Stealing Time awm-5

by Leslie Glass

  What she saw in the office was one middle-aged Popescu sitting on the sofa with his head in his hands. The other one, slightly grayer and fatter, was at a rolltop desk, seemingly unconcerned with the proceedings. He was playing a computer game on his laptop. The two uniforms, who'd been lolling by the door watching over them, came to attention.

  "How's it going?" Alfie asked.

  "No problem, we got them printed," Lapinsky said.

  "Good, good." Alfie turned his attention to the suspects.

  The one on the sofa stood up and started in on Bernardino in an aggrieved voice. "I don't know why you insisted on finger-printing, Sergeant. After all these years I thought we were pals. I'm really upset with what's going on here."

  Alfie shook his finger at him. "You guys were holding out on me when I came in here yesterday. I don't like that."

  "Wait a minute, you got it wrong."

  "Don't give me that, Marc. What am I supposed to think, huh? I pay you and Ivan here a friendly visit, and the next thing I know, a girl dies in your place. This is more than careless." He took a disgusted look at the food, the beer cans on the table, and the full garbage can beside it. "And by the way, it's Lieutenant."

  "Yeah, yeah. I knew that. When are you going to get these people out of here? This is bad for our image," said Marc.

  "I can think of worse things," Alfie spat back. "Are we going to have problems with you two, or are you going to tell me what happened here last night?"

  "I have no idea what happened. Ivan was the one who closed up yesterday." Marc let tearful eyes wander over to his cousin at the desk. "I didn't want to say it. I

  hate

  to say it. But truth is truth. Ivan knows more about this than I do."

  "Hey, wait a minute, asshole. I told you that's not going to fly. I had nothing to do with this." Ivan shut down the computer indignantly. "I told him to send the girl to a hospital last week. See what happens when you try to do a good deed?" he added bitterly.

  "What good deed was that?" April asked.

  Ivan spun around to where she was standing by the door. "What's she doing here?"

  "She's the one on Heather's case." Marc gave her a hurt look, too. "What are you doing here?" he asked.

  Before April could answer, a scraping sound on the wall outside the door distracted them. Startled, Marc turned to it. "What the hell is that?"

  "Mice. The place is full of them," Ivan said, unperturbed.

  April popped her head out the door. Cartuso and Bernheim were heading down the stairs, working the tools of their trade.

  "There's another one here." Cartuso was busy examining the wall and handrail with a magnifying glass while Bernheim carefully dug out of the plaster and aged paint the browning spots Cartuso indicated.

  "Hey, April. Your boyfriend's waiting for you upstairs," Bernheim told her.

  She left the lieutenant in the office to do his job and closed the door behind her. "Hey Saul, you got something?"

  "You bet. Real geniuses, these guys. They left us the works. Looks like they kept her in a closet upstairs on the third floor. We found signs of habitation up there—cup, saucer, honey drips. Greasy food spots. Dirty towels. Blood and other stains on a folded mattress up there. We also got what we think is blood caked in cracks in the floor. The perp mopped up, but the mop only got the surface. The windowsills showed us that the victim didn't go out any window up there, so we checked out the stairway. Blood droplets on the treads." He swept his hand in a downward motion.

  "You can see how they came down the stairs. There was a smear with a hair stuck in it on the wall. Must have bumped her head. Then two drops on the railing there, on the railing above it. And we have some more down here. My guess is that there wasn't that much blood, so he just carried her down the stairs, took her out the back door, and dumped her. You saw the door in there." He pointed at the office.

  April nodded.

  "We'll probably get something on the floor. There were a few drops outside on the pavement—not hard to pick up. He must have wanted it to look like a suicide. That's why he didn't wrap her in something. You'd think he'd have wrapped her up in something so she wouldn't drip all over the place." Bernheim shook his head at the sloppy work.

  "Men don't think housekeeping. And these don't strike me as detail men. You think maybe they did it together?" April mused.

  Saul shrugged. "Same thing, one or two. Neither of them wrapped her up." Saul seemed upset about this.

  "Maybe it was a rage thing and they panicked when they realized they'd killed her," April speculated.

  "Possibly."

  "Is it okay if I go up?" she asked.

  "Yeah, but keep to the middle and don't touch anything."

  April met Mike in the room with the sewing machines. He was taking copious notes. "Feeling better?" he asked without looking at her.

  "Okay. I'm sorry I acted like that," she murmured. "It upsets me when you get all protective on me when I'm in the middle of something."

  He shook his head, still mad. She considered touching him, decided against it. "Forgive me? We've got to get moving here."

  He turned a page in his notebook and wrote some more.

  "Oh come on," she wheedled. "You're always bugging me to make the call. So this time I made a call. You can't be mad at me for that. I happened to be right. And time is passing here. I need you."

  "You don't have to make the call when you're deathly ill," he said.

  "I wasn't deathly ill," she insisted.

  "Let's hope not. I wouldn't want to have to replace you." He turned another page.

  Oh, God, she was in a hurry. This wasn't the time for a debate.

  "When you love somebody, you're in it together." He was pushing every button.

  "Okay, I'm sorry, but we've got a time limit here. This guy Anton is on his way out to Garden City, pretending to be a police captain."

  "So I heard."

  "He beat up his wife. For all we know he killed this poor girl. Who knows how far he'll go to get the baby back?

  Caw,

  we have to get going. What do you think, should I call for a bird?"

  In the old days they were not supposed to call for the expensive equipment, like Aviation, unless there was a real emergency. These days, pulling out all the stops and getting a chopper was not that big a deal. April checked her watch anxiously. She didn't know where Anton had started. He had a car in a garage near Fifty-ninth Street; he might be leaving from there. But if he intended to take the baby home with him, he might well use a car service. April wanted to get to Garden City before he did. She considered how long it would take to get a bird. The helicopters were on standby at Floyd Bennett Field. They'd have to bring one over to Battery Park or South Street Seaport. It would take half an hour, minimum.

  "It's all a matter of form,

  querida.

  Brushing me off is bad form." Mike stood his ground, still on love. He could be very stubborn.

  April was thinking about a landing site. Where would they be able to put the bird down? Somewhere along the Southern State Parkway? That meant they'd need coordination with Nassau County agencies for the vehicles on the other end.

  The minutes were mounting up. April did not want to resort to groveling to get her boyfriend on the road.

  "Fine. Don't bully, then. Do you want to drive, or should I get Aviation into this?" She

  really

  didn't want to grovel.

  "Aviation will take too much time on both ends. We'd do better on the road." He made the snap decision and eye contact at the same time. He was kicking in.

  "Whatever. You finished here?" April figured she'd won and smiled. He gave it up on the basis of the smile.

  "Yeah." He stuffed the notebook in his pocket and took her arm as they hustled down the stairs. She must really look bad, but miraculously, she was feeling a lot better.

  "Hey, watch that." An irritated Cartuso, now on the bottom step, complained at the stampede for the door.


  "Did you see everything?" Bernheim asked April.

  She shook her head. "I'll have to save it for later."

  "No matter. It's not going anywhere."

  They pushed past him, jostling each other for first out the door. Suddenly, after the delay, they were racing. April rushed out into the street and jumped into the passenger side of the unlocked Camaro, almost slamming the door on her foot. Mike dove into the driver's side and reached for the gum ball under the seat. He plopped it on the roof, turned the ignition key, and hit the hammer. His siren wailed all the way across the Brooklyn Bridge and kept wailing as they headed out on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

  CHAPTER 47

  R

  ing Road did not run in a circle. It traveled parallel to Roosevelt Field, cutting a wide swath of comfortable, tree-and shrub-lined boulevard across a ten-block length of suburban city. Two lanes of traffic could travel each way, yet there was still room along the sidewalk for parking. Since every house had an ample driveway, few cars were parked on the street at any time of the day; even at peak traffic hours, a sense of quiet and order prevailed. By anybody's standards, it was an area not without its charm, even elegance.

  After their long vigil on Allen Street and a frantic phone call in the early afternoon, Frankie and Joey arrived at the Hua house at 4:03. By a quarter past four they had settled in the living room and were heatedly reporting what they knew about the murder of Nanci's cousin.

  "We saw those guys go in real early. Unbelievable, they were opening up as usual. These guys are something. They both have green Mercedes." Milton's friend Frankie had been marveling over the cars for hours now.

  "We got there at seven-thirty. The two fat dudes showed up, like almost instantly," Joey confirmed.

  "But then when the girls showed up for work, they didn't let any of them come in. They stood at the door and sent them all away. One guy went out for food. Then a couple hours later, a pizza was delivered and another joker turned up in a taxi. This one was wearing a suit, but he looked just like them. He left in a hurry just before the cops got there. Then a whole bunch of cops were in and out of there, are probably still there. But your little Chink lady never showed—"

  "Hey, watch that," Milton said sharply.

  "What?" Frankie entreated Nanci with a what-did-I-do expression.

  "We're Chinks," she reminded him. "My cousin was a Chink."

  "Oh, give me a break. Can't you tell the difference?" He looked disgusted.

  "No." Nanci stared at the window, too upset to make an issue of it.

  "Of course she didn't show up, stupid. Lin was already dead. That's why Annie never called back." Milton shook his head and glanced at his wife. "You okay, baby?"

  Nanci's teeth were clamped hard on her bottom hp to keep it from quivering. She couldn't believe this was happening, the sweet baby upstairs, crazy Frankie in her living room, and the man who said he was a police captain, coming for the baby. It was impossible to imagine Lin dead and her murderer on his way out to their little house to take away her baby.

  She didn't have a chance to answer. Frankie was back on track with his story. He'd never even met Lin, but suddenly, describing the police activity around the building where she had died, and the neighbors' feelings about the arrogance of the Popescu family, he was as incensed as any blood relation.

  Nancy wondered where April was. She'd said help was on the way. But where was it? Where was help? And where was the man who'd claimed he was a police captain? Nanci hoped he'd changed his mind. It occurred to her that the call might have been a cruel prank. Maybe no such person was on his way out there, and she and Milton had encouraged crazy Frankie and Joey to drive out for nothing. She hoped that was the case.

  "Help is on the way," she murmured at Milton. He was sitting in a chair by the window. Like her, he had one eye on the street and one eye on his friend.

  "Sons of bitches," Frankie was saying about the Popescus.

  Nanci could see that Milton didn't like Frankie's being all pumped up like this any more than she did. Suddenly Frankie got up from the sofa by the fireplace and started walking around, waving his arms, all excited by the police investigation of a murder of someone he felt was closely related to him. If she hadn't known him for more than a decade, she would have been even more frightened. Frankie was not easygoing like Milton. He was almost nine inches taller than his friend, an angry-looking young man with a hooked nose and a big mouth who'd been a brawler from the day he could walk. Even in Little Italy, where a certain lack of impulse control among young men was not uncommon, Frankie was out there near the far end of the bell curve of aggression.

  But of the two, his best pal, Joey, was generally regarded as the dangerous one. The only thing that could incense Joey more than the real cops he'd seen hanging out around Allen Street with their walkie-talkies and other cop gear was a cop impersonator. That really pissed him off. Joey never got tired of telling people of an incident a year ago when he'd been dragged off a subway by a man and a woman claiming they were police officers. The woman had been wearing a silver police shield around her neck; the man had on ragged jeans and sneakers. The two of them looked like a hooker and a doper to Joey, but they managed to pull him and three other people off the train at a deserted stop and rob them on the platform. Then they took off. As soon as they started running, Joey and the other men went after them. It must have been quite a sight: the two muggers emerging on the street with their victims in hot pursuit. Some passersby picked up on it and called 911. The woman got away, but when the victims caught up with the man, he turned on them with a lead pipe. In the ensuing battle, he managed to split one man's head open with the pipe before Joey took a good, deep slice out of him with his switchblade. Joey recovered his wallet and watch and was out of there before the police showed up. Nanci could see from the faraway look in his eye that he was thinking of the triumph of that much-discussed day, and of his wish to repeat it.

  "We'll show this guy," he said, abruptly zooming in to focus on the present. It was clear that for Joey it had been bad enough to watch real cops at work that morning; the threat of being pushed around by a phony one was more than he could bear.

  Nanci cast an anxious look at her husband. "Milton," she murmured.

  "Okay, okay. Just calm down, will you?" Milton shook his head at the two, then turned his attention to the window. "It looks fine out there. Maybe you guys better take off."

  Frankie sprang across the room, punching one fist into his open hand. "No way. Who's going to protect you if this asshole shows up with a gun?"

  Nanci flashed to the last sight she'd had of her cousin, walking away down the street without looking back. Her eyes flooded.

  "Hey, hey. It's okay." Milton jumped out of the chair, crossed the room, and took Nanci in his arms. He hugged her tightly.

  "April said the killer threw Lin out the window," Nanci sobbed. "Oh, God, she must have been so scared." She held on to her husband. "Who could do something like that?"

  "We'll get him," Frankie promised.

  "No! Milton's right. You should go home. You've been great, but, please, we're okay now." Nanci got up and checked the street. There was nothing going on out there but the usual daytime traffic. She swiped at her eyes. "Get them to go, Milton."

  "You're no fun," Frankie joked.

  That really angered her. "This is not a game. Please, Milton, tell them we're okay now," she cried.

  "Nobody has a gun, right?" Milton looked from one to the other. Now he was worried.

  "Right," Frankie said seriously. "This isn't a game."

  "You promised me no guns."

  Frankie glanced at Joey. "I don't have a gun, do you have a gun?"

  "No way, man." Joey got to his feet and backed out to the door to the kitchen. "I'm clean."

  "There are real cops on the way out here, understand?" Milton got up, too. Now they were all on their feet. Nanci started trembling.

  "You got a gun, you get outta here." Milton chose to advan
ce on his friend.

  Frankie struck a pose and held his arms out. "Go ahead, search me. You find a gun, I'll give you a thousand dollars."

  Milton lunged across the room. "You're on."

  "He doesn't have a thousand dollars," Nanci told him. She was so nervous she couldn't keep still. What was it with these guys? All of a sudden they were playing high school games, Milton wanting to be one of them. They'd forgotten all about Lin, about the man coming to the house. Frustrated, she blew her nose. She had to stop crying. It didn't help. She had to do something.

  Frankie spread his legs and held out his arms. Milton started to pat him down. Nanci wanted to punch them all. Then she thought she heard a sound somewhere in the back of the house and froze. "Did you hear that?"

  Joey charged into the kitchen for a look out the back window. "Nothing out here," he called.

  "Stay there and keep watch," Milton told him.

  Suddenly in her mind's eye Nanci could see the killer scaling the brick wall outside, hidden from their view, and carrying the baby she and Milton had named William out the window. What if he got the baby and took off without any of them ever seeing him? She ran up the stairs and into Will's room. The cherub was safe and wide awake in his borrowed crib. His blue eyes were open, and he was calmly trying to focus on the colorful figures in the mobile over his head. Nanci was transported.

  "Hi, sweetheart," she crooned. "You're awake. How come you didn't call me, sweet boy?"

  He gurgled up at her. She picked him up, her heart thumping as his tiny hand escaped the blanket and reached for her cheek. She kissed his fingers and the nose that didn't look Chinese. Then she took him over to the makeshift changing table they'd set up by the window to see if he was wet. It was from there that she saw the limousine drive up to the house. The car was navy blue and looked new. She gasped, couldn't move. She stood by the window, paralyzed, as a dark-haired man in a navy suit got out of the car and looked around at the quiet row of houses. Then he looked up, saw her standing in the window, and started walking toward the house.