A beautiful middle-aged woman dressed in a black knee-length cheongsam, that elegant, body-hugging style of Chinese dress, joined the men of the family in trying to persuade Mrs. Yee to calm down. She didn’t have any effect, either. When she put her hand on Mrs. Yee’s shoulder, the other woman impatiently shook her off.
Having been rebuffed, the woman in the cheongsam cast a frowning glance at a young man who was still seated in his chair. He was looking the other way and evidently trying to pretend that this noisy family scene wasn’t occurring. She spoke to him sharply in Chinese, but he seemed not to hear her. Her tone grew exasperated as she switched to English. “I’m speaking to you, Ted!”
“Huh?” he said vaguely, looking in her direction now.
“Ted, please do something!”
Ted, I thought with interest. The filmmaker.
He looked pretty unprepossessing. But then, directors often do. (And writers usually look like they should be in a padded cell.) He was younger than I expected—early twenties, probably. Very skinny, he wore his long hair in a messy shag that kept getting in his eyes, his white shirt was half-untucked and wrinkled, his tie was loose, and he was the only male family member who wasn’t wearing a suit.
He shrugged and said something to the woman whom I now took for his mother, but I couldn’t hear him above all the shouting.
Whatever he’d said, it caused his mother to turn away from him with an expression of resigned disappointment that I had a feeling Ted saw often on her face.
Then a pretty woman in her twenties started saying in American-accented English, loudly enough for everyone to hear, “Aunt Grace is right. That woman has some nerve showing up here!”
The beautiful woman in the cheongsam said firmly, “Susan, please.”
But Susan—Ted’s sister, whom I remembered John mentioning earlier—ignored this. She said directly to Benny’s secretary, “Get out of here! Can’t you see you’re upsetting my aunt? Show some respect!”
The secretary’s grief turned to anger, and she started shrieking at Mrs. Yee and Susan.
Apart from Susan, who continued using English, everyone was still speaking Chinese, so I didn’t understand what was being said; but it didn’t take much imagination to guess what Benny’s wife and mistress were shouting at each other over his dead body while his offspring and relatives watched with horrified embarrassment. I looked around and noticed that virtually all the visitors I could see were also focused on this scandalous scene, watching the players with riveted interest—and very glad, I suspected, that they had braved tonight’s rotten weather to pay their respects at what was turning out to be quite a memorable wake.
I returned my attention to the shouting match—which was when I realized what should have occurred to me before: If Benny had been murdered, then Mrs. Yee was an obvious suspect. I had watched enough episodes of Crime and Punishment to know that the spouse often turned out to be the killer.
John had said that Benny Yee had a lot of enemies; but closer to home, he had a wife he was cheating on—and based on the determined way she was advancing on Benny’s mistress right now, she didn’t seem like a woman you could expect to cross with impunity. Mrs. Yee roughly shook off the restraining hands of her anxious young male relatives (her sons, I assumed), stopped at the altar near Benny’s coffin to pick up a bronze incense burner, and then leaped vengefully at Benny’s screeching secretary.
“Hey!” Without conscious thought, just acting on reflex, I jumped into the fray and threw myself bodily against the secretary, slamming her sideways so that Mrs. Yee’s deadly swipe at her skull with that heavy object missed its target.
Inevitably, the girl and I flew straight into the coffin and landed facedown on top of Benny’s corpse. We were both winded for a moment. Then she realized where we were and started screaming and flailing. I had landed on Benny’s embalmed legs, in their well-tailored trousers. The body didn’t feel particularly eerie—mostly, it felt like landing on a very solid mannequin—but falling on top of a dead guy was still pretty disturbing. So I gasped in startled revulsion and vaulted backward—straight into a broad chest and a pair of strong arms.
“Did you intend to fling yourself on the corpse?” John asked.
Dangling from his arms for a moment, I said breathlessly, “No! I was trying to . . . Trying to . . .”
“I know. I saw.”
He set me on my feet, waited to make sure I wouldn’t sway, then let go. Then he went to assist the woman who was flailing and floundering atop the open coffin, still screaming her head off.
Mrs. Yee had apparently struck herself in the leg when she missed her nemesis’ skull. The bronze incense burner lay on the floor while she limped back to her chair, moaning in pain and supported by two sons.
“Esther! Are you all right?” Max asked, appearing at my side. Nelli was with him, panting anxiously.
“I’ve been looking for you,” I said, getting my breath back. “Where were you?”
“Due to the demands of Nelli’s corporeal form, we had to step outside for a few minutes.” I assumed he meant she had needed a little walk. Max looked at the injured woman who was limping toward a chair, then he looked at the hysterically shrieking woman who was still flailing atop the corpse while John tried to disentangle her. “What manner of cataclysm occurred in our absence?”
“Benny’s mistress showed up. His wife attacked her.”
“Ah, and you rescued the young woman? I see.”
“I don’t think she sees,” I said, looking in her direction.
Benny’s mistress, now back on her own two feet, was pointing at me and shouting angrily. John, who was speaking to her in English, with a few Chinese phrases thrown in, was not having any success with trying to calm her down. When she saw me gazing her with a bemused frown, that was evidently the last straw. She took off one of her high-heeled shoes and, holding it overhead like a weapon, lunged for me.
Max stepped into her path and, with a quick gesture and a word in Latin, caused the shoe to fly out of her hand. Due to the woman’s uncoordinated movements and her hysteria, it almost looked natural, despite her startled reaction. I wasn’t sure anyone else saw it happen, anyhow, since Nelli had started barking ferociously the moment the woman’s attack began, and a dog that size is pretty distracting when she behaves that way.
John grabbed the woman, restraining her, while Max soothed Nelli.
A nice-looking, neatly dressed man who appeared to be in his thirties rushed to the coffin and started tidying up Benny’s appearance. He looked over his shoulder and said, “Get her out of here, John!”
I realized that must be John’s older brother.
“Right.” Speaking calmly to her, John retained a firm grip on the woman as he started dragging her away. “Let’s go find a taxi for you.”
As they started making their way through the crowd, the woman now sobbing again, I said to Max, “I’ve never been to a Chinese funeral before, but you have. Are they usually this eventful?”
Rather than answering, he said, “We were able to examine the corpse earlier. Nelli exhibited no peculiar reaction to it.”
Watching John’s brother fuss over Benny’s body, I asked, “How did you get Nelli close enough to the coffin to—”
“John has told his family and the Yees that Nelli is a therapy dog and that I brought her here to comfort those who have trouble expressing their grief. Since we are in America, this explanation was received without the incredulity it would produce in most societies.”
I looked at Nelli. She drooled a little.
“I gather she hasn’t noticed any demonic entities at this festive gathering?”