by Leslie Glass
“I don’t know. Something a woman would like. Sun, sky. Maybe a terrace or a little garden …” He stared out the window at the quiet Sunday street. “Bedroom,” he murmured, and felt himself getting excited at the thought of April in his bedroom.
Judy Chen laughed. “They usually come with a bedroom. What’s this for, getting married or getting laid?”
Two hours and five apartments later, Mike parked behind April’s newly washed Le Baron on the street in front of the Woo house and waited as if it was a stakeout. It took five minutes before a window opened on the second floor.
“What’s up?” April yelled across the frozen grass.
He got out of the car. “Want to come out for a while? I want you to meet someone.”
“Yeah, who?” Without waiting for an answer, she shut the window.
A few minutes later she appeared at the front door. “What’s the matter with you? You look sick.” She was wearing her red turtleneck sweater and black slacks. The week before when he had turned up she’d demanded to know what he was doing there. This week she seemed to be expecting him. Probably Judy Chen had called and told her they were finished.
“You want something to drink?” she asked, stunning him with an invitation to come in.
“Sure.” He followed her inside, looking around for her disapproving parents.
No one else seemed to be home, not even the dog. Still, April avoided the open door to the living room, where Mike could see a hard-looking sofa, two hard-looking Oriental chairs, some of the cheap red and gold things with tassels and paper coins that could be found in Chinatown, and not a lot else.
April entered the enclosed staircase to her place, gesturing for him to follow. At the top of the stairs he wiped his cowboy boots on a welcome mat that had lotus flowers and two Chinese characters on it. He didn’t ask what they meant.
“It’s kind of a dump. I never had time to finish it, and it’s a real mess.” Nervously April admitted him to the neatest place he’d ever seen.
“It’s beautiful,” Mike said, and meant it. “Really.” He took in the plush deep pink sofa with two tapestry pillows of matching pavilions among the clouds and mountains with blooming cherry trees embroidered in pale pinks, blues, and gold. In front of the velvet sofa were two carved wooden tables. One had April’s new nine-millimeter on it. It was still in its box because she had not yet taken the training to qualify for carrying it.
Mike’s gaze traveled to the not-so-newly-painted walls decorated with several scrolls hung with braided rope of more mountain scenes April was never likely to see. The Venetian blinds on the windows were up. He went to look at the view. The garden was shut down for the winter. A denuded hedge hid part of the house on the other side. He turned to the tiny kitchen. Two woks hung above a two-burner stove. The shelves were lined with colorful porcelain jars, bags of unidentifiable dried things. There was a wide rack that held many knives.
“Beautiful,” he said with the solemnity of a person having a religious experience. “Can I see the rest of it?”
“It’s really small,” April muttered. “There’s not much more to it. The bedroom is a mess.… ” She indicated where it was.
“I’m sure it isn’t.” He passed her, moving to the front of the house, his heart hammering away in his chest with the violence of fifteen racehorses in the home stretch of the Kentucky Derby. Oh, God, she was going to do it. All the work, the pressure he’d put on people, the arrangements he’d made, were for nothing. She’d invited him in. She loved him. She was going to make love with him right here, right now, in her own house.
He was in ecstasy. He couldn’t believe it. He’d thought of this moment, dreamed of how it would happen when they finally got together. For months he’d fantasized different April scenarios—April as a hungry tiger, fiercely passionate and aggressive. April ripping her clothes off and going straight for his zipper. April as a cherry blossom, tender and yielding. April touching him, embracing him with all her heart. He’d dreamed of their two naked bodies pressed together in ardiente pasión. April kissing him all over. April with her legs wrapped around him.
He was almost dizzy with anticipation as he went through the door to her bedroom. It had a single bed like his, only hers had a quilt with pink flowers on it. Not cherry blossoms, violets maybe. The bed was made. Two pillows were propped against the wall with the impression of her body on them as if she’d been lying there waiting for him. The chair beside the bed was piled with books.
The fragrance of the light scent she wore was everywhere. He wanted to put his face in the nightgown hanging over everything else on the closet door, sink to his knees, and die on the spot. His heartbeat was like thunder in his ears. He felt almost sick with desire as he waited for her.
But April didn’t follow him into her room. He waited and waited, but she didn’t come for his embrace. Why didn’t she come in? He began to pace, unwilling to leave the bedroom but uneasy about forcing the issue. Finally he poked his head out the door. Steam was beginning to pulse out of the archway into the kitchen. The steam was not April’s desire. The water in the kettle had begun to boil. In a second the kettle whistled, sending his heart into shocked awareness that she had not invited him in for love.
“Mike.”
She summoned him. There was nothing he could do but leave the place of his dreams. As he emerged painfully from her room, she handed him the drink she’d been so busily preparing in the kitchen. He regarded the steaming cup of green liquid with deep distrust. It had a bitter smell.
“Maybe some other time,” he muttered.
“Drink it,” she commanded. “It’ll make you feel better.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine,” he lied.
“No, you don’t.” She clamped a hand on his forehead. “You’re all clammy, you’re sweating. You have a fever. Drink it, you’ll get better.”
That was how April allowed Mike Sanchez close enough to die for her but not close enough to touch. He had to drink the foul herbal tea to get out of there. And only after he drank the tea and told her he felt better would she agree to get in his car.
Then he told her where they were going. At one on Sunday, every Sunday without fail, his Mami always put dinner on the table. She invited some of her ladies from the building, or a cousin, sometimes a priest or a couple of nuns from the order. Always there was lots and lots of food.
April talked about the missing Boudreau file and how that bothered her, but she did not ask any questions. She glanced at him two, three times as they drove to the Bronx, as they parked on Broadway, then again as they waited for the elevator in the low brick building where he lived. He didn’t want to talk about work. She could see how nervous he was.
“Don’t worry, it’s not a big deal,” he kept saying. “I saw yours, you see mine. That’s all. Not a big thing.”
He kept saying it was no big thing, but his heart was going crazy again.
The aromas that greeted them as they stepped out of the elevator on his floor were almost unbearably delicious. Clearly his mother had outdone herself. He could smell onions and peppers, chicken mole, beans and melting cheese. He glanced surreptitiously at April. She didn’t like cheese. He wanted her to like it.
“Smells good,” she murmured as he turned the key in the lock.
“Yeah, my father taught her everything.” Mike opened the door into a room warm with cooking and filled with heavy wooden furniture piled with bright pillows covered in coarsely woven fabrics with bold geometric patterns. He smiled encouragingly, then turned to the table by the window, where his mother sat bathed in the midday sun.
Maria Sanchez had her long hair down her back. She was wearing a purple taffeta dress, with a ruffle around the neckline low enough to reveal the tops of her plump, round breasts. When the door opened, one of her arms was outstretched and her hand was pressed to the lips of a dapper little man with a high pompadour and a bright green shirt.
Mike froze as if confronted by a couple of
Uzis. Equally stunned, his mother gaped at him, then at the beautiful dark-haired woman in the red sweater and black jacket beside him, then back at him. Finally her surprised face relaxed into a wreath of smiles.
“M’ijo,” Maria breathed. “Dichosos los ojos. Come in.”
fifty-five
Bobbie Boudreau did not need to send the Treadwell bitch any more messages. The old woman was right. Treadwell had called in the FBI. She knew he was out there now, and she was running scared. He liked that. A suit was guarding her building, an FBI agent, not a cop. He knew a cop would look like a homeless person or a delivery man from Pizza Hut. The suit you could pick out from two blocks away, right down to the device in his ear so somebody could talk to him from another planet. Just like they did for the President of the United States. Bobbie had to be pretty important if they had to call in the FBI to keep him out of Treadwell’s office. He guessed by now there was another suit standing outside the executive suite on the twentieth floor. It made him want to laugh. Did they think he was stupid?
He could stand out in plain view and they wouldn’t see him. They didn’t know jackshit. Let the police come, let the FBI come, let the whole fucking Army come. What would they find? Nothing. The whole thing made him want to laugh. How long did they think they could secure the area? A week, two weeks, a month?
They could hang around a whole year, for all he cared. This was his territory. He’d been here for fifteen years. He wasn’t going anywhere. He stayed underground most of the time he wasn’t working. Let them worry about where he was and what he was doing. Let them think whoever was bothering the bitch was gone now, far away. He wasn’t showing up for any party with the feds. This wasn’t Waco. This wasn’t Oklahoma. This wasn’t big-time stuff so they could hang out there for weeks just waiting for him to make a move. This was a fucking shrink who killed her patients with words. Whispered nasty little somethings in their ears and down they fell like bowling pins. Bobbie had heard the gossip about the patient who committed suicide because of her. Probably wasn’t the first. These doctors could do anything. They were licensed to kill. Nobody could stop them. She was no better than the bastard back in ’Nam, practicing open-heart surgery on healthy hearts because he wanted to do bypass surgery when he got out. Nobody would say anything. Nobody tried to stop him.
So now it was proven. Words in the mouths of shrinks could kill. Same as guns. Same as explosives, same as poison. Shit—they were carrying concealed weapons that could maim and kill. And nobody had the power to stop them. Only God had the power, and He was taking care of them in His own sweet time.
It was no sin to be on God’s side in this. It was necessary, like war. Sooner or later the FBI was going to be finished bugging and wiring the place. They’d get tired of watching and listening and waiting for him to do something they could nail him for. And then they’d go back to wherever they came from and he’d come out of the basement.
fifty-six
April didn’t sleep well after the lunch with Mike’s mother and the boyfriend he hadn’t known anything about, and after she saw the place he wanted to rent in Queens. Her insomnia didn’t have anything to do with the food, which had been impressive even to her. The apartment was all right, too. It had a terrace and was higher up than either April or Mike had ever lived. Judy was trying to get Mike a special deal on the rent because the landlord wanted a nice quiet cop in the building.
There were a lot of problems with change. April tossed around, worrying about why she was driven to push so hard for advancement when advancement would only take her away from the Two-O, where at least she knew who her enemies were. She had no idea where she was headed or what would happen to her and Mike if they messed up on the Dickey case. Nothing was exactly crystal-clear in this case except that there were a number of songs playing simultaneously and all they had picked up so far were the tunes of the dead men.
The easy homicides are the boyfriend/girlfriend cases. There’s no mystery there. You can see them coming a mile away. Ten miles away. Was Dickey’s death a boyfriend/girlfriend thing? Or was it a revenge thing by a guy who’d poisoned a patient with an antidepressant, harassed the head of the hospital—who conveniently neglected to tell anybody about it for a full six months—and then spiked a doctor’s scotch bottle with the same drug that made the crazy patient a flier a year ago? It was pure speculation, right down to the spiking of the scotch bottle, because the bottle, if there had ever actually been one, had disappeared. April made a mental note to check the building’s garbage even though it would be some job to find a bottle tossed out a week before.
And what was the story with this guy from the FBI? Daveys seemed pretty hot on Boudreau as the killer. But if Dickey’s death was really connected with the Cowles suicide, then how did Boudreau fit into that scenario? Was he really the perfect suspect?
April rolled around in her single bed worrying about the case, trying not to think about sex with Mike in his apartment with its western exposure and view of the sunset. Clara Treadwell had had an affair with Dickey years ago when he was Clara’s teacher. What if Dickey hadn’t been able to handle Treadwell’s being his boss? What if Dickey’s wife was right and Dickey had wanted to renew the romance and his influence over Clara? Clara had a boyfriend in the Senate. Maybe she had been trying to get rid of Dickey and Dickey had been blackmailing her. That played. Clara could have mixed the alcohol and Elavil, not necessarily to kill Dickey, but to make him act crazy so she could discredit him and force him out.
April was also troubled by Daveys. She’d worked with the feds before, down in Chinatown, and she’d never seen a Feeb working on his own. Generally if you saw one Feeb out there in the open, there were dozens more holed up in a building down the street, watching and listening, waiting for a break while partying—eating and drinking on taxpayers’ money.
Feebs and money was a sore issue with cops. Feebs made a lot more of it than cops, and they had an endless supply of federal money for their expenses. Feebs also had the kinds of labs and computers and technical equipment cops only dreamed of. So where were the rest of the Feebs on this case? What were they up to, and how were they about to ruin April Woo’s chances for good luck and a long life?
“Ni,” Skinny Dragon Mother screamed up the stairs just as the sky was graying with dawn. “Ni, you not in hamony. That is the probrem. Not in hamony.”
April did not love it when her mother called her “you,” especially when she was miserable and trying to sleep. She dragged herself out of bed and found a note on her door. The note read, in Chinese:
In order to contract,
It is necessary first to expand.
In order to weaken,
It is necessary first to strengthen.
In order to destroy,
It is necessary first to promote.
In order to grasp,
It is necessary first to give.
It was a description of the transformation process—or what to do when things are out of harmony. A person had to be advised which one of the above things to do when something was out of whack. According to Chinese traditional thinking, the world and all its parts were in a delicate balance of Yin and Yang. Yin the dark—the passive, the brooding female—and Yang the bright—the positive, the active male.
When Yin and Yang were in balance, a person was in good health and good relationship with others, in an excellent position for long life and other good things like job security and status. When Yin and Yang were not in balance, the body became sick in ten thousand ways and relationships with others were bad. Work became impossible, and all kinds of things went wrong.
According to the same ancient Chinese philosophy, bad luck, illness, a rotten character (whatever was wrong) was never a person’s actual fault. The fault was disharmony. If one was lucky and received the correct cure, harmony could be reestablished by one of the transformations described in the note on the door. Yin and Yang could be restored to their rightful balance and happiness achieved.
&nb
sp; “Ni,” Skinny Dragon continued screaming up the stairs. It was clear from the piercing tone of her voice that she had not slept a wink the whole night, either. Her voice was so violent, not even the dog was visible when April opened her door, found the note, and peered down the stairs, yawning.
“Yeah, Ma, what?”
This morning Skinny Dragon Mother was wearing black pajama bottoms and a padded blue peasant jacket to fool the gods into thinking she was poor. Suddenly she started smacking her chest with an open palm and screaming in operatic Chinese that April’s Protective Qi was weak, and this defect was the cause of all her troubles.
“What troubles?”
“You need treatment right away to get in hamony before your jing is so weak it’s too late for anything.”
“Jing? What’s that?” April demanded.
“Neva mind what is. Clock ticking, losing more every day.”
April yawned, bleary-eyed. If a clock was ticking, it had to be hormones. Jade Treatment was not for hormones. Any idiot knew that.
“Velly bad news. Come here,” Sai screamed.
April padded down the stairs to her mother’s kitchen, the official place of bad news. There Skinny Dragon told her that the Chinese newspaper had reported New York City was blanketed with a great fog of impure air so disease-ridden that no one outside or in a public place was safe from the dangerous colds and fevers all around. April was outside and in public places every day, Skinny Dragon said, scowling at her daughter. April breathed the impure air of rapists, thieves, and murderers. So April was in special danger.
April thought of Sergeant Joyce and knew this was true. The rest of yesterday’s disaster she deduced from her mother’s tirade about fat Foo Chang. Apparently the word had spread all the way to New Jersey (where Woo parents were visiting the Chang family) that April’s monkey business with Spanish had spoiled her chances with George Dong and now no one worth marrying would ever have her. Foo Chang told Sai Woo that George Dong’s mother, Mimi, had a cousin whose daughter’s best friend was a Harvard docta. The girl was small size, only four foot ten, and not good-looking. She had curly hair, freckles, and a boxy figure. Also much older than April but … she was successful docta of women at Lenox Hill Hospital on Park Avenue, Manhattan. This small, old women’s doctor, Lauren Cha, and George Dong had played tennis together twice in the big Queens bubble, and now there was rumor of a spring wedding.