Burning Time

42

Sometimes April was so busy she didn’t have time to think about Sanchez, and sometimes, like right now, she found herself listening to his voice. He was on the phone having some kind of conversation with his mother. He was speaking in his fish-in-water language, and said her name.

“Sí, Mama.”

Sanchez had a special tone of voice when he talked to his mother. April had mixed feelings about it. Sanchez told April that when she talked to her mother, it always sounded like they were arguing, no matter what they were talking about. When he talked to his mother, it sounded like she was center of the earth to him.

Spanish people were not so different from Chinese, April thought. Both spoil their sons rotten, give them everything, and never get mad at them. Fix it so when they marry, their wives sound like scolding nags and can never make them as happy.

“Sí, Mama,” he said again.

And then something something else about la casa and something something else she didn’t get at all. They were on the four-to-eleven shift that day. Maybe he was telling her when he was getting home.

By now April was beginning to pick up a few of the words. It wasn’t a hard language like Chinese, which had a lot of different dialects and words that changed their meaning just by the register and tone in which they were spoken. She had a lot of paperwork to do and tried not to listen. Soon she was thinking about it again.

It was a good thing that Sanchez had respect for his mama, but a bad thing that he hung on her every word. Pretty soon she was speculating about how Spanish women were lower than Chinese. Chinese kept their pride in their face. Men and women, same thing. Both had pride, both had face. All Chinese spent time on saving face, protecting face, building face. It was kind of like face was money in the bank, and you could accrue interest on it, or lose it all, if you didn’t watch and protect it every day, and invest it just right. Jimmy lost face when his girl dumped him and he had to go home on the subway.

Spanish had their pride in a different body part. They didn’t care about face. Spanish had their pride in their penises. So only men could have it. You could see by the way they walked and talked that was where the pride was. Women were lower, had no pride. They walked around with their clothes too tight and their big behinds bouncing up and down to get men’s attention. Lipstick too bright, eyes too dark. All so they could attract a man and get some pride from him. Pah. And then when they got one, if he was a true Spanish man, he’d have the red-eye disease, be crazy jealous over her big, jiggling bottom, afraid every minute some other man would take it away.

Still, Sanchez went home to take care of his mama after his marriage broke up and his father died. And he was not ashamed of it. That was like Chinese, but not like Caucasians, who ran away from their parents in a big stampede as soon as their hormones changed. Other people just did their sex business and went home, didn’t have to make a big deal about it.

April couldn’t help wondering about Sanchez. Why did his marriage break up? Why were all the women he knew named Maria? It was hard to tell if they were sisters, or aunts, or cousins, or girlfriends, or what. Even Sanchez’s ex-wife was called Maria. That was another difference between the two cultures. Each Chinese had his own name, not like anybody else’s name. Parents put together whatever words they wanted. Happy Face. Free of Sorrow. Jade Luck. Tomorrow’s Chance. Chinese named their children like round-eyes named racehorses.

April’s Chinese name was Happy Thinking, as a kind of counteractive against the way she wrinkled her nose just after birth, as if she came into the world with a bad smell in her nose and was thus fated to spend her whole life questioning everything. Her mother liked to tell how she called her daughter Happy Thinking to trick the Gods into changing April’s fate.

“Didn’t work,” Sai lamented. Her unlucky daughter was still sniffing out the worst in everybody. She also liked to say she was afraid her only child had too much un-tempered yin to get married, which April believed was a contradiction in terms.

“You can’t be too much woman to be woman,” April told her.

“Not woman like person,” Sai argued. “Woman like down thinking. Settle for less when you could have husband, babies. Not gun in hangbag.”

“Handbag.”

April’s phone rang just when she was wondering which Maria Sanchez was now having his sex business with before he went home to his mother.

“Detective Woo?”

“Yes, speaking,” April said. It was a voice she knew, but couldn’t place.

“This is Jason Frank.”

“Oh.” The doctor who didn’t call himself a doctor.

“I’m calling from San Diego.”

San Diego again? “What are you doing there?” she asked with surprise. It was nine o’clock at night. What made him think she’d be on duty?

“I’m doing your job, Detective. Do you have anything new?” The edge to his voice made her bristle. Curiosity wrestled with insult as she struggled for an appropriate reply.

“I can’t do a job that I’m not authorized to do, Dr. Frank,” she said more sharply than she meant to. What did the man think he was doing in San Diego? He must be crazy.

“I’m sorry,” he amended hastily. “I meant the police, not you.”

“Okay.” She accepted his apology. “Then the answer is no. I tried to call both you and your wife, and neither of you has returned my calls.”

“You called my wife?” Now he was surprised.

“Was that a wrong thing to do, Doctor? I thought it might help to get her opinion of who might be sending her these letters.”

“Well, I think I might have something.…”

“Oh? What do you have?” Crazier and crazier. How could he have something?

“I have a name, but I can’t locate the guy. He doesn’t seem to be around. Do you have any suggestions?”

“What do you think you’re doing?” April demanded.

“I thought I’d pay him a visit, but he doesn’t seem to be around.”

Pay him a visit? Was he crazy? April’s heart constricted with anxiety. This was her case. Sergeant Joyce had given it to her and told her to be diplomatic. She had failed, and now the doctor was out there looking for some letter-writing lunatic on his own. What if he found him and got his head bashed in?

“You can’t do that,” April said loudly. “Come home, get a lawyer. Get an injunction against him. Dr. Frank, please listen to me. You can’t help your wife this way.”

“There may be more to it.”

“What do you mean?”

“He may have done some … other things.”

April took a deep breath. “What kind of things, Doctor?”

“I talked with his aunt. He has a psychological profile that definitely indicates he was a troubled boy. He set fires. He threatened other children. He may have been institutionalized somewhere. Maybe nobody’s been paying any official attention to him for a while. Maybe they have.”

“Okay,” April said, quickly pulling herself together and making up her mind. She didn’t like the urgency in the doctor’s voice. When civilians got involved in police business, things always went wrong. “The thing to do is call Sergeant Bob Grove of the San Diego Police Department. I’ve been in contact with him. Ask Grove to check if this guy has a sheet, a criminal record.… But, Dr. Frank, even if this man doesn’t have a sheet, don’t go to talk to him. Get a lawyer, get the court to deal with this. You can’t just charge around taking things into your own hands. There could be legal consequences. You could get hurt.”

“Uh-huh. Sergeant Grove? What’s that number?” Dr. Frank asked.

April looked up her notes on the Ellen Roane case and read the number to him. “Uh, Dr. Frank. What’s the man’s name? The man you think is writing the letters. I’ll try to work on it from here, see what I can find.”

He told her the name. She wrote it down on a fresh sheet of paper. Troland Grebs. She hung up and looked at it. What kind of name was that?

Sanchez had long since finished his conversation with his mother. He leaned over April’s desk. “What’s going on?”

“Can you believe this? That crazy doctor went out to San Diego,” she said, her nose wrinkling up with deep suspicion and concern. “And unless the wife doesn’t like the police or doesn’t return her calls, I bet she’s gone somewhere, too.” It was all very difficult and out of control.

A few minutes later a call came in about a robbery on Central Park West, and Sergeant Joyce sent them out on it.