The Misfortune Cookie

of my way.”

“Fiery temper. Mmmm. Lots of potential. You know what I mean?” He winked again.

I was about to speak sharply to him when someone near us burst into noisy sobs. Distracted, I looked over my shoulder. A pretty young woman in a tight black dress (one that was better suited to a cocktail party than a wake) was weeping uncontrollably as she gazed at Benny in his coffin. Her elaborate hairdo (better suited to opening night at the opera) gleamed under the lights as she shook her head in anguished denial while staring at the departed. Her dangling earrings sparkled, and long, fake eyelashes fluttered as tears streamed down her face.

“I guess Benny will be missed,” I murmured.

“Yeah,” said Danny Teng. “Benny was good to her.”

“Oh.” I realized who the girl must be. “She was his secretary?”

“That’s one word for it,” he said with a snort.

Realizing this guy had known Benny, I reluctantly decided to see what I could learn from him. While the secretary continued sobbing over the corpse, I said to Danny Teng, as cheerfully as if he weren’t intentionally blocking my escape route, “So this is quite a wake, huh? A big turnout.”

“Sure. Benny had some juice.”

“I’ll bet,” I said with a nod. “All those floral wreaths. Some of them are really elaborate, too. All these offerings. So many visitors.”

“It’s important to show face when a guy like Benny dies,” said Danny. “A big funeral, no expense spared, a lot of mourners. It’s a sign of respect. The way it should be when your number comes up—if you were anybody that mattered, I mean.”

“How well did you know Benny?”

Danny shrugged. “I guess I knew him a long time.”

“How did—”

“So why don’t you and me get outta here, babe?”

“For someone who knew him a long time, you don’t seem that broken up about his sudden passing,” I noted.

“I know a lot of dead people,” Danny said, and I believed him.

“How did you know this dead person?”

“You could say we were business associates.” He leaned closer to me, his breath hot on my face. “How about we go somewhere for a drink?”

“Business associates?” My gaze flickered over Danny’s attire. “What sort of business are you . . . Oh. Wait.” John had said that Benny Yee was the sort of tong boss I read about in the news, involved in crime and violence. And Danny looked like the epitome of a Chinatown street thug.

“You’re in a gang,” I guessed.

“Is that a turn-on?” he asked in what he evidently thought was a seductive voice. “A lotta girls like that.”

“You worked for Benny?” I asked. “For the Five Brothers?”

“I work for me,” he snapped. “No one gives Danny Teng orders.”

“But your gang is associated with his tong?” I persisted.

His expression changed. “Oh, shit, you’re not a reporter, are you?”

Since that possibility obviously repelled him, I didn’t deny it. “Who are the Five Brothers?”

“Like you just said, it’s a tong.”

“No, I mean, who are the five brothers the tong is named after?”

“Oh, who cares? They’re long gone. That was, like, a hundred years ago.”

“The tong is that old?” Well, most of them were, I recalled. There had been tong wars in Chinatown since the nineteenth century.

“We could skip the drink,” he said. “Just go straight to my place.”

“Was someone after Benny?” I asked. “Do you think he might have been murdered?”

“Jesus, you are a reporter,” Danny said with disgust, turning away.

“I know he had enemies. Do you think one of them . . . ? Never mind,” I said to his retreating back.

Above the sobs of Benny Yee’s secretary, I suddenly heard a woman shouting in Chinese. I looked in that direction and saw that the widowed Mrs. Yee had shed her expression of stoic grief in favor of an animated look of outrage. She was on her feet, pointing a finger at Benny’s weeping secretary and shouting a torrent of words at her which, based on the appalled expressions of the relatives surrounding her, I was glad I didn’t understand. Several men in the family were trying to appeal to Mrs. Yee to calm down, but she shook them off and continued hollering angrily at the secretary, whose sobs turned into a high-pitched screeching wail that made me wince.

A beautiful middle-aged woman dressed in a black knee-length cheongsam, that elegant, body-hugging style of Chinese dress, joined the men of the family in trying to persuade Mrs. Yee to calm down. She didn’t have any effect, either. When she put her hand on Mrs. Yee’s shoulder, the other woman impatiently shook her off.

Having been rebuffed, the woman in the cheongsam cast a frowning glance at a young man who was still seated in his chair. He was looking the other way and evidently trying to pretend that this noisy family scene wasn’t occurring. She spoke to him sharply in Chinese, but he seemed not to hear her. Her tone grew exasperated as she switched to English. “I’m speaking to you, Ted!”

“Huh?” he said vaguely, looking in her direction now.

“Ted, please do something!”

Ted, I thought with interest. The filmmaker.

He looked pretty unprepossessing. But then, directors often do. (And writers usually look like they should be in a padded cell.) He was younger than I expected—early twenties, probably. Very skinny, he wore his long hair in a messy shag that kept getting in his eyes, his white shirt was half-untucked and wrinkled, his tie was loose, and he was the only male family member who wasn’t wearing a suit.

He shrugged and said something to the woman whom I now took for his mother, but I couldn’t hear him above all the shouting.

Whatever he’d said, it caused his mother to turn away from him with an expression of resigned disappointment that I had a feeling Ted saw often on her face.

Then a pretty woman in her twenties started saying in American-accented English, loudly enough for everyone to hear, “Aunt Grace is right. That woman has some nerve showing up here!”

The beautiful woman in the cheongsam said firmly, “Susan, please.”

But Susan—Ted’s sister, whom I remembered John mentioning earlier—ignored this. She said directly to Benny’s secretary, “Get out of here! Can’t you see you’re upsetting my aunt? Show some respect!”

The secretary’s grief turned to anger, and she started shrieking at Mrs. Yee and Susan.

Apart from Susan, who continued using English, everyone was still speaking Chinese, so I didn’t understand what was being said; but it didn’t take much imagination to guess what Benny’s wife and mistress were shouting at each other over his dead body while his offspring and relatives watched with horrified embarrassment. I looked around and noticed that virtually all the visitors I could see were also focused on this scandalous scene, watching the players with riveted interest—and very glad, I suspected, that they had braved tonight’s rotten weather to pay their respects at what was turning out to be quite a memorable wake.

I returned my attention to the shouting match—which was when I realized what should have occurred to me before: If Benny had been murdered, then Mrs. Yee was an obvious suspect. I had watched enough episodes of Crime and Punishment to know that the spouse often turned out to be the killer.

John had said that Benny Yee had a lot of enemies; but closer to home, he had a wife he was cheating on —and based on the determined way she was advancing on Benny’s mistress right now, she didn’t seem like a woman you could expect to cross with impunity. Mrs. Yee roughly shook off the restraining hands of her anxious young male relatives (her sons, I assumed), stopped at the altar near Benny’s coffin to pick up a bronze incense burner, and then leaped vengefully at Benny’s screeching secretary.

“Hey!” Without conscious thought, just acting on reflex, I jumped into the fray and threw myself bodily against the secretary, slamming her sideways so that Mrs. Yee’s deadly swipe at her skull with that heavy object missed its target.