Ming-kuo had dressed in a shirt, tie and jacket. In the bright lights of the Korean restaurant, he looked like a chubby variety-show host minus the microphone and charm.
“This isn’t a job interview,” I told him.
“I wanted to look professional,” he said eagerly. “My mother always said that even though I wasn’t good-looking, I could at least dress well.” Man, was she right.
“Your mom was wrong,” I said.
“I don’t dress well?”
“You are good-looking,” I said as I wiped my mouth. I delved into the menu so I wouldn’t have to look at him.
“Thank you, Jing-nan! You’re a good-looking guy yourself!”
“Say, Ming-kuo. If I take you to Hsinchu City, do you think you could point out the stand Julia was working at?”
“I don’t know if I could. It’s been a few years and it was dark. No, I definitely couldn’t.”
“A few years? I thought you said it was a few months ago.”
He smiled and nodded. “Ah, you see how bad my memory is?”
“So which was it, a few months or a few years?”
He gave me an exasperated look. “Jeez, you’re making me feel like this is a job interview, putting all this pressure on me!”
I mashed my right foot into the ground. “Ming-kuo, could you please get serious about this? I’d like to know any details you can remember.”
“Well, then I guess we can choose something in between. Let’s say it was a year ago.”
“Last Ghost Month?”
“Sure, let’s say that.”
Gan! Could I believe anything this guy said? I sipped some water and swished it around my mouth. “Ming-kuo, I’m going to level with you. I’m actually asking for Julia’s parents. I’m seeing them after this and I’m going to have to tell them I couldn’t come up with anything useful.”
His eyes bugged out and he cracked his knuckles again. “You’re asking for her parents, Jing-nan? I thought you were trying to get to the bottom of things for yourself. I mean, you two were practically married.”
“Only in our minds.” I noticed that our silently furious waitress was standing at the ready. She took our orders for zhajiangmian, wheat noodles in bean sauce, without saying a word, and returned with several appetizers, ranging from salty to spicy, and steamed to chilled. There are a lot of different ways to make zhajiangmian, but for my money the best one is a dish that originated in the ethnic Chinese communities living in Korea. This variety includes a thick black paste made from roasted and fermented soybeans and tiny chunks of pork. The only place to find this type is in Korean restaurants that include Chinese items on their menu. Apart from that I didn’t know much about Korean food, and I knew even less about the little snacks. I didn’t want to ask our waitress about them because she was already mad enough that she had to serve us. It also didn’t help that Cookie Monster was looking at her like she was the daily special.
Classy as ever, Ming-kuo craned his neck and stared at her ass as she left.
“It’s not a crystal ball,” I said.
Ming-kuo sighed, shoved his elbows up on the table and cradled his head. “I’m not like you. Looking is all I get to do.”
“You haven’t been dating?” I asked, suppressing a laugh.
“Every few months I work up the courage to approach a girl, but I strike out every time.”
“I’m a virgin,” he said with exasperation.
Gan! Or rather, non-gan!
“That’s an honorable thing, Ming-kuo. You’re saving yourself for marriage.”
“But how do I get to marriage if I can’t even get a date?”
“What a situation you’re in. You work at a love hotel and everyone else around you is getting laid.”
He dug his chopsticks into a cold dish of sprouted beans and threw them into his mouth. “You don’t have to rub it in,” he said with his mouth full.
I sampled some silvery fish that looked like crumpled foil candy wrappers with eyes. “I’m just making an observation. I’m not making fun of you.”
“You’re laughing at me.”
I bit into the inside of my left cheek. “I’m not laughing.”
“This is a fine way to treat your old classmate.”
A different waitress brought our zhajiangmian, snipped the noodles in our bowls with a pair of plastic scissors and left without saying a word. This would have been a huge breach of etiquette in a Chinese restaurant. Sure, shorter noodles would be easier to eat, but the noodle represents one’s existence. Breaking it means shortening your life. You’re supposed to have the entire noodle in your mouth before chewing it.
But it was just another stupid superstition. Why pay attention to it?
Ming-kuo’s face was ashen.
“She didn’t even ask if she could cut the noodles,” he said to the table.
I picked up my chopsticks and mixed the bowl. The bean sauce was impressively thick, like tar.
“Ming-kuo, you scared that first waitress away. This one probably has it in for you as well.”
The minor calamity wouldn’t stop Cookie Monster from eating. I’m not even sure a major one would. The dejected look on his face didn’t perk up, but he began to feed. At least he used a napkin. “You think she saw me look?” he asked.
“Of course she did! Women see everything.”
“I’m sorry I don’t have the experience that you do. Nobody was ever in love with me, all right?”
As I ate, I continued to stir up the noodles. You have to. The sauce is so thick, it can only penetrate the ball of noodles one layer at a time. The greasy black gravy made slopping sounds like someone chewing with his mouth open, as Ming-kuo was. The poor bastard.
“Look,” I said. “I’m going to help you, okay? I’m going to fix you up.”
“With whom?”
“A pretty girl.”
“She has to be smart.”
Don’t make it tougher for me, I thought.
THE ZHAJIANGMIAN WASN’T SITTING right in my stomach, and the little bumps I hit on the way to the Huangs’ apartment sent strands of noodles whipping around inside.
It felt like a final act. This part of my life was over. This was the goodbye.
I wasn’t worried about the big Taiwanese-American. If I ran into him, I’d say I was here only to pay my respects to Julia’s parents one last time, and I was never going to see them again. Even an uncouth Taiwanese-American would understand that.
I pulled up to their building. I would give it to them plain and simple. I had tried asking Julia’s NYU classmates but neither of them had anything useful to offer. That would be enough for them.
But was it enough for me? Damn, Ming-kuo’s words were stuck in my head now: “You two were practically married.” Any husband whose wife had just been murdered would not rest until the killer was prosecuted—or he’d go out and kill the guy himself.
At least that’s how it is in the movies. I didn’t know if I could hold a gun in my hands, much less shoot someone.
I put my hands in my pockets and rode up the elevator. The doors made a hard scraping sound I could feel in my molars as they opened. Strange. The ride had been quiet last time. The place was falling apart.
I rang the doorbell and stood back. I saw something block the light of the peephole.
“Jing-nan!” Mrs. Huang shouted through the door. “What are you doing here?”
Odd. She sounded unusually surprised and maybe a little scared.
“Hello, Mrs. Huang, I just wanted to talk to you a little bit,” I said.
“It’s all right. Everything’s okay. Don’t need to come here anymore!”
“What?”
“Go home or go to work. Just go away.”
Just go away? Now that was just plain mean!
“Mrs. Huang, are you all right?”
“Get out of here now and stop bothering people!” I heard her stomp away from the door.
“You won’t even let him in?” I heard her husband say. “That’s rude!”
My thoughts exactly.
“Doesn’t matter!” she yelled at him, before apparently dragging him off to their bedroom so she could yell at him some more.
I was stunned. Out of all the phrases she could have used, she had to pick that one. It was the most hurtful thing anyone could say to me.
I crossed my arms and walked gingerly to the elevator. I felt the way I used to as a kid when my grandfather would reprimand me for transgressions I didn’t know I had committed.
Was I somehow at fault here?
Maybe they had been expecting me to call every day with updates? I hadn’t wanted to talk on the phone because it wasn’t respectful enough.
Maybe I should have come to Julia’s altar every night? No, they knew neither of us was into such a thing.
Then it hit me.
Someone had gotten to the Huangs. That Taiwanese-American and the goon who had confronted me at Taipei 101. I subconsciously covered my stomach with my hands.
The bad guys were probably watching the Huangs’ apartment. They probably saw me come in.
I continued walking cautiously down the hallway, but the sound of a door closing on another floor spooked me. I broke into a full run to the elevator, which was jammed open with the light off. Reluctantly, I ducked into the stairwell and began the long walk down. The smell got to me immediately. It wasn’t just putrid garbage. It was the stink of rotted and maggoty meat run-off. A few people must have missed the garbage truck and hurled their kitchen waste into the stairwell.
I tried to get out at the next floor, but the stairwell door was locked. A nearby sign said that all the doors were locked from the stairwell side as a security measure. I had no choice but to continue.
I looked down and saw something that made my heart stop. The lights were out to the ground floor.
I heard another stairwell door open somewhere above me and slam shut. Then came the sounds of steady footsteps and a solidwood sound tapping the floor—a baseball bat?
The goons had been waiting for me. I had already been given my last warning. This was where they were going to finish me, making me yet another victim of an unsolved murder.
Using my phone light as a guide, I walked down quickly and cautiously.
“Hey!” called out a gruff man’s voice. “I hear you down there! Don’t try to run away!”
I stumbled down as fast as I could. Soon I was on the ground floor. I shone my phone light around until I saw the shiny metal handle of the door.
The damn thing was locked.
The footsteps continued to descend from above at a deliberate pace, heavy with authority.
“You’ve run out of room, eh?” the man taunted. He slammed the bat hard on the ground. “Like a little cornered rat, ha ha ha!”
There was nowhere to hide. I stood with my back against the door, waiting for the inevitable. I was going to find out how long a pair of fists could last against a baseball bat.
A beam of light from the stairwell poked around my feet.
“I see you! You’re gonna get what’s coming! You shoulda listened to my warnings!”
The light zipped up to my face, blinding me. I did the bravest thing I could think of. I brought my two fists up into the light.
“I’m not going to go down easy!” I yelled.
“Huh, what’s this?” the voice asked. “Who are you?”
“I was just here visiting someone,” I stammered.
I heard the sound of a large ring of keys rattle.
“Get away from the door,” the man commanded. I moved to the side. A dull light poured in as the man wedged the door open.
He was a big guy in his thirties, and his uniform said he was the maintenance man. The crooked fingers of his right hand were wrapped around the middle of a wooden axe handle.
“Sorry, fella. I thought you were one of those kids messing with the elevator. You know, they jam up the doors by putting crates and bricks in the door so it can’t go anywhere. Eventually the thing shuts down, and I have to call in the elevator guys.” He swung the axe handle to his shoulder. “I was just trying to scare them. I wasn’t going to hurt anybody.”
“Are you going to do something about that smell?”
“You smell something?”
I WALKED OUT INTO the lobby and pushed the building doors open with shaking hands.
I got on my moped and started the engine. I sighed as I drove in slow, lazy loops around the parking lot.
I had been warned not to ask questions about Julia and even taken a beating for it. I was ready to provide what little closure I could on the whole sad story. Unexpectedly, Julia’s parents had closed the books on me.
Doesn’t matter, huh? Your only kid doesn’t matter? I went through hell and it doesn’t matter?
Anger coursed my body, but as I got madder, I also softened. I thought about the kid I had been and the girl Julia had once been, too. They were so in love. Sure, they were stupid. What was wrong with that?
What would that stupid, love-struck kid do right now?
He would go to the police. Of course! Sure, the Huangs had given up on the cops, but older people don’t know how to talk to authority figures. They’re too deferential, and that never gets you anywhere. Jenny had shown me the way. Stick the phone in their faces and make a video.
Besides, the Huangs had been bugging the wrong people. They had been harassing the Taipei City cops when they should have been sticking it to the Hsinchu City police.
When I marched into that hick police station, confident and cocky, they would know there would be no peace until they solved the case. Those stupid, lazy cops would have to set down their coffee cups and bowls of Hsinchu ba-wan meat dumplings and get off their asses for a change.
I cracked my neck. This was Johnny talking.