The vomit was dark colored, and Jack guessed from the crust that had formed that it had dried for at least a day.
Opposite the body was a large Chinese armoire that blocked off a neat home-office area: desktop with computers, a printer, and a set of filing cabinets. On top of the cabinets was a stack of books. One was entitled The Day Trader’s Bible.
Jack used up the rest of his film, taking shots from different angles. He believed photos were a more efficient way to preserve his impressions than written notes and he wanted to take them himself before the crime scene became crowded with the coroner’s people and the crime-scene team.
When he was in Chinatown, Jack would drop the camera off at Ah Fook’s Thirty-Minute Photo, and Fook Jr. would develop his order first while he went next door to the Mei Wah, got a nai cha tea, and watched the gangboys roll by.
He dropped the disposable camera back into his pocket.
Outside the bedroom, Wong said, “Sarge notified the ME about twenty minutes ago. They’re en route in the meat wagon.”
“Okay,” Jack nodded. He knew Wong wasn’t being crude and insensitive. It was just cop talk, jargon they used to take some of the edge off of a traumatic event.
Wong moved toward the main door and the old woman, who was now weeping quietly. Jack went to the window wall of the living room. The view swept north toward the Empire State Building and the jumbled rooftops and billboards of the big city beyond.
The streets below were bustling, a tangle of pedestrian traffic crowding the intersection. The city was in a holiday season rush, and people poured out of the subways and buses, jamming the streets in every direction.
The world goes on, Jack thought. An entire family offered up to the gods, gods of greed and desire, and the world stops not one second for condolences. Too bad.
It wasn’t the first time Jack had seen dead children, but it was the first time he’d witnessed the end of an entire family. That they happened to be Chinese brought it closer to home, as he assumed it did for P.O. Wong. But as cops they instinctively protected themselves.
Cops got paid to sop up the daily horrors and bloody atrocities that the white-collar suits and ties didn’t want to deal with. Cops became hard-hearted, kept a professional distance from the victims, and worked in a way that didn’t affect them emotionally. Deeper involvement was a real danger that could lead to overzealousness. Frontline cops became numb to the daily onslaught of unspeakable crimes that crossed the desk blotter day and night. Fifty thousand arrests a year. In a city where teenage mothers disposed of their babies in the garbage, parents were known to kill their children and themselves out of anger, depression, desperation, very often in the grip of an alcohol-and-drug-induced rage.
The Taiwanese, like other Chinese, were obsessed with success and money. The present tragedy was the result of depression over the imminent loss of a certain lifestyle, but it was as much about shame, about losing face. Ma’s Buddhist beliefs came back to him: greed and desire. The Buddhists taught that wanting and having, the material world, could only lead to unhappiness. Life was suffering, and suffering came from desire, the desire for things, for hopes unfulfilled. Eliminate desire, and you will eliminate suffering.
Suicide was not uncommon in America, Jack knew. Most were men, and they shot themselves. Then there were drug overdoses, risks taken to disguise a death wish, and, finally, assisted suicide from those who believed in the right to die.
At the apartment door, Jack saw the ends of the packing tape that had been used to secure a quilt over the door so none of the carbon monoxide could escape.
Eliminate desire.
He left Wong at the scene and went down to get a statement from the building manager. He knew the follow-up paperwork at the precinct, plus the reports from the coroner’s office, the notification of next of kin, the certificates from the funeral parlor, everything, would take up his next few shifts.
Finally, after sixteen hours on the job, with weariness pulling at his eyelids, he called for a Chinatown see gay, car service.
* * *
The Chinese driver spoke Cantonese, and took him straight out to Sunset Park, Brooklyn’s Chinatown, without asking directions. Exhausted, Jack powered down the window and let the icy wind slap him awake.
He’d been thirsty long before he reached his studio apartment, but once inside he went directly to the cupboard in the kitchenette, took out a few sticks of incense, and lit them. He shook off the ash and fanned the wiggling tails of smoke as he planted them at the little shrine he’d made for Pa on the Parsons table near the windowsill, where he’d placed an old photo of his father dressed in Chinese-styled tong jong clothing.
Pa was now seven weeks buried in the hard ground of Evergreen Hills.
Jack’s next visit to the cemetery wouldn’t be until mid-January, on what would have been Pa’s birthday.
This sad day reminded Jack that he, too, though only twenty-seven, was at the end of his bloodline, a solitary remnant of the Yu clan, whose ancestry retreated back through the generations.
Eighty-eighth cop of Chinese-American descent. A lucky number, he’d thought. But it hadn’t worked out that way.
He could still hear the old man’s words. “Chaai lo ah? Now you’re a cop?” Pa had said with derision when Jack first put on the blue uniform. “Chinese don’t become policemen. They’re worse than the crooks. Everyone knows they take money. Nei cheega, you’re crazy. You have lost your jook-sing— American-born—mind. I didn’t raise you to be a kai dai—punk idiot—so they can use you against your own people.”
I never took any money, Jack hadn’t found the chance to say to his father.
Jack bowed three times before the shrine, then quickly found the Johnnie Walker Black and poured a tumbler full, cracking open a can of beer to chase it.
The whiskey had only coated his throat with fire. He told himself that the beer would chill him out, would let him sleep better, as he drained the can. He’d lost any appetite he’d had at the crime scene. Now he sat on the edge of his convertible couch nestled in the far corner of the studio. He kicked off his shoes, trying to focus, to make some sense of the days and weeks gone by since Pa’s death.
Four months earlier, what began as a hardship transfer to Chinatown’s Fifth Precinct to be closer to his dying father, had ended up with a promotion. Then he’d been transferred to the Ninth.
Bad memories from the period in between twisted together as the alcohol reached his brain. He drew the blinds against the afternoon light.
When he closed his eyes, his mind drifted. He fell asleep on the couch.
His sleep was pervaded by a restless disconnected feeling, fitful, punctuated by dreams.
He was seventeen again, running across rooftops at twilight, with Tat Louie, and Wing Lee. Three bloodbrothers, hingdaai. Tat was throwing pebbles at the tenement windows and they were shrieking with juvenile laughter as they ran; three Chinatown boys, mad with mischief, having the time of their young lives. Then suddenly, there were the ugly, sneering faces of Wah Ying street-gang members, wielding nasty 007 knives. A swirl of images: Tat, fighting, and Wing, being stabbed. For himself, a quick blackness as he was smashed across his forehead, blood running into his eyes. Then the scene faded to a Chinatown funeral parlor. Wing in a casket, his face dead white, and Tat running out, past the pallbearers, followed by the wailing of Wing’s mother. The incense smell of death.