The Misfortune Cookie: An Esther Diamond Novel (20 page)

“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?”

Fortune, luck

“A
nd 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 after letting me into the building and thanking me for preventing Benny Yee’s widow from committing a murder here during her husband’s wake.

Nelli lay by the door, contentedly chewing on a bone that Max had brought to keep her occupied. He believed this activity helped her think. As Nelli made occasional happy little sounds while gnawing on her prize, I wondered what she thought
about.

“Well, yes, I
am
finished filming for the day,” I said to Lucky. Which was why I was now fully covered in layers of warm winter clothing, with my face clean of Alicia’s makeup. “But as I was leaving the set, Ted asked me if I’d meet him at his mother’s store later to try on some outfits for a party scene that we’re supposed to film later on.”

To my relief, he hadn’t wanted me to do the fitting at that moment, since he had a meeting to go to right after the shoot; so I hadn’t had to cancel my plans to confer with Lucky and Max over dinner at the funeral home.

“How is the filming going?” Max asked me.

I waggled my hand. “So-so.”

I started giving them a judiciously edited account of the day’s events while I served myself some steamed Chinese broccoli. Then I succumbed to temptation and put a dumpling stuffed with succulent shredded duck on my plate.

After our eventful lunch on Doyers, which had concluded with Ted assuring a departing Lopez that we certainly would not attempt to film on location again without a permit, most of us had returned to the loft on Hester Street to shoot part of a different scene there, so the day wouldn’t be completely wasted.

The loft, which was chilly and pretty bare-bones, had belonged to Benny Yee, and it served as Ted’s production base. This was where I had auditioned for my role. Ted used some of the space to store all his film equipment. Another part of the loft was set aside for the actors to get into costume and makeup. The rest of the space was a film set decorated to look like a small apartment; this was where the movie’s protagonist lived, and a number of scenes took place here.

As we were setting up for the afternoon shoot there, I’d learned that Ted had an additional problem, besides losing Benny as an investor. It turned out that Benny had not left his widow as well-fixed as everyone assumed, and Grace Yee needed to sell this loft in order to solve the financial problems created by Benny’s recent business setbacks. These fiscal woes, she had explained privately to Ted, were why she couldn’t honor Benny’s memory by sinking more money into the movie which had been his last investment in life. Even for Benny’s nephew, Grace just couldn’t spare the cash—as her sons kept telling her.

She was sympathetic to Ted’s situation and didn’t plan to kick him out of the loft, but she was going to have to put the place on the market soon. She was just waiting to be advised of an auspicious date for that.

“Astrology is very important to Chinese people,” Ted explained in a quick aside to me, when telling us about the possibility of losing the loft as our production base and primary set. “She wouldn’t want to launch the sale on an unlucky day.”

Fortune and luck, both good and bad, kept playing a big role in everyone’s fate here, including mine.

Due to the economy, the loft might sit on the market for a long time. After all, although it was in a good location, it would probably need remodeling and updating to be useful to anyone besides an indie filmmaker or a tong underlord. (I was curious about what Benny had used the place for before loaning it to Ted, but I assumed I was better off not knowing.)

“Or this loft might sell within days to a buyer who wants us out of here by the closing date.” Ted concluded with a shrug, “There’s no way of knowing.”

“What’ll happen to the movie if we lose this space?” Bill asked anxiously. “I really need this film to succeed, Ted. My parents . . . you know.”

I resisted the urge to give Bill a reality check. Even if the film got finished, which wasn’t a given,
success
was nowhere in this low-budget movie’s future. Not with Ted’s clumsy script and plodding direction.

“Don’t worry, we’ll find another space,” said the ever-optimistic Ted. “Our fortunes are improving all the time. I’ve got a meeting later today with our new backer.”

“We have a new backer?” I asked eagerly.

“Well, I
hope
he’s our new backer,” said Ted. “Fingers crossed.”

Indeed.

Dressing, undressing, and sitting around waiting to work were uncomfortable in the frigid loft. So was touching each other, due to how cold our hands were. We wound up working on a love scene between Brian and Alicia today, during which my shirt kept getting hiked up (but stayed on); and every time Bill touched my bare skin, it was hard not to shriek.

Cynthia wasn’t needed for this scene, since Mei wasn’t in it, so she had gone home after lunch. Archie was with us on set, though, since Jianyu came to Brian in a vision while Alicia was trying to seduce him.

None of us had our lines down well for the scene, since we hadn’t expected to shoot it today, so progress was slow and we had to do a lot of retakes. Which meant that I spent much of the afternoon repeatedly flinging myself at Bill, who responded with comedic uncertainty to Alicia’s aggressive sexuality. The first few takes were a little uncomfortable between us, since we were scant acquaintances who’d never done more than shake hands before, and now I was in his arms and kissing him. But after we’d done this several times in a row while Ted asked me to tilt my head differently, the production assistant called out the lines we kept forgetting, and Archie was practicing moves nearby with his sword while waiting for his cue . . . the awkwardness faded, and Bill and I got pretty comfortable with each other.

Kissing a fellow actor in performance isn’t like kissing someone in life. Your character may well have complex feelings about embracing the other person, but
you’re
just doing your job. So unless your relationship with the other actor is making the situation complicated (which wasn’t the case here), once you get over the initial embarrassment of intimately touching each other, doing a love scene isn’t that much different than doing a close-contact fight scene or a dance routine together.

It’s all physical acting, and in each instance, you have to rehearse together, develop trust and a comfort zone with each other, learn your mutual moves well enough to make the scene look spontaneous and natural, hit your marks, say your lines, and make sure your face can be seen when the director wants it seen. And whether you’re on camera or on stage, the whole time you’re touching and kissing each other while exchanging seductive dialogue and pretending to be turned on, lots of people are right there in the room watching you. When filming a love scene, the director may be within a foot of your embracing bodies, and the camera and microphone may be perilously close to hitting you in the head.

So although Bill was the first man who had touched me this way since Lopez had left my bedroom Christmas morning, there was no similarity whatsoever between the two experiences, and one didn’t remind me of the other.

Anyhow, as I now told Max and Lucky, we’d gotten a very late start on filming today because of the Doyers Street mess, and we hadn’t really learned our lines for the scene we wound up working on. (I didn’t tell my two companions that the scene involved a lot of kissing and fondling.) So we didn’t get much done today and would have to return to the same scene tomorrow.

“And at some point,” I concluded, “we’ll also have to go back to Doyers to film the scene we should have filmed today.”

Max reached for a second helping of noodles as he said, “It was most thoughtful of Detective Lopez to offer to help expedite the necessary paperwork for the filming to proceed more smoothly.”

“Thoughtful, my elbow,” said Lucky. “He owed it to her.”

I froze for a moment, feeling awkward as I realized he must know what all his colleagues who’d been busted at Bella Stella knew—that I’d had sex with Lopez (twice) after the arrests at Fenster’s, and then he’d never called me.

Lucky added, “He’s the reason she lost her last job, after all.”

“That’s right,” I said with an emphatic nod, though I recognized that Detective Quinn had a point; I’d lost my job because I was working in a mob joint that got busted. Even Thack had said it was bound to happen eventually.

“Besides,” Lucky added, “it’s no secret that Detective Lopez has got a thing for Esther. Anyone can see it. So he probably feels bad about what he did to her. Maybe he even wishes he could go back and change what happened.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” said Max, oblivious to the subtext that I suspected I was hearing. “Helping her now was obviously the honorable thing to do.”

“Hmph,” I said, recalling that Quinn seemed to think Lopez was helping me in hopes of getting laid again.

“Yep. If he’s bein’ a stand-up guy now,” said Lucky, “well, it’s no more than he
should
do for a lady he’s wronged that way he wronged our Esther.”

Our eyes met for a moment, and I saw that he did indeed know. But he was, in his way, a gentleman of the old school, so he would never mention it. Not directly, anyhow—and probably not ever again, either.

So I smiled at him and said, “Being saddled with the job of liaising between Ted Yee and city bureaucracy might even be sufficient punishment.
I
sure wouldn’t want to be in Lopez’s shoes now.”

“And speaking of Detective Lopez,” Lucky said, though his tone suggested he was changing the subject, “it’s kinda funny that he’s poking around Chinatown because of the Ning family.”

“Funny ha-ha or funny strange?” I asked.

“From where I’m sittin’, funny coincidental.” He added with a philosophical shrug, “Or maybe not. Uncle Six has got his fingers in so many pies, maybe it ain’t that strange that Young Blue Eyes and I both wound up with our hooks stuck in him at the same time.”

“Ah!” said Max, who had obviously followed Lucky’s mixed metaphors better than I had. “While Detective Lopez is revisiting his former investigation of the younger Ning whom the elder Ning is now trying to get exonerated, you have uncovered relevant information about the Nings in the course of your inquiries into Benny Yee’s affairs.”

“Yep.”

“Oh.” I said in surprise to Lucky, “Do you mean you think Uncle Six wanted Benny dead?”

“Sure looks like it,” he confirmed.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “They were both in the Five Brothers tong. Wouldn’t that make them allies rather than enemies?”

“Well, I don’t know about the Chinese, kid—John’s an educated boy, so he could tell us—but Sicilians must have a hundred proverbs that warn you how dangerous your
friends
can be,” said Lucky. “Sometimes they rat on you . . .”

Which was presumably what Victor Gambello was worried about these days, with so many of his “family” members being arrested.

“. . . and sometimes they stab you in the back—which they’re in a position to do because you trusted them. After all, giving someone an opportunity like that is a mistake a man doesn’t make with his enemies.”