One day in the car Mike told April his mother Maria wrote a letter every day to his dead father up in heaven to keep him informed of what was going on with his family down on earth.
April didn’t have to ask how much postage it was to heaven. Postage to heaven was free, but apparently getting there wasn’t always so easy. An unhappy wife stayed married because she was afraid a divorced woman wouldn’t get in. April felt bad that she had known Mike for a year and it took Ducci to find that out.
Skinny Dragon Mother would say April wasn’t much of a detective. And it was true she didn’t know what to make of Spanish women. One writing letters to her husband in heaven because she didn’t want to keep him waiting for the news. One thinking she could get there on a technicality, pretending she hadn’t violated her sacred vows by leaving her husband. What kind of God would put up with tricks like that?
In trouble, though, Mike’s hand moved up to his neck, where the small gold cross hung on a chain. She had seen it once after they had a scuffle with two thirteen-year-olds who’d robbed a corner store, shot the owner in the chest, and then led them on a chase down a crowded play street, through an open fire hydrant. By the time they and three uniforms stopped the kids, the gun was long gone, people were shrieking on the street, and everyone was soaked. Mike had shoved his wet tie in a pocket and opened his collar.
It was then that April saw for the first time a small portion of dark and hairy, barbarian chest and the cross. She had thought it must be easier with only one God to worry about, because she didn’t want to think about the hair on Mike’s chest and how sexy she thought it was.
The whole thing had made her sweat—the cross, the chest. The chase, the stinging cold water from the fire hydrant.
Jason didn’t buy shift change as the cause of her tension. “Where’ve you been?”
April turned to take him upstairs to the squad room. “Out in the field,” she said vaguely.
“Something must have happened. You don’t look so, ah, great.”
“Yeah, I’ll tell you about it. How are you doing with Camille?”
“Oh, I’m about finished for now. I’ve sent the officer back in with her while we talk.”
Jason followed her upstairs to the squad room. He’d been there before.
It was after midnight. No one was around. April glanced at Sergeant Joyce’s closed door. She wondered if Mike was still in there with her, giving his statement. If that was the case, hers would be next.
She sat down at her desk, trying not to think about it. She had been working six different cases when the Maggie Wheeler thing came up. All of them had been put aside. They were sitting there on her desk, the folders untouched in a week. Everybody cared about his own case and wanted it dealt with right away. Quite a few message slips had accumulated. The pile looked a little messy, as though someone had gone through it.
April took a sidelong glance at it. The name on the top pink slip jumped up and startled her. George Dong had called at nine o’clock. Hastily, she shoved the slips under a folder.
Jason lowered himself into the visitor’s chair beside her desk, grimacing as if everything hurt. “I’m really hungry, and I’m really tired, and there’s blood on your shirt. What happened?”
“It’s mole,” she replied quickly, closing her jacket around the stains. She couldn’t decide what to tell him, so she hedged. “You want food first or the story first?”
Jason smiled bleakly. “Why don’t you tell me the story while we’re waiting for the food?”
60
We got a warrant to go over the house where Camille lives,” April began. “Her boyfriend came back before we were finished. There was a confrontation. He shot a Lieutenant from Homicide, and a detective shot him.”
“What?” Jason’s California tan turned a little green. “You mean the boyfriend, Bouck, had a gun? He shot a cop?”
April nodded. “And a cop shot him. In the back.”
“Jesus, is he alive?”
“He was alive half an hour ago. He’s probably in surgery by now.” She checked her watch. It was really late.
Camille’s friend got shot. Jason looked stunned.
“In the back?” he said faintly, not understanding how that might have happened.
“Yeah, well, the Lieutenant was in front of him and the Sergeant was behind him. When the Sergeant saw him going for his gun, he fired to protect his boss.”
Jason thought about that for a moment. “A real gun?”
“You mean Bouck’s? Oh, yes, it was very real. We found three guns, none registered.”
The sandwich came. Jason unwrapped the paper plate, then stopped and regarded it doubtfully, like suddenly he didn’t feel so hungry anymore.
“Go ahead.” April nodded at the food. A huge pile of crispy french fries took up more than half the plate, so the huge triple-layer turkey club on white toast hung over the side. “That should keep you for a while.”
“Yeah,” Jason agreed. “Thanks.”
She watched, amazed, while he added five packets of Sweet’n Low and a full cup of milk to the half cup of coffee he had ordered in a large cup. Interesting ritual. She wondered what Freud would think of it.
“Want some?” he offered.
April shook her head even though the french fries looked pretty good. “No thanks. I’m on duty.”
“You can’t eat when you’re on duty?” Jason took a bite of the sandwich.
That was her attempt at a joke. She shook her head again. The plate had a lot of food on it. It would take a while before he could talk. She looked away, letting her thoughts wander around in the fog of this case.
In the office were Mike and Sergeant Joyce, either talking to each other, or Captain Higgins, or somebody who outranked Higgins. In the hospital were Braun and Bouck. April’s thoughts drifted to Albert Block, their first suspect. It occurred to her that Block was a B word, too. Block, Bouck, Braun. All B words. What did that have to do with it? Nothing. She told herself to get focused.
She pulled out her pad and made some notes. Check handwriting in guest book. Bouck’s. Camille’s. They could get handwriting samples out of the house. April had taken the hairbrush from the room. They could match the hair from the hairbrush with the hair on Maggie’s dress. It might not be Camille’s hair in the hairbrush, but might be Camille’s hair on the dress. Maybe both Bouck and Camille wore the clothes at different times.
Jason finished the french fries, pushed the plate away, and picked up the coffee. “Thanks for the food,” he said again, and seemed to make a decision about something.
“I want to review the whole case with you, and I want to talk to Camille again. But not now. I think for now I should give you my reading of Camille and wrap it up for the night.”
April frowned. She was the detective. He was the consultant. He wasn’t supposed to tell her how to manage the case. She told herself to lighten up. “So what’s your reading?”
“At this point I can’t give you a complete diagnosis, but I can tell you what she isn’t.”
“Fine.”
“She isn’t delusional. That means she doesn’t hear voices. She’s not hallucinatory. She doesn’t see things that aren’t there, at least not at the moment. She’s not psychotic. She can tell the difference between what’s real and what isn’t. She’s not paranoid and not violent.”
April frowned. What was he talking about? The woman tried to eat her arm.
Jason smiled. “I know. You’re thinking if they act crazy, they probably are. Camille is certainly very troubled, very frightened. But except for the rages she directs at herself, she’s a gentle, nurturing person. She could not hurt anybody else. I don’t think she could kill a spider.”
Judging from the state of the kitchen, she couldn’t wash a dish either. April thought of the straitjacket.
“The clothes of the first murder victim were found in the basement of the house where Camille lived,” April told him.
Jason shook his head. “Poor wom
an.”
April nodded. “It was a—pretty unhealthy scene. The place is a mess. Her room was upstairs. Looks like he kept her in a restraint at least part of the time. We found a lot of sedatives, sleeping pills, that kind of thing, in his medicine cabinet.” She shuddered and fell silent.
“Look, she doesn’t need to be hospitalized at this time, either voluntarily or involuntarily,” Jason said.
“We can’t hold her here,” April protested.
“I know that, but she does need supervision. She’s used to having someone care for her. Unimaginable as it may seem, she was attached to Bouck, and freedom from him will be threatening, certainly more than she can handle. Better call her sister.”
April nodded. Yeah, the sister could take her off their hands. She looked at her watch. Twelve-forty-five. “Thanks,” she told Jason. “I owe you one.”
“Sure, sure.”
She collected the garbage and threw it in the overflowing wastebasket by her desk, then walked downstairs with him. “I really appreciate this,” she said again at the door. The season had changed. The humidity had lifted, and there was a definite bite in the air.
Jason yawned and nodded absently. “Keep in touch. We have to follow up on this one.”
“Yeah.” Two of the guy’s victims were dead. But the one he kept in a straitjacket was still alive. Eventually, if Bouck lived, he’d be tried and Camille might have to testify against him. It would be somebody’s uphill battle to prepare Camille for that. But not hers, thank God.
April took a final breath of fresh air, then climbed the stairs to the squad room. She dialed the sister’s number. She should come for Camille. But there was no answer, and not even a machine to take a message.
The door to Sergeant Joyce’s office was still closed. It made her mad not to know what was going on. Finally she muttered “To hell with it,” went over, and knocked.
61
It was well after one o’clock by the time April pulled her car into an empty spot in front of the Woo house. The light by the front door was still on, and April could tell from the glow spilling out from the kitchen into the downstairs hallway that her mother was still up. She groaned.
She had left the house before ten that morning, was bone tired, and due back in the precinct in less than seven hours. That left no time for study, and hardly any for sleep. At this point it was the sleep April worried about. She had been back and forth across town a half dozen times that day, and had to cross again to get to the Queensboro Bridge. At this hour the traffic wasn’t so bad, but all the way to Queens she worried about Chinese torture. The worst torture was to have to eat, and be deprived of sleep.
One thing April liked about her job was the perpetual growling hunger she acquired in the long hours when there was too much to do and no time to eat. As a child she had never been allowed to grow hungry, but always fed before the need came. To Sai Woo this was the sign of a good mother. By feeding April she could change the long history of hunger and famine in China, and ensure for April a good future, full of plenty. April was sure plenty on her plate at all hours of the day or night was her torture for being her mother’s only child. Only child had to have special care for good luck.
Chinese didn’t wear crosses or medals of tortured saints on chains around their necks. Good luck, not heaven, was the great Chinese pie in the sky, the thing most prayed for and revered. Good ruck, rots of money, rong rife. Those were the symbols most often stamped in gold.
Gold symbols made April think of Mike, or maybe it was the other way around. She wondered if the great generic God that monitored the North American continent might be punishing Maria for leaving him, and not letting him go. That was sure thing bad luck for everybody. No way to put a good face on it.
On the other hand, sometimes you couldn’t tell good luck was coming even when it was right in front of your face. Like the breaking of this case. Woman comes in with a story her sister might have killed somebody, doesn’t say how she knows. Police check the story out, and before the A.D.A. even has time to get there, before there is any exchange of information at all, two people get shot.
Then, when it turns out the sister Camille was a virtual prisoner of the boyfriend, the sister Milicia can’t be found to come and take her away. So now they had an officer guarding the boyfriend in the hospital, and an officer in the house making sure the wacko made it through the night. And still no word from the sister who started the ball rolling.
Well, good luck and answers to all questions were like shadows in the mist. You had to know how to interpret them, and when to follow them into the murk. April turned off her headlights and sat in the dark for a moment. What she remembered most about the Sherlock Holmes story she read a long time ago was the part about the London fog so dense, policemen could lose their way following a suspect around the block. At NYPD she learned fast that almost every case presented such a fog.
In her early training the question was once put to her: “What do you do, Officer, when you get called to a scene where there’s a body splattered on the sidewalk and you don’t know the first thing about it?”
The correct answer was: “You look up, sir.”
A lot of people would give different answers, but that was the right one. First things first. Use your head, see if you can determine where the body came from.
April sat there, trying to sift through all the thoughts whirling around in her head. What was she so apprehensive about? Her Sergeant’s test in two days? The command from the Captain to get together with the A.D.A. and wrap up the boutique case in the morning?
Higgins actually suggested they go to the hospital and wait there till the suspect regained consciousness, then arrest him for the murder of Maggie Wheeler before he fell asleep again. Then they could relax and put the Rachel Stark case together.
Damn. The shadow of Skinny Dragon Mother crossed to the window, cracked it open.
“What you doing out there?” Sai Woo threw her best English out into the night, so the neighbors, if they were up to hear her, wouldn’t think she was an immigrant.
Often when April was on the four-to-midnight shift, her mother waited for her to get home, then invited her into the kitchen to feed her and hear about her day. That’s why April was sitting in the car. Hoping to avoid it.
“Just getting my stuff.”
“Come in, come in. I have good dumprings. Your favorite kind. Been waiting all night.”
“Okay, I’m coming, Ma.”
“Not come soon enough. Best kind. Clab, flesh pea.”
That was just great. April grabbed her two bags and got out of the car. Her father was top cook in an Upper East Side restaurant. He must have brought the crab and ginger delicacy to bribe boo hao daughter to sit in kitchen, middle of the night, discuss cases with Skinny Dragon Mother, who didn’t have anything else to think about but making her daughter as miserable as possible.
Sai Woo’s greatest amusement was to steal many precious hours from her daughter and use them to scold her for choosing a hard life when, if April only smiled a little, she could marry and have a soft one. In this way she passed the time happily by making her daughter’s hard life a whole lot harder. April trudged up the short cement walk to the house.
Magically the window closed and the front door opened. Sai examined her daughter critically, noticed right away that April was wearing her locker outfit. “Change crows,” she said, wrinkling her hose.
“Yes.” April turned away, didn’t want to discuss it.
“ ’Nother dead body?”
“Yes.”
“Bad?”
“Yes.”
“Very bad. Can smell from here. The one on TV? I watch, didn’t see you.” Sai Woo led the way back through the living room to the kitchen. “Why you never on TV?”
“Ma, I’m very tired. I’ve got to go to bed.”
“You got to eat first.”
“It’s late, don’t go to the trouble.”
“No trouber.”
“I can’t eat now, really.”
“Got to.”
April suddenly got a look at her mother in the light. Sai Woo was all dressed up, wearing her good gray silk dress, stockings, and shoes. Her face was carefully made up. April regarded her suspiciously.
“What’s going on?”
There was a sly smile on Skinny Dragon Mother’s face that April didn’t like.
“I’m cerebrating.”
All alone at one o’clock in the morning? Sure. “What are you celebrating?” April asked.
The smile got wider. Ha. Got her. “Your good ruck,” Sai said triumphantly.
April stared at her mother. What good luck? Everything in her life was a mess. “What good luck, Ma? Did I win the lottery?”
Sai got tired of being looked at and shoved April along the rest of the way to the kitchen. “Sit down. Eat clab dumprings. Don’t mess up.”
April shook her head. “I don’t know about any good luck. I don’t want crab dumplings. I had a hard day. I want to go to bed.”
“Eat clab. Clab good luck.”
April shook her head again. She could stop a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound drug-crazed thug with a razor knife and a gun no trouble. But couldn’t get away from her mother when she wanted to talk.
“All right, give me a hint. What’s the good luck?”
Sai nodded her head approvingly. “My friend say vely good ruck. He don’t rike nobody, rike you.”
Oh. If her mother got all dressed up for that, she was going to have a long wait for the wedding. April sat down at the table meekly. She’d bet a thousand dollars that even though Dr. George Dong was willing to ask her out again, maybe even take her to a nice place this time, it was very unlikely to work out the way her mother hoped. She decided she’d better have a dumpling, make her mother happy while she could.
62
One after another the antique clocks around the apartment chimed the half hour. On the tenth dong another sound joined in to pierce the silence. It was a ringing deep inside the head, like the echo of a bad hangover. Jason rolled over and groaned.
Hanging Time Page 29