by Leslie Glass
“He’s probably away.” Lorna Cowles hung back. “I’m sure that’s what it is.”
“Do you want to wait here?” April asked her gently.
“I—I don’t … Well, what’s … I mean what do people—”
“It’s your call.” April left her to her choice and followed Mike into the apartment.
The living room and dining area made a quick, precise statement. They were spare, unfinished. In the living room were a sofa, a glass coffee table with two empty wineglasses on it. A stereo component system and compact discs were laid out on the floor at the edge of a colorful area rug. A standing halogen lamp still burned brightly in the corner by the un-curtained windows. Under the lamp were two unopened cardboard mover’s boxes. In the dining area were a round café-style table and two wicker café chairs. The only thing on the table was a bowl of wrapped Halloween candy, the kind you passed out to trick-or-treaters. The bowl was about a quarter full.
It looked as if Cowles had only recently moved in, and he and a friend had just finished dinner. April took it in instantly and would not forget her first impression. Out the windows she could see the back of the museum and the leafless trees in the park. Mike had stopped at the bedroom door. The total stillness of his attitude, the stiffness of his back told her the man they were looking for was in there.
“Looks like a suicide,” he said softly, going in.
April followed him to the door, then stopped as Mike had so that she, too, could form an impression. They worked the same way. Later, they would ask each other the same questions, shake the answers around like a dog with a sock, follow the same thoughts to their conclusions. But for now they just looked.
Raymond Cowles lay on one side of his queen-size bed, the side with the bedside table next to it. He was lying on the rumpled beige sheets, wearing suede loafers without socks, faded jeans, and a blue shirt buttoned only halfway. He was on his back, his arms at his sides. He was beautifully dressed and looked like an actor in a movie.
The way the room appeared only half-lived in, with no reading light by the bed, no clothes on the floor, no paraphernalia of a life scattered about, it almost seemed as if someone could shout “Action” and Raymond Cowles the actor would get up to finish the scene.
Raymond Cowles the man wasn’t getting up, though. He’d finished his last action when he put the plastic bag over his head and taped it with masking tape around his neck. His life had gone with the air in the bag. He was the color of putty.
“Oh, God. No!” Lorna Cowles had finally made it into the apartment. Her fist flew to her mouth, and she screamed, “Oh, God. Oh, God. Take it off! Quick, take it off.”
April took her arm. “Come on, let’s—”
“Take it off,” she screamed. “Don’t let him—”
“It’s too late. There’s nothing we can do.” April guided her out of the room.
“Is he—?” Suddenly Lorna wanted to go back.
“He died hours ago. Long time ago.” April led her into the kitchen. Here Raymond had taken an interest. Pots hung from a pot rack. Rows of glass jars filled with beans and dried pasta, a shelf of spices. A bowl of fruit, ripe. Two used cloth napkins and matching placemats lay on the counter along with some crumbs and an empty bottle of wine. White wine, a California chardonnay.
“Oh, my God.” Lorna Cowles was horrified, stunned. The fist went to her mouth again. “He cooked for someone.”
Apparently he had. April found a clean glass in the cupboard, filled it with water, and handed it to Lorna.
Lorna took a sip, then turned and vomited in the sink.
April swallowed. This was the way it happened. Mike hit the redial on the phone to find out if the deceased had called anyone before he died. Then he went into the victim’s bathroom looking for the sedatives Cowles would have needed to take to get drowsy enough not to fight asphyxiation, and she was in the kitchen with the vomiting wife.
When the vomiting wife was finished, April handed her paper towels and some ice water.
“Oh, God … Who would do something like that to him?” Lorna slumped against the counter. “Who would do that?”
“What makes you think someone else did it?” April murmured.
“Well, he wouldn’t. Ray wouldn’t do such a thing. He believed in God. He believed in eternal Heaven and Hell. He would not have done this to himself.” Lorna fixed her light blue eyes on April. “Don’t even consider suicide. I’m sure it wasn’t. Please, don’t cover it up like that. Find out who did it.”
“Sure,” April said. Of course they would investigate. It was their job to investigate. But it looked like suicide to her. In the other room April could hear Mike calling for Crime Scene and an ambulance. Maybe he’d found something that made him suspect Cowles’s death wasn’t a suicide. That changed things.
Lorna Cowles reached out, as if somehow to connect with the last bottle of wine her husband had drunk. “Poor Ray,” she murmured.
“Don’t touch,” April said quickly. “Don’t touch anything else.”
The woman’s hand jerked back. “Don’t touch,” Lorna Cowles told herself. “Don’t touch.”
nine
Ten minutes later Lorna Cowles was out in the hall of her estranged husband’s new apartment, weeping noisily. “Ray would never kill himself. He’d been analyzed. He was saving for his retirement.”
April handed her a tissue.
“We were so close, liked all the same things. Neither of us cooked. Restaurants were our thing. We went out a lot.… ”
April waited for her to blow her nose.
“I don’t understand. He said he needed to be alone for a while. That’s all I know. Maybe his psychiatrist knows.”
April could hear Mike’s voice on the phone. Then everything was quiet. She knew Sergeant Joyce was on her way over.
“He couldn’t have killed himself.” Lorna started again, shaking her head so hard, her fine pale hair flew back and forth.
April let some silence build up for a few seconds. More silence. Finally she asked, “What makes you think so?”
Lorna frowned. “He didn’t know how to make pleats.” She held her hands up and pleated the air with her fingers to show April what she meant. “The bag was pleated around his neck. Didn’t you see that? How could he have done that?”
He probably did it before he put the bag over his head. Suicides often planned everything. April cleared her throat.
“Ray wasn’t manually dexterous,” Lorna insisted. “He couldn’t cook, couldn’t hammer a nail. You see?”
What April saw was a pale, slender woman who no longer appeared helpless and tragic. The tension and fear that had been engraved so deeply on Lorna’s face when they’d first met her was gone. Now she was angry, indignant. April wondered what kind of life insurance the deceased had. She fell silent, waiting for the widow to tell her more.
Just then, down the hall, the elevator door slid open. Sergeant Margret Mary Joyce, her hair awry and her face set in a scowl, slouched out. As April’s favorite color was blue for the Department, Sergeant Joyce’s favorite color was green for her heritage. Today she wore a forest-green jacket over an un-matching green blouse and dark-brown trousers.
On Sergeant Joyce’s bad days April thought she looked like a badly dressed fire hydrant with a badly dyed blond wig. On good days April acknowledged that her supervisor’s small Irish nose—which tilted up at the tip instead of becoming flat and spreading out as April’s did—was quite appealing. Her skin was nice and white, even in summer, because she never went outside except on a call. She was plump, but hardly fat. And her hair was not really so terrible in and of itself. It was just hacked off without a plan, dyed the wrong color, and not often enough. Sometimes the front of her hair stuck straight up, and April itched to do something about it.
Sergeant Joyce’s eyes were dark blue, too close together, and she squinted when concentrating, which was most of the time. But she was very serious, wanted to prove to the world that women were just as good in law
enforcement as men. Maybe better. She, too, was a comer. That’s why she was there, didn’t want anything in her squad to get by her, just in case the squeal turned out to be an important one.
She walked past April without acknowledging her. “Are you Mrs. Cowles?” she asked with no attempt at sensitivity.
As Lorna looked the newcomer over, her uncertainty returned. “Are you with the police?” she asked anxiously.
“Yes, I’m Sergeant Joyce.” Commander of the Detective Squad, she didn’t say.
Right away April could see that Lorna didn’t like her. “I already told the officer everything I know.” She cocked her head toward April, who was suddenly busy with her notebook.
“You mean Detective Woo?”
Lorna glanced at April. “Uh, yes.”
Sergeant Joyce looked doubtful. Looking doubtful or scathing was her thing. “Well, you’ll probably think of some more things over time.”
“I may think of a lot of things,” Lorna replied sharply, “but I know my husband, and I know he didn’t kill himself, so you better start looking for the monster who did.”
Nothing like antagonizing the cops. The way Sergeant Joyce hammered her flat feet on the worn hall carpet as she walked away gave every indication that it was not up to the newly widowed Lorna Cowles to tell the police what their job was. Without another word, she went inside. Eager to get into the apartment to view the deceased.
ten
Sergeant Joyce’s lips were gone when she returned. They had disappeared into her mouth, where she chewed on them thoughtfully as she considered the situation. Inside the apartment the Crime Scene team had already begun its work. Joyce made a slight motion with her head at April as she stared steadily at Lorna. April knew that scrutiny. It meant We’re going to strip all the covers off this woman and see what’s underneath. It was a common police tactic that April and Sanchez used only on alternate Tuesdays with clearly guilty suspects. Today was Monday. The woman was the victim’s widow, and clearly not at her best. With her, they wouldn’t have used it.
April’s left eyebrow arched at her supervisor. You want me to go or stay?
Joyce raised her shoulder a half an inch in reply.
Stick around.
Inside the apartment, muffled conversation as the two men from Crime Scene went about their job of dusting for prints and photographing and sketching and measuring and bagging anything that could conceivably be used as physical evidence in whatever case might be made in court many months from now. If it ever came to that. Sanchez was searching for an address book, for leads on the girlfriend, Cowles’s dinner companion. April wanted to be in there with him.
Out in the hall, silence. Now the Sergeant was guarding the door like a brick chimney, her hair on end and her mouth shut tight on her lips. She studied the widow this way for what seemed like a few eternities. Lorna’s beige coat had fallen open. Underneath, a tan sweater was unevenly tucked into a straight plaid skirt of the palest blues and browns. It appeared the woman had dressed in a hurry and rushed over. Still, her tights matched and so did the paisley scrap of silk tied around her neck. Sergeant Joyce’s eyes finished the tour of Lorna’s person by scanning her polished tasseled loafers, which were similar to those of her dead husband except hers were not suede, and the shoulder bag that had seen better days. A most conservative-looking person. A drink of water. Pale and exhausted, Lorna did not give the impression of a killer. But April had seen her change colors three times in an hour, now, and had a picture of her as a chameleon.
Sergeant Joyce released her lips from behind her teeth. Her pink lipstick was now outside the lines. She was ready to speak. “Mrs. Cowles, are you all right? Would you like a cup of coffee?”
Confused by this sudden concern for her well-being, Lorna glanced quickly at April, the cop who had seen her vomit in the sink without gagging herself.
“I touched. I’m sorry,” she said, so softly the brick chimney was taken aback.
“What?” Sergeant Joyce turned to April for an answer.
April reached into her own shoulder bag, pulled out her diminishing pack of tissues, and offered it to the Sergeant, pointing to the bow in her own lips.
“What …? Oh.” Sergeant Joyce accepted a tissue and dabbed at her mouth distractedly. “What do you mean, you touched?”
“I know you’re not supposed to touch anything. I threw up,” Lorna said flatly. The Chinese cop wouldn’t let her clean the sink. Her eyes flickered at the clicking sound inside the apartment. “What’s that?”
“They’re taking pictures.”
Down the hall a door opened. A gaunt elderly woman in a pink flannel bathrobe cautiously emerged from her apartment with a garbage bag. “What’s going on?” she demanded querulously. “I’m a sick woman. I’m not supposed to be disturbed.”
Sergeant Joyce motioned with her head toward the woman. Without a word, April crossed the hall to talk to her.
“Who are you? What is this, a convention?” The woman peered at April through watery eyes.
“We’re with the police. There’s been an accident,” April told her.
“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. Just get out of here as soon as you can.” She thrust the garbage bag into April’s hand and closed her door with a bang.
In the six years April had worked the Fifth Precinct in Chinatown, first walking the beat, then as a detective, no one had dared call her a bitch or hand her their garbage for disposal. In Chinatown, people believed the law existed for one purpose only: to cause trouble for perfectly innocent citizens. The police were there to imprison or deport them, steal their money, and maybe beat them up in the process. In Chinatown, police were treated with fear and respect.
But here, on the affluent Upper West Side, no one was afraid of the police. No one respected them, and no one was grateful when they did their job. Here, the police were held in contempt by the rich, and cursed and shot at by the poor. Considering the fact that the police department was the city’s only hedge against chaos, April sometimes thought being a cop was worse than a thankless job; it was a cruel joke. Maybe that was the reason so few Chinese wanted it.
She marched to the door marked EXIT with the old woman’s garbage. Near the door something touched her. She brushed her face with her free hand. Nothing was there. Still, for a wild moment, her armor was pierced and she felt elation. What was it? No one was anywhere near her. At the end of the hall, Sergeant Joyce stood talking to Lorna Cowles.
Must be her mother who traveled around with April sneaking her ideas in whenever she could. Many years ago Sai Woo had told April that the air was in constant motion, not with wind and rain and snow and sleet but with the activity of powerful gods and ancient spirits that could do whatever they wanted to human life. She had warned April to watch out for them and try to decipher the hidden meaning in everything in order to make the gods work for, not against, her. For spirits could blow hot or cold in a person’s face and alter his feelings and his life in an instant. Turn a man away from his wife, toward evil and ruin. Turn a woman toward the golden light. You never knew what they were going to do.
This was another way in which April was disobedient. She refused to believe in golden lights and shabby gods that had been lost even to China for more than half a century. She was American, lived in a rational world where things could be explained. Where things had to be explained. Every day of her life, every case she worked had an official beginning, had to be written up on numerous forms. Every case had to be officially opened, investigated, and officially closed. The blanks on the forms were small. There was no room for subtlety.
Yet the system turned out to be more tricky and complicated than any capricious spirit her mother could invent. Even when the laws were crystal-clear, lawyers and judges shrouded the path to punishment in an impenetrable fog, putting a dozen different spins on every count against every criminal. People killed one another in riots, on the streets, murdered them brutally in their own homes, and their lawyers got them off.
They stole cars and sold drugs and assaulted children and were out on the street again without blinking. Who knew why this was happening?
Every day April tried to make sense out of events that made no sense whatsoever. And still, every once in a while, she had a golden moment of absolute happiness that challenged reason. Now, standing in the hallway of Raymond Cowles’s apartment building with an old woman’s bulging plastic bag in one hand, she wondered if perhaps the flooding toilet and the old woman’s garbage were spirits telling her she was wasted and unappreciated here in this uptown Caucasian world.
It occurred to her that this part of her life was a test that was over, like the sergeant’s test she had taken. Except her sergeant’s test had been a retest. Months ago, she had missed her scheduled appointment for the exam because a suspect had been trying to kill her at the time. So they had given her another chance at it. Only this time no board of real people was there to ask her questions and evaluate her answers. Instead of a board of three, one sour-faced uniformed Sergeant had given her the written exam, then set up a video camera as if she were a suspect in a particularly nasty homicide.
“Please direct your answers to the camera,” he’d told her.
Who knew if anyone ever actually looked at the tape. Maybe they—whoever they were—just decided it was time for a change for April Woo, as they had when she was transferred out of the Fifth Precinct. Perhaps it was her destiny to return there now because she was an Asian and that’s where she belonged. Only this time maybe she would go in triumph, as a Sergeant, a Supervisor.
Maybe wearing a uniform and eating delicious Chinese food every day was her future. The correct future. Recently she had met a doctor who had his office in Chinatown. George Dong seemed to be interested in her despite her age, which was nearly thirty, and her job, which was demanding at best. Maybe something would come of it. The thought shot a shiver down her spine, sending the golden moment on its way. She opened the exit door.
The building was too small for a back elevator. Only a landing with a recycling bin, a shelf for newspapers, a garbage chute, and the back stairs were behind the door. The recycling bin and the shelf were empty. Whatever had been in Raymond’s garbage had already been removed. April remembered that his Monday paper was on the carpet in front of his door, but there was no sign of a Sunday paper. Most people kept at least a few sections for a day or two. Funny. She dumped the old woman’s garbage down the chute.