Henry Chang - Death Money

“Right,” Jack said. “Anything?”

“We don’t keep records that way.”

“Yeah, but you know what I mean,” Jack pushed.

The two undercover cops exchanged glances before the black one answered.

“Matter of fact, a coupla months ago,” he said, smirking, “there was a fight or something just around the block. A truck driver called it in. A Chinese kid got beat up pretty bad. We found him laying in the street. But he claimed he didn’t know who assaulted him, couldn’t press charges.”

Going to settle it himself? wondered Jack.

“There were a few Chinese on the street,” he continued, “but nobody witnessed anything.”

“How was it called in?” Jack asked. “Did the truck driver describe the fighters?”

The white cop hesitated before answering. “He said a bunch of Chinks were kung fu fighting.”

They all turned as Billy fired up the Mustang, keeping the lights off.

Jack’s face twisted from a sad smile to a frown as he asked, “What else?”

“Some of the kid’s friends came by, said they’d take him to Bronx Medical.”

“You get a name?” Jack asked.

“He said some bogus name, Dew Lay or something.”

Dew lay meant “fuck you” in Cantonese, the assault victim blowing off the white gwai lo cop.

“That’s it?” Jack said. “Right. No charges, no case.”

Yeah, just some crazy Chinks kung fu fightin’ on a Saturday night in the Four-One , thought Jack, but he backed his gratitude with a handshake as the two undercovers moved off.

The adrenaline from the armed face-off was draining off now, and he slipped back into the Mustang, watching the plainclothes cops in their unmarked car roll off into the dark Bronx distance. Lucky they were cops , thought Jack, it could have been a trigger-happy nightmare . There had been a spate of shootings of black off-duty cops by white off-duty cops.

“Lucky for them ,” Billy said, firing the headlights and driving in the opposite direction. “I woulda iced them if they weren’t cops.”

Exactly , thought Jack. He’d had enough of Billy’s help for one night.

“C’mon,” Billy said, “enough is enough. I’ll drive you home, bro. Unless you want to go for siew yeh snacks.”

“Home sounds good,” answered Jack.

“I bet.” Billy nosed the black car back toward Brooklyn.

THE RIDE BACK was relatively quiet-no Steppenwolf, no rock ‘n’ roll-with just some generic news station that Billy had switched to. Neither man spoke, watching the highway and the night beyond.

Jack knew Billy was savoring the flavors of his night’s exploits, and Billy knew Jack was preoccupied, turning over whatever clues he had in his mind. Cop work. He had a homicide, a body with two names, a set of keys, and an unknown motive. They passed that section of the Harlem River where Sing’s body was discovered earlier in the morning. Where the victim worked, where he gambled, maybe. Was it just over a gambling debt? Billy worked his way through traffic. But who collects from a dead man? It didn’t make sense to kill him. Was it a robbery? But why go through the trouble to dump him in the river? How much of a debt costs someone his life? And how come no ID?

Traffic thinned out, and Billy had them rolling through Sunset Park before the weight of the day’s events could finally settle, take hold.

Money -Ah Por’s words- the root of all evil .

JACK SAT ON the edge of his bed and stripped, thinking he’d get a few hours’ sleep before the visit to the Chinatown funeral parlor where Sing’s pre-cremation wake would be held. He didn’t know if it was the fatigue from the twenty-four-hour murder shift or the cheap beer at Booty’s or the drinks at Grampa’s and Fay Lo’s that was dragging him down.

He closed his eyes, saw glimpses of Alex’s naked curves, the lean angles of her arms and legs. He took another breath, imagining an herbal scent in her hair. Hips, thighs, breasts , firm and soft where he’d caressed them. Places that became hard upon his touch.

He remembered taking a deep cleansing breath, still remembering Alex’s wet and tender places. Then his head hit the pillow, and he went down for the count.

THE COUNT DIDN’T go to oblivion, but to a series of disjointed dreams and images.

He saw himself, nighttime at the racetrack. He’s in the grandstand watching a racing filly named Alexandra pulling a sulky around the oval track. She’s hopelessly boxed in along the rail by the other horses and their rigs.

The dream jumped to:

Naked women cavorting to a remix of “Sukiyaki” in a strip club. Cascading money, with Billy throwing folded-dollar airplanes at the topless dancers.

Cops silently lingering over a dead body floating in the river.

The sequence jumped again to:

Gritty piles of money for bets on a pair of colorful fighting fish separated in a square tank at Fay Lo’s gambling joint. An explosion in the water, bloody fins and organs flying as the frenzied fish tear each other to shreds.

Silence over Yao “Singarette’s” corpse on the steel slab at the morgue, from possible suicide to homicide in a single thrust.

The root of all evil . Ah Por’s words breaking the silence.

Following the dreams was a dizzying kaleidoscope of images. Freudian stuff he’d prepared for the NYPD shrink.

A pit bull lunging at him out of the ghetto project’s darkness.

A Chinese tong enforcer bearing down on him as he frantically tries to reload.

His Colt revolver clicking on empty chambers.

Lucky, Chinatown ex-blood brother and Ghost Legion street-gang boss, suddenly sitting up out of his hospital coma.

The last image jolted Jack awake in his bed. He tried to get back to sleep but wound up drinking green tea and thinking about the Wah Fook funeral parlor as morning light crept into the bedroom.

THE WAH FOOK still had the nineteenth century baroque façade from when it was the Bacigalupe Funeral Home, with the relief columns and sculptural decorations still visible on old buildings throughout Chinatown and Little Italy.

Jack remembered the Italian mob in Chinatown used to store its illegal Fourth of July fireworks that it hawked on Canal Street in the Bacigalupe basements.

Plastic signage in Chinese covered over the Bacigalupe name that had been carved into the stone above the portico entrance.

There were two old lanterns above the bronze entrance doors on which seven death notices-white tickets with the Chinese names of the dead-had been posted. Jack saw the one closest to what he was looking for, Jun Wah Zhang, and went inside. He badged the manager, who led him past the two wakes in progress to a smaller room at the end of the corridor and turned on the ceiling lights. There was a closed casket there, but the room hadn’t been set up for a wake yet.

On a small table to one side, there was an urn. An inexpensive one you could find in any of the Chinatown curio shops. Dark glazed ceramic, featuring bronze mountains and green scenery of leaves and trees. Colors of the earth. Big enough to hold all the remains of what was once a man.

No picture.

Nothing but a Chinese name in black ink on a white scrap of paper. A name that wasn’t even really his, a name he’d purchased.

“What can you tell me about him?” Jack asked.

“The association paid for the urn, the for jong cremation, and the burial in their field at the cemetery.”

“It’s empty now?” Jack asked, looking at the urn. Fire interred .