Burning Time

45

Sanchez pulled up next to Dr. Frank’s building and parked the car in front of a hydrant. It was eleven-thirty. Their shift ended a half hour ago. The call from California had come just as they were leaving. Sergeant Joyce was already gone.

April took the call and talked to Dr. Frank for a long time. He was still at the San Diego Police Department with Sergeant Grove. He was extremely worried about his wife. He had been out of touch with her for nearly twenty-four hours. She had left a message at noon his time to call her immediately. Now it was almost nine hours later and he still hadn’t heard from her. He had called the apartment, her agent, her friends. No one knew where she was. Grove faxed April the sheet on Troland Grebs.

As the husband talked to her long-distance, April felt sick with anxiety. It was possible that she had not done the right thing from the very beginning with this case. Maybe she had waited too long to call the wife. If she had called earlier, she might have found out the real story then. Why had she accepted the doctor’s request that she not call? And when she did call and the woman didn’t call her back, why didn’t she just go over there and talk to her? Now she, April Woo, would be to blame if she went in there and the woman was dead.

April felt sick, sick all over. People weren’t supposed to just run around on their own, checking things out. There was a system for doing everything. April followed the rules. She always followed the rules. There was a reason for every one. Cases had to have complainants, or they weren’t cases. Cases that came in after eleven had to be referred to Central. If she let it go until tomorrow, then the doctor would come home. If his wife still wasn’t there, he could fill out a Missing Person Report, and Sergeant Joyce would assign the case.

But it was her case. She’d already been assigned this doctor, and she’d messed up. She should have followed through. She should have talked to the wife before. What if she was dead on the floor? April had been trained just for this kind of thing, to look around and underneath what people were telling her for the real story. Why hadn’t she listened more carefully, asked more questions? It seemed to be about letters, but she knew it wasn’t always what it seemed to be.

Every day she tried to remind herself about the robbery call that came in when she was so green the sap was still leaking out of her every pore. She got to the address and climbed three floors to find a hysterical young Chinese woman covered with bruises, dressed only in a robe, hitting herself and wailing in Chinese that it was “My fault, my fault.”

After talking to her for a long time, April finally persuaded the woman to tell her what the crime really was. She had been raped and sodomized by two men for three hours. And the only thing that had been stolen was the woman’s whole life. No way the man who was engaged to her would marry her now.

April never waited until tomorrow for anything. Why had she not gone to see this Chapman woman sooner? My fault, she told herself. She had been intimidated by the husband, the doctor. Now she couldn’t go into an unknown situation by herself. They didn’t exactly have partners in Detective Squads. When big cases came in, they all worked together, each trying to find a tiny piece. In small cases they usually worked on their own. They certainly could work together if they wanted to.

“Mike,” April had said when she hung up, “I need your help.”

The car had stopped, but she wasn’t in a hurry to get out. She looked at Mike.

“All set?” he asked.

They had hardly spoken on the way over. She was tired, and apprehensive about what she was going to say and do. They had an understanding. This was her case, and she had to handle it. But she had no real sense of these people. All she knew for sure was that the husband was a doctor, a shrink he finally told her. And the wife was an actress. But what did that really mean? She had no idea what it meant, no idea at all what their lives were like. She had never met any people like that.

For months after being transferred up here, just walking into one of these buildings on the upper West Side was a shock to her. And she was still trying to get used to it. She didn’t know about buildings with doormen to guard the entrance, back elevator men to take away the trash, drugstores, dry cleaners, and grocery stores that all delivered. She didn’t know people who wore fur coats and had dog walkers to walk their tiny dogs, who went to the Caribbean islands in winter and passed through Queens only to get to the airports or the Hamptons.

She’d never been to the Caribbean or the Hamptons. She was born in a building where the toilet out in the hall was shared by three families. And the tub was in the kitchen. All she ever wanted was to grow up, get her degree, and help people like her mother and father survive. She had never asked to come uptown, to have to look in the mirror and wish her eyes and bottom were round. Never in ten thousand years would she have wanted to have to learn to walk and talk and think like educated Caucasians. And now she had to. These people were coming to her as if she knew how to solve their problems.

The shrink, with all his years of education and training, had come to her, as helpless and terrified as any illiterate Asian just off the boat.

She glanced at Sanchez and nodded. “Yeah, let’s go,” she said.

“Jesus, what a place,” he remarked.

April looked up at the extraordinary canopy made of some kind of carved metal. She had found that even in buildings like this, she was still afraid of what was behind the door. They had taught her that, but the fear must be from another life. She had always been scared to open the door. April couldn’t get the thought out of her head that maybe there was a reason the wife never called her back. Maybe she was already dead.

She glanced at Sanchez again. He was waiting for her to go in first. She straightened her shoulders. She didn’t want him to know she was scared.