The Silent Bride

by Glass, Leslie

  "What kind of crazy things does he say about brides?" April asked, back on the brides.

  Relieved to be off the subject of Kim's friends, Cho said, "He talks about angels. He loves angels," she said, smiling a little.

  "Angels?" Click. April got a sick feeling. Hadn't Ching said something about an angel being embroidered in her gown?

  "Yes, like that show on TV. He thinks when people die they become happy angels, like on TV."

  Oh, shit! Ching a happy angel. April glanced at Mike. She needed to call the lab and check something about Prudence's gown. Tovah's. Andrea Straka's. Ching's. Her stomach churned.

  "Did you ever hear him mention Tovah Schoen-feld?" April asked, just wanting to get this straight.

  "I don't listen."

  "How about Prudence Hay?"

  "I told you. I don't know."

  "Andrea Straka."

  "Oh, yes, Andrea. That girl who died in the subway. He was very sad about that. Something's wrong with the lawn mower," Clio said suddenly.

  "What's wrong with the lawn mower?" April asked, still horrified by that angel in Ching's wedding gown. Had Tang requested it, or was this Kim acting on his own? She didn't remember what Ching had told her.

  "I don't know. Maybe somebody came in the gate and did something to it."

  Mike went outside to take a look. Clio had a small patches of lawn in the front and back. The lawn mower was chained to the fence in the back.

  April stayed in the living room. Her heart thudding over Ching. "What about Tang Ling?" she asked. "Do she and Kim get along?"

  Clio's cat eyes narrowed down to slivers. "She's a bad woman/' she said. "Bad for Kim. You looking for him, he's probably hiding under her skirt."

  "Thanks. Here's my card. If you get scared you can call me anytime."

  April found Mike in the back puzzling over the small motor in the lawn mower. It looked all right to April until he stood up and brushed off his hand. Then she realized that Clio was right. Something was wrong with it. The muffler had been removed.

  Fifty-nine

  April was in a panic as they hurried back into Manhattan from Queens. Not since the attack on the World Trade Center had murder been something that could only happen to someone else. After thousands of people died in just a few minutes, everybody in New York felt close to death. For April, every murder since was personal. But the killings of Tang's brides brought death too close, way too close to home.

  Clio's knowledge of Andrea Straka, Kim's driving the car for which he didn't have a license to Tovah's wedding. The missing guns still out there. The presence in Kim's house of the comic book for crooks that explained the items in his basement—the PVC pipe, the bottle caps, copper sponges, tennis balls, copper screen, metal washers, rubber stoppers. The muffler from the lawn mower. Kim had been making his own crude silencers from crude household materials to take the sonic boom of a heavy load down to subsonic whimper. Kim's past reliance on Tang when he was in trouble. The angel on Ching's gown. Ching's plan to have dinner with Tang that night. It was coming together way too close to her.

  Ching had left her cell phone home. She'd already left work. April wanted her safe and sound, somewhere far away from Tang. Her heart hammered in her chest. Her stomach churned. Why had Kim marked Ching? She wasn't a client of Wendy's or Louis's. She was just a girl, a plain girl! And the closest thing April had to a sister. It didn't matter why.

  Her cell phone rang. She grabbed it. Private came up on caller ID. "Sergeant Woo."

  "Where are you?" came the irritated voice of her boss.

  "Lieutenant, thank God. Do you have something for me?"

  "What's up with this guy Kim Simone?"

  It was amazing from how many places in Queens you could see the skyline of Manhattan. You could be on the road, out in the borough, everything all quiet and low, on a highway or a back street, and all of a sudden you'd go up a little rise and there it was, Citicorp, Empire State Building, and everything in between, all spread out. The towers were gone, but New York was still there. At night the halo of lights still brightened the dark sky. It happened then just as the sky was fading to navy. The city loomed up ahead, and she was scared.

  "We think he's the one," she said faintly. "What do you have?"

  "Guy has a sheet. Joined a cruise ship as a steward some five years back. Jumped off at Cancun three and a half years ago. He was picked up on a local bus in El Paso, soliciting. Spent two months in an INS camp. His now wife, Clio Alma, helped him out with a lawyer."

  The phone crackled for a moment as they hit a dead zone.

  "April?"

  "Okay now?"

  "Yeah." He went on. "Simone's position at his deportation hearing was that he'd be in danger in the Philippines if he returned."

  "Uh-huh, any particular danger?"

  "His mother was denounced as a witch and stoned to death by neighbors when he was twelve. He and his sister were badly beaten and left for dead."

  "True story?" April asked. Nothing surprised her anymore, but this was a new one. Witches now.

  "True story."

  "What about the sister?"

  "She married a general or something. They had a dispute over a girlfriend. He shot her."

  "Oh, God."

  "There's more. Clio Alma paid his fine, and the two got married soon after he arrived in New York. And get this. He's been arrested several times since then."

  "Let me guess," April said.

  "You don't have to guess. I'm going to tell you. Indecent exposure, soliciting. And right here in Midtown North."

  "No kidding. Does he have a favorite spot?"

  "Forty-second Street, theater row, near the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. He's a repeater, so I've got people out there now."

  "Any drug angle?"

  "No, no, this guy is strictly sex, and no history of violence that we know of until now."

  "What about the Straka case?"

  "Okay. That occurred in the Nineteenth. At the

  Hunter College subway station. Happened during rush hour, around seventeen hundred. Very crowded platform. A lot of people left right away."

  It was the closest subway stop to Tang's shop. Another piece.

  "You owe me," Iriarte growled.

  "Yes, sir, I always owe you. One more question. How did Simone get his job at Tang Ling's?"

  "Your florist met his bail twice. My guess is he and Kim first met up in the bars, or on the street. The florist definitely had him working in the shop for a while. After a dispute, he set Kim up with Tang because Kim knew how to sew. I'm going out now, and I'm staying out until we get him. I don't want him on my turf."

  "Yes, sir. Be careful. He's A and D."

  "Okay, are you with Sanchez?"

  "Yes. We're coming in from Kim's home."

  "You got someone watching out there?" he asked as if they were total dummies and he the one in charge.

  "Yes, sir. Two."

  "See you, then," were his last words.

  Monday evening the traffic was still heavy getting onto the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. April had plenty of time to tell Mike Kim's story. After she finished, he smacked the wheel angrily.

  "We had him all along," Mike said. "We had his ear."

  "A little ear, perfect seashell. I noticed it right away in the wedding photo, but I didn't want to jump on it until we knew it was him."

  "Shit. We had him on day one. We could have put

  this together in twenty-four if everyone around him hadn't covered for him. Wendy, Louis. His wife."

  "They made it hard," April agreed.

  "So he had a chance to kill somebody else. And still Wendy didn't say anything." He was furious.

  "It was her gun," April said slowly. "She's a thief. She can't restrain herself. It's a sickness. That first day I questioned her I hit her with her weakness. She didn't want to get branded as a thief so she drove up to the Vineyard to get some of the stuff out of her apartment. But she also wanted to check out her guns. She wasn't
absolutely certain one of her crew hadn't taken one. Remember when I asked her how many guns she had? She said she didn't know. She said they'd been stolen years ago. But after Prudence was killed, she knew she couldn't wiggle out. She just hit the bottle. Whether or not she wanted to die only she can say."

  Traffic slowed almost to a stop on the bridge, and Mike hit the siren to open it up. "Bleeding to death like that is a hell of a way to die," he muttered.

  "Maybe she didn't know what was happening." April didn't want to think about Wendy's lethal binge while they were on Martha's Vineyard.

  "Yeah, Prudence Hay went that way, too. Wendy had that on her conscience." April's thoughts shifted to another member of the team, Louis the Sun King, not exactly an expert in pain management. He'd been Kim's first friend—after Kim had married Clio for citizenship. Maybe he was the man Clio was talking about, still Kim's special friend. Someone should check.

  Mike hit the siren again, more insistently this time, and a little frantic maneuvering of the cars around them got them moving toward the off-ramp.

  April punched some numbers in her phone. Mike glanced over at her.

  "Who are you calling?"

  "Tang. I'm worried about Ching."

  "Why?"

  "Mike. This thing has just been bothering me all day. Why is Kim doing this? How does he choose the girls? And then I realized Louis and Wendy have nothing to do with it. It's about the girls and their dresses. He's turning the girls into angels, dressing them in their white dresses, and marrying them to God so they don't have to marry men."

  Mike whistled. "But what does Ching have to do with it?"

  "Ching told me Saturday that Tang put an angel on her gown. But she must have been mistaken. My guess is that Kim did it on his own."

  Sixty

  After leaving the bar, Kim went back to the Dumpster on Fiftieth Street. Seeing Tang on TV offering so much money for the chance to punish him made him feel terrible. He was wandering around, dazed and wounded. When he got back to the Dumpster, there were policemen around it, and he left right away.

  He didn't know what to do. Tang was his closest friend. He'd been so proud to have a friend, a boss, who was so famous and so rich. He told everybody about her house. He went out of his way to pass the fine brownstone just so he could show off and tell his friends, "This is where my boss lives."

  Even when Tang wasn't home, Kim took every opportunity to deliver things and help out there. He knew how the alarm system worked and what her housekeeper looked like, much prettier and younger than Tang. He knew a lot of things about Tang. He knew that she did not get up early because she was out late every night. He knew that she did not like lunch or exercise, but at the end of every day she enjoyed an hour of relaxation in her beautiful pool. The maid told him Tang's pool had lavender oil in it and was kept very hot for her, almost as hot as a bathtub.

  The pool was in a glass room on the roof. The room was full of plants and palm trees, and the pool was so heavy the ceiling of the floor above had to be reinforced with steel beams to support it. He'd seen the room on the top floor himself, that's how close to her he was.

  Because Tang liked him, Kim thought of himself as a protector of hers. He'd pass her street in the evening before he went cruising just to see if she was home, to look through the windows into her rooms. He didn't want her as an enemy.

  Kim felt sick and lonely and needed a friend to help him. Wendy wasn't answering her phone, so he went to see the old man, Bill, who bailed him out whenever he got in trouble. Bill was at home in his penthouse apartment, but he was busy and didn't want to be bothered. Bill Krauterman was his name. Bill buzzed Kim up, but as soon as he opened the door, he told Kim to go away.

  "I don't have time for trouble now," he said with an angry face.

  Kim started crying out in the hall. "Clio hit me."

  "Well, I'm sorry she hit you. I told you not to stay with her."

  "She hits me too much. I can't go back there."

  "Okay, so leave her." Bill was big, very big. Over six feet tall, and he weighed too much. He had trouble getting in and out of bed, and sometimes he got very mad at Kim for nothing at all.

  "I did leave." Kim was desperate and cried some more, letting his tears run down his face so Bill would feel sorry for him. He should have been an actor. "Tang fired me." He was pleading while the fat old man was trying to make up his mind.

  "Kim, did anybody ever tell you you're too much trouble?"

  "But you like me, Billy We're friends, right? I need one thousand five hundred dollars for a new place. Then I won't bother you." Kim said the words quickly, working hard to get the order right in English.

  Bill's angry face looked back inside his apartment as if someone were in there waiting for him. He wasn't letting Kim in.

  "I'll pay it right back," Kim promised.

  Bill snorted and pulled on his gray ponytail. "How are you going to pay it back if you've lost your job? Oh, never mind. Take it and get lost." He reached into his pocket, fanned out a fat roll of hundreds and gave Kim fifteen, then closed the door without saying anything more.

  Kim's heart felt full. It made him so happy to get such easy money and be loved by a rich friend. Right away he went shopping. He wandered from store to store on Lexington and Third, looking for new clothes to look good for his friend. He spent all his shopping time thinking about the rest of the money in the old man's pocket and how he would get it later.

  He was surprised when all his money was gone. He was wearing a green silk shirt and a fine suede jacket, new white pants, and Italian slip-on shoes. But he had nowhere to go, no plan. He felt poor and lonely again, and his memory flashed back to long ago. He thought of the village good-time girl who was so horribly burned when angry wives held her down and threw acid on her face for stealing their husbands. He could still hear the girl's screams in his head and see clearly the way she looked afterward.

  Her body was sdll alive but she was dead. She called herself a living dead person.

  Living dead person. Kim's sister, too. Kim thought of his sister, who was an angel now. He thought of Tang and the acid-throwing wives. Tang Ling was very vain; she liked to have her picture taken and see herself in the magazines. If acid spoiled her face, she would be ugly. She could never go on TV or hurt him again.

  Kim was walking around Lexington Avenue, thinking about throwing acid on Tang for hurdng him so much. He walked around for a long time, down to Forty-second Street and Grand Central Station. He was thinking how easy it would be to make Tang a living dead person. She would scream and roll around on the ground. Her husband wouldn't want her anymore. No more late nights in restaurants. Kim knew where acid was, but not here in Manhattan. He had to go back to Queens to get it. That would take a long time. Anyway, even if he was mad at Tang, he would never hurt her.

  Kim thought of another dead person. A girl, only thirteen. He didn't know her when she was alive. But when the men pulled her naked body out of the river, his mother turned to him.

  "Maybe someone raped her and she struggled too hard," she told him.

  He was little then and didn't know what she meant. But he remembered later not to struggle too much when people hurt him. The girl in the river made him think of Tang drowning in her pool. A strong person could hold her under the water until she stopped struggling like the girl so long ago. Kim started walking to Tang's house. His feet in the handsome shoes were taking the familiar route back uptown. He wasn't thinking of taking the gun out and shooting Tang. That was the furthest thing from his thoughts. Wendy told him you couldn't shoot a gun without fixing the bang first because people were so afraid of guns. They got upset when they heard the noise and called the police. He hated the police, who always made trouble for him and tried to lock him up.

  He had no plan to shoot anybody right then. The gun with the muffler on it was buried in the garbage. Because he was a forgiving person, he pushed his bad thoughts about Tang away. He knew he would never in a million years hurt Tang. He
just wanted to be near her and change her mind. He was good at changing people's minds, never stayed in trouble for long. He'd changed Billy's mind, hadn't he? The closer Kim got to Tang's house the stronger was his idea that if he had a chance to talk to Tang, she'd change her mind. He'd get his job back and they'd still be friends. That was all he wanted.

  Sixty-one

  April dialed Tang's private line at her office and was not surprised to hear her assistant say, "She's gone for the day."

  "When did she leave?" April asked, relieved that anybody was there so late.

  "Who's calling?"

  "Sergeant Woo, police department. I was there this morning."

  "Oh, yes, Miss Woo. Is there anything I can help you with?"

  "I need to reach Miss Ling; it's very urgent." She had to find Ching and send her out of harm's way.

  "Um. Miss Ling left the building a few minutes ago.

  "In a car?"

  "No, no, it's only a few blocks. She always walks home."

  "What route does she take?"

  The woman hesitated. "Oh, I'm sure you can reach her at home in half an hour."

  "Well, that might be too late. Are you sure she's on her way home?" April asked.

  "Well, I think so. Is something wrong? You could call on her cell phone." The woman gave her the number.

  "Okay, good. Thanks." April jotted it down.

  "You know where the house is?" she asked, suddenly helpful.

  "Yes. I know where the house is." April ended the call. "Tang is walking home," she told Mike.

  Then she dialed Tang's cell number. It was turned off, so she left a message. Didn't important people like Tang Ling always keep their cell phones on? she wondered. Where was Ching? She was getting panicked.

  "Shit." Mike had taken the Sixty-sixth Street cross-town, and now they were caught in the Lincoln Center traffic. He hit the siren and waited only a second before barreling through a red light at Lexington and bucking the oncoming traffic. A bus almost hit them, and the female driver gave them a horrified look as she jammed on the brakes.