I listened to the music, and I thought of the liquor I’d consumed since then, the bottles of sour wine, the smoke, the canned heat. I thought of the flophouses, and the hallways, and the park benches and the gutters and the stink and filth of the Bowery. A pretty picture, Matt Cordell. A real pretty picture.
Like Joey.
Only Joey was dead, really dead. I was only close to it.
The music stopped. There was the bare room again, and the old man, and the broken memories.
“Is someone coming to talk to me?” I asked.
“You go up,” the old man said. “Upstairs. You go. Someone talk to you.”
“Thanks,” I said, and went into the hallway, wondering why the old man had sent the kid up ahead of me. Probably a natural distrust of Westerners. Whoever was up there had been warned that an outsider was in the house. I climbed the steps, and found another doorway at the landing.
I opened the door.
The room was filled with smoke. There were at least a dozen round tables in the room, and each table was crowded with seated Chinese. There was a small wooden railing that separated the large room from a small office with a desk. A picture of Chiang Kai-shek hung on one wall. A fat man sat at the desk with his back to me. The kid who’d been downstairs was standing alongside him. I turned my back to the railing and the desk, and looked into the room. A few of the men looked up, but most went on with what I supposed were their games.
The place was a bedlam of noise. Each man sitting at the tables held a stack of tiles before him. As far as I could gather, the play went in a clockwise motion, with each player lifting a tile and banging it down on the table as he shouted something in Chinese. I tried to get the gist of the game, but it was too complicated. Every now and then, one man would raise a pointed stick and push markers across wires hanging over the tables, like the markers in a poolroom. A window stretched across the far end of the room, and one group of men at a table near the window were the quietest in the room. They were playing cards, and from a distance, it looked like good old-fashioned poker.
I turned away from them and stared at the back of the man seated at the desk. I cleared my throat.
He swung his chair around, grinning broadly, exposing a yellow gold tooth in the front of his mouth.
“Hello, hello,” he said.
I gestured over my shoulder with my head. “What’s that? Mah-jongg?”
He peered around as if he hadn’t seen the wholesale gaming. “Chinese game,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said. “Did Harry Tse play it?”
“Harry? No, Harry play poker. Far table. You know Harry?”
“Not exactly.”
The Chinese shook his head, and the wattles under his chin flapped. “Harry dead.”
“I know.”
“Yes. Dead.” He shook his head again.
“Was he here last Monday night?”
“Oh sure. He here every Monday.”
“Did he play poker?”
“Oh sure. He always play. Harry good guy.”
“Who played with him?”
“Hmm?”
“Last Monday? Who was he playing with?”
“Why?”
“He was killed. Maybe one of his friends did it. Who did he play with?”
The fat Chinese stood up abruptly and looked at the far table. He nodded his head then. “Same ones. Always play poker. Only ones.” He pointed at the far table. “They play with Harry.”
“Thanks. Mind if I ask them a few questions?”
The fat Chinese shrugged. I went across the room past the mah-jongg tables and over to the poker game. Four men were seated at the table. None of them looked up when I stopped alongside it.
I cleared my throat.
A thin man with short black hair and a clean-shaven face looked up curiously. His eyes were slanted, his skin pulled tight at the corners. He held his cards before him in a wide fan.
“My name’s Cordell,” I said to him. “I understand Harry Tse was playing cards here the night before he was killed.”
“Yes?” the thin man asked.
“Are you the spokesman for the group?”
“I’ll do. What’s on your mind?”
“Who won Monday night?” The thin man thought this over. He shrugged and turned to another player. “Who won, Tommy?”
Tommy was a husky boy with wide jowls. He shrugged, too. “I don’t remember, Lun.”
“That your name?” I asked the first guy.
“That’s right. Lun Ching.”
“Who won, Lun Ching?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Did Harry win?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Yes or no?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
Lun Ching stared at me. “Are you from the police?”
“No.”
He nodded, his head imperceptibly. “Harry didn’t win. That’s enough for you.” He turned back to his cards, fished two from the fan, and said to a player across the table, “Two cards.”
The dealer threw two cards onto the table, and Lun Ching reached for them. I reached at the same time, clamping my fingers onto his wrist.
“I’m not through yet, Lun.”
He shook his hand free, and shoved his chair back. “You better get the hell out of here, Mac,” he said.
“Matt,” I corrected. “I want to know who won here Monday night. You going to tell me?”
“What difference does it make?”
“I want to know.”
Lun Ching gestured impatiently with his head. “Tommy won.”
I turned to the husky-jowled Chinese. “Did you?”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“A few bucks.”
“Did Harry lose?”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“I don’t know. Two, three dollars.”
“Who else won?”
“What?”
“You said you’d won a few bucks, Tommy. You also said Harry lost about three bucks. What did the rest of you do?”
Lun Ching stood up. “We broke even. Does that answer you?”
“Maybe,” I said. I turned and started across the room. Over my shoulder, I said, “I might come back.”
Someone from the table whispered, “Don’t hurry.”
The fat Chinese looked up when I stopped at the desk behind the wooden railing.
“I don’t think I caught your name,” I said.
“Wong. Sam Wong.”
“Mr. Wong, did Harry leave here alone on Monday night?”
“Yes, he did.”
“Did he say where he was going? Did he have to meet anyone?”,
“No. He didn’t say. I think he go home.”
“I see.”
Sam Wong looked at me curiously. “Harry no killed Monday night,” he said, his voice puzzled. “Harry killed Tuesday night.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s what’s bothering me.”
None of it fit.
I was banging my head against a stone wall, and I didn’t like the feeling. It wasn’t like the old days when someone shoved a fat retainer under my nose, held it out like a carrot to a rabbit, challenged me to find a missing husband or squelch a bit of blackmail.
There was no retainer now. There was only the thought of Joey lying dead in that small park, Joey about whom I knew practically nothing. We shared a big thirst, that was all, and we’d done our damnedest to quench it. I thought of the last bottle I’d shared with him. We’d sat on the corner of my flophouse cot a few days back, drinking the fifth of Imperial, forgetting the heated streets outside, forgetting everything but the driving desire to get blind stinking drunk.