House Cleaning (2)

Shifu was gonna bring them some hamburgers later. The one without the pickles would have poison on it. That was the one they would give to Li Xian.

Cao Feifei clutched her baby so close the infant started to scream. She didn't want to hear about it. She didn't want to know. Then her ex-husband informed her that Shifu wanted her to come back later that night with the car so they could dump Li Xian's body.

Cao Feifei couldn't answer. Her throat ached. She started to shake her head, but Sean Xiao started shaking his.

"You better not say no," he warned her, 'Shifu will get mad."

Sean Xiao was serious.

But even though she didn't say anything to Sean Xiao, she made up her mind on the spot. She wasn't coming back. She didn't want any part of this. As she drove out of the parking lot of the Holiday Inn, she was determined to go home and stay home. She loved Zhang Xiaohua, and she felt sorry for Sean Xiao, but Li Xian was her cousin, for God's sake.

Later that evening Liu Shifu returned to the York Motel with a bag of hamburgers and french fries. Li Xian and Sean Xiao were hungry. They didn't have any money, and they hadn't eaten all day. As Shifu handed out the burgers, he exchanged glances with Sean Xiao. Sean Xiao unwrapped his haimburger and lifted the bun. He checked to make sure his had pickles on it.

Li Xian unwrapped his and dug in. But as Shifu watched him devouring the food, he wondered why the hell the cyanide was taking so long.

Then it happened. Li Xian had eaten little more than half of the hamburger when it finally started to work.

Li Xian dropped the burger and fell back on the bed where he was sitting. His throat was on fire straight down to his stomach. The room was spinning, and he felt as if his face were going to explode.

He knew Shifu was going to kill him. He'd known it all along, and now it was happening. In his last moments he pictured his daughter Melissa's room the way it was two nights before, when he'd hitchhiked home. He'd gone back there to say goodbye to her. She was sleeping, and he didn't have the heart to wake her up. His wife was in the doorway, whispering to him, begging him not to go back to the motel, that Shifu would kill him.

"I know," he'd murmured, and he started to cry. The tears streamed down his face and spattered the sheet around Melissa's chin as he bent down to kiss her goodbye for the last time.

"I have to go back," he told his wife as he walked past her, heading for the front door. Shifu had threatened him after he had hitchhiked home the first time. Shifu had promised that if he tried to run away again, he'd find Melissa and he'd kill her. Shifu hadn't yelled or screamed the way Zhang Xiaohua did when he made threats. He said it nice and calm, just a plain statement of fact, a reality of life. There was no question in Li Xian's mind that Shifu would do it. That's why he had to go back to the York Motel. For Melissa.

Blurry shapes loomed over Li Xian as he started to black out.

Sean Xiao and Shifu were laughing at him. ''Look at his eyes," Sean Xiao said. "Look at his eyes. They're all goofy."

They kept laughing at Li Xian as he choked and writhed on the bed. But then Liu Shifu stopped laughing. Li Xian wasn't dying fast enough. Maybe he hadn't eaten enough. Maybe there wasn't enough cyanide in his system.

He looked around the room for something they could use to finish Li Xian off. There were two lamps in the room, one on either side of the bed.

Sean Xiao saw the lamps, too. He wasn't laughing now. This wasn't the way it was supposed to go down. Li Xian was supposed to die fast. Instead, he was choking, making too much goddamn noise. Someone was gonna hear him. Why the hell wasn't he dead yet. He'd eaten the damn hamburger.

Sean Xiao unplugged one of the lamps, stepped on the cord, and jerked it out of the base. Wrapping the ends of the cord around his hands, he went to the bed, put one knee on the mattress, and hovered over Li Xian. His heart was pounding as he looped the cord around Li Xian's neck and yanked Li Xian back. Li Xian put up no resistance. Sean Xiao held him tight, jerking him back and up as if he were riding a wild horse. He pulled so hard, the cord snapped. Li Xian flopped back on the bed. Sean Xiao quickly took the longest piece of cord and wrapped it around Li Xian's neck again, continuing to strangle him even though he wasn't moving anymore. When his hands started to cramp, he finally let go.

Sean Xiao looked at Shifu, panting for breath. "Is he dead, Shifu. Or should I do some more."

"What do you think?"

.....

Four days later, on December 27, 1982, the guests in Room 31 called the motel office to complain that there was an awful stink in their room. They said it was coming from the bed.

The bed in Room 31 was a simple wooden frame built to support a mattress and box spring. The space under the box spring was hollow and completely enclosed. As the manager walked out into the cold without a coat to go see what the problem was, all he could think was that somebody must have left some food or something under the bed and forgotten about it. One of the goddamn maids probably.

But the stink in Room 31 was unlike any rotting food he'd ever smelled. He got his fingers under the box spring and mattress and lifted them off the frame. The stench made his eyes water. Then he saw the face, and he dropped the mattress. He ran back out into the cold and went to the office to call the police.

The first two officers on the scene held handkerchiefs to their faces as they shined a flashlight into the space under the mattress. When they called in their report of the body found under the bed, they identified the deceased as "a well-built Asian male."

Sealed in the enclosed space under that bed in an overheated room over the Christmas weekend, Li Xian's body had decomposed rapidly. He was so bloated, the buttons were popping on his plaid flannel shirt. His tongue was so swollen and it protruded from his blubbery lips. His eyes were dull and milky. His skin was pale and sickly with dark purple marks of bruising around his neck.