The Misfortune Cookie

“I haven’t thought of one yet.”

“Hmm. You know, sometimes—”

“Ted!”

We both flinched. The whole restaurant flinched.

Susan Yee was standing in the doorway of the restaurant, her cheeks flushed, her eyes blazing as she stared at her brother. “Ted!”

Ted waved to her casually. “Oh, hey, Susan.” Then he returned to conferring with Lopez, who (like everyone else) stared at Susan as she stomped angrily through the restaurant, making a beeline for Ted.

“Are you getting arrested?” Susan demanded.

“Nah, it’s cool,” said Ted.

“I heard that a police officer stopped your filming today,” Susan continued, loud and furious. Everyone was watching with interest, including me and Quinn. “I heard that you were filming in the street without a location permit! Breaking the law!”

Lopez rose to his feet and introduced himself, then said, “You must be Ted’s wife.”

Oops.

I recalled that he tended to have cynical views about marriage. Not due to his parents, who seemed to be very happy together after nearly forty years of wedlock, but rather due to crime statistics and his experiences as a cop in dealing with domestic violence.

“I’m his sister,” Susan hissed.

“Oh. Sorry. My mistake.”

“I should say so!”

“Susan, chill, okay? Detective Lopez fixed the whole thing for me.”

“What?” Susan shrieked at Ted. “Did you bribe him?”

“On the other hand,” Quinn said to me, obviously enjoying this, “working with Lopez is never dull. I gotta give him that.”

“It was just a little misunderstanding and an honest mistake, Miss Yee,” Lopez said. “We’ve talked about it, and Ted knows not to do it again.”

“How do you know about this, anyhow?” Ted asked her in puzzlement.

“I know,” Susan said tersely, “because the whole damn restaurant knows, Ted. Even you must have noticed people coming and going while you’ve been here? And by tomorrow, I assume half of Chinatown will know that my little brother was arrested in the street today—”

“I wasn’t arrested,” Ted protested mildly.

“—because of his stupid movie!”

Rushing in where fools would know better than to tread, Lopez said, “He wasn’t arrested, Miss Yee. Ted’s a good citizen who agreed to stop filming as soon as Officer Novak informed him that—”

“That he had no business being there?” Susan said shrilly. “That he was breaking the law? And making a spectacle of himself?”

“Man, we should turn her loose on Ning’s new lawyer,” Quinn murmured to me. “I’d sell tickets.”

“And,” said Lopez, raising his voice, “we’re going over the script right now to make sure it won’t happen again. So it’s all under control now.”

“That’s right,” said Ted. “Detective Lopez is going to help me with everything, Susan. He’s got a friend who handles the location permits for the city, so he’s going to walk my applications in there personally and make sure everything is shipshape from now on. Right, detective?”

“Right,” Lopez said wearily.

Quinn looked at me. “Can’t you see how desperate our boy is to get laid again?”

“Oh, just eat your dumplings,” I said.

“Detective Lopez is on top of this, Susan. So lay off, huh? Things are going to go smoother now that I’ve got him helping me.”

Susan said to Lopez, “My brother needs to be taught a lesson. Can’t you just arrest him?”

“I, uh . . .” Lopez looked in our direction and said vaguely, “I think my lunch is ready. Excuse me, Miss Yee.”

“Here, take a copy of the script with you, detective,” said Ted. “And we’ll talk later, right?”

“Right.” After he joined us at the counter, script in hand, Lopez muttered, “Does either one of you have something for a headache?”

Quinn shook his head, then reached for his cell phone when it started ringing.

“In my purse,” I said to Lopez. “I’ll be right back.”

When Susan saw me, the woman whom she had warned away from her brother’s film, she cast a glance over my outfit and sneered, then ignored me. She was still berating Ted, making a scene that all of Chinatown would surely know about before long, when I returned to the lunch counter and handed Lopez some painkillers.

“God, what a start this year has gotten off to,” he said morosely.

Quinn finished his call and said to him, “We’ve got to go.”

“Now?” Lopez looked sadly at the delectable dishes that had just been set before him for his lunch.

“Right now,” Quinn said with a nod.

Lopez sighed and asked the waiter. “Can you put this in a carry-out bag?”

12 Fortune, luck

“And that’s all Lopez said about being in Chinatown. So it looks like you got lucky again,” I said to the notorious Alberto Battistuzzi as I spooned a modest portion of steamed crab in spicy sauce onto my plate that evening in the Chens’ back office.

“I’m trapped in a funeral home,” he said grumpily. “How lucky is that?”

“You’re safely hidden in a funeral home,” I corrected, “which should be treated as good news, given that you were worried about being rumbled.”

The old capo sighed and nodded in acknowledgement of this. “I’m a little cranky, I guess. I got word before you got here that OCCB has arrested a couple more of our guys. This is a grim time for the family.”

“Has Don Victor been taken into custody?” Max asked, helping himself to some food.

“No, that’s the good news,” said Lucky. “They still can’t touch the boss. Not so far.”

“Your loyalty to the head of your famiglia does you honor,” said Max, which I thought was a tactful way of commenting on the situation.

“It’s how I was raised.” Lucky looked at me again. “So your boyfr—uh, Detective Lopez really don’t seem to have any idea that I’m holed in up Chinatown?”

“No.” I shook my head. “No hint of it at all. He seems to be in the neighborhood strictly to work on the Ning case.”

“Then that’s one problem we are spared,” said Max, who had been apprised of Lucky’s concerns about Lopez before my arrival this evening. “Beef with preserved ginger, Esther?”

“No, thanks, Max. I’ve got a costume fitting later, and I had a pretty hearty lunch today. So I’d better eat lightly.”

Max had brought such a delectable dinner, though, that I was tempted to stuff myself despite how it would make me look in the tiny outfits that Ted insisted on for Alicia.

“I thought you were done working for the day?” Lucky said as I handed him the container of crab.

There was currently no one else (well, no living person) in the mortuary. John was still at the NYU lab, his father was playing mahjong this evening, and his brother had gone home for the night