Burning Time

37

Sanchez had a hit-and-run on Amsterdam. In broad daylight a van running the light hit a woman with a dog and a baby carriage. Mother and child were squash flat, as Sai Woo put it when April told her about it. The dog, which had been tied to the carriage, managed to escape injury. Sai liked hearing stories like that. Happen to other people, not happen to her.

“I had a dog once, long time ago in China.” She reached for the story, offering it up to April as favor for favor.

April nodded seriously, accepting the gift she’d already received a hundred thousand times.

“One day dog gone. I very sad,” Sai said. “Look for it and look for it. Ask everybody.” When she paused to shake her head, April knew she was thinking about how everybody said they didn’t see a thing. Didn’t remember ever seeing any dog. And that was how Sai learned she couldn’t trust anybody.

“Neighbors ate it,” she said now, playing it for all it was worth.

“Serve dog right,” she added, “for going outside without me.” She looked at April slyly out of the corner of her eye. She was eating melon seeds, cracking the shells open delicately with her teeth at the kitchen table after dinner. The TV was on, but neither of them was watching. Sometimes Sai left the picture on and the sound off, just for company when Ja Fa Woo and her daughter were both at work. Now it was on for show. To show April she didn’t have to be there and could go home whenever she wanted.

“Probably dog’s fault. Why he tied to carriage anyway?” she asked. She couldn’t stand the sight of a dog now, didn’t like her neighbors either. She brushed an errant shell off her lap impatiently.

She had given April perfectly good story. Very good story about her life. And now April’s turn to tell something. Dead baby and mother not enough. Sai wanted to know important things, like what happened to red Camaro, and why white Baron was back with no sign of Jimmy Wong.

April was writing something and wouldn’t say. Sai leaned over to see what it was, but couldn’t see a thing without her glasses. She never liked Jimmy Wong. Not so good as a doctor or dentist. Jimmy Wong wore a gun in a shoulder holster and walked like gangster. Had no good future. Boo hao. “Ni, you listening to me?” she said.

April nodded without looking up.

“Main thing is, lose innocence but not hope,” Sai said pointedly.

“Okay, Mom.” April rolled her eyes because she had no idea what that meant and her mother still called her “you.” Like, hey you, you listening to me? How could she avoid it?

April looked her mother over critically. Desperate to be “new style” right up-to-date, Sai Woo always wore extravagantly colored blouses which she tucked into matching tailored pants. Her hair was still black as patent leather, and though she swore up and down she didn’t touch it, April knew she dyed it promptly at the beginning of every fifth week.

In spite of these details, she was “old style” in her soul. No getting around it. She ate melon seeds, cracking the shells with her teeth, gossiped like an old woman, and sometimes hunkered all the way down on her heels without warning. Just the way they did in China, because not so many chairs there. Nobody who was born in America would dream of doing that. No one could. Well, cowboys maybe. But there weren’t many of those in Queens.

“You should be the detective,” April said.

“Not so good detective, not find out much,” Sai replied disgustedly, ending the discussion as usual on a sour note.

By the time Sanchez found the van, it had been sold. But he didn’t have too much trouble getting to it. The person who bought it lived only a few blocks away from the suspect, and hadn’t had time to get the bumper or the broken headlight fixed. It was after four when he came back from the indictment.

The squad room was always pretty empty between four and four-thirty. Day shift going or gone, night shift coming in.

“I was afraid I’d miss you,” he said.

April was sitting at her desk, tying up a few loose ends. Sergeant Riley was already there and hassling her to get out so he could have her desk. She looked up at Sanchez. It was nowhere in her thoughts that she might be waiting for him.

“Why?” she asked. Then lowered her head with some confusion because he seemed tired and discouraged.

“Why what?” Sanchez asked.

“Why were you afraid of missing me? Did something come up?”

“No. Just wanted to know what was going on, uh, with you. Bad day.” He said it as fact, not a question.

“Had a DOA on Broadway. Homeless. Poor guy sat there on the bench for nearly thirty hours before the neighbors were willing to admit he hadn’t moved in a long time.”

They didn’t look at him when he was alive, but a crowd had gathered to watch him bagged and taken away. But that wasn’t what Sanchez was asking about.

“The positive ID came in on Ellen Roane,” she said at last.

“I heard.”

“I had to talk to the mother.”

“Rough.”

“Very rough.” April looked away. That was the worst part of the job. That and collecting more pictures and information about Ellen to send to Sheriff Regis. She would have liked to follow up on this case herself, go out to San Diego and follow Ellen’s tracks all the way to Potoway Village in the hills to see if she could come up with anything resembling a suspect. Now Sheriff Regis would have to do it. She’d found her Missing Person. For her, the case was closed.

“I see you got your car back,” Sanchez said after a minute.

“Yeah, last night.”

It was in the lot downstairs. April took a lot of flak for it. Very flashy car for a cop. Couldn’t miss it coming, couldn’t miss it going.

“That have any special meaning?” Sanchez asked.

“Why don’t you two woo somewhere else,” Sergeant Riley said with a leer. He’d already been married twice, had the white hair to show for it, was now engaged to be married for the third time, and still didn’t think much of women. “Ha, ha. Woo woo, get it?”

April saw the words “fuck off” jump into Sanchez’s mouth behind the mustache, and then saw them jump out again when he looked at her.

“Hey, man. We’re doing business, got a problem?”

“Yeah. I want to sit down.”

“Fine. Let’s go.” Sanchez put his hand up to touch April’s arm, then checked the gesture.

Good. She didn’t want him embarrassing her. She picked up her bag. It was heavy. It had mace and a .38 in it. He followed her out.

“So, ah, what’s happening with this Hinckley case of yours?” he asked as they headed down the stairs. “You got plans? We could talk about it, eat some Mexican.” He looked at her slyly.

So he knew about Jimmy. April didn’t say anything until they got downstairs and punched out.

“Nothing to talk about,” she said. “No one’s getting letters like that in San Diego. I tried to call the husband to find out if they were still coming, but he’s taken off.”

“What do you mean, taken off?”

“I don’t know. He’s out of town. I guess he doesn’t think it’s so important anymore. On his answering machine, he gives the name of another doctor to call in case of emergency.”

April caught sight of the LeBaron right away, even though it was parked in the back. Sanchez’s red Camaro was right next to it. Yeah, he came in just around four. Maybe someone was pulling out right then. The red Camaro was flashy, too. Even her mother remembered it.

“It’s kind of weird.” She unlocked her car door but didn’t get in. “Maybe it’s like this. One time we went up to this lake when I was a kid. Upstate somewhere. In the middle of the night there was this helicopter with a big searchlight flying back and forth over the cabin. Everybody jumped up and got really scared and thought there was an escaped convict out in the woods gonna kill us.” She laughed, remembering it.

“So what was it?”

“Well, we couldn’t call the police, because Chinese, well, you know how the Chinese feel about the police.”

“No.” Sanchez moved over and leaned against her car, smiling. “How do Chinese feel about the police?”

He was close enough now for her to smell him. His after-shave was not so strong after a whole day of sitting around a stale courtroom. But even now he didn’t smell of sweat. More like shirt starch. She wondered if he took his shirts to a Chinese laundry, or if some woman ironed them for him. Boo hao, ni, ni, she scolded herself in her fish-in-water language. No good, you.

“They think police will steal what’s left in their house after they’ve been robbed, and take their favorite son to jail,” she said. “I have to go.”

Sanchez’s face fell enough so she kind of felt sorry for him.

“I have a class,” she added.

“So what was it doing there?” he said after a second.

“What?”

“The helicopter?”

“Oh, that.” He got her so mixed up she couldn’t remember what she was talking about. “Turned out there’s this wife and husband staying on a boat. They get drunk. Wife jumps off the boat. Husband gets scared and calls the police. Police spend three hours searching for her. They get cars, park them all around the lake with the lights on, send up a helicopter. Everything. Then when they get all ready to start dragging the lake with nets, she walks out of the bushes where she’s been watching the whole thing. Know what? She gets right back on the boat. Wouldn’t go to the station, make out a complaint against him. Nothing.”

“So you think it might be something between the two of them?” Sanchez asked. “The husband and wife?”

“Well, I haven’t heard a word from her. It’s kind of weird, isn’t it?” She cocked her head toward the car, so he would move.

“Yes,” he agreed. “Sometimes you think they’re going to add up to something, and then they just go away.” Sanchez shrugged and moved away from the door of her car.

What? Cases or people?

A few days before, on the way back from a call, Sanchez had told her his father was a cook in a Mexican restaurant before he died. He worked in a restaurant in El Paso and then when it failed, someone offered him a job in New York. It was at a red light in a lot of traffic. They were sitting in the car. April had to close her eyes for a minute to keep the Mexican ghost out of her soul. Her father and his father did the same thing. She didn’t want to hear that. Sanchez put his arm out on the seat so his hand was not too far from hers. She knew he was showing her they were the same color. But she wasn’t sure they were the same color underneath, so she didn’t say anything.

“The thing is there’s still the San Diego thing. I have a feeling it’s not over.” April smiled suddenly. “You know, Sergeant, I’ve never had Mexican food.”

Then she looked at her watch in alarm and realized she’d been talking so long she was going to be late.