Loving Time awm-3

by Leslie Glass

  “I’m sorry, m’ijo,” she cried. “Is it my fault that God’s plan is so mysterious we can’t understand it?”

  Mike kissed the wet cheek. “No, Mami, it’s not your fault. But if you believe in God”—he opened his hands, shaking his head like a wise man—“then you have to trust He knows what He’s doing with me, too.”

  Maria felt God’s presence in those words, too. She believed her son was assuring her that either china primavera would become a Catholic if they married or he was not that serious about her after all.

  sixty-three

  Bobbie Boudreau closed the door to the fire room he now called home in B3 of the Stone Pavilion. He had spent the last four nights here. It was dark, and all that could be heard was the machinery—the electrical relays of the elevators clicking and throwing off sparks one after another all day and all night long, as the buttons were pushed upstairs and elevators in the bank right next to him moved from floor to floor; the thud and creaky whir of the mammoth belts and gears on the pumps that drove the water; the hiss of the steam escaping from dozens of safety valves. It was very hot, like Louisiana in the summer, but none of the sounds there were animal or human. He liked that. He was in a hurry to get upstairs, though. He needed a bathroom, a hot cup of coffee, and a doughnut.

  He had just turned the corner into the main corridor near the elevators when he saw a guy in a gray sports jacket and a female slope coming toward him. Bobbie looked at them warily, kept going. His bladder was full. He had to take a leak.

  The man spoke. “Robert Boudreau?”

  Bobbie thought of turning the other way and bolting, but he decided he didn’t give a shit. He kept moving toward them, his eyes fixed way ahead on a better future. The man was nothing, one of those little Hispanic clowns like the building workers, shorter than he and at least thirty pounds lighter. He could knock the guy over with one hand. He planned to brush past them on the slope’s side and just keep going. It didn’t work out that way, though. When Bobbie was ten feet from them, the man opened his jacket and casually reached for the gun in his waistband.

  “Stop. Police.”

  Stunned, Bobbie stopped short and put his hands up. “Hey, man, you got some kind of problem?”

  The man shook his head. Bobbie was the one with the problem. “Are you Robert Boudreau?”

  “You gonna shoot if I am?”

  “No. Just getting your attention. I was addressing you. Didn’t you hear me?”

  “No.”

  “Do you hear me now?”

  Must be some kind of undercover cop. Bobbie glared at him. Asshole never took the gun out of his waistband, but he kept his hand near enough to it for the display of power to piss Bobbie off. What kind of shit was this? Bobbie felt like peeing all over the spic.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I hear you.”

  “Good. Put your hands against the wall and spread them.”

  An electrical engineer from the maintenance staff turned down the hall. He came to a stop when he saw them. The blood rushed to Bobbie’s face. Now he was being humiliated in public. He looked at the cop’s gun, then at the slope. Her jacket was open and she had a gun in her waist, too. What kind of shit was this? He hadn’t done anything to deserve this. This was an outrage. This was beyond an outrage. He didn’t want to put his hands on the wall and spread them. He didn’t want that slope touching him. But he’d seen people killed by cops before. He was clean. He didn’t have anything to hide, so he spread them. It was a good thing the male patted him down. He would have lost it if the slope touched him.

  A few minutes later the two cops had him in a cop car headed for the station, and it was happening to him all over again.

  sixty-four

  April put the coffee and doughnut on the table in the interview room and waited for the uniform to return from the bathroom with the charming suspect. Sergeant Joyce had finally succumbed to her fever and called in sick. Mike was in her office talking to the D.A.’s office. He was in charge now.

  She sniffed the coffee and was tempted, but it was precinct bilge, decided against it. The door opened. It was not the officer and the suspect. It was Lieutenant Marsh. Since the Department had done away with Desk Sergeant, some precincts had Lieutenants, even Captains, in the command area at the desk downstairs. The Two-O was one of them. She had no idea why Marsh had left his command post and come up to the squad room, waving an envelope in her face.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  Marsh held out the sealed letter with a smirk. “Congratulations.”

  April had been pranked before, more than once. She regarded the official-looking envelope with suspicion. She didn’t have time to be the butt of a joke. She had a suspect in the john.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know, Sergeant.”

  Sergeant, what was this sergeant? She was a detective. April squeezed her lips together, afraid to take the envelope and get bad news.

  “What is your opinion? Is this something I have to respond to right away?” she asked, meek as a lamb.

  “I would say so, yes. Go ahead, take it, it won’t bite.”

  “I’m in the middle of an interview.”

  “Maybe the interview can wait.”

  “Okay.” I’m a sucker. April took it.

  “Go ahead, open it.”

  She didn’t want to open it in front of Marsh. But she could see he wouldn’t leave until she did. She opened it. Inside was the request to report for the promotion she’d been waiting for. She’d made Sergeant. That was good. Her heart thudded. She’d made it. Had she made it, or was this a joke?

  Lieutenant Marsh held out his hand. “Like I said, I wanted to be the first to congratulate you.”

  April shook his hand. “Thank you.” Where was the joke?

  “Yeah.” He smirked.

  April glanced at the date for reporting. “Report November 16,” it said. What was this? Today was November 16. She frowned. That couldn’t be right. There was supposed to be notice for this kind of thing. It was a big deal. You had to report in uniform. There was a ceremony and everything. People brought their families. Everybody clapped.

  She checked the date again and got the joke. The letter from downtown was dated November 1. That was the day the Cowles case started, the day of the flooding toilet. April stared at Marsh. “Lieutenant …?”

  He shrugged. “Yeah, well, it got kind of mislaid.”

  “Mislaid?”

  “Well, I just found it. I don’t know what happened. Some screwup.” Lieutenant Marsh was a big red-faced man, the kind of guy who couldn’t run a block without stroking out. He wasn’t known for screwups. He was grinning now, totally unapologetic.

  April lowered her eyes so her rage wouldn’t jump out and hurt her career. “Yeah, well, thanks for finding it. I appreciate that.”

  Just then the uniform brought Bobbie back into the room. Boudreau ignored the Lieutenant and reached for the doughnut before he was even seated at the table.

  “Well, you better deal with it, Sergeant,” Marsh said as he left. “Better hurry up.”

  April checked her watch. It was 8:15. She was supposed to report for promotion at 10:30. One Police Plaza. She’d been through this before. It was the kind of thing that made a person crazy. Just when you were at the turning point of a case, you had to be downtown taking a test or getting a promotion or some damn thing. Mierda. She was angry, really angry. She could kill Marsh. She wanted to go downtown; she couldn’t go downtown. Mike was here all alone with their suspect—not to mention every crisis of the whole squad—and she was supposed to walk out on him and report for promotion with the wrong clothes, totally unprepared? She felt sick. She hadn’t gotten the letter in time. She was working a case and couldn’t leave.

  “You all right?” Mike came in, frowned with concern.

  “Sure.”

  “Problem?”

  “No. I’ll tell you about it later.” She put the letter in her pocket. It was her job to finish what she’d sta
rted. All that work to get ahead and now she was going to miss the glory. She felt sick, wished she could puke right there on the floor. “You all set?”

  Mike nodded. She punched the button on the tape recorder. She told it the day and the date, the location of the interview and the persons present.

  “Would you tell us your name and address,” she said to the suspect.

  Boudreau turned his head away from her, gulped some coffee, and didn’t reply.

  April waited for a moment, then tried again. “We’re beginning our interview now. Would you tell us your name and address for the record?”

  Boudreau screwed up his face at Mike. “You call this an interview?”

  “We’re having a conversation. How about making a contribution?” In spite of taking over command, Mike seemed relaxed, ready for a long, complicated day.

  Bobbie glared at him but said, “What do you want to know?”

  Mike and April exchanged glances. The suspect had some kind of authority problem with women. So, this one would be Mike’s. April thought about leaving, going downtown, having the Police Commissioner shake her hand. She thought about becoming a Sergeant. Her old boyfriend Jimmy Wong had told her he would never marry her if she made Sergeant. Sergeant Joyce’s husband divorced her when she’d joined the force. Lots of people had trouble with women in authority. Mike didn’t seem to. He must already have known she’d been promoted when he took her home to meet his mother.

  Well, they had to be professional to work efficiently. Never mind the shit she’d gotten from downstairs, or this snub from a slime. She couldn’t let these things bother her.

  Mike led Robert Boudreau through the preliminary questions. The suspect pushed his chair back from the table and thrust out his pelvis defiantly as he described his job at the Stone Pavilion, how long he’d worked there and what he did. When asked what he had been doing down on B3, he didn’t respond. Nor did he ask how the cops had located him there.

  Bobbie did respond to the question about his previous job by giving a long, rambling account of his work as a nurse at the Centre—the faithful service he’d given for so many years all for nothing. He’d been unappreciated all along, and betrayed at the end, he told them. It happened to him over and over. Agitated, he tugged on his greasy ponytail.

  An hour passed. Bobbie’s position in his chair changed as he became more intense and involved in the story of his life. One injustice after another. Another forty-five minutes passed. At ten o’clock April thought some more about leaving. Then the hair on the back of her neck prickled. She could feel Mike getting tense. She turned her watch around so she couldn’t see its face. Still, she felt each minute tick by.

  Bobbie leaned forward in his seat, his sullen eyes locked on Sanchez. “We went halfway around the world for them. And you know what they did to us? They blew us to bits. You had to be there to understand. Those people were worthless trash. They didn’t appreciate what we were doing for them. They had no honor. I’ll tell you, those slope women are nothing like American women.”

  Sanchez chewed on his mustache, uncomfortable with the Asian stuff.

  “Those people weren’t even human. They stole our stuff. They had diseases. They killed people. One of my buddies tried to help some slope cunt’s kid—”

  “Hey, watch your language.”

  Boudreau kept his eyes locked on Mike. “You know what they did to him? They stole his money. They led him on a fucking goose chase, and they killed him. You know what? I didn’t give a shit when our guys raped the women, killed them. They’re worthless trash. They’re nothing, not even human.”

  April’s scalp prickled. Ten-twenty. It was over. It was too late. She’d missed it. And for what, to hear this slime call Asians trash? Her stomach ached. She was tense, worried about where this was heading. She could see that Mike was bristling all over.

  “I don’t know how you can stand to work with one. These slopes are shit. They used their own kids as decoys. They killed their own children. The women were prostitutes—”

  “Okay, that’s enough. We heard you got into some trouble in ’Nam. Why don’t you tell us about that?”

  Boudreau’s strange, pale eyes locked on Mike. “A man should work with a man.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s not for you to say.”

  “It just makes you wonder what kind of guy works with a slope cunt—”

  There was no advance warning. No rumble, no growl, no muscle contraction. Nothing. They were in one place and then they were in another with no intermediate steps. The electrical charge hit Mike like a bolt of lightning, sudden and deadly. First he was sitting at the table listening to the suspect, sweating a little, uncomfortable. Then he was on his feet in the place beyond rage. He dragged the bigger man out of his chair and hauled him to a standing position. Then he rammed his knee into Boudreau’s groin so hard, the impact of the collision almost knocked them both over.

  Gagging, Boudreau tried to double over, but Mike was out of control. He didn’t let go. He didn’t let the man buckle and vomit on the floor as nature decreed. He kept his hold on the larger man, shaking and shaking him in a frenzy.

  “You sick bastard. Hijo deputa.” He held Boudreau upright by the throat so close their faces almost touched. “Culo,” he whispered. “Cagado.”

  Then he smashed Boudreau backward over the table and pinned him down with one arm. His other hand was clamped on Boudreau’s Adam’s apple, squeezing so hard the man couldn’t vomit, couldn’t make a sound, couldn’t catch the breath he’d lost.

  April was horrified at the pure animal rage of Mike totally lost to the world. He was crazed, didn’t know what he was doing. She’d seen this happen with other cops. Seen plenty of kicking and beating violent suspects on the street, seen cops so mad they could kill with their bare hands. The thing you did was open the door. Call for help. Subdue the cop.

  Stop it. Her job was to stop it.

  The suspect was choking. He was losing consciousness, was turning blue. Open the door, call for help. Subdue the cop. She couldn’t move, couldn’t make a sound. The tape clicked off. Sergeant Joyce was at home, sick. The A.D.A. wasn’t coming in until they had something. There was nobody watching behind the mirror. They were alone. Mike was covered with sweat. He was at the man’s throat, out of control. And April was too shocked to move.

  Then it stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Mike removed his hand from the suspect’s throat and pushed him off the table onto the floor.

  “Now apologize to the lady,” he said.

  sixty-five

  In about fifteen minutes Mike had cooled off and returned to being the professional cop. He had Boudreau back in the chair at the table and appeared to accept the man’s mumbled apology to April. It was clear he was not going to leave Boudreau alone to think about what he’d done. He was going to go on with the interview as if nothing had happened, calm and cool.

  April did not calm down, however. It was not unusual for suspects who hadn’t been touched at all to demand lawyers, then claim they’d been beaten and tortured. Mike had almost killed this guy. If Boudreau asked for a lawyer and complained soon enough, there might be bruises on his neck to prove Mike had lost it. She was nervous and unsure of what she should do.

  Healy was down at the courts waiting for a warrant to search Boudreau’s apartment. Aspirante was searching the basement of the Stone Pavilion. Their investigation was moving along. There was no way to change the configuration of who was doing what without Sergeant Joyce’s intervention. April had no doubt Joyce would take them both off the case if she knew what had just happened.

  Mike’s sweat dried. He’d calmed down, but the threat of violence lingered. April did not consider the problem resolved when Bobbie did not immediately ask for a lawyer, or when both men pretended nothing had happened. Or even when Mike got a uniform to bring in more food at twelve-thirty and Bobbie ate it. This was bad news, an unstable and potentially dangerous situation. She debated calling in another detective. But ther
e were problems with that. All the detectives were out in the field. And even if everyone were in, she was not in a position to take any independent action. Mike was in charge. He was the supervisor of the squad and he had not adequately supervised himself. All she could do was stay in the room as long as Mike was with the suspect.

  April was deeply disturbed. She had worked with Sanchez over a year and had no idea he was capable of nearly killing an unarmed man in his custody with his bare hands. She could not take over the interview because the suspect hated Asians. But she could not leave, either. She was pinned to her chair for hours in the airless interview room as Mike tried to make the crucial bridge between Boudreau and the murder of Harold Dickey.

  She would not leave him. The balance had shifted and things had changed between them. It wasn’t simple anymore. When he’d shoved his own body between her and a raging fire months ago, Mike had viewed protection of her as his duty. He’d have done the same for a man, for anybody. Some cops saved the other fellow first no matter who the other fellow was. This defense of her honor today was mad and unreasoning, totally out of control. There was no excuse for it.

  April sat uncharacteristically mute. Over the hours, as Mike questioned Bobbie, she remembered all the times she and Mike had been alone together in tight places, in dangerous places, in boredom—in the maelstrom of other people’s violence. In extreme situations he would punch somebody once, jerk someone’s arm behind his back. But his way was to subdue quickly and efficiently. He wouldn’t use force unless he had to, and never extended it beyond what was necessary to get the job done. He had a reputation for being laid-back, almost too laid-back.

  Now she knew Mike’s self-control was new, learned relatively recently. The going-over-the-edge was an old thing. And now he wouldn’t look at her. He was ashamed, like a reformed alcoholic who’d fallen off the wagon. That was how she guessed he’d been in the gangs when he was a kid, was no stranger to violence.

  She was stunned. She had thought she knew him. She thought she knew herself. Right and wrong always seemed so black and white to her—what you were supposed to do and what you weren’t. It was clear. It was written down. April always felt she would hold to the side of right no matter what happened or who was involved. She didn’t like violent people. Didn’t respect cops who went around bashing people who taunted them. But she still respected Mike, even after what he had just done. She knew that when she hadn’t stopped him, she herself had gone over the edge. And now they were both out there.