by Leslie Glass
Mike didn’t know any of those long-gone relatives. He didn’t want anything to do with them. Of all those lost to his mother, only his father had died here. Three years ago Marco Sanchez had collapsed in the kitchen of the Mexican restaurant where he had been chef for twenty-three years, and no one had thought of calling 911. They had called him. He was the cop who had a handle on the system. But it had taken him over an hour to reach the restaurant. By then his father was dead.
“What are you doing, Mamita?”
Maria looked up, snapping her mouth shut so hurriedly her soft chin quivered. She hadn’t heard her son move back across the hall to his room to dress for the day. Now he was wearing a gray shirt and shiny silver tie, gray tweed jacket, cowboy boots. She didn’t see the bulge of his gun under his jacket, but she knew it was there. Mike stood at the far end of the living room jammed with bright heavy furniture studying her as if she were a suspect in a crime.
She frowned. It didn’t take a famous policeman to see she was on her knees praying. Her fingers moved to the next bead. “Do you know what tomorrow is?” she asked softly.
“Yes, tomorrow is the Day of the Dead.” In Mexico, not here.
She nodded. Correcto. “I am praying for the dead.”
He didn’t say he thought it was too late to pray for the dead. She already knew he thought that. She knew his job was to collect the dead and study their lives to find out how they died. She knew he didn’t want those dead, or any others, to follow him home. But as long as he was unmarried and fatherless, the dead were all she had.
“I’ll pray for you, too.” She leveled her gaze at him defiantly, willing her prayers to enter his heart.
“Thank you, Mami, my prayers are for you, too.” In a weak moment after his father died, Mike had moved back to his childhood home to keep his mother company for a few months. That had been three years ago. He wondered if she planned to dismantle the shrine any time soon.
Then, as he did every morning, he told her he had to get an early start on his day and took off after coffee without having breakfast. As he left at seven-thirty A.M., November 1, it occurred to Sergeant Mike Sanchez that it was time to move out and get a place of his own.
five
The detective squad room of the Twentieth Precinct was a long room on the second floor with windows facing the north side of West Eighty-second Street. Nine desks stuck out from the windows, like boat slips. Seven had a telephone and a typewriter, an ancient tilting, rolling chair, and a metal visitor’s chair. So far only two desks had computers. But not everybody knew how to use them anyway, and there weren’t enough printers. Opposite the marina was a holding cell.
The place didn’t look much different from the set of Barney Miller, the TV comedy series about detectives that had made Detective April Woo think it would be fun to be a cop when she was a kid. The difference between then and now was that a lot more people died and you couldn’t ever count on a happy ending.
Tilted back in her old swivel chair, the phone tucked under her ear, April was thinking about Barney Miller because Monday had hardly begun and already she was having a Barney Miller conversation. She looked up at the ceiling, her small nose wrinkled with exasperation.
“Yes, ma’am, the police do care that your toilet is clogged, but we can’t come over right now and fix it.”
“Why not?” The demand was nearly a shriek. “You’re right across the street. You can send someone across the street, can’t you?”
“No, ma’am. We can’t send anybody anywhere for a flooding toilet. We’re not plumbers.” April had already explained this several times.
The shrill voice rose. “You mean there isn’t a single person in that whole fucking precinct who knows how to fix a toilet?”
April smelled Sanchez long before he stood over her desk, guffawing and trying to get her attention. The powerful, spicy-fruity sweetness of his unnameable aftershave traveled way ahead of him wherever he went. She had known the moment he entered the little ell at the entrance to the room, where there was a bench for people to sit on while they waited for a detective. It had taken her almost a year to get used to his smell, but a lot of people never did. Occasionally Mike had to punch out some fellow officer who didn’t know him and thought he could get away with calling Mike a spic or a faggot.
“So? Are you sending someone?” the woman screamed in April’s ear.
April had the feeling this call might be a leftover trick-or-treat from Halloween. Cops were always pranking each other. She had a powerful urge to sneeze. But maybe it was Mike’s aftershave. The need to sneeze came from way back behind her nose. It was unpleasant, worse than a tickle. It felt as if the explosive seed of a chili pepper had lodged up there in her sinuses.
Sai Woo, April’s mother, liked to tell the story of April’s birth to explain her daughter’s occupation, which was unlike those of any of her friends’ children. From the start of her life, Sai said, April had been difficult. She said April had resisted coming into the world, so her poor mother had to push her, push her out by force. When she finally emerged from the womb, April’s head was elongated like a squash, and her nose was badly twisted out of shape. She looked as if she smelled a really bad smell. That’s how April became suspicious, the reason she was a cop, Sai explained.
To offset the bad omen of her resistance to life, April had been given the Chinese name Happy Thinking, just in case her head remained the shape of a squash. But even though she had grown up beautiful and smart, she was still disobedient in many ways. Insisted on always seeing things from the worst side, never the best. And refused to get married, have children, be happy.
April held the receiver away from her ear. “No, ma’am, I already told you we can’t assign a police officer to a clogged toilet.”
Unless the toilet happened to be stuffed with body parts that wouldn’t go down the drain. Briefly, April considered asking if that was the case here, then decided against it. Even in New York it didn’t happen that often.
“You have to.” The woman wouldn’t give up. “The man downstairs is a maniac. If the water goes through the ceiling, he’ll come up here and kill me.”
“Sounds like you should call a plumber right away.” The chili seed exploded and she sneezed, shaking her head just like the dog did when it was annoyed.
The sneeze made April think of the dog. She had given it to her mother to divert Sai from her preoccupation with April’s unmarried state. The orphaned poodle puppy came from a case April had had several months before. A famous dog, it had been the only witness in two homicides. April had worried that her mother might not accept any creature that wasn’t Chinese, but after the case was closed, she went through all sorts of paperwork to get it anyway.
Turned out to be worth the trouble. Even though the puppy wasn’t a Shih Tzu or Pekingese, the Chinese dogs of emperors, Sai had liked the poodle and solved her problem by making it Chinese. She gave it the name Dim Sum, which meant Touch the Heart Lightly. And immediately the strong-willed animal and its many needs took over all the attention in the house.
The puppy had to be trained, had to have lots of toys and learn not to teethe on the furniture. Had to have special cooking. When Dim Sum arrived, she had weighed hardly three pounds and didn’t even know how to play. Now she was nearly six pounds of confident apricot-colored poodle that behaved like a tiger. Whenever Dim Sum was annoyed or impatient or angry, she shook her tiny head and sneezed hugely. Sai Woo, who had never had a moment of true enchantment in her life, was enchanted. And forgot about her daughter’s wasted childbearing potential.
April sneezed again.
“God bless,” Mike said.
The woman on the other end of the phone line continued to scream. “Oh, my God, you should see it. I’m not kidding, Niagara Falls.”
April giggled.
“Are you telling me you’ll come only if I’m dead? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“No, ma’am. I’m just telling you we can’t fix your toilet.�
�
“Bitch!” The woman slammed down the receiver with a crash.
Finally, April glanced over at Mike, now innocently sitting at his desk with his back to her, a file open in front of him. Only a slight tightening of her lips betrayed her suspicion.
She was a classic beauty with a delicate, oval face, expressive almond eyes, rosebud lips, swan neck, and willowy figure. She didn’t look like a cop.
“Buenos días, querida,” Mike said without turning around. “¿Cómo estás?”
Her lips tightened some more. She didn’t answer.
He swiveled around. “What did I do?” he demanded, palms up.
“That woman just called me a bitch because I wouldn’t come over and fix her broken toilet.”
Mike shook his head. “That’s what’s wrong with this city. Can’t ever get a fucking cop when you need one.”
“Nice.” She gave him a hard look. “Anyone you know pranking me?”
“Querida, please. Who would do such a thing?” He smiled his big, friendly, engaging, seductive smile that was so sexy and so un-Chinese.
“Yeah, yeah. Who would do such a thing?”
Sanchez grinned.
April did not at all feel like grinning back. It really annoyed her how Mike Sanchez projected himself as the sincere, stand-up kind of guy the public could rely on, and everybody bought it. Women went for the Zapata mustache and the powerful aftershave. Juries believed his testimony. In spite of his being a bit on the laid-back and relaxed side, rumor had it he was a comer in the Department.
“Busy night last night?” Mike slapped some files around on his desk and changed the subject.
“You mean because of Halloween?”
April checked her watch. Eight-thirty-three. All crimes and misdemeanors that had occurred the night before were on color- and number-coded forms, waiting for the Detective Squad Supervisor, Sergeant Margret Mary Joyce, to assign them for investigation.
Major cases brought a million people swarming in. April had heard about the accident involving a homeless male who either jumped or fell off the bridge at the Ninety-sixth Street entrance to the parkway. One car hit the victim, the other rear-ended. It had been a mess to clean up. A twelve-year-old, who hadn’t been wearing a seat belt in the front seat of the second car, slammed into the windshield and was in a coma. Two other people had been hospitalized. The John Doe was in the morgue. April shrugged again. “Guess nobody important died,” she murmured.
The call about Raymond Cowles came in at ten-thirty. Some wife who didn’t appear to have access to her own apartment wanted them to check out her husband. He hadn’t turned up at the insurance company where he worked and was expected at some important meeting. Sergeant Joyce said it sounded like a case for the two of them.
six
On the way out Mike stopped to pick up the keys to the unmarked puke-green Chevy he’d been using for the last week. Outside the precinct door he offered them to April. “You might as well enjoy it while you can, querida.”
He nodded at two uniforms on their way in, then paused for a second to raise his arms as if in a great embrace of West Eighty-second Street, Columbus Avenue, the whole plum of the Upper West Side where the two detectives from Queens and the Bronx were lucky to have been assigned and which April might soon leave.
April’s eyes were on the solid block of three-story, mud-colored town houses across the street from the precinct. Somewhere in one of them was a flooding toilet she’d refused to deal with. It was far from the worst thing she’d ever done as a cop, but she felt kind of bad about it. Maybe the woman was old and didn’t know what to do.
For a few seconds, she stood on the sidewalk jingling the car keys. It was only the first of November, but already the air was cold and damp, just slightly on the pungent side. Maybe they’d have another bad winter.
Walking the Chinatown beat for four years, April used to gauge the changing seasons by the intensity of the garbage smell as it sat on the sidewalks waiting for pickup. Last winter there had been no less than eighteen snowstorms in New York. The city had been paralyzed again and again as mountains of snow and garbage cut off access from the sidewalks to the frozen streets. Yet the air had smelled sweet and fresh.
Most of the year that April had been in the Two-O, she had traveled around in an unmarked car working cases with Sergeant Sanchez even though there was no such thing as partners in detective squads. He called their relationship “close supervision.”
Close supervision of one cop over another could have several meanings, April knew. It could mean her work wasn’t up to standard and needed watching. Which it didn’t. It could mean Mike was her rabbi, showing her the ropes. Which he thought he was. Or it could mean he was just constantly hitting on her. Which he also was.
April hadn’t liked the arrangement. She didn’t like being second-guessed or watched, didn’t like being close to anyone or involved. Cops who were too involved made mistakes in the field. They got hurt. Mike had jumped in front of her gun once to save her life. She could have accidentally shot him. It still upset her to think about it. He knew as well as she did that involvement could mess up judgment, could be lethal. And still he worked pretty hard at involving her.
“I’m nostalgic already,” she muttered, buttoning her jacket.
Mike shot her a glance. “You mean that?”
“Well, it’s not so bad here. Bad would be Brooklyn. Staten Island. Lots of things worse than being here.”
They found the car in the police lot in a tight spot, squeezed inside carefully, and banged the doors shut at the same time.
“Why didn’t you just get the pay, then?” he demanded.
“You know why.” April slammed the car into reverse and made a number of tight maneuvers that almost resulted in disaster for two blue-and-whites and the Commander’s navy Ford Taurus.
“Hey, chill out. It’s not the end of the world.”
“I’m fine.”
“Yeah, then why wreck the Captain’s car?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I made a mistake.” It was the first time April had said it, maybe even the first time she had thought it. But now that the truth was out, it hit her hard. “I liked being a detective. I mean I really liked it.”
She pulled out into the street and jerked to a halt, narrowly missing a speeding bicycle messenger. “Sorry,” she muttered as Mike’s lowered head hit the dashboard.
“Get out. I’m driving,” he snapped.
“I’m sorry.” April leaned over solicitously. “Are you all right?”
“No, you nearly killed that kid. Get out.” Mike’s Zapata mustache quivered with outrage as he smoothed back his fine head of hair with both hands, checking his profile in the mirror.
“I didn’t even get close to him,” April protested. “Get off my case.”
She’d said it a thousand times. Back off. Leave me alone. What did she want with a vain, sweet-smelling, overheated, hairy, smiling non-Chinese person who would not stop calling her “darling” in Spanish no matter who was around to hear him? She wasn’t his darling.
“Fine.” Now he probed a nonexistent bruise on his forehead. “Fine. You fucked up, and you want me to stay off the case. Fine, I’ll stay off the case.”
“I fucked up? I made the list, didn’t I? You know how many good people didn’t make the list?”
April pulled out into the street carefully and stopped on Columbus at the red light.
“Fine,” Mike said a fourth time. “You wanted the rank more than the pay. You wanted a command of your own some day. Huh? Was that it? Maybe you like me so much you wanted to get away before you did something your mother wouldn’t approve of. How about that?”
“Okay, you win. You can drive.” April unfastened her seat belt and flung open the door.
“Get back in here. I don’t want to drive. It’s only two fucking blocks.”
“Damn,” April muttered, slapping her seat belt back on. Yes, yes, and yes. She’d wanted the rank. A lot of cops didn
’t give a damn. They got promoted to detective and made it to first grade. They got a lieutenant’s pay and were happy without the rank. But she wanted the rank. The catch-22 was this: To get the rank you had to take the test. If you were a detective and scored high enough to make sergeant, you lost your job as detective because each advancement in rank meant going back into uniform and out on the streets again as a supervisor.
So, by forcing herself to study for and finally take the sergeant’s test, she’d put herself in the position of possibly losing her status as a detective, her accrued days off, and a lot of other things. There was no telling where she’d end up and how long it would take her to get back into the detective bureau. If ever.
So why had she done it, when she already had sergeant’s pay? She did it because only after you got to the rank of captain could you be promoted further without taking any more tests. Since the sergeant and lieutenant and captain tests were given only when the ranks got thin, you could hit them right or not. Five years ago, when the last sergeant’s test had been given, she had been too green to score well. Mike had taken his sergeant’s test when he was twenty-nine. He was already a sergeant when he went into the detective squad. Last time he had the chance, Mike passed on taking the lieutenant’s test because he already had the pay and liked his job. If he had another opportunity now, he’d probably take it. They were silent for two blocks. April double-parked on Columbus. She tossed the car keys at Mike before getting out.
Raymond Cowles occupied an apartment on the fifth floor of the building located on the corner of Seventy-ninth Street and Columbus Avenue. On the ground floor was Mirella’s, one of the many popular, pricey restaurants in the neighborhood that the officers from the Two-O never patronized.
The first thing April did was look up toward the fifth floor. The building faced the park at the back of the Museum of Natural History. The park looked gloomy now in the gray autumn light, with the few remaining leaves on the trees shriveled and brown.