Hanging Time awm-2 Page 6

  There were two women in the room. Only one got a chair. Sergeant Joyce sat behind her desk. April leaned against the windowsill near the dying plants. Healy and Aspirante, always the self-appointed honchos, sat in the two visitors’ chairs in front of Joyce’s desk. Aspirante’s beady eyes and large nose were moist with ambition and a lot more heat than the room’s air conditioner could handle. He was skinny, not a centimeter taller than April, and pugnacious to compensate. Now he was holding forth about psycho-killers he had known, not saying anything because he hadn’t ever known one, but pushing noise out his mouth all the same.

  “It’s the guy on the tape,” Aspirante said. “All we gotta do is find him.”

  Healy, at twice Aspirante’s height and girth and possibly half his intelligence, nodded his agreement.

  Joyce put her hand over the receiver. “Shut up,” she said.

  April glanced over at Mike. He was nonchalantly holding up the back wall as if nothing about anybody’s behavior bothered him in the least. It was their case. Theirs. They were the first men in, the ones who answered the call and found the girl. And Mike had to know there wasn’t a detective in the room who wouldn’t do anything in his power to upstage them and complicate the process as much as possible.

  Mike nodded at her, a small smile teasing the corners of his mustache. Clearly he was thinking the same thing and coming up with a different take on it. She knew how he thought. Life is short, take a chill. Hah, some philosophy.

  But April felt a sudden shock at the eye contact and the way he raised his chin at her. The jolt was unfamiliar and a little unnerving. All the time Sanchez was away experiencing his roots yet again, April hadn’t just missed him. She actually felt anxious, as if a part of her were missing. She didn’t like the sensation a bit and was pretty sure she wouldn’t feel that way if they hadn’t almost gotten blown up together last May.

  Now she had to worry about the effects of gratitude on this relationship that Sanchez called “close supervision.” She didn’t like it. She had always felt safer just a little isolated and separate from everybody. “Watch your back” was not a sufficiently cautious approach to either life or work for her.

  Maybe it was the effect of all those years hearing her mother’s litany of every possible danger of being alive in Queens, America, as well as constant replays of the violence and chaos, starvation, and family separations in China when she was young. In the fifties, in the Cultural Revolution, Tienanmen Square, now.

  “Never forget best friends, even Chinese best friends, stab in front easy as back.”

  April went to bed with those words in her ears the way she knew American children did the prayer “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”

  She and Mike hadn’t talked yet. Maybe they wouldn’t have a chance today. She couldn’t help noticing how tan he was, must have spent his whole ten days in Mexico out in the sun with some Maria or other. Suddenly April was aware that Sergeant Joyce had hung up the phone and was frowning at her, as if already she had done something wrong. She hadn’t done anything wrong. All she did was take a call, cross the street to a fancy boutique—where neither of them could even think of shopping—and find a dead salesgirl in the storeroom. April wasn’t responsible for killing her, or hanging her up on the chandelier.

  She clenched up inside, but refused to look down. It was a daily trial to her that Sergeant Joyce, who was so tough and so good with men, and smart enough to pass every test, didn’t seem to like her. Every day April was aware Joyce could orchestrate her removal to some other precinct, and this kept the edge on April’s anxiety nearly all the time. She didn’t want to go back to Brooklyn or Queens or the Bronx and get lost in the backwater. She wouldn’t mind being assigned to a special unit. Special Crimes, Sex Crimes. DEA. Even go home to the 5th in Chinatown. But not now, sometime in the future.

  After a full year in the Two-O, April had seen a lot of things she had never expected to see, met people she never would have known. In Chinatown she spoke the language of the powerless and ignorant, the prey of every kind of predator. She knew how they thought, where to go to ask the questions. No matter what the case, she knew the path to follow, knew the secrets. And she had never known that she was one of them, as powerless as they, until she was summarily moved up to the Two-O.

  Now she was in a different world, a world of random violence, where rich, educated whites tried not to rub shoulders with the disenfranchised blacks and Hispanics all around them. And the people of color refused to be ignored, pounded white heads whenever they could. But this homicide was no street crime.

  April held her ground as Joyce stared at her with apparent hostility. “Have you located the other salesgirl?” she demanded. “Maybe she knows who the guy is.”

  When in the world would April have had time to check out the second salesgirl? It took her and Sanchez three hours to get someone from the Sheriff’s office in Seekonk, Massachusetts, to locate Maggie’s parents. It was the part of the job she hated most. She was glad this time she didn’t have to be the one to knock on their door and tell them.

  April had learned that the Wheelers had six kids, but the number of kids never made the slightest bit of difference. She once knew a Chinese couple who had five kids. Baby drowned in the Central Park reservoir, where they were picnicking in a rowboat. Afterward, the mother went crazy, sat in a chair staring at the wall. Never recovered even though she had four other children to care for.

  “I’ve got her number and her address,” April said about the missing salesgirl. “She was first on my list.”

  Joyce nodded. “Okay, get the hell out of here and find out what she knows.”

  April shoved off the windowsill with a small sigh of satisfaction. Released without bail. Wow. She pushed through the crush of detectives, who didn’t exactly make way for her because Joyce gave her the show in front of everybody. It felt good. Two minutes later Mike was at his desk, and they began trying to find the other salesgirl, Olga Yerger.

  It was an hour later when they finally located her. She wasn’t at home and the girl she lived with didn’t want to say on the phone where she was.

  “Gee, I don’t know a thing. Monday’s Olga’s day off. I have no idea where she goes,” her roommate said with so many hesitations and pauses, April was pretty sure she did. “How do I know you’re really from the police?”

  “You can call the precinct and ask for me. You want to do that?” April asked. “Or do you want me to come over and show you my badge?”

  “How do you spell your name?”

  “W-o-o. How do you spell yours?”

  “Ah. We just share the rent. I hardly even know her. Do you want to leave a message?”

  “No. I need to talk to her now.”

  “Why, did she do something wrong?”

  “Someone’s been killed in the store where she works.”

  “Jesus.”

  There was a pause. The girl didn’t ask how or when.

  “Now will you tell me where she is?” April said.

  “I’ll call around and see if I can find her. I’ll call you right back,” the girl promised nervously, and hung up.

  April threw her notebook in her bag and turned to Mike. “Want to take a drive?” she asked.

  “That was easy.” He reached for his jacket. “Where is she?”

  “Doesn’t want us to know. She’s probably working without a green card. Let’s try the roommate.”

  It was seven P.M. on the first day of a big case. The squad room was riotous and smelled strongly of sweat and stale coffee. Five people in the detective squad day shift were still there, the seven-man evening shift had long since arrived, and both shifts were jockeying for desk space and the phones. April and Mike’s departure opened up two desks and phones. In the barred cell which was the main decoration of the room, an outraged mugger screamed obscenities.

  11

  Well, What did you do for a whole week without me?” Mike said as soon as they were in the
car. It was hot, maybe eighty-five degrees. They took the unmarked red Chevy Sergeant Joyce had used earlier even though the air conditioner was broken. They didn’t like to use their own cars while they were on duty, and taking a blue-and-white was beneath Sanchez’s dignity.

  “Pined away,” April answered lightly, busy with her seat belt.

  It had taken him all day to get personal. It always happened when they were in a car together.

  “No kidding.” He pulled out of the police lot. “Where to?”

  “Prince Street.”

  “Hah. Your old neighborhood.”

  Hah. Now he was making the same sounds she did.

  “Hah, yes indeed. My old neighborhood. I’ll try not to hyperventilate when we get there.”

  He turned at the corner and headed down Columbus. Yellow crime-scene tapes still sealed The Last Mango. April knew she and Sanchez were both having the same thought. That someone should die so young and so grotesquely not even a block from the precinct was an offense that was hard to take.

  Sobbing off what was left of her mascara, Elsbeth Manganaro had said that of all her stores, she felt safest in this one. “Because of the police next door. And what good was that?” she added for the fourteenth time.

  “How many stores do you have?” April had asked to make the question go away.

  “Four, but two of them are on the Island.”

  “Long Island?”

  “Where else?” Elsbeth demanded.

  April lifted a shoulder. There were other islands.

  Now she was silent. The beginning of each case was like walking into a fog so dense you couldn’t see to the corner, couldn’t even see your own feet on the ground. Everything was unknown. You didn’t know what kind of awful thing you might find when you put your hand out. What piece you might miss if you didn’t ask the right question. Or look in the right corner when the light was just right. Sometimes the fog didn’t lift to reveal the puzzle pieces for a long time. Sometimes it never did. Anxiety about finding some pieces in the murk caused April’s thoughts to jump around like a bird hopping from limb to limb.

  Who would kill a girl with police cars parked all over the place just outside? Sometime on Saturday, probably just after seven when the store closed, but maybe later. The girl could have waited for someone who was picking her up. Maybe there were no police cars out there. Maybe they were all on call. What else happened on Saturday night?

  “So where were you on Saturday night?” Once again Mike’s thoughts echoed her own.

  “Not on duty. I don’t know what was going on here.”

  “I know. I checked.”

  “Checked what?”

  “I checked to see if you were on duty.”

  It was really hot in the car, even with the windows open and the wind blowing through. It was almost theater hour. Columbus Avenue was jammed.

  April bristled. “What did you do that for?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you were here and saw something.”

  “I wasn’t,” she said flatly.

  There was an opening in the traffic. Mike speeded up.

  “So where were you?” he asked after a minute.

  “I was off duty, like you.” She frowned. “Why?”

  “I’ve been away for a week. I just want to know what mi querida’s been up to.” He turned to look at her and smiled.

  Very engaging. Very Spanish, just what she needed.

  “I could ask you the same thing,” she snapped.

  “Go ahead, you want to know what I did? I’ll tell you everything.”

  “Some other time. Right now we have a dead woman to think about.”

  “She’s not exactly going anywhere. You could take a second to ask me if I had a good time and tell me you missed me.”

  April looked out the window. Lincoln Center was lit up like a Christmas tree. She had walked around it with forty other eleven-year-olds on a class trip once, but had never been inside. Mike sped past it.

  “I had a wonderful time, thanks for asking,” he said.

  She had never been to Mexico either. There were a lot of things she didn’t know. “How’s Diego?” she said to prove she was up on something.

  “Diego? Diego, who?”

  “Diego Rivera. That painter you told me about.”

  “Wow. What a memory. Diego’s dead, but the paintings are fine.” Mike accelerated through a yellow light. Months before he had told her about the art and literature of Mexico to let her know he wasn’t just some Latino from an island with a short history and not much art. His culture was as old as hers.

  “Guess I should have sent you a postcard,” he said.

  She shrugged as their progress stalled again around Forty-second Street. He held out his hand, wiggling his fingers. Without having to ask, April knew he wanted the turret light. It was on the floor by her foot. She handed it to him. He reached out his window, stuck it on the roof, then hit the hammer halfheartedly a few times. Cars ahead of them moved over slowly at the sound of the siren.

  “So?” he asked after a few minutes of silence.

  “So what?”

  “So, where were you on Saturday night?”

  “What’s the damn difference?” April fumed for a second, then relented. “Okay, I was at a wedding.” She finally blurted out the hateful fact. “Not mine, are you happy now?”

  A gust of hot air ruffled her hair as she turned her face back to the window.

  “Oh, querida. I had no idea you wanted to get married.” Mike was silent about his part in her breakup with Jimmy Wong.

  Last spring he had checked Jimmy out, maybe found something, maybe not. Anyway, he had raised April’s suspicions enough about Jimmy’s activities on the night team in Brooklyn for her to end the three-year relationship.

  “I don’t,” she said quickly. She didn’t want Mike to think she was indecisive, had any regrets. She didn’t have any regrets, just a lot of things to wonder about. One of them was that the person “closely supervising” her had a lot of sex appeal. She didn’t know how to feel about that.

  Skinny Dragon Mother said men and women shouldn’t be partners. She made an explosive spitting sound when April assured her she and Sanchez weren’t partners. “Detectives don’t work as partners, Ma. You know that. He’s my supervisor.”

  “Can’t be superwhatever, can’t be friends either,” Sai Woo insisted. “You got big trouble.”

  And Skinny Dragon Mother wasn’t the only one who said it. The whole thing made her uneasy.

  As they neared her old neighborhood, April’s stomach rumbled with the hunger of remembered childhood happiness. No, better not think that, she told herself. Just rumbled from plain hunger. With all the excitement, there hadn’t been time for lunch.

  “Here we are,” she said suddenly.

  FUCKING LESBO, SUCK MY DICK was the exhortation on the door of the formerly brown sandstone building where lucky Olga Yerger had emigrated.

  Mike parked the car in front of a hydrant, and they got out. Prince Street was both run-down and fixed up in the extreme. The street was narrow, crowded, and dirty. The loft buildings all around were crumbling. Not more than three or four stories high, many of them had been old sweatshops and warehouses. Now expensive façades on restaurants, art galleries, and clothing stores winked at the shabby street. Upstairs there still could be anything.

  April nodded at a gallery window featuring small wire sculptures of body parts. “This is it.” The door to the building had recently been painted a color April knew as Chinese red. She opened it.

  Inside, a metal cage door blocked access to the stairs. Even from the door April could see the treads dipping and sagging just the way they did in the building where she grew up. Also like home, the light was poor and the walls were coming down. Only here there wasn’t the pervasive smell of cooking food, garlic and ginger and scallions frying in peanut oil, duck roasting in honey and hoisin sauce. No sounds of squabbling families.

  Mike pushed the button beside the l
abel that said YERGER. Instantly the metal door clicked open.

  “Third floor.” The voice on the intercom had no accent and invited them in without asking who was there.

  Mike and April exchanged glances. Even when expecting company, not many people did that in New York. They passed through the metal door, letting it clang shut behind them, then trudged up the three extraordinarily narrow flights of stairs. On the third floor there was no bell for the only door. Mike knocked on it.

  The dark-haired girl who opened it looked surprised to see them. She was wearing very short cut-off jeans and a halter that pushed her small breasts up. Her red lips puckered into a startled “Oh. What—?”

  “Detective Woo. I called a little while ago.” April showed her badge and cocked her head at Mike. “Sergeant Sanchez.”

  “She’s not here,” the girl said.

  “Who?”

  “You said you wanted Olga, didn’t you? Well, she’s not here.”

  “Do you mind if we come in and wait for her?” Mike smiled engagingly.

  The girl looked him over. “Actually, yes. It’s not a convenient time. I’m expecting company. I thought you were—”

  “We need to talk to Olga.”

  “Why? She hasn’t done anything.”

  “Then she won’t mind talking to us, will she?” Mike crowded her a little, moving forward so that she had to retreat.

  She backed into the apartment, protesting. “Hey, I said you can’t come in.”

  They came in. So did a huge Viking of a woman. She was over six feet tall and slender, with blue eyes and a mane of fine, pale hair almost down to her waist, which was a long way. Her choreographed entrance had her clicking through a beaded curtain. The first glimpses of her through colorful plastic that tried but did not succeed in looking like glass gave the impression that she was nude. But in fact she wore a short black leather skirt and matching leather bra.

  She, too, let out a surprised little “oh,” at her mistake, dropped her pose, and turned anxiously to her friend for help. The friend shook her head. The blond woman was a massive Scandinavian with a very little brain.