A lot of things happen in New York City’s Chinatown: things get stolen, people turn up dead, and—apparently—dead people get stolen.  “Somebody heisted a body out of the Manhattan South Morgue?”  I put my coffee down on the diner’s sticky blue counter.  “Come on, Nick.  You’re joking, right?”
        Detective-Inspector Nick Serrano gave me a cold grunt as he poured sugar into his own cup.  “Do I sound like I’m joking, Mark?”
        “No,” I said.  “It’s just I can’t imagine why anyone would want to steal a corpse, that’s all. Any ideas?”
        “None of them good,” Detective Serrano said.  “You’re the private investigator, you tell me.”  He dropped a manila envelope onto the blue Formica counter.  “This is what I’ve got.  And Inspector Behr is breathing down my neck on this one.  Any help you can give me…”
        “Yeah.”  I picked up the file and opened it.
        The deceased was a homeless man; a Chinese John Doe in his late 60’s with no ID, found dead in the north end of Roosevelt Park three days ago.  “Natural causes?”
        “So the Coroner said,” Nick replied, stirring his coffee.  “I got to tell you, none of this makes sense.”
        An all-too-familiar female voice cut in on us.  “What doesn’t?”
        My cheek twitched at the sound of her voice and I closed the file.  “Hey, Joi.”
        She clapped me on the back.  “Why, Mark Sauer!  I didn’t see you sitting there.”
    
I turned around on my stool and stared disbelievingly at her oval brown eyes.  She wore her trademark black leather jacket, the one with the Kevlar lining and .357 in the concealed holster, and had her long, silky black hair pulled back in a utilitarian ponytail. Despite the tomboyish outfit, she still drew the intrigued glances of a sizable number of people in the diner, and she enjoyed the attention.  That of course is part of the problem: Joi Li is beautiful, dangerous, and utterly convinced that because of an ancient Chinese curse between her family and mine, I’m supposed to fall helplessly in love with her.
        So far, it hasn’t happened.  “What are you doing here, Joi?”
        “Grabbing a Coke,” she said with a grand gesture.  “What’s up?”
        “Someone stole a corpse out of the Manhattan South Morgue,” Detective Serrano told her.
        “What for?” she asked, dropping onto the stool next to mine.
        “That’s the big question,” Serrano said.  “And right now, I’ve got enough on my plate without trying to track down some body-snatching weirdo.”  His phone beeped and he glanced at the number.  “I’ve got to run,” he said, getting up to take the call.  “Let me know what you find out.”
        I paid my bill and got up to leave.
        Joi followed me out.  “Where are we going to start first?”
        “We aren’t going anywhere,” I pointed out, striding up Canal Street to my car.  “I’ve got a job to do, so I’m going to go do it.  I’m going to the morgue and see what I can turn up.”
        “Hey, I’m just trying to help.”
    
I left her on the sidewalk and went around to get into my car.  “Joi, the very first day I met you, you had my car towed and impounded, you tried to evict me from my office, and you falsely implicated me in a shooting incident!”
        “Oh, you have no sense of humor.”
        “No sense of—?  You think getting me picked up by the cops for attempted murder is funny?”
        “Don’t you know flirting when you see it?”
         “ ‘See Mark,’ ” I quoted, opening the door.     “ ‘See Mark leave.  Leave, Mark, leave.’ ”  
        “What a nice car,” Joi said, smiling.  “Is it new? Be a real shame if anything happened to it.”  She gave me the sweetest Chinese promise in her smile, one that let me know that with a single phone call to her grandmother, my shiny new Chevrolet could be reduced to a crushed block of dirty scrap metal.  And considering the fact that her grandmother is the head of the Jade Dragon triad, it was a promise I could not afford to ignore—not after having lost three cars this way.  I was fast becoming regarded as an insurance risk because of Joi.
        She grinned, waiting.  “Well?”
        “Get in.”  I did, and started the engine as she sat down in the passenger seat.  “Have I told you lately that I hate you?”
        “Yes.” She fastened her seat belt.  “You could get a restraining order.  Well, you could try…”
    
I could control my hands, but not the tone of my voice.  “I commanded a combined anti-armor platoon in Iraq.  I don’t back down from a fight, and I don’t get other people to fight my battles for me.  So get it through your thick head right now: I don’t love you, I’m not ever going to love you, and you’re not going to get the better of me no matter what you do.  Got it?”
        “You know, you’re hot when you’re being stubborn.  So,” she said, changing the subject.  “Someone stole a corpus delicti right out of the morgue?”
        “Corpus delicti is Latin for ‘the body of evidence’ that constitutes an offense.  It doesn’t mean ‘corpse.’  And yes, someone took a body.”  I pulled out and turned us north onto Centre Street. “The question is, why? Find out Why, and you find out Who.”
        “It could be someone deep into Santería,” she suggested.  “There’s a church up in Harlem, up above 100th Street.  We could start there.”
        “They engage in animal sacrifice,” I said as I swung around an illegally-parked Telstar Logistics truck in front of Madame Liu-Tsong’s art gallery.  “Why would they want a dead body?”
        “For their voodoo ceremonies,” she said, adjusting and retying her ponytail.
        “You’re thinking of Haitian Vodou,” I corrected, turning the corner.  “And despite what Hollywood tells you, they don’t actually go around reanimating the dead.”
         She folded her arms.  “Are you sure about that?  “Hey, let’s stop and get something to eat.”
        “I’m not hungry.  I always try to avoid eating right before I walk through a morgue.”
        “Well, I’m hungry,” she declared.  Anyway, the cops already looked over everything at the morgue.  You need to start looking at who has a reason to have taken the body.  Let’s stop and
get something to eat.  We can make a list of suspects—”
        “Look, I’m not hungry, all right?  And I’m tired of you dragging me into every Chinese restaurant in New York. What is it with you?  Does the triad get kickbacks from the entire Chinese food industry in New York?”
        She gave me a superior smirk.  “The Jade Dragon triad isn’t the Mafia.  My honorable grandmother isn’t some kind of cruel ‘godfather’ figure. She’s just a, a ‘spiritual advisor,’ to all those businessmen.”
        “Oh, is that what you call the protection racket these days?”
        She looked out the window.  “You know absolutely nothing about Chinese spiritual matters, do you?”
        “I never needed to, until now.”
        “We do things very different than you do.  In China, we mourn the death of a loved one differently.  In the West, you just bury your dead in a pretty box and forget about them.  In the Far East, it’s different.  We pray to the spirits of our ancestors every day, because if we don’t keep them linked to this world, they can forget their lineage and become homeless spirits in the next.”
    
I turned the corner and headed toward Roosevelt Park, and she perked up as we passed DiBenedetto’s.  “Hey, let’s stop. We could grab some Italian for lunch.  How’s that sound?”
        “What part of ‘I’m not hungry’ do you not understand?” Even as I said it, a frown crept onto my face.  In all the time I’d known her, Joi had never eaten anything but Chinese food.  Why was she being so accommodating all of a sudden?
        I drove up Kenmare to Delancy, then pulled over near the corner of Chrystie Street, near one of the food-cart vendors on the edge of Roosevelt Park.
        “You want to check out the spot where they found his body?”
    
Her question suggested something I didn’t like.  “Yeah.  I do.”  I walked over to the nearest vendor and got a couple of Cokes and two hot dogs, and gave her one.  I took a bite of mine and nodded at the park on our right as I started walking.  “I still can’t figure out why someone would go to all the trouble to steal a dead body from the morgue.”
        “Maybe to spare him a city burial.”  She took a

sip of her Coke.
        “What’s wrong with a city burial?”
        She snorted.  “Do you know what that consists of? They get rid of unclaimed bodies in Potter’s Field, on Hart Island, out in Long Island Sound.”  Her voice tightened.  “They shove the corpse in a cheap pine box and dump the coffins, fifty at a time, in a mass-grave.  No funerals, no tombstones, no nothing! They use prison labor from Rikers Island for the burial details.  Do you think that homeless man’s spirit would be happy in the afterlife if his mortal remains were treated that way?  No Chinese man would!”
        “Why should it matter how a corpse gets treated?” I asked, watching her carefully now.
        “When a family member dies, it’s important to take care of his body, so he’ll be happy in the afterlife.” She turned to face me.  “Mark…what do you think happens to us when we die?”
        “We die.  That’s about it.  I’d rather not think about the rest.”
    
She looked away again, the Coke in one hand, the uneaten hotdog in the other.  “If you had to…how far would you go to ensure the safety of someone you loved?”
        I finished my hotdog and pitched the greasy paper toward a battered wire mesh trash can.  “Everyone I loved that much is dead.  It doesn’t matter to them anymore.”
        “It does!” Joi insisted, throwing her uneaten hotdog into the same trash can.
        “Not hungry?”
        Joi flushed and shook her head.  “Look, what I’m trying to tell you…”  
        “Is that you weren’t stalking me this morning; you were stalking Nick.  You needed to know if he figured out yet that you were the one who took the body.”
        Her lower lip trembled for a moment; I’ve only startled Joi a couple of times in our very rocky time together, and this was obviously one of those moments.  Her face screwed up in confusion.  “How did you…”
        “You made such a big deal out of eating, but then didn’t want anything when I finally did stop.  You were trying to keep me from going to the morgue. Why?  The only reason could be that you were afraid I’d find something that revealed who took the body.”
        Her eyes became wary brown slits.  “That’s not enough for you to—”  
        “It wasn’t.”  I drained my Coke and tossed the empty cup into the trash can.  You knew that the corpse was male.  No one ever said it was.  You also knew he was Chinese.  How?  You didn’t see the Coroner’s file, and neither Nick nor I mentioned it.  So how did you know, unless you were the one who took the body?”
        She swallowed, her face amazingly pale for a Chinese woman, and took a long breath, not meeting my eyes, but finally managed a nod.  “Yes.  I took his body.”
    
Now I had a confession.  What I didn’t have yet was a reason.  “So you knew him, then?  He wasn’t really a John Doe?”
        She gave a mute shake of her head, and then tossed the Coke into the trash.  “All I know is that he was homeless, and that no one claimed the body.”
        “If he wasn’t family, then why take the body?”
        “Because someone else died, too.” She fell quiet.  “My uncle Manfred Li died last month.  We’re going to take him back to China, to be buried in the family tomb in Jieyang in Guangdong.  We give the dead the proper rites and take care of their mortal remains so that their spirit becomes content in the next world. That’s why every year we celebrate the Ching Ming Festival and tend to the graves of our departed relatives.  Once they’re content, the spirits of our ancestors watch over us and protect us.”
        “Which doesn’t explain stealing a homeless man’s body.”
    
She stuck her hands in the pockets of her leather jacket.  “There are land shortages and overpopulation problems in Guangdong.  The Chinese government has mandated ‘cremation of the dead’ as a way to save valuable land.  But it’s not right for us to cremate our dead relatives.  If his body is burned up like that, my uncle’s spirit will be angry, and will cause bad things to happen to us.  And the Government will take his corpse and cremate it, whether we want that or not.”
        “And so you needed a body…a male Chinese one, of about the same age,” I said, “to give to the Government to cremate, while you secretly smuggled the real body of your uncle into the tombs of his ancestors.  But why would you grab a corpse here and go to the trouble of shipping it halfway around the world to China?  Why not just find an unclaimed body there?”
        “Unclaimed bodies in Guangdong are all cremated!  Besides, there’s a very expensive market for dead bodies in Guangdong right now. Criminal gangs there are making a lucrative business out of producing corpses on demand for state officials to cremate, while family members hang on to their dead for a secret ritual burial later.”
        Joi gave me a calculating stare.  “Over four hundred living people have gone missing in Guangdong since the cremation order went into effect. Where do you think those gang members get newly-dead bodies to hand over to the Government crematoriums?”
        Resigned anger filled her words.  “We had to find a dead Chinese man of my uncle’s age to give them to cremate.  That homeless man’s corpse would have been shoved into the ground in Potter’s Field, out in the harbor with no one in the world to mourn him, no one to provide for his welfare in the spirit world.  My family will remember him, will honor him, for taking my dead uncle’s place in the Government crematorium. We’ll pray to him every day, and provide for his spiritual needs.  We may not have known him in life, but in death he will be honored by my family, and remembered.” She licked her lips.  “I knew that Nick had gotten the case, so I was following him, trying to see if he’d found anything.  And when I saw him talking to you—”
        “You decided to step in and make sure I found nothing.”
        “No!  I…I wanted to tell you the truth.  I wanted to ask you to…to keep my family’s secret.”
        “You mean, lie to the cops?”
        She said nothing, her face painted now with uncertainty.
    
Then I saw the rest of it.  “You not only want me to lie about what I know, you want me to throw them off your trail?  To not only lie to the police, but obstruct an ongoing police investigation?  I wouldn’t do that for my own mother!”
        “Mark, you’re the only one I can turn to—”
        “Go to hell.  And when you get there, tell them a US Marine sent you there.”  I marched back to my Chevy and drove off, leaving Joi standing there on the sidewalk, alone.
                                    ^   ^   ^
Detective Serrano met me at our usual spot at the lunch counter of Bill’s Hamburger Grill, on a miserable gray day, with the rain beating down against the city.  He sat down alongside me and ordered a coffee.  “What have you got?”
        I sat gazing out the window at Joi standing bare-headed in the pouring rain, waiting to see if I would betray her and her family to the authorities on two different continents.
        Our eyes met.
        She waited.
        I turned my back on her. She was just some crazy Chinese girl.
        Yeah.  That was all she was to me.
        “Well?” Serrano asked.  “What have you got on the case?”
        I picked up my coffee cup.  “Nothing,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.  “I’ve got nothing at all to tell you.”
    
    
                       About the Author
     
        J F Benedetto, an active member of the Mystery Writers of America and a Writing Mentor in their New York Chapter, is also a member of the Short Mystery Fiction Society and was nominated for the Derringer Award for excellence in the field of mystery fiction.  He is also the Senior Assistant Editor for the Triangulation speculative fiction anthology, and his work has appeared in several venues, most recently the Wolfmont Press mystery anthology, The Gift of Murder.
  
    
    
                                 Copyright © J F Benedetto