Ground Zero: the San Dimas Happy Year Chinese Restaurant. There are three other Happy Year restaurants spread around the San Gabriel Valley, each of them newer and larger than this one, but the San Dimas location is the granddaddy, home base. On Saturday at lunchtime, the parking lot is a bit of a shit show.
“I hope we can get a table,” Jules murmurs. We’re lurking in her hatchback as we wait for three generations of a Chinese family to pile into a minivan. A honk sounds from the growing line of vehicles behind us, and Jules thrusts a middle finger out her window. That numb mood has come over me again, the one in which I keep reconstructing the last night of Dad’s life, replaying various scenarios in my head, now with additional detail: two precise stabs in the chest and a clean slash across— Lang didn’t finish his sentence, but I have a good guess.
It’s not until we’re walking through the automatic sliding doors that I realize how uncomfortable this situation will be. The two young hostesses rush up to us as soon as we step inside the waiting area. Wearing long faces and pink qipao, they ask us in their chirpy Fujian accents if we’re holding up okay, if we have everything we need. They tell us how things aren’t the same without Dad around. Blood rushes to my face as the twenty-odd people waiting for tables perk up and bend their closest ears toward our conversation.
Rick Yin shows up to save us. Tall, handsome, and fluent in English, “Slick Rick” Yin has worked at Happy Year almost as long as Dad, I guess because his acting career never took off. Dad valued him enough to pay him nearly twice as much as any of his other employees. Technically he’s the front-of-house manager, but Dad often had him on the phone with the bank, the utilities, the Chamber of Commerce, and so on, and not only because he speaks perfect English. Slick Rick can wheel, deal, and wheedle. On the rare occasion that someone orders a bottle of wine, he makes them feel like they’re at a Michelin-starred restaurant just by how he opens it.
“Xiǎozhōu, Liányīng, nǐ zŏngsuàn lái le—You’re here at last,” Rick says, as if we were turning up late instead of unexpectedly, and he wraps the two of us into a big hug like he’d been doing since we were in grade school.
“It’s really nice to see you, Rick,” I say, meaning it.
“How’s business?” says Jules.
“Oh, business is great, really, super. You know your Dad, he trained us pretty well! A new guy came over from Beijing to help out, Mr. Rou. He’s back in the office. You’ll want to meet him. Kind of a character,” and Rick laughs like he said something hilarious. He seems a little antsy beneath his Chinese Elvis veneer. I thank him and tell him that we’ll go back and see Mr. Rou now.
“We can’t eat here,” Jules says hoarsely as we pass along the seafood-tank side of the vast dining room, and I nod my agreement. Through the saloon doors, in the kitchen, everyone is too busy with the lunch rush to notice us. I’m beelining it to the office door at the back when Jules grabs my arm.
“Hey, slow down. You cool, Cato?” she asks.
She’s right—I’m not. I take a long breath, try to unwind the key between my shoulder blades a few clicks. The kitchen is intense with the heat of the gas stoves, the sounds of chopping and frying, the competing odors of sesame oil, cilantro, and Sichuan peppercorns. My eyes reflexively drift to the back doorway, where Dad would stand with his arms folded over his chest and supervise his underlings. He started me working here when I was thirteen, five or six hours each weekend at minimum wage, wrestling the mop and bucket around the bathrooms or mixing the duck sauce in an industrial-size garbage can. Three cases of applesauce, three jugs of white vinegar, two boxes of white sugar, half a bottle of molasses, and one big jar of plum sauce, which Dad had shipped in from China by the case. No ducks. If you didn’t stir it fast enough, the sugar would clump, but if you stirred it too fast, you’d end up with sticky brown goo all over your pants.
My eyes dance over to the extra sink Dad installed by the chopping station for velveting the meat, presently filled to the brim with bloody skirt steaks, corn starch, and diluted Shaoxing wine. Old Jiang, Dad’s indispensable knife man, spears a steak with a barbecue fork and begins shaving uniformly thin slices off of it with concise, rapid motions. He handles his ultrasharp blade with mesmerizing efficiency, standing over his work with an athletic flex in his knees, an unlit cigarette dangling from his expressionless lips, as he flicks bits of gristle and fat into a separate bowl.
“Jīngtōng gèshì jìnéng, zhǐ shì biǎomiànshàng sìhū bu fèilì—Masterful skill appears on the surface to be effortless,” Dad would say.
I take Jules’s hand off my arm and give it a squeeze. “I think I’m okay.”
“Play dumb.”
“Right.”
“Don’t flip out.”
“Right.”
We slip through the back door into a fluorescent hallway, a bright dream of thin white walls and rough corporate carpet, eerily serene after the hubbub of the restaurant. Dad’s office is the second glass door on the left. We peek through the glass and see a sturdy Chinese guy with a shaved head and cauliflower ears, sitting at Dad’s desk and talking on the phone. He’s wearing a loose black button-down, tucked in, like a corny stage magician. I tap on the glass and the man looks around. When he sees us, some kind of resolved calm spreads across his wide face.
“Yuck,” Jules whispers.
The man rises and unlocks the door, which requires more steps than I remember. Only then do I see another man getting up from the sofa behind the door, a muscular young Chinese guy with deep acne scars on his temples, a long black ponytail, and what looks like a life-size tattoo of the human nervous system running up and down his arms and legs.
Shaved Head ushers Ponytail out the door, and as he steps past us, he scans me with an expressionless look that feels like an icy hand on my chest. Then he strides purposefully toward the exit at the end of the hallway that leads to the back of the parking lot.
Shaved Head waves us into the office, speaking Mandarin: “You must be Lianying and Xiaozhou. I saw you at the funeral. My surname is Rou. I am called Rou Qiangjun.”
He stands up to shake our hands; his is coarse, calloused. His shoulders are broad and powerful, his muscular neck almost as wide as his head. I notice a tattoo on the inside of his right wrist, but it’s mostly concealed by his magician shirt, so I can’t tell what it is.
“Please, sit. I’ve worked for many years for the Happy Year company in Beijing. After the company heard the terrible news about your father, they sent me here to help. Since I arrived, I have learned how much everybody loved your father. Please accept my sincere condolences.”
His southern accent is not the same as the hostesses’ Fujianese inflections—more like the thicker, heavier Mandarin spoken by people from Hong Kong.
“So you previously worked at the restaurants in Beijing?” Fishing. I figure he has no idea what we’ve been told about the company.
“That’s right. It is all very different here in America.” He smiles at me without showing his teeth. “I learn a lot each day.”
He’s a decent liar—no stuttering, no fidgeting—but I can sense him taking measure of me as I look around the room. Nothing much seems to have changed, except for the new locks on the door and a small lockbox sitting on top of the bulky drop safe in the corner. I scan the untidy desk, the stack of papers on the filing cabinet. No yellow legal pads.
“Is everything going smoothly?” Jules asks.
“I assume you heard that someone broke into the restaurant a few nights ago. No? They cleaned out the registers and broke into the office. You see, your father was the only one who knew how to open the safe, so the employees have not been dropping cash into it. So a lot of cash had accumulated in the drawers. You haven’t heard anything about that, have you?”
“I’m afraid not,” I say, and Jules shakes her head, but Rou keeps his gaze on me, watching me keenly, and I find myself imagining him stepping through the broken window in the breakfast nook, peering around with his small, alert eyes.
Then he looks away, shifting a stack of papers on the desk, affecting nonchalance. “Anyway, insurance will cover everything. We have receipts, of course. We replaced the locks, and we’ve taken some additional measures. The young man who was just here is our new head of security.”
“We’re glad the business is in good hands,” Jules says. The tightness around her mouth tells me that she’s feeling the weird vibe, too. “We came to thank you for sending meals to our house. Let us know if there’s anything we can do to help out.”
“Everything is very good, thank you. Except there is the safe.” He points to it with his left hand and I see a tattoo on that wrist, too: a snake’s head. “Your father didn’t share the code with you, did he? From what I know, it’s only some cash in there. But it’d be nice to be able to use it.”
“I’m afraid we don’t know the code,” Jules says.
I stand up to go and put out my hand. When he takes it with his, I meet his probing gaze again, and he grips my hand much more tightly than he did a few minutes earlier, mashing my knuckles against each other as he stares into my face. But I have strength of my own; I turn his hand upward and pull it toward me, out of his sleeve a bit, feeling his weight and power as I do.
It’s a snake on this wrist, too, the head peeking out of his cuff, the body winding up his wrist, disappearing into his sleeve.
“Interesting tattoo,” I say.
Rou looks down at his wrist, and he smiles, but not with his eyes.
“I was born in the Year of the Snake,” he says. “That’s just something I did when I was young. Like you.”
Well, that guy’s a sleazefest,” says Jules as we pull out of the parking lot. “I hope to God you got what you wanted, because I’d rather mate with a sloth than converse with him again.”
“Jules, he could be the killer.” I find myself looking at my hands, making fists again. “Or that other guy with the long hair. Did you see his tattoo? And now they’re sitting there in Dad’s office like they own the place, sending us takeout. Fuck!”
My fist bounces off the rubber dashboard. Painful. Useless.
“Victor, chill the fuck out! They do own the place, you need to get used to that. And I don’t know anything about killers, but a lot of people have tattoos. We can’t jump to conclusions here just because a straightforward explanation would make us feel better.”
“I know that,” I say. “I’m just saying, he wouldn’t have acted so defensive with us if he didn’t have something to hide.”
“Yeah, sure,” Jules says. “Or? He knows he’s taken over for our dad, and he’s insecure about his position here. And you were simply behaving like a couple of alpha dogs, trying to look tough while you sniff each other’s buttholes.”
I close my eyes for a second, force myself to take a few deep breaths. Sometimes it’s hard to understand how Jules and I came from the same parents. I follow simple rules of my own devising, sliding along the deep grooves of my productive habits; she considers every situation from every angle, floundering in the deluge of her hyperactive intellect. I’d like to think we complement each other, one helping the other cover the blind spots, but sometimes it seems like we’re just driving each other nuts.
Jules has a tattoo of her own, a Katharine Hepburn quotation in tiny script on her shoulder blade: “The time to make up your mind about people is never.”
“So what do you make of Sun?” I say. “Do you think we can trust him?”
“I dunno.” Jules frowns into the distance. “Like you said, he’s a bit like Dad, all goofy and intense at the same time. But I bet there’s something he’s concealing beneath that pleasant exterior. I don’t think he’s telling the whole truth.”
I let this stew for a minute along with the fact that Dad never told us about Sun, that he deceived us about his work, his past, and the very foundations of our family. Maybe for our own benefit. Maybe he didn’t have much of a choice. But finding out still stings like a slap.
Back at the Quad, we tell Sun everything we saw and heard, pausing now and then to look up Chinese words on Google Translate.
“I know this person, a man named Rou with snake tattoos,” Sun says in Mandarin after we finish. “The tattoos are the sign of the Snake Hands Gang. They come from one village in Guangdong where chemical drugs are a cottage industry. They sell the drugs in the streets of Beijing, send home most of the profits, and spend the rest on liquor and prostitutes. Since two years ago, Ouyang has been helping them expand into other businesses. Rou Qiangjun is one of their captains.”
“So you think he killed Dad?” I ask.
“This is a possibility, but not the only one. Maybe this new ‘head of security’ was the killer, or they worked together. We can say definitely Rou was sent by Happy Year from Beijing for some purpose other than helping with the restaurants. But perhaps Ouyang and Zhao are also working with other people in Los Angeles. Zhao also communicates with the attorney, Peng.”
Jules and I share a startled look. “Perry Peng? How much does he know?”
Sun knits his brow, scratches his head. “More than we do. We’re going to have to break into the restaurant and retrieve your father’s documents before we do anything else.”
“Wait, what? Break into the restaurant? What the fuck are you talking about?” Jules says, folding her arms across her chest.
Before Sun can respond, Andre comes out of his room in full pregame regalia: fresh sweats, loosely tied AF1s, Jordan duffel, enormous shiny headphones.
“Game time, baby boy,” he says to me. “Roll out.”