Burning Time

2

Detective April Woo neatened up her desk for the night shift and covered a small yawn, even though the squad room was empty except for Ginora, the glorified secretary who answered the phone and took the messages, and Sergeant Sanchez. Both were at their desks hunched over their phones talking rapidly in Spanish. Neither looked her way.

Detective Bell was at the range in the Bronx. Detective Davis was at the range at the Academy, and Sergeant Aspiranti was in the field. It was three-thirty. If nothing new came up, April was due to go home in half an hour.

Her eyes slid over to the couple who had been sitting for almost an hour on the bench just inside the door. The Squad Supervisor, Sergeant Joyce, was out on a call. No one else could make an assignment. They’d have to sit there until Joyce got back, or the duty changed and Sergeant Rinaldi took over at four.

April studied them, wondering what the complaint might be. These were the kind of people who always made her a little nervous. Clearly educated, affluent, Caucasian. Her mother was old-style Chinese. Even now she sometimes called whites round-eyes, or ghosts. That made April nervous, too.

One of the first things she was taught at the Police Academy was, “We’re only one color here. Blue. Whatever prejudices you have, leave them at the door.” April didn’t forget it.

After six years of being one of New York’s Finest, which was in fact one-third African-American, one-third Hispanic, and one-third white—with Asians at maybe three percent, a few hundred in thirty-five or so thousand officers—April Woo thought of herself as pretty much color-blind.

Even without the professor’s warning to keep an open mind about people, it wouldn’t have taken April many months to see that underneath the skin colors and cultural differences everybody wanted pretty much the same things. But the combination of education and class and money in people like this couple still intimidated April. When they were white and educated and rich all at the same time, she couldn’t help feeling inferior. She might have a chance for one, but she’d never have all three. April went two nights a week to John Jay College of Criminal Justice where she was getting her degree so slowly she was afraid her hair would turn gray before it happened.

“Bastard!” the woman said fiercely.

April looked her over without opening her eyes all the way. The woman had a lot of dark brown, possibly dyed hair—a huge mane of it, elaborately styled—and was wearing a short fur coat. Very short. Her skinny legs in their sheer black stockings stuck out a long way. Must be cold walking around in that all winter, April thought.

The woman’s face had been painstakingly made up earlier in the day, but now the eyeliner was mostly gone, there were traces of mascara under her eyes, and her blush-on was all cried off. The man beside her looked like a lawyer or a doctor. He wore a dark business suit and had a camel hair coat and a silk paisley scarf over his arm. They argued quietly on and off as they waited for someone to take their case. Must be a robbery.

The squad room had a little jog in it, a short hallway which widened out into a good-sized room with six small metal desks equipped with not much more than phones and manual typewriters. The desks were all in a row by the windows that faced Eighty-second Street. The only place for people waiting for a detective was on that one bench in the narrow hall. Across from the desks was a single holding cell with thick iron bars. Suspects brought in for questioning were kept there. But none today. It had been a pretty quiet day, but a successful one for April.

For the first time in a long time, she had a case that made her feel good. Well, not her first call. Her first call that day was a DOA on Amsterdam. Old guy hadn’t been heard from by anybody for several days, and finally someone called the police. April and Sanchez went in and found him on the toilet, where he had died straining for his last poop. Lot of old people in the neighborhood. They died in front of the TV. They died in their beds. Occasionally, one fell down in the bathtub, broke something, and couldn’t get help. But a surprising number of them died on the pot. This time it must have happened sometime in the night. The lights were on. His teeth were in a glass. His hearing aid was on the night table. He was a tiny guy with a dapper mustache, sitting there perfectly balanced, his red-and-white striped pajama bottoms around his ankles and his eyes wide open in shock as if he had been caught in the act.

About midday, when April was still looking around the apartment for numbers of relatives to notify, and waiting for the ambulance to take the old man away, a request came in just for her. Up here on the Upper West Side, on Columbus Avenue only one block from Central Park West, where there was a lot of money around and very little need for a Chinatown expert, it didn’t happen a lot.

It was a case in the Westminster, one of the famous buildings on Central Park West. They sent her out to interview a Chinese maid, and she relished every second of it. Turned out the woman, Ling Ling Jee, had been assaulted when she discovered two robbers in the apartment busy pocketing her mistress’s jewelry. Ling Ling was a broad-faced woman of middle age and stoical peasant stock who couldn’t speak English. She was terrified by the two men, and even more frightened of being blamed for their entry into the apartment. Worse, her employers were out of town on a skiing trip. Ling Ling didn’t know where they were, nor was she absolutely sure what skiing was.

The Haitian maid across the hall had called the police for her. Two police officers arrived on the scene, but couldn’t get enough of a story to fill out a report. Eventually April got there and sorted everything out. She calmed the woman down, got her story, tried to ascertain what was missing, explained to her what skiing was, and found the Barstollers up in Vermont. Tomorrow Ling Ling was coming in to look at mug shots.

Sorting things out for confused and terrified newcomers was what April felt she had been born to do. And for five years she had been a happy detective down in Chinatown. She knew all too well the terrors of people who didn’t know what to do or who to believe about what the rules really were.

Almost nobody in Chinatown had come into the country legally. So when they got there, they lived in constant anxiety about being discovered and sent back. This and the fact that they couldn’t speak the language made them perfect victims—for each other, for the authorities, and for the people who employed them.

Sometimes the people who sold them fake papers for thousands of dollars then sold their arrival dates to associates in New York, who kidnapped them at the airport and ransomed them to the desperate relatives who were waiting for them. In her years in the 5th, April had had many cases that made her happy. Not so many up here, where she felt like a fish out of water.

Sergeant Joyce came in and brusquely motioned for April to come into her office. It was three-forty. April knew by the Irish set of her supervisor’s jaw that she wasn’t getting out of there in twenty minutes. Something had come up.

Two minutes later she came out of the office with the Missing Persons form that had only been partially filled out at the desk downstairs. She approached the anxious couple on the bench.

“Mr. and Mrs. Roane,” April said. “Come with me.”