“So he didn’t report it?”

The man shook his head no as he finished his cigarette. “I don’t think so.” He answered Jack’s frown, saying, “I got robbed once. At knifepoint. Three guys against me, on a bike. The bosses didn’t help, but I reported it.”

“And what happened?” Jack asked.

“I went into the station and looked at photographs. But it happened at night. It was dark. They all wore hoodies, and they all looked about the same. I remembered the knives more than the faces, and I couldn’t pick out anyone for sure.”

“It’s good that you reported it,” Jack advised. “At least the cops know about it, could look out for crime like that.”

The man didn’t look convinced, changed the subject. “I lost two hundred dollars,” he said bitterly.

Jack redirected the talk. “Where did he live, this brother, Singarette?”

“Mox-say-go,” he said, grinning. “He was joking that he was living with Mexicans.”

“Mexicans?” Bronx immigrants from Mexico?

“Maybe one of Gooba Jai’s places.”

Gooba Jai was Chino-Cubano, one of the later waves of Chinese-Cuban immigrants who found their Spanish-speaking way to the South Bronx and bought blighted buildings in decaying neighborhoods, properties no one else wanted. Those derelict, rent-controlled tenements were set up as rent-a-bed deals for Chinese and Latino workers or visitors to the Bronx.

“I don’t know any addresses,” he said.

“Did he have any other problems?” Jack pressed. “Girlfriend? School?”

“No. But he mentioned a gambling situation, had to do with him getting robbed. Like he was trying to win back what he’d lost.”

“Gambling?” challenged Jack. “Up here? Where?”

“Don’t know, but everyone talks about Fay Lo’s.”

“Fay Lo?” Fat boy. “Where?”

Jack got the don’t know shrug again, just as the China Village manager that Jack had spotted earlier came out of the front door and peered into the alley.

“DEW NA MA GA HEI!“ he cursed in Toishanese as he spotted the deliveryman. Motherfucker! Your deliveries are getting cold!

Jack handed the man his detective’s card as he started moving his bike toward the front. He gave Jack a departing nod.

“Call me if you think of anything else,” Jack called out after him.

The manager cast a quick look in Jack’s direction and was momentarily puzzled. Then he shivered in the cold and ran back inside the China Village. Jack imagined him to be as glib as the manager of the Golden City, tactful, expeditious, but not very helpful. They volunteered nothing and spoke like they’d been pre-lawyered up.

Jack couldn’t recall much else on the Chinese-Cubans in the Bronx, but he felt like he’d struck a vein. He was pondering Mexicano Chino-Cubano crash pads and Fay Lo’s gambling operations when his cell phone jumped around in his jacket pocket.

He tapped up a number he didn’t recognize, but the phone voice belonged to Sergeant Cohen from the Three-Two.

“The report’s in,” he advised. “Report to the morgue, ASAP.”

ON THE WAY downtown, Jack tried to put together what he’d gathered. The dead man was a deliveryman/waiter/student named Chang, who’d been robbed and had a gambling problem. He’d been angry, maybe depressed. Maybe suicidal. The jumper/floater scenario was unreeling in his head.

He arrived at Manhattan’s West Side before he knew it.

Steel Cold Dead

HE STOOD IN the cold, stainless-steel stillness of the room, its wall of metal doors housing the dead, the after-world rendition of a Fukienese rent-a-bed. A female morgue assistant handed him the certificate of death. She said, “Dr. Jacobson will be right back,” before walking away.

Jack scanned the certificate. The decedent, John Doe, was listed as Asian. Under the section “COD,” the entry for cause of death stunned him: Sharp force piercing through heart. Manner of death: HOMICIDE.

But how? There’d been no blood and no visible trauma or defensive wounds. He imagined the frozen body in the frozen river again, was turning the image over in his head, when the medical examiner appeared. He looked like an Ivy League professor in a gray smock.

“A stab in the heart, Doctor?” Jack asked incredulously. “I didn’t see any blood.”

“It was easy to miss, Detective. A single thrust. A very thin wound.” Jacobson lifted a black hoodie sweatshirt, still wet, from one of the gurneys and held it open. He indicated a thin slit in the fabric where a sharp force had penetrated. “The sweatshirt and undershirt, everything was wet and black and bunched up. We didn’t see the wound until we got the clothes off.”

“But no blood?” Jack repeated.

“It’s possible, from floating in the cold water for hours,” the doctor suggested, “that any blood could have washed out. And it’s also harder to see blood on black.” He opened one of the metal drawers and slid out a rack with the decedent’s autopsied corpse. Chang, thought Jack. Jun Wah, aka Singarette. It comes down to a body on the slab at the morgue. A Y-cut where they’d opened him up ran from chest to navel, but what caught Jack’s eye was the single wound over the heart area, a thin vertical slit barely an inch tall, with matching bruises at either end.

“The skin normally contracts around the wound,” Jacobson said, “but the cold river water could have helped close it. But we can tell that it was a double-edged weapon, which is unusual.”

“Like a sword?” Jack asked.

“More like a dirk.”

Jack narrowed his eyes at the wound, trying to imagine the weapon. Like a Greek or Roman dagger, the kind you’d see in a knife collector’s mail-order catalog.

“Or a dagger,” the doctor continued. “In this case a short dagger, maybe a four-and-a-half-inch blade. See the rounded abrasions at either end of the cut? The dagger had a hand-guard. It pierced his heart but not through to his back. Severed the aorta and the veins around it.”

“It was driven in to the hilt then?” Jack said.

“With tremendous force. That’s what caused the hand-guard marks.”

Driven forward and held until the man was dead, the weapon could kill in less than three minutes.

“Given the angle of the thrust, I’d say it was a left-handed person, someone taller than the decedent. Maybe five foot ten inches, almost like yourself.”

“I don’t see any defensive wounds,” Jack said. “And you said only through the sweatshirt and undershirt, but not the jacket? So the jacket was open?”

“Yes.”

“So he never saw it coming?” Jack said as he gained clarity.

“We don’t know that.”

“He let his guard down. Or it was someone he knew.”

“That’s for you to find out, Detective, isn’t it?” Jacobson smiled faintly. He took from the gurney the knockoff Rolex that Chang had been wearing, laid it next to the corpse. It had stopped at 10:30 P.M.

“Estimated time of death is between nine thirty and ten P.M.,” Jacobson continued. “The casing and the metal clock mechanism freeze in the water and contract and slow to a stop. Within an hour or two.”

“Think he was dead before he hit the water?” Jack asked.

“Very possible,” Jacobson answered. “Or close to it. There wasn’t much water in his lungs.” He bagged the watch and gave it to Jack.

Ah Por, thought Jack. He’d want her to get a touch on the watch before it went into the crime lab. Maybe they’d get some prints off it. He took a last look at the corpse before Jacobson pushed the drawer back in.

“Good luck, Detective,” Jacobson said as he moved to the next body.

Jack thanked him and left the room of the dead.

Outside, the cold, crisp air revived him. His cell jangled with a familiar number.

“Find out anything, bro?” It was Billy Bow.

“Yeah, he’s Chinese,” snapped Jack. “Why?”

“Last name Chang, right?” teased Billy.