A Killing Gift

Forty-one

In the old days when April had lived at home, Skinny Dragon Mother used to show her love by force-feeding her daughter before she went to bed. Didn't matter what time April dragged herself home after work. There was always food waiting for her. One, two, three in the morning. The poodle Dim Sum would be waiting and so was the real dim sum. Pork and shrimp and vegetable dumplings, steamed rolls. Crab in ginger sauce, lamb and scallions. Succulent chicken and vegetables in the clay pot. Skinny was a big nag and threatener, but a great feeder. April sometimes got nostalgic thinking of home.

By the end of the week, the refrigerator in her kitchen was usually empty. She didn't have time to shop or cook. Mike didn't care what he ate during the day, but she was picky. If she didn't take the time to find something she liked, she went to sleep hungry and almost missed her mom. That night she missed her. After they'd settled in for the night, she lay in Mike's arms for hours listening to the steady beat of his heart and thinking about love and food and telemarketers all over the country, armed with the tools for the most insidious kind of home invasion- telephones.

People called from real companies like AT & T and Sprint, and Chase and Citibank, from charities like heart and cancer organizations, from the Special Olympics, from Channel Thirteen. And they called for phony charities, like police and state police funds that didn't help the police. They called from chiropractors and dentists. And they called alums from universities, where they knew how old you were, where you lived, and what you looked like.

Her restless dreams were full of probabilities. Armies of black-belt wannabes practicing one punch, one kill against herself, naked and out of shape. Horses stuffed with thousand-dollar bills. And the approaching thirty-day anniversary of Jack Devereaux's father's death.

At four-thirty a.m. thunder struck in the distance, forecasting another rainy day. April climbed out of her bad dreams and out of her bed. Mike never knew she left. In a T-shirt and a pair of NYPD shorts, she foraged in the kitchen for food. Way at the back of the freezer she found two ancient heavily frosted roast pork buns under a half-filled ice tray. She defrosted them in the microwave and boiled some water for tea. A few minutes later as the buns were steaming, she found the calendar of the woman she still thought of as Birdie Bassett.

Detectives were forbidden to take any kind of evidence from a homicide. April knew that it was a serious breach for her to have any items from a victim's home in her possession. The calendar should be in the file along with everything else relevant to the case- the tape that Woody had made of Birdie's voice messages, the list of the last hundred numbers dialed to her phone that had been on her caller ID, the notes and receipts from her various purses, the recent mail and correspondence on her desk and in her files-the whole panoply of bits and pieces that compiled a paper trail through her life.

April didn't dwell on the infraction as she drank her tea slowly and turned the week-at-a-glance pages of the last year of Birdie Bassett's life. Before her husband died, when the couple had been in New York, she'd spent her days mostly on maintenance. Once a week she'd had her hair and nails done and had visited Bliss Spa for aromatherapy and massage. She had standing appointments. Twice a week she'd played tennis at East Side Tennis in Queens, and three times a week she'd exercised at Pilates on Fifty-sixth Street. From time to time she'd visited doctors and had fittings for her clothes, some of which appeared to be custom-made. Why anyone would need to do that in one of the fashion capitals of the world, April couldn't begin to fathom. But the really rich were different.

In the evening, Birdie had attended benefits and dined out with her husband. During her winter in Palm Beach, the drill had been pretty much the same. The woman didn't appear to have many friends of her own, and her routine seemed set in stone. Some life for a woman not very much older than she was, April thought. She poured herself more tea and thoughtfully chewed on the soft, tasty buns, which were none the worse for the ice crust from the freezer. She reached the recent past in Birdie's life. After her husband died, her routine had changed. She abruptly stopped playing tennis and going to Pilates. New names appeared on her calendar. She'd lunched nearly every day.

On a legal pad, April wrote down all the names and dates, then turned to the list that Dr. Crease had given her. Not counting the as-yet-unknown number of students who had been in the building the day of the calls to Bernardino and Devereaux, twelve university staff members had been at meetings there.

The dean had categorized the list. Beside each name was a title and the location of the person's office in the university and their reason for attending a meeting. She was a thorough person. She'd also included a list of maintenance people who had access to the professor's office and the duties they'd performed the day in question. Diane Crease would have made an excellent detective.

As the sun rose, April began cross-checking names of people who'd attended the president's dinner, people Jack Devereaux knew at the university, names from Bernardino's private files, people who'd been in contact with Birdie Bassett after her husband died, and people who had been at both the meeting and president's dinner last night. Only three people had attended both the dinner and the meeting: Wendy Vivendi, the vice president for development; the dean herself; and Martin Baldwin, the head of alumni affairs. None of them had been in contact with Birdie Bassett. However, one person on the dean's list had been in contact with Jack Devereaux, and had spoken with Birdie Bassett many times and had had lunch with her only a week ago. His name was Al Frayme.