Hot Poppies (14 page)

Henry said to Chen, “He would like you can help him with driver's license if he help you.”

“What's wrong with his license?”

“It got taken away.”

Unperturbed by the preliminary bullshit, Jerry Chen took out a business card and scribbled on the back. “Tell him this will help. If he gets picked up, tell the patrolman to give me a call. OK? Now.”

“Maybe he seen this photographer.”

“How tall is he?”

“Like your friend.” Henry pointed to me. “Very tall.”

“How fat?”

“Fat,” Henry reported. “Fat like two of you, Jeremy.”

Chen led the kid patiently by the nose, took him around the territory to streets, apartments, even area codes I never thought of. I was rusty. Chen cajoled, smiled, patted the kid's knee, told him to eat. He was very good, a seducer, a detective of real talent. I had almost forgotten how slow it could be, like dragging your body through a swimming pool knee deep in molasses, all the digging around for evidence that could take you into a dozen blind alleys, the well-intentioned citizens who gave you the wrong information, the informants, like this jackass, who lied. Jerry never lost it with the kid. A couple of times, Jerry adjusted his belt as if he'd eaten too much, but it was so the kid would see his gun. It was an old trick.

“What else?”

The boy mumbled something to Henry.

“What's he speaking?” I said.

“This and that. I speak Cantonese, Mandarin. This boy is Fujianese. I don't like them, but I do business with them. You surprised, detective? Business is business. He say someone planning a big snatch on ship coming with new illegals.”

“They take them straight off the ship if they can,” Chen explained. “They figure if someone spends thirty grand plus to get over from China, they're gonna spend an extra ten to stay alive. Illegals spend six months on a ship to get over from China, creeps kidnap them right off the ship. They take girls a lot of the time. It's easier. No one gives a shit. There's always more. Even if some fuckwit professor at NYU tells us, no more crime in Chinatown. Ha ha.”

“There is someone who can maybe help you, he says,” Henry reported, relaying a version of what the kid said.

“Is that the one they call Chicken Chicken?” Jerry said.

“No,” said Henry. “Chicken Legs.”

“Not Chicken Lips?”

“Chicken Legs,” Henry insisted. To me he added, “You see Cantonese, Mandarin, Fujianese, all different. All different names. Sometimes we use nicknames that sound like name.”

Under my breath, I muttered to Jerry, “This is where we enter the twilight zone.”

Chen nodded. “This kid doesn't know shit.”

“There's a whorehouse,” Henry said. “The woman drives a white Caddy sometimes.”

Jerry Chen sat up. His body tensed. “Where? Where? Where the fuck is this whorehouse?”

The boy shrugged.

“Tell me where it fucking is or I'll hurt you,” said Chen.

The boy lifted his head half an inch in Henry's direction and said, “Ludlow Street.”

Twenty minutes later, me and Jerry Chen, both half crocked now, were on the second floor of the shitty brownstone on Ludlow Street trying to pick a lock. The hall was covered with linoleum. The light was broken. From one apartment, I could hear a lot of snores. Someone cried. Someone puked their guts out.

“Why do I get the feeling you've been here before?” Jerry asked.

It was the building where I'd seen Hillel. The building with the photo lab. The gates were down on the souvenir shop, but we managed to jimmy the front door and now, we were outside the lab on the second floor trying to break in the door.

“I don't know anything about a whorehouse, Jer.”

“It's not what I fucking asked. You want to tell me what we're looking for in this dump, if it's not for the whorehouse?” Jerry shoved at the door. The frosted glass pane rattled.

“Trust me. Let's just figure this is a little light burglary, official-style, OK? You're an official-style guy.”

In his coat pocket, Chen found a bunch of locksmith's tools and messed with the lock some more. Without any warning the door to an apartment opened and a man bolted into the hall. He was in pajamas. He shouted at us. Chen chased him back through his open door. I followed.

The one-room apartment was about ten by twelve. In three rows of triple-decker bunk beds, eight men were asleep. I couldn't see much, but from the dark recesses came the snores and splutters, the cries and wheezes. The place was damp and fetid. Our guy stood near the doorway and stared hard at us. He got a good look, then crept back into his bunk. We backed out into the hall and went back to the photo lab.

“For Chrissake, Jerry, let me do it.” I snatched the keys out of his hand.

“Fucking fine with me.” He began to laugh. “You think this is how the bad guys do it? Try a credit card,” he said and we cracked up, the two of us, drunk as skunks, trying to pick a lock in the middle of the night.

The lab was a mess. As soon as Jerry switched on a light I saw someone besides us had been nosing around. Boxes of photographs had been turned upside down. Chen lifted some of them off the floor and dumped them onto the sales counter.

“Fucking hell,” he said. “How'd you find out about this dump?”

Rose's picture was in my pocket. I showed him the numbers printed on the back. I told him about Eljay.

“It's one of the advanced photo systems. I've got one of the same fucking cameras. Mr Snap is a state-of-the-art guy. He's using one of these.” Chen pulled a small stainless steel camera out of his pocket. It was the size of a pack of cigarettes. Examining Rose's picture, he said, “The pictures we picked up before were always Polaroids. No way to trace them. This time the son of a bitch left us what we need on print. Right on the goddamn print.”

“What was that?”

“What was what?”

I said, “In the hall. Shut up for a minute.”

“Maybe it's the whores, Art.” Already Chen was turning the boxes upside down, sales slips, prints, cassettes of film spilling onto the counter. “Look for anything with numbers that match the numbers on the girl's picture. Anything. Sales slip. Other prints. You understand computer stuff?”

“About like DNA.” I was looking through the shelves behind the counter now. There were piles of stuff—pictures, photo albums. Some of it was still on the shelves, some had been tossed on the floor. My guess was someone else wanted what we wanted. Then I heard Jerry Chen explode.

“Shit,” he yelled. “Shit shit shit.”

“What?” I got up from behind the counter. Jerry had his hands full of glossy prints.

“First, I thought to myself, why would anyone risk leaving evidence on the prints? Now I get it. It's because you can stick these pictures on a computer, you can send them by e-mail. Everything you can do with a big digital camera, you can do with this baby.”

“So?”

“For years the snakeheads—the smugglers—had to circulate lists of names, the illegals that owed money. Now they can ID them with pictures. I bet they use it to lean on the families back home too. Extort them. Squeeze them.”

“How do they earn that kind of dough? You said, what? Thirty, thirty-five grand.” I pulled a box of sales slips off a shelf and sat on the floor and looked through them.

“You saw the way they live, across the hall? The poor fuckers live like that. They work six, seven days, two, three jobs. They don't spend. They can earn a thousand bucks a week.”

On his knees now, Jerry scrabbled among envelopes of photographs. Then he whistled. One after the other, he opened them, held them upside down and let the pictures fall onto the floor, a stream of glossies, a torrent of tits. He spread them around, turning them face up, one at a time, like a man obsessed with a game of solitaire.

“Jesus fucking Christ.” Chen grabbed at my sleeve. “Look!”

Most of the women in the pictures were naked. Most of them were spread shots. The women simpered and smoldered and struck poses, every lewd pose you could think of, girls alone, girls on girls, with boys, and all of them Chinese.

“You think some of the girls that got snapped with the white Caddy also posed for a little light porn? Is that what we're talking?”

Chen scooped them up and got up off the floor. “I don't know. I'm going to find out, though. You know what I think? I don't think there is any whorehouse. I think this is it. It's the fucking pictures, man. I think we found our whores.”

It was getting to be a long night and it got longer. I never went back to the club, never called. I knew I'd be out of a job, but I had to keep going. Something was fermenting, brewing, boiling up, something was going to happen before this night was over, I felt it in my bones. We left Ludlow Street. For a while, we cruised the downtown bars—Mercury, Match, Pravda, Bowery—Chen looking more and more hangdog at every stop. The photographs were in his pocket but he wasn't in any hurry to do a follow up. Instead, he drove around, slumped low in his seat, mired in some kind of obsession that made me keep my mouth shut and play his game. In front of the Odeon on West Broadway, he jammed the brakes on and slapped a police card on the dashboard. We got out.

“You're not gonna lock your car?”

He laughed. “What for? Anyone steals it, I'll just shoot them.”

And then Chen's face lighted up like a kid in a candy store. “She's here, Art.” He was excited. “She's here.”

At a round table, a thin black style-guru who even I'd heard of was sitting with a no-tit English model. They were eating steak and mashed potatoes, and, between them, Coco Katz, the designer, held court.

Skinny, imperious and tall, Coco Katz looked up and Chen practically drooled over her. Eyes hopeful, smoothing his hair over and over, Jerry waited.

“I like your clothes,” I said to Coco.

She looked me over briefly like I was bubble-wrap. “Do you?” she said. She turned to Chen. “Let's get out of here, Jeremy.”

“She lost a big order, she's upset,” Jerry said, as I made for the door. “You know.”

“Sure, Jer. I know,” I said.

He watched Katz get her coat on. “So, Art, you'll give Pansy my regards when you see her.”

“Leave it alone.”

“I can't do that,” he said. “It's for her own good. I told her that.”

He followed his girlfriend out the door. I went out after them and stood a few feet from Jerry and Coco Katz as they waited for her limo.

“You gonna tell her, Art? You'll tell Pansy, won't you?”

“Your friend, Jerry, she uses the sweatshops? She uses them to make her fancy outfits, huh?”

“Fuck you. Just tell her. Tell her she has to talk to me. Tell Pansy Loh, if she isn't already dead.” Jerry took a picture out of his pocket and flipped it to me.

“You found that at the lab?”

“Nope. This one I already had. This one I been fucking saving to give you, Art.”

It was another picture of Pansy.

13

Queens, as a borough, is a lot like hell: it bleeds at the edges and becomes Long Island, but, after I left Chen in front of the Odeon, I went to Queens because of the sales slip I found in the lab on Ludlow Street. The numbers of the slip matched the numbers encoded on the back of Rose's photograph. There was an address in Flushing. It wasn't much. But I didn't have much. Also, I'd called Lily three times; she must be out with Leung. What were they talking about? Babies?

Like everywhere else, the streets in Flushing were dead. White and dead. Small neat houses, strip malls, all of them hunkered down, inanimate, frozen.

I stood in the middle of the suburban street and looked around. Where was I? I got out the map of the city which I always carry—a lot of times it's better than a gun—and tried to figure out where in the hell I was.

When I did, I walked a couple blocks and found the address. It was a vacant lot. A vacant lot full of broken bottles and piles of dirty snow. A brick wall ran along the back of the lot and I went to see what was on the other side when the thing fell on me. It grabbed my hair and clawed the dry cold skin on my face, but the adrenalin shot into my system and even my legs pumped as I threw it off, whatever it was. Without looking back, I ran like a bat out of hell. After a block I stopped and put my hands on my knees and tried to get my breath. I looked back. The street was empty and I realized what had jumped me in the vacant lot was a huge, fat, feral cat. The skin on my face was lacerated; the thing had missed my eye, but when I put my hand on my cheek it came away wet with blood.

Shivering on the corner in Flushing, I tried to orient myself and get to a subway. I was wondering if New York cats were ever rabid, when a gypsy cab stopped for the light and I leaped into the street and banged on the door.

“Going home, bub,” said the driver.

“Where's home?” I said. He said Brooklyn and I got in. For thirty bucks, he dropped me off near the bridge; the bastard wouldn't even cross the bridge to Manhattan, so I set off, hands jammed in my pockets, face burned raw with scratches and fatigue.

I didn't know what to make of Jerry Chen. He blew hot and cold. He was a smart cop but a tortured angry man, and he was in thrall to Coco Katz. I pitied him for that; it happens to all of us, one time or another.

A wind tugged a cloud cover back over the sky, and the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge soared against the whitening sky. On the wooden walkway of the bridge, a man passed, a miner's light fixed to his forehead. By the time I got to the other side, I was half frozen.