Paper Son Read online

  PAPER SON

  S. J. ROZAN

  AUTHOR’S NOTE: This book is a work of fiction. None of the characters in it are meant to resemble any real persons alive or dead. In particular, the fine law officers of the Coahoma County Sheriff’s Department are nothing like any of the deputies in this book.

  For Nancy Richler,

  with love, food, and a good long hike

  1

  “Mississippi?”

  “Ling Wan-ju, please do not stare with your mouth open in this way. It makes me worried that I didn’t raise you well.” Reaching into her sewing basket, my mother took out the folds of fabric that were in the process of becoming a blouse for my brother Ted’s wife.

  “You raised me fine,” I said. “Only now I think maybe my hearing’s going. The Mississippi Delta?” It’s not the easiest phrase in Cantonese, so maybe it wasn’t what she’d said. Maybe I’d just been doing what she so often accused us of when we were kids: listening in English.

  However, my mother’s eye roll made it clear I’d understood her correctly. And actually, I knew nothing was wrong with my hearing. I thought something was wrong with my mind. I must be hallucinating, except I didn’t know which part was craziest: that my mother wanted me to go to Mississippi on a case; that my mother wanted me to go to Mississippi on a case; or that my mother wanted me to go to Mississippi on a case.

  I tried to recover my equilibrium with a different question. “Why didn’t I know we had cousins in the Mississippi Delta?”

  “You do not pay attention.” My mother threaded her needle. “Your father used to get letters from his cousins. One of the wreaths at your father’s funeral was sent by the Mississippi cousins. The wreath with the big white bow and the yellow chrysanthemums.”

  My father died fifteen years ago, when I was thirteen. He was a popular man; so many wreaths, sprays, and bouquets crowded the funeral home that it was remarkable bees weren’t buzzing around the casket. That I didn’t know who’d sent which flowers wasn’t surprising. Nor was the fact that my mother did, and to this day could tell you. It was likely she also had a comprehensive list of people who’d sent nothing, but that was a different issue.

  “Who are these cousins? And who’s the one who’s been arrested?”

  That was what she’d just told me: that I had a cousin in Mississippi, which was a surprise; that he was in jail, which took me aback; and that she wanted me to hurry down and get him out, which rocked my world.

  My mother smoothed the fabric. “Your father’s grandfather’s brother, Chin Song-Zhao, came to America as a boy in 1915.” Her needle started flashing, making quick, even stitches. “He worked in the grocery store of a man from his village who had come earlier. In Clarksdale, in the Delta of Mississippi.”

  I left aside the Delta and the fact that a Chinese person a hundred years ago would go there—and that another Chinese person already had a grocery store there for him to work in—and focused on the family. Yes, Chin Song-Zhao’s descendants qualified as my cousins. Something like my fourth cousins three times removed, but we don’t cut it fine like that. Older relatives who aren’t your grandparents are your uncles and aunties. Besides them and your nieces and nephews, everyone else is a cousin. And now, four generations later, behold, I have Mississippi cousins.

  “So who’s been arrested?” I asked again.

  “A young man, Jefferson Tam.”

  “For what?”

  She frowned in distaste. “The killing of his father.”

  “Ma!” I stared at her. “Murder? I—” I clamped my mouth shut before any words like can’t or don’t got out. I was in a real bind.

  My mother’s attitude toward my PI career has zigzagged from disgust, disapproval, and attempts at deterrence to, on good days, a kind of pointedly exaggerated patience, a showy expectation that I’ll get this out of my system and turn to a pursuit worthy of a good Chinese daughter. That she would bring me a case and demand I take it is something I never would’ve imagined five years, or five minutes, ago.

  Many things about this profession escape my mother, though. One is that PIs generally don’t get involved in homicides.

  It’s understandable she’d miss that point, on two counts. First, some of my past cases actually have included homicides. Once or twice, when the suspicious death showed up, I’d turned the whole thing over to the cops, but other times, for various reasons, I was in too deep by that point and I just stayed in.

  Second, as far as my mother’s concerned, homicide, tax evasion, and jaywalking are all as bad as each other. Criminals on every level are dangerous, unsavory people, and if I insist on getting involved with them, why draw the line at murder?

  I watched her sew. In midwinter, the sun never quite makes it into our living room, so even though it was barely two o’clock, my mother sat in a pool of lamplight. This case could represent the first tiny thaw, the sharp edge of the wedge, the foot in the door. A change in her attitude toward my career. And it was a case I had no business taking.

  “Tell me all about it, Ma.”

  “If I knew all about it, why would you have to investigate?” Her needle flicked. “Jefferson Tam is innocent. You will find things out. Then you will clear up this mistake.”

  “How do you know what happened?”

  She gave me a look as disbelieving as it was disapproving. “As usual, you are not listening. I just told you I don’t know what happened. But whatever happened, Jefferson Tam did not do this crime. He’s your father’s cousin.”

  Oh, right. A relative of my sainted father, and therefore incapable of such an act.

  “I see. But that’s not what I meant. How do you even know he’s in jail?”

  “His uncle called me. Captain Pete Tam. From Clarksdale, Mississippi. To ask me to send you there.”

  I digested this news. If this uncle knew I was a PI, it could only be because my mother had told him, something I thought she never did unless wild horses were dragging it out of her.

  Then she dropped the capper on My Weird Day with Ma.

  “But do not think for a minute, Ling Wan-ju, that I’ll permit you to go to the Delta of Mississippi alone.”

  “Permit me? It’s your idea!”

  “Of course it is. You’ll go help your cousin. But not alone. You will tell the White Baboon he has to go also.”

  2

  “So let me get this straight.”

  My partner, Bill Smith, poured himself a cup of coffee. An hour after being more or less hired by my own mother (do you say “hired” when there’s no possibility of turning the job down and you can’t expect to get paid?), I was at Bill’s Tribeca apartment, a big-windowed place above a bar on Laight Street. I already had my mug of oolong tea and was curled up in the easy chair by the piano. There’s lots of tea at Bill’s place, not that he has any idea what to buy in that department. You’d think after all this time, starting from our sometimes-coworker days up to our current full-partner situation, he’d have caught on, but no. So I stock his shelves out of self-interest.

  “Your mother not only wants you to go to Mississippi, to work a case,” Bill said, settling on the sofa, “she wants me to go with you.”

  “Do you think I need to get her a mental health exam?”

  “Maybe so. Maybe she’s got some weird dementia that makes you sane in your old age. What exactly did she say?”

  “She said I had to go to the Delta—which has never been on my radar as a destination and which, by the way, I don’t think she even knows where it is—to straighten things out because a cousin I’ve never heard of is in jail. But I can’t go alone, and I should tell the White Baboon to come with me.”

  “Oh, wait, she called me that? Then don’t worry, she hasn’t lost a step.” He took a contemplative sip. “In fact, I think we should leave before the echo comes back and she hears herself.”

  “Seriously? You’re willing to go?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Who wants to get involved in Chin family business if they don’t have to? Especially for free?”

  “You underestimate the enduring fascination of other people’s problems. And there’s more than one kind of compensation. Your mother wants me to go. If I do, she’ll owe me. She’ll have to be nicer to me.”

  “You know that’ll never happen.”

  “Then I’ll have the moral high ground. And anyway, the Delta? Where they eat grits three times a day and drink moonshine with their barbecue? Where they play the blues deep into the starry night? Where we’ll stay in a Motel Six on Highway Sixty-One with a connecting door between our rooms?”

  “That won’t happen, either.”

  “And your mother’s right, you need me down there. I speak the language. Y’all are fergittin’ ah’m from Kin-tucky. Born ’n’ bred below th’ Mason-Dixon lahn. Ah kin talk South’rn with th’ best of ’em.”

  “Please don’t do that, it’s creepy.”

  “Someday you’ll be glad I have that skill. But back to this cousin you’ve never heard of.”

  “Jefferson Tam, twenty-three. Arrested yesterday in Clarksdale, Mississippi.”

  “For?”

  “Murder.”

  Bill stopped mid-sip. “Is that true? Or you just said it to see if I’m paying attention?”

  “No, true, and worse: patricide. They say he killed his father, Leland Tam. He says he didn’t. My mother says he didn’t.”

  “Who says he did?”

  “I’m not clear on the details, but he seems to have been found kneeling over his father in the family grocery store, wit
h blood on his clothes and his prints on the knife.”

  “I see. And what makes your mother so sure he didn’t do it?”

  “Because.” I looked straight at him. “No one related to my father could have done such a thing.”

  Bill raised his eyebrows. “Well, if that’s her thinking, I’ve got to say she’s entirely compos mentis in her own inimitable way. What’s your sense? You think she’s right?”

  “About my father’s relations? I doubt it.” I sat back. “About this guy, I’d have to meet him to say. Like I told you, I never even knew these people existed.”

  “Okay. And what is it we’re supposed to do down there?”

  “For one thing, be Chinese.”

  “I’m not very good at that.”

  “Har har. I think my mother’s idea is, there might be things he’s not telling a white lawyer but he’ll tell me, his Chinese cousin.”

  “Did he grow up down there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then Yankee might trump both Chinese and cousin, and he’ll freeze you out, too.”

  “I guess. The whole situation’s a little unclear to me. Not to my mother, though—Jefferson Tam’s related to my sainted father, he’s innocent, go get him out of jail.”

  “It’s sweet she still thinks of your father that way.”

  “Yes, well, it gave her an unfair advantage after he died. She invoked him all the time. We half believed he was standing beside her, watching us from the other world.”

  “He probably was. He’s probably here right now. Hi there, Mr. Chin. Could you remind your daughter how much she loves me? She forgets all the time.”

  “He can’t do that, dummy. Ghosts can’t lie. So you’re really in?”

  “Come on, you didn’t actually think I’d turn you down.”

  “I thought you might turn my mother down.”

  “See aforementioned forlorn hope of nicer treatment. But speaking of forlorn hopes, there’s your mother’s, about Jefferson Tam. Mississippi justice has a bad rep, but even a blind squirrel sometimes finds an acorn.”

  “Is that a Southern saying?”

  “They have an endless number of those, just wait. The point is, this kid might not be a saint like your father. Your mother might find herself disappointed in him.”

  “And by extension, in me, you mean?”

  “If you have to be the messenger bearing the bad news, yes.”

  I sighed. “I thought of that. But the thing is, my mother’s never asked me to take a case before.”

  “A milestone, I agree. Showing a good deal of faith in you.”

  “It’s more even than the faith. It’s that she’s finally sort of admitting this is my job.” I looked for the words to explain it. “My parents were thrilled when I was born. They didn’t want a fifth son. They wanted a daughter. My mother made all these flowered dresses. But I could look around the schoolyard and see who was having all the fun. When I turned out to be a tomboy, my father kind of enjoyed it. We went to ball games and he signed me up at a dojo. My mother’s always been disappointed, though. She doesn’t like it that I’m a PI, but the problem goes deeper than that. It’s my—” I waved the mug at my jeans, my boots, my short hair. “My whole unmarried, non-girly-girl self.”

  “You sure she’s disappointed? Not just worried about you?”

  “Why should she worry?”

  “Because where she came from, an unmarried woman was potential prey to every man who came along, likely to be misused, abandoned, and, in the end, starve to death.”

  I stared. “That’s not only extraordinarily feminist of you, it’s bizarrely empathetic toward my mother.”

  “She’s not always wrong. Just about me.”

  I drank my tea, which I was grateful to find tasted just like I thought it would, seeing as how the rest of the world was upside down.

  “So,” Bill said. “When do we leave?”

  “You’re sure?”

  He didn’t dignify that with an answer. If it had been Bill asking me to do something like this, I wouldn’t have, either.

  “Tomorrow morning,” I said, and smiled. “Thanks.”

  He returned the smile, our eyes met, and I went quickly back to business. “The closest airport’s Memphis,” I said. “There’s an eight A.M. flight—”

  “Ugh.”

  “Ugh, Memphis?”

  “No, I love Memphis. Ugh, eight A.M.”

  Bill’s a night owl. I’m an early bird. I shrugged.

  “You know that means we have to leave for the airport at six?”

  “We can watch the sun come up.”

  He nodded slowly. “Maybe that connecting door’s not such a hot idea.”

  “Told you. Anyway, when we get there, we rent a car and drive to Clarksdale, which I understand is about an hour south, and meet the client.”

  “Wait. I thought your mother was the client.”

  “Technically, no. She might never have known about this murder if a guy named Captain Pete hadn’t called and asked for her help. Actually, my help. Generally, when people come to my mother asking for me, she tells them to go fry ice, but I guess because this is family, it’s different.”

  “I’m having a little difficulty following this part of the story. Do I get in trouble if I ask who Captain Pete is?”

  “Pete Tam. Uncle of the victim and great-uncle of the suspect. He’s the cousin who sent the flowers to my father’s funeral.”

  “Okay, now explain something else. If these are all male relations on your father’s side”—he paused; I nodded—“how come they’re Tams, not Chins?”

  “Because,” I said, “the original one, Chin Song-Zhao, came here as a paper son.”

  3

  Throughout the middle of the nineteenth century, thousands of Chinese men headed for America—Gaam San, the Gold Mountain. They farmed, panned for gold, and were indispensable to the building of the railroad. But when the railroad was finished, white people began to see them differently. Suddenly they were the Yellow Peril. Dangerous, devious, out for your jobs and your women. It happens to many immigrants—Bill’s people, the Irish, coming over around the same time, weren’t exactly welcome, either—but against the Chinese, and us alone, Congress passed a law: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. It pretty much choked off immigration. The Exclusion Act and its extensions made landing on the shores of Gaam San illegal for most Chinese, and it stayed that way until the 1940s.

  Congress did not, however, take the further step of shipping home the Chinese already here (though their neighbors in the West often found it expedient to beat them up and burn their homes to drive them away). And this being America, the law had loopholes. Merchants and scholars—who were few, and who had money, as opposed to laborers, who were numerous and needed it—could still come. The Exclusion Act also didn’t affect the right of an American citizen, natural-born or naturalized, to bring his foreign-born family in.

  Thus was created the paper son.

  Many of the original immigrants had families back in China that they’d go home every few years to see. A man who’d been naturalized could register any children born in China and then bring them to America. A young man wanting to come over would make arrangements with—meaning, pay off—one of these citizens and for immigration purposes claim to be his son.

  On, um, paper, being a paper son seems simple enough. In reality, it was arduous and anxiety-filled, because immigration officials were onto the scam. Questions about the weather and geography of the home village, relatives’ names and ages, and neighbors’ occupations became standard. Paper fathers had reams of information to provide, and paper sons had hours of memorizing to do. Many hopeful paper sons got sent back, but many made it through.

  Apparently, my great-grandfather’s brother was one of those.

  He got to stay. But he lost his name.

  I told Bill all this as the last traces of sunlight slipped off the building façade across the street.

  “A lot of immigrants change their names,” Bill said. “It can be a way of shedding baggage, starting over.”

  “Not for us. In Chinese culture, your family name is who you are. It’s a big deal. Our family records go back a dozen, twenty generations. We have ancestor tablets and family altars. Just because someone’s dead doesn’t mean he’s not kept up-to-date on relatives’ affairs and consulted on important decisions.”