by Leslie Glass
"Could be. We'll have to see how the DA takes it."
"I never touched those guns."
"How many guns, Louis? One, two? An arsenal?"
"I don't know, a few," he said vaguely. "I don't like guns. I wasn't paying attention."
"Maybe you didn't touch them, but transported them."
He shook his head. "They never left the island. I'm sure of it."
"How can you be sure of it if you weren't paying attention?"
Silence.
"You took a big chance, Louis, and you're going to pay for it."
"The bigger chance was talking to you," he muttered.
"We're going to take a look around, that okay with you? If it isn't okay with you, we'll get a warrant. Which do you prefer?"
He shook his head. "You have my permission. Look away," he said.
Forty-four
M
ike blew air out of his mouth. In big puffs like someone practicing Lamaze. He was tired and wanted April to come home with him. "You okay?"
"Oh, yeah, just thinking." April was writing quickly in her notebook. Her to-do list. Go to Martha's Vineyard Island. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.
He could see her thoughts churning. In a few hours they'd covered a lot of bases. This time they'd gone through Wendy's place themselves, and not looking just for guns. They were after an address and found one in a file with tax and electric and phone and water bills for a house located at Chappaquon-sett, Vineyard Haven, Mass. Bingo.
They also found the garage bill and located her car in a garage on Third Avenue. It was a tomato BMW 538i. In the BMW, a bunch of empty Coke cans, a couple of Steamship Authority ferry schedules—one for winter and the latest, spring/summer, just out this week. Also used ticket stubs for Tuesday, May eleventh. After Tovah's killing and before Prudence's. Killers were dumb. Nearly always. They never thought their tracks could be followed. Why hadn't they followed this track sooner? They guessed that the gun used to shoot Tovah was back on Martha's Vineyard and possibly a different gun had been used to kill Prudence. Why? People who loved guns—people who shot them regularly—usually had more than one. Some had dozens; collectors had hundreds. They were betting that Weridy, of the tomato red BMW and many pairs of candlesticks and stemware with the stickers still on them, had many guns.
The Vineyard Haven sheriff said he'd meet them at the airport in the A.M. Barring fog at either end, they'd be there before ten. They'd already placed their bets on what they'd find in her house. Mike wanted his sweetheart home with him.
"Querida?"
"Hmmm?" She didn't look up.
"You want to eat?"
"The pizza was fine." Still writing.
"You didn't touch it."
"I ate the crust."
Cheese, she still wouldn't eat cheese. He blew out more air, remembering his perpetual warning to himself:
Women. You risk your life if you fall in love with one.
These Chinese girls were tough. Ching had warned him that he'd better be prepared for a long battle if he wanted to win.
April put the notebook down and looked up. "Tired?" she asked.
"No, I'm cool." They were now in the shiny Crown Vic headed down Second Avenue to Twenty-third Street, where his battered Camaro was parked. April's car was in the garage at One PP, all the way downtown. He'd have to take her down there to get her car; then they'd both head home in different cars on the BQE. Toughness was tough on logistics. He knew he was going to pick her up in the morning for the drive to La Guardia, but he didn't want to be separated from her for what remained of the night.
"I wish they'd held on to Wendy. I don't want to get yanked out of bed when she takes off in an hour." April yawned.
"Exactly what I was thinking," Mike said.
They'd held on to her for nearly ten hours. Some of that time she'd cooled her heels all alone in an interview room. They had her on video, chewing her nails, tapping her feet, twisting around in her chair, taking insignificant bites of three sandwiches then discarding them, and drinking more than a dozen Cokes. There was a saying in the cops that if you put three suspects in a cell for the night only the guilty one would sleep. The innocent ones would be scared shitless; the guilty one could relax because he knew who did it. Wendy was worried and pretty much hopping out of her skin. Without her guns connected to the homicides, though, they didn't have enough to arrest her. They needed the guns to connect the dots.
Mike left the Crown Vic at Twenty-third Street, and they both got in the Camaro. "You want to leave your car and come home with me tonight?" he asked. So much for toughness.
Forty-five
S
kinny Dragon was waiting for April when she drove up at one-thirty-three A.M. April could see her fried-seaweed hair framed in the light of the living room window. Before April had even switched the headlights off, Skinny was out the front door in her pajamas, screaming as if there were no such thing as sleeping neighbors.
"Where you been,
nil"
she cried. "So late. Thoughtless, thoughtless." Loud. Something April didn't catch, softer in Chinese. About a party she was supposed to go to, didn't get to. It wasn't clear which one of them Skinny meant.
April grabbed her purse and Ching's custom dress in its see-through plastic, then jumped wearily out of the car. "Hi, Ma. Sorry. I didn't know it would take so long."
"No good. Worry all day. Sorry not good enough," she scolded in Chinese.
Of course not. What could be good enough to appease a suffering mother? A hundred years of apology would not be enough.
"Where you been?" Skinny asked softer now, clearly relieved her only child was not dead, as she had feared. "What's that? You go shopping?"
As soon as Skinny struck a more normal furious tone, April didn't feel the need to run anymore. Her exhausted body crawled up the walk, acting like the worm her mother thought she was. She wished she could hide the dress. No such luck.
"How much you spend for that?" Skinny demanded.
"Nothing, it was free," April said.
"Free? What kind of dress is free?" Skinny moved closer for a better look. "You do monkey business for that dress,
nil"
She peered at the dress, giving her daughter a poke in the ribs.
"Maaa!" April dodged her, dove through the front door.
Home sweet home.
But she didn't make it to the stairs leading to her apartment.
Skinny hurried in right behind her, now screaming with a worse idea. "You get that dress from ghost?" she demanded, poking the air with her finger, appalled that April could even consider taking an article of clothing from a dead person. But where else would such a thing come free? The Dragon was not a sophisticated thinker.
"Ma, relax. It was a gift," April assured her.
"Ha." That meant monkey business for sure. Skinny drew close to her daughter to sniff out the truth. She grabbed April's arm and held her in the old iron grip.
It was late and April longed to permanently wrench herself away from her difficult mother with the one-track mind. The problem was, Skinny had a nose worthy of one of those fake doctors in Chinatown who smelled their patients for symptoms. In fact, if Skinny had become a fake doctor, she'd have made a fortune and wouldn't need a daughter to torture and take care of her.
But April was too tired to wrench right now, and there Skinny went. Sniff, sniff, sniff at April's neck, her hair, the palms of her hands, sniffing for sex and murder. And April happened to have been exposed to both that day, the sex most recently. Where and how she would never tell. Mike had been hot; she had been hot. The long week without was more than either could take a second longer. Okay, they'd done it in a car. Okay, in both cars.
April tried to disengage so her mother wouldn't know, but it was too late.
"Aiyeeei," Skinny screamed.
"Ma, come on, I'll make you some tea. We'll talk," she said. "Look at my dress. Here, isn't it beautiful?"
S
kinny staggered into the kitchen, too traumatized to think about the origins of a dress. Sex made her absolutely nuts. She was nuts for ten minutes; then the kitchen restored her to what passed in her for sanity. Like a windup toy she went directly to the refrigerator and started taking out the food, which was a good thing because April was really, really hungiy.
Skinny's angry muttering while she cooked, however, soon drove April upstairs, where she threw her offending clothes on the floor, showered, and changed into a clean T-shirt and a pair of NYPD shorts. When she returned to the kitchen to mollify the Dragon with stories of Ching's kindness, the ham-and-scrambled-egg fried rice, pickled baby bok choy, and red-cook chicken was on the table. Relieved, April collapsed in one of three battered kitchen chairs and reached for her chopsticks.
"Eat," Skinny demanded, as if she weren't about
to.
"Thanks, Ma. I'm starved." April snagged a bite of succulent wing meat, perfectly simmered in gingered soy and saki and still warm. Her favorite.
"Bad luck," Skinny said.
"Yum." April savored that first bite, then attacked the mound of hacked chicken on the plate. For a few seconds Prudence's murder pushed back just a few inches and her mother's comfort food made life as poignantly sweet as it had been in April's youngest years. Her body tingled with the afterglow of Mike's love and the excitement of leaving the city for her first on-the-job flight out of town.
"Bad luck," Skinny announced again, pouring tea.
April stopped gobbling long enough to swallow some. Delicious. She didn't want to ask what in particular was bad luck, since practically anything from the Dragon's point of view could be. She tried distraction.
"The dress came from Ching, Ma. Isn't it beautiful?"
"She gave it to you, why?" Skinny looked suspicious.
"She wants me to give a speech at her wedding."
"Why!" Skinny was flabbergasted.
April lifted a shoulder. A little break with tradition. Skinny didn't wait for an answer.
"Ching called five times," she announced. "Bad luck."
"Okay, Ma, what's the bad luck?"
"Tang Ling on TV. Big interview. You see?"
No, April did not have time to watch TV today, or any other day "Is that what Ching called about?"
"Tang made Ching's dress."
"I know."
Skinny leaned over the table and took a bite off April's plate. "They're friends. She was invited to the wedding. You didn't know?"
"I know." April flashed to her garish Chinatown cheongsam. Too bad she didn't get a Tang Ling dress.
"Ching can't wear bad-luck dress! Tang very mad. Call her now," Skinny commanded.
April checked the kitchen clock. "It's almost two in the morning, Ma. I can't call her now."
"Tang very famous,
ni."
"I know." April put her chopsticks down, her shortlived feeling of well-being totally gone. Had Prudence been wearing a Tang dress? That was something she hadn't asked.
Five minutes with her mother and the fog was back. She remembered that she could have stayed at Mike's place and avoided this complication. She should have stayed at Mike's. But her makeup case was here. Her clean clothes were here, and she hadn't wanted to leave town even for a few hours unequipped. Tang Ling wanted to talk to her, or maybe it was Ching who wanted Tang to talk to her. That meant Prudence's dress was a Tang. Another thread to follow.
"You solve case?"
"I hope so, Ma," April said wearily.
"Good girl. You solve," Skinny said, nodding with approval for the first time April could remember.
Forty-six
T
oo soon it was morning. Birds called outside April's window. She heard them before the click of her alarm, almost as soon as the sun had dragged itself out of the ocean and made its presence known in Queens. The chirping and chattering heightened as light slowly suffused her little room. She'd had a deep and dreamless night, thanks to the feeding philosophy of Skinny. Fill the belly to cease all functioning of the brain.
It worked for only a little while, though. The new day always kicked April's thinking back into gear. Yesterday, storms and catastrophe. Today, birdsong and optimism. Two young women were dead, and nature didn't give a shit. Groaning, she punched the pillow to find a cooler place for her face. That kept her calm for exactly fifteen seconds. After that, all possibility of sleep was gone. She rolled over to stretch her spine and muscles. She hadn't run yesterday or the day before. No martial arts for weeks. Last night, love in a hurry, hardly the sustained hard exercise her legs and spirit required. Today she didn't have time to give it to them, either.
Exactly a week ago Tovah Schoenfeld died. Yesterday Prudence Hay followed her into an uncertain afterlife. But peaceful afterlife wasn't her business. Fully alert now, she jumped out of bed and into the shower. No dme for food or further thinking.
A few minutes before seven Mike pulled up in the Camaro. The second she heard the car begin to cough its way into her block, she charged down the stairs and out the door before her mother could ask her where she was going so early on a Sunday morning. The fact that she still had the habit of sneaking in and out at thirty-one years old would have filled her with her usual disgust if Mike hadn't been out of his car, standing by the passenger door. With his ample mustache, dark sunglasses, open-collared amber shirt, buff jacket, and cowboy boots he looked like a drug lord from Miami or
Miami Vice,
one or the other. One who'd been in a fight. But his open arms sent her heart sailing.
Seventy-one degrees, cerulean, nearly cloudless sky, and she was dressed for travel in all-American Gap. Navy polished-cotton trousers, matching blazerlike jacket, and underneath a lucky-red camp shirt, short-sleeved in case it got really hot later. On the job like Mike, she was wearing a Glock on her hip and dark shades. They kissed by the car. Mike's mustache prickled as his tongue nudged into her mouth. She sucked it in deeper, swaying a little in the embrace. Death and hunting: It always made them edgy and hot. She could have kept at the necking for some time, but they had a plane to catch. Reluctantly, she stepped back. Just in time to see her mother's face with its sour expression in the window. Freedom hit her like a drug, and she smiled.
"You're late. Will we make it?" she asked.
"Sure. It's only ten minutes from here." He closed the door gently and paused just long enough to wave gallantly at the Dragon. Then he got in, revved up the noisy car, and peeled out into the quiet street. Fresh spring air blew in from the open windows, bringing the thrill of escape. Mike raced through the back streets of Queens, avoiding the highway. He pulled into the short-term parking lot at La Guardia nine minutes later.
All was quiet there on May sixteenth for the American Eagle seven-fifty A.M. flight to Martha's Vineyard until they arrived—the couple on the job with four guns, one on the hip, one in a shoulder holster, one in the shoulder bag, and one in a cowboy boot. April and Mike had their boarding passes in hand, but before they'd pulled their gold and authorization to fly armed, the new, beefed-up security teams converged on them like birds to bread crumbs.
"Police," Mike announced, quickly producing the paperwork.
A uniformed officer and the four security persons manning the two metal detectors and conveyor belts each checked out Bellaqua's letter before falling away. The other passengers had backed away for the confrontation.
April's heavy shoulder bag with the .38 and extra ammunition never hit the belt. She kept her sunglasses on, trying to act cool when actually she felt as excited as a kid. City cops rarely traveled out of state on the job, and on those occasions it was usually to escort a prisoner or a suspect back. This trip was also a quickie. They were booked on a three o'clock flight back.
"Chico,
ever travel on business before?" April asked as they walked out on the tarmac into a stiffening breeze toward the tiny propeller job that was their conveyance.
He nodded. "Wasn't fun like this, though. I had to go do
wn to South Carolina to pick up a guy who'd hacked up his wife. We had to sedate him pretty heavy to get him on the plane."
April had no comeback for that. "You want the window?" she asked as she ducked her head to climb aboard. Oh, it was small.
"No, you take it." Mike slid in next to her, scrunching into the narrow space with zero legroom. "Isn't this fun?"
"Oh, yeah, this is great." She checked her watch. It was getting late. Nobody came to close the door. The other passengers had been smart enough to bring their coffee and bagels with them. They'd been too cool to think of food.
Mike's cell rang and he reached into his pocket for it. "Yeah? Oh, yeah, hi. Uh-huh, we're there. Yeah, looks like we'll be on time, maybe a minute or two late. Weather's good. Little bit of a breeze. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. Okay" He hung up and gave April's arm a pat. "How ya doin',
querida?"
"Who was that?" April asked, as if she didn't know.
"Bellaqua. Wendy hasn't moved or called anyone since last night. Ditto Louis. Tito's in the hot seat downtown. They'll work on him all day. She wants us to keep in touch and get with her later this afternoon at One PP."
April peered out the little window. Martha's Vineyard was about two hundred and forty miles, not that far, but ahead of her she could see a line of jets assembling for their eight o'clocks to wherever.
Let's go, let's go.
They didn't have all day. Yesterday, she'd taken a chance in the interview room and kept her questioning real general because she hadn't wanted to alert Wendy. Sometimes they talked around and around a subject, never hitting the nail on the head. In this case Wendy was holding out on them big-time. April didn't want her calling her mystery assistant, or getting on the road in the BMW herself. She hoped she knew what she was doing.
She turned to Mike with a little smile, remembering their search of Louis's place. They'd come up with a few fancy sex toys, but nothing of a more sinister nature than that. The detectives who tossed Tito's rented room in a small house found
Soldier of Fortune
magazines, but no guns. He said he liked to look at the pictures.