s thoughts and feelings as he marched through the cold, toward what might have been his last moments on earth. I’m carrying a ten-pound case of canned abalone in each hand, using the ropes to hold each one like it was a briefcase. Also carrying two cartons of cigarettes inside a back sack.
Hands restricted, vulnerable to attack.
The delivery has been paid for in advance. I’ve already made my profit, so this is just to close off the deal.
Confidence. A deceptive quality.
Then go to meet my amigos at Booty’s, or Chino’s, and have a few cervezas. Tomorrow’s another day, right?
The long, two-block walk west to the riverfront ran through a desolate stretch of ghetto parkland.
He’d been taken completely by surprise, thought Jack. Sing’s jacket open, for a single thrust through the heart. A lucky strike? Or diligently practiced? The assailant was taller, the coroner had said.
When Sing never shows, the Mexicans think nothing of it. They figured maybe Sing got lucky or something, shacking up elsewhere. It wasn’t the first time el chino didn’t roll in until dawn.
Gradually the streets led to a pocket park, the kind that got created by waterfront development deals and later named after politicians or city big shots. It was the early stages of gentrification butting up against the decay of the ghetto.
The little stretch of park had only six wood benches, facing the water, on land that had to be paved over anyway in order to get to the railroad tracks.
He didn’t know if it was parkland or Metro North, or DOT, but the pocket park seemed public and unsecured. He noted the broken chain-link fence around a track-repair shed. You could drive a car into the area if you knew about the little back street that ran along the waterfront.
He arrived at a low railing that separated the parcel of riverside embankment from the raised concrete landing. The bank sloped off a bit, but at high tide the river would rise to the landing. If you aren’t paying attention, or if it’s dark, you can walk twenty feet out and already be knee deep where the underwater bank drops off.
Deep enough to float a body away, shove it off toward the middle of the river?
Behind him, the landing had enough space to park two or three cars, dark and distant from the solitary lamppost some fifty yards back. He heard the wind, the lapping, rippling of waves. Otherwise so quiet and deserted here that you could probably kill someone. And get away with it.
He didn’t see any obvious traces of struggle or blood evidence.
He stayed there almost half an hour, trying to sort it out. Sing, the Chinese orphan from Poon Yew village, was a “paper man” who had followed a trail of established immigrant communities eastward across Canada to New York City. He came to America looking for a new future but found instead a length of steel dagger through the heart somewhere on these cold-blooded streets of the South Bronx.
Jack knew that it wasn’t a random, or thrill, kill. Someone had worked it out, played the whole con, followed the hit list, and tried to wash it. Someone with a purpose, a mission. Someone who’d picked the location and set up the exchange at nighttime, when it was dark and the tide was high.
Someone who knows the area.
If it was just a gambling debt, then the suspicion fell on Fay Lo and the Ghosts. The Ghosts were capable of it, for sure, but it didn’t seem like their style. The Ghosts were ruthless and calculated and would have simply snatched Sing off the street and left his body in a barrel somewhere. Not some bogus abalone-and-cigarette setup in the South Bronx.
He knew if he poked Fay Lo, he’d probably lawyer up and charge police harassment. He wasn’t expecting to get a straight answer out of the Fat Man anyway.
If they were trying to make an example of Sing, why dispose of his body in the river? The street face of it asked, Who collects from a dead man? Gamblers are scared off. It’s bad luck, and there’s a death stain on the gambling establishment.
Jack remembered Sun Tzu’s advice to strike where your opponent is weakest, and thought about gau jai-Ghost Doggie Boy-probably recovering somewhere in one of the Ghost crash pads in Chinatown.
IF IT WAS more than a gambling debt, then maybe the bad blood between Sing and Bossy Gee’s restaurants figured in his murder. Was it something he said? Something that caused one of the restaurant managers to lose face? Angry words worth dying for?
Jack had no clue. Or rather, he had a lot of clues that didn’t make sense. Like Ah Por’s words, Money is the root of all evil.
He considered the Mexicans. Luis, Ruben, and Miguel struck him as hardworking, willing to take on dirty, low-paying jobs. In many ways, the mox-say-gos were the new Chinese coolies, facing the same racist discrimination that the Chinese of earlier generations suffered. Jack could understand the reluctance to notify law enforcement. Immigrants filing police reports on other immigrants? Not likely, thought Jack, when they couldn’t even be sure of each other’s names and identities.
Nobody else ventured down the streets during the time he stayed in the pocket park. No vehicle drove by. He knew he’d have to return in daylight and check out the area again.