by Leslie Glass
Instantly, a thousand memories jumped out of the smoke, crowding the match tip as it flared. Then, as she reached out and lit one of the dozens of candles she had placed around the table and sideboard, her memories began to separate and go to their places. Some traveled to the silver pocket watch that had not worked since the day her grandfather died, some to the baskets of fresh and dried fruits, some to the chilies and herbs tied in bunches with thin bakery string, some to the stacks of letters with ink so faded on the brittle paper that the words could hardly be deciphered anymore. Still others flooded into the bright, artificial lilies and roses that reeked of plastic no matter how many times they were washed.
As the candle smoked and guttered, Maria lowered herself to her knees and began to pray. This year she did not pray for the dead, who were either in Heaven or not as God saw fit, but for the soul of her son, whose heart had refused to heal for so many years in spite of the many eager women who took him to their beds. Mike had been a husband with no wife for a long time. But now the wife-who-was-not was dead. It was only right that her son should have his soul back, so life could begin again.
“Just take a look at him, Todopoderoso, a man of thirty-four, almost old enough to be an abuelo and not yet a padre,” Maria complained softly to the Almighty in her own mix of Spanglish.
“Está un crimen en contra la naturaleza, no? I ask you not for myself, even though I wouldn’t mind taking care of dos bebes, or even tres. I ask for m’ijo. My only child. You took the first step. Now take the second. Whisper in his ear, Todopoderoso, tell him it’s time to love, to marry again. Dios, are you listening …?”
Maria never prayed to the Son of God. At the center of her shrine she had placed one lone crucifix, a very small and painless one that showed no signs of suffering on the serene face of Jesucristo. There were no nails sticking through His hands or blood dripping down His chest, and His crown of thorns was all but obscured by His healthy head of long, curly hair. The crucifix was surrounded by small prayer cards colorfully adorned with rosy angels and many poses of the Virgen y Jesu. Maria preferred the Mexican Church with its emphasis on the love of mother and child to the endless Italian celebration of tortured saints—skinned and beaten and burned—and otherwise martyred Christians in the church she attended. She always prayed to Dios Todopoderoso and to the Virgen. No one else.
Her fingers moved to the next bead. “Ave Maria …”
Her son, Mike Sanchez, stood in the hot shower for a full five minutes, savoring the only privacy he had. He dreamed in the hot rain, scrubbing at his skin absently with a rough loofah, wondering, as he always did these days, if April Woo was showering in Queens at this very moment. Wondering if indeed she showered. He didn’t know if she showered. Maybe she bathed instead, in green- or blue- or pink-scented bubbles.
So which was it—shower or bath? Every day he thought about it, and every day not knowing made him anxious. He could not imagine her asleep at night either, since he didn’t know what she wore to bed. This was the kind of thing that irritated him. He was a detective. He could find out anything about a dead person he hadn’t even known, but there were a lot of very simple facts about April Woo he just couldn’t find out. The living could be tricky. Every time he asked April a question she didn’t like, she flashed him the kind of look that proved her claim that Chinese torture was the best.
It also annoyed him that he couldn’t get a grip on his feelings about her, a female cop who didn’t need a gun to waste a guy. Tough. And he never liked the tough ones for more than a few hot New York minutes. Still, she was the one he thought about.
Okay, so say it was a shower. He visualized April Woo taking a shower. That wasn’t hard. He’d driven her home a few times and knew she lived on the second floor of the neat red-brick house she shared with her parents in Astoria, Queens. There were white curtains in the windows. He had no trouble imagining her soaping her slender body behind the white bathroom curtains. For a few seconds he allowed the vision to turn him on.
Then suddenly, without any warning, April’s sharp, beady-eyed mother intruded on the scene. She leaned out the window and screamed at him in Chinese. Mike could hear the harsh guttural sounds, the meaning as clear as any deep-throated growl of a well-trained guard dog. April’s mother was as thin and mean as his own mother was plump and sweet.
As Mike washed the soap away and then turned off the water, he realized he had heard something after all, but it wasn’t in Chinese. It was a passionate whisper in Spanish. He stepped out of the shower, straining to hear. He felt a chill enter the steamy bathroom and was puzzled. He could almost see the cold air drift in under the door and freeze the moisture. He knew what it was. His mother’s prayers had summoned the ghosts of her family all the way from Mexico. And now they were beginning to arrive.
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 exasperat
ion.
“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.