It was almost eleven when the old men arrived quietly at the Hip Ching meeting hall, about the usual time of morning when they would normally be enjoying dim sum, snacks, and taking yum cha, tea, with the fragrance of oolong or chrysanthemum drifting above the round table in the back of the Joy Luck tea parlor.
The Hip Ching tong elders all knew about their leader's mistress, the one called Mona, the Hong Kong slut, the one they never mentioned for fear of causing him loss of face. Now they were faced with a dilemma. They'd discovered that money was missing, a hundred thousand dollars, from their benevolent community services account at the New Eastern Bank. It had been withdrawn, signed out in the Big Uncle's hand, four days before his untimely demise.
Now the loss of face was theirs. The free congee breakfast at the Senior Citizen's Center they sponsored would be affected, and they would have to cut back the supply of Similac formula and flu shots to the Children's Health Clinic. There would be no more elaborate Chinese NewYear's banquets.
Perhaps they could pay it off with money from other accounts, like the secret fund for free coffee and cakes at their daytime mahjong parlors? But quickly enough their words came back to the murder and the missing money. It had been all too clean and clever and they did not believe that the see gay to, lowly car driver, was smart enough to have pulled it off. Not without help, anyway. Now they needed his help to find the mistress. Find her, find the money, and wash the whole affair. They needed to show the driver something, in good faith, for his cooperation, even from the small jail cell he was in.
San Francisco, after all, was just another Chinatown away, and with the Chinese world so small nowadays, how far could she have gotten? Not so far that their tentacles could not reach her.