In the space between the two bodies was a crumpled business card. Protruding from the man’s shirt pocket was a folded piece of notepaper.
Jack stepped back and snapped photographs from different angles and distances, wide shots and close-ups fixing the images in his mind before Crime Scene arrived.
At 4:44 AM, the woman wasn’t going out, Jack thought. She’d just come home. And he was waiting for her, his jacket draped over the chair. No sign of forced entry. He’d had a key. Or she’d let him in.
The layout of the bodies made it look like she’d sat down at the edge of the bed, placed her handbag on the floor, and then he’d shot her. She’d fallen straight back, nestled neatly into the comforter. Dead on impact, a bullet in her brain, the back of her head bleeding out, he concluded.
Sometime after, the man had seated himself, taken her hand in his, and then eaten the gun.
Jack imagined it with a cold clarity-the gun jerking out of the man’s mouth, the wild swing of his arm smashing into the clock radio, sending it to the floor. The revolver bouncing, sliding onto the comforter.
The crashed clock radio on the floor was blinking 4:44 AM, offering the three worst numbers a Chinese could get: the number four in Cantonese sounded like death. Triple death.
The man had drop-twisted to his right, as if he were dragging her into the next life-holding hands-toward oneness with the universe.
The gun was an older model H amp;R 622, a.22-caliber revolver that fit the Saturday Night Special profile. Someone had filed off the serial numbers. Only two shots had been fired. With such a cheap revolver, he’d had to have shot her at close range, almost point-blank. There’d probably be some gunshot residue on her face and hand as well. Jack made a mental note to advise Crime Scene, and the ME, then carefully spread open the crumpled-up business card. It was from the Golden Galaxy Karaoke Bar, with a handwritten telephone number scrawled across the back. Jack snapped photos front and back, checked his watch.
6:06 AM.
There was nothing in the man’s jacket draped on the chair.
Jack took the note from the man’s shirt pocket, and opened it up on the table. The word characters were written out in broken lines, like a Chinese poem, in a Three-Kingdoms-period style. Jack mouthed the words silently, reading through the series of vertical sentences, using his schoolboy Cantonese.
Black Clouds
have covered the sky
like ink.
The whirlwind
sweeps in
from the rivers.
Even the air itself
Is frozen.
Inside,
A growing sorrow
I cannot bear.
There is no one
to turn to,
not even a reflection
in the mirror.
I cannot Face
anyone.
A man
without a face,
I am ready
to do
What I must do …
The man had lost face, mo sai meen, and had become despondent. A hopeless predicament, according to the poem. Overwhelmed, he’d given in to despair.
Jack pushed back from the table, turned toward the bed. The scene looked like a textbook open-and-shut murder-suicide, one that any of the murder squad cops could have stepped up to, way before he’d gotten the call. Even a sergeant and a couple of uniforms could have managed it.
So why me? Jack had to ask himself. Because I’m Chinese? Not that he was complaining. Murder was murder, any way you colored it.
Still.
He went back down the stairs to where the uniformed rookie was leaning against the wall of the little vestibule, half-nodding his way toward the end of the overnight shift. The cold draft of air at the door invigorated Jack.
“What’s the deal with Crime Scene?” he asked.
“Sarge said they were en route.”
“What about the ME?” Jack frowned. “I need a wagon here.”
“I’ll notify the sarge again.”
Jack took a deep gulp of the cold air before quickstepping back upstairs. Inside the apartment, he emptied the woman’s handbag onto the linoleum floor. There was nothing unusuaclass="underline" cell phone, makeup, change purse, pen, eyeglasses. A wallet, containing a photo of herself with a karaoke microphone in her hand, smiling; various credit cards, and a non-driver’s license that identified her as May Lon Fong, thirty-one years old. Another photo of her with two infants; scrawled across the back of the photo, the Chinese words ma, jai neui, mother and children.
The refrigerator was stocked for a single person: two bricks of tofu, some gai choy, vegetables, and a gallon jug of dao jeung, bean milk. There were leftover salad greens, a half-dozen eggs, a piece of flank steak, dumplings, and noodles in the freezer.
Jack sat down at the little table and waited for the coroner’s wagon. Crime Scene would arrive soon enough. Nobody here was going anywhere. The waiting made him wonder again why he’d caught the case, and reminded him of all the Chinatown events that had led up to his recent transfer from the Fifth Precinct. The adrenaline had begun to ebb from his body. Fatigue slowly crept back in.
He remembered how, seven months earlier, he’d gotten a hardship transfer out of Anti-Crime, to be closer to Pa in Chinatown, who’d been terminally ill. The transfer had brought Jack back to the 0-Five, back to the old neighborhood, where he’d grown up, where he’d lost boyhood friends and his innocence, and from which he’d thought he’d finally escaped.
The old man had died recently, and Jack’s grief and guilt were still fresh in his heart. He’d moved out on Pa, but only because Chinatown was no longer the same place for him as it was for his father. Jack’s Chinatown was colored by violence, death, and a feeling of helplessness that he hated.
He’d become a cop, thinking he’d make a difference. The difference was he’d become as cynical and hard as the gangboys he’d left behind.
He was on the job, working Canal Street with the Anti-Crime plainclothes squad, when Pa passed away. Jack had found him, after stopping to pick up jook, congee, for the old man, after the day shift. He’d missed the chance to say good-bye, to try and apologize for the clashes they’d had. And now Jack was the last man standing in the Yu bloodline. Two hundred years of family history on the edge, in Mei Kwok, America.
Not long after the burial, a Chinatown tong big shot had gotten himself murdered. Jack was given the case. Uncle Four, leader of the Hip Chings, had been shot coming out of an elevator at 444 Hester Street. One man was in custody, awaiting trial. Another suspect had vanished.
During the investigation, Jack had been suspended by Internal Affairs, but still managed to bring back from San Francisco’s Chinatown a New York limousine driver whose name was Johnny “Wong Jai” Wong. A person of interest, a Hong Kong Chinese woman, was still at large. They knew her only as Mona.
The case was pending trial.
Johnny Wong’s name brought back memories: a short heavyset body lying on the floor, halfway out of a small elevator, the doors bumping up against his ample waist. The vic was Uncle Four. Someone had popped a couple of.25-caliber hi-vels into the back of his head.