Seven Doyers stood above a Vietnamese restaurant and the Nom Hoy Tea Parlor on an empty street lined with the closed, roll-down gates used overnight. The uniformed officer standing outside was a solitary figure beneath the yellow glow of the old pagoda-style streetlamp; a tall, baby-faced Irish kid, a rookie. Jack wondered how he’d pulled the overnight shift. Had he been desperate for overtime or had he fucked up somehow; was this a reward or punishment?

Jack, letting his gold badge dangle, asked, “So who called it in?”

“Dunno,” the rookie answered with a shrug, “Sarge just told me to stay here and secure the scene. Wait for you. Yu?” The kid grinned.

“Where’s the sarge at?” Jack asked, looking at the entrance.

“Dunno,” the rookie repeated. “He got a call from the captain and he left.”

Jack didn’t see a squad car anywhere. His watch read 5:45 AM. “Who was here when you arrived?”

“An old Chinaman,” he answered, pausing, allowing for a reaction from Jack, who didn’t rise to the bait. Jack offered instead the inscrutable yellow face.

“He said he was the father,” the rookie continued. “And that there were two dead bodies inside.”

“So where’s he now?”

“Dunno. He left after the sarge left.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Who?”

“The old Chinese-American,” Jack said.

“Oh. Said he had to make a phone call. Or something. Hard to understand his funky English.”

Jack shook his head disdainfully, scanning the empty street. “Keep an eye out,” he advised.

“Ten-four,” the rookie responded, straightening up as Jack entered the building.

Death Before Dishonor

The door at the top of the first flight of rickety stairs was slightly ajar. Yellow Crime Scene tape crossed its frame.

Jack pulled the tape back and took a breath. He pushed the door gently, stepping into the space illuminated by dim fluorescent light. The old apartment was a typical Chinatown walk-up: a big rectangular room, sparsely furnished, with a kitchenette and a small bathroom against a long wall. Worn linoleum covered the floor. The rest of the space was open. A little table nestled in the corner to his left, a puffy jacket draped over a chair.

The place looked neat; there were no signs of a struggle.

Even in the half-light, Jack saw them right away: two bodies, holding hands but sprawled apart, on their backs, across the width of a bed in the far corner. Their legs dangled off the side of the bed. One man, one woman, Chinese, as far as he could make out in the shadowy distance.

The woman still had her quilted coat on.

There was a lady’s handbag placed neatly against the foot of the bed.

On the linoleum at the headboard end was a small clock radio, crash-tilted at an angle to the floor, its digital display frozen at 4:44 AM.

As he stepped closer, he figured the dead couple to be in their mid-thirties. He couldn’t find a pulse, but the bodies were still warm to the touch. Rigor had not set in.

Dead less than two hours, Jack thought.

He pulled the plastic disposable camera from his jacket.

The man still had two fingers of his right hand on the butt of a gun, a small black revolver, just at the end of his grasp, dangling askew off the duvet cover. He was grimacing; dark blood spread from the back of his head. In the firm grip of his left fist was the woman’s right hand, their fingers laced, as if he was taking her with him somewhere. There was blood on the back of her right hand, blood on the comforter that had come from inside her palm, and a small red hole in the center of her forehead. Beneath that, a dark puddle had formed in the turned-up collar of her coat. Her eyes were open, and her lips slightly parted; she wore a look of disbelief.

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&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 unusual: 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.