by Leslie Glass
“Rosario Tebrones married an Italian. He went to Canada, then came here to visit a friend. Remember Rosario, Maria? She went to Canada and became very rich.”
Maria could no longer remember Rosario. She could hardly remember her Mami, dead of fever at thirty when Maria was only twelve. But she remembered the soft whispers, the exhortations like prayers in her ears each night before she slept. “En el nombre del Padre, del Hijo, y del Espírit? Santo marry a good man, Maria, or your life will be fuego del infierno from the first day to the last.”
Maria got up to pour a coffee thick as soup for her hijo, anticipating his arrival only seconds before it occurred. She inhaled his morning collection of fragrances: deodorant, toothpaste, Irish Spring soap, shaving cream, some kind of crema hidratante to soften his skin after shaving—and the strong perfume of many flavors that overshadowed everything, lingering in the apartment for hours after he was gone.
He sat down, his eyes, for a change, soft with concern. He did not begin with a thousand questions about Diego, and for that she was grateful. “What are you worried about, Mami?” he asked.
She sighed. “I saw the papers in your room. Are you getting married?”
“To April?” Mike swallowed some coffee down and choked, laughing at the same time. “You jump to the finish too fast, Mami I’ve never even kissed her.”
Maria was surprised.
“She’s a—serious kind of woman. She doesn’t play around.” He shook his head, lifting a shoulder as if a little ashamed at how hard he had to work toward that end. “It’s complicated.”
“What about the apartment papers?” Maria asked, puzzled. “You’re moving to Queens? You never said anything.”
He looked guilty. “I’m getting reassigned, so I’m thinking about it.”
What did that have to do with it? Maria gave her son a searching look. “You want a compañera de cama in Queens. That’s far away, m’ijo.”
She traced the wormholes in the polished wood with a tentative finger. She didn’t believe her son had never even kissed la china. He was leaving home for her, so she must have grabbed him in the important place.
“She’s very nice, muy bonita, muy simpática. I liked her, m’ijo.” Maria didn’t say, Even though la chica had no womanly flesh and clearly wasn’t a Catholic. She loved her son. What can you do?
Mike smiled. “Thank you, Mami.”
“Is your promotion in Queens?” She licked the tip of her finger and rubbed at an imaginary spot on the glossy table.
“Ah, no.” Mike changed the subject. “Mami, I’m surprised at you. You didn’t tell me you had a—”
“Amigo. He’s a friend, m’ijo. I met him in Church,” she said pointedly.
“I’m sure you did, Mami. And you told me you were finished with men, an old woman ready to fly up to Heaven. Remember?”
Maria’s round cheeks pinked at the lie. Sunday Diego had told her his philosophy of women. It was very interesting and not the philosophy of a Mexican man, that was for sure. Diego’s theory was that there was more to a woman who had finished with her babies than one who hadn’t started with them yet. And he didn’t mean thickness around the belly, either. He meant more enjoyment, more time for eating and talking. Ola, Diego liked to talk. He wanted a woman of his stage in life who’d lived through the things he had and wouldn’t think him a fool.
Maria thought Diego was a wise man, possibly even a saint. And she felt his appearance in her life at such a time must be a sign from the Almighty Father Himself. It was not impossible. Such things had happened before. Not lately, perhaps, and not to anyone she knew, but Todopoderoso could do anything He wanted. And if He wanted a good woman to care for a saint, He could certainly reach down to such a woman from Heaven above—as she prayed in His holy place, don’t forget that—and breathe new life into the deepest part of her soul. The Holy Book, after all, was full of such miracles.
“Maybe not yet,” she said of herself and Heaven.
“Well, what do you know about Diego?” Mike said suspiciously. “When did he turn up? What does he want?”
“M’ijo, remember that dog your father brought home? Big as this table and covered with flies?”
“Fleas. Yes, I remember. He said the dog was Jesus and we had to keep him.”
“That dog followed him home.”
“Uh-huh.” Mike remembered that bit of insanity. “So?”
“Diego también.”
Mike pursed his lips. “Diego is a dog?”
“No, m’ijo, the other.”
“Diego is Jesus.”
Maria nodded soberly. “I met him in Church. God spoke to me.” Her meek eyes flashed with sudden passion. “That is more than you can say about la china.”
Mike put down the coffee cup. He was not smiling anymore. Diego Alambra was the headwaiter in an Italian restaurant. So far that was all he’d had time to check out the day before. Diego’s parentage and country of origin were still a little on the vague side, but Jesus he was not. “Mami, we will talk more about this later.”
“Forgive me, m’ijo. I only want you to be happy. And no one can be happy without the Faith. M’ijo, wait a minute. What’s the hurry?”
Mike struggled into his leather jacket, adjusting the gun harness under his arm with a jerk. His voice showed how angry he was. “Maria had the Faith. And she had me. Was she happy, Mami?”
A giant tear collected unexpectedly in Maria’s eye. All her sorrows puddled into a lake and tipped over the dam of her lid, gathering momentum as it rolled down her cheek. He hadn’t gotten over it. Mike was still in pain, still suffering over that poor crazy chica.
“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 started. 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 mor
e 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.