Burning Time

Raymond Cowles died of love on the evening of his thirty-eighth birthday. It happened on Sunday, October 31, after a long battle for his soul. As with many bitter conflicts, the end was abrupt and unexpected. In the same way as love had come on him unexpectedly and caught him by surprise after a lifetime of loneliness and despair, death crept up on Ray from behind without his even knowing that his release from ecstasy and anguish was at hand.

Since his twenties, Ray had flipped past the passages about love in the books he read. The movie versions of passion and lust seemed stupid and unbelievable to him. Love was supposed to happen to men like him when scantily dressed, big-breasted women flashed the look that said “I’ll do anything. Anything at all.”

Lorna had looked at him with those eyes; other women had, too. Many other women. Sometimes Raymond had even thought he’d seen it in the eyes of Dr. Treadwell. He never got it. Love to him was like a foreign language for which he had all the clues but couldn’t figure out the meaning. And he had learned to live without it as his own personal cross to bear, like a dyslexic who could never really read, or a patient with a terminal illness that wouldn’t go all the way and end his misery for a long, long time.

Until six months ago, Raymond Cowles thought he had all his problems solved. He had made work the focus of his life, tried to find the same satisfactions in his personal life other people experienced in theirs. He wanted to feel what other people felt, and when he couldn’t, he acted as if he did.

Then, six months ago, Ray Cowles finally understood what life was all about. He fell in love. The paradox was that real love, the kind that smacked into one so hard it turned a person all the way around, didn’t always happen as it should. The great passion of Raymond Cowles’s life came too late and was spiritually messy. Even though he was a man experienced at battling demons, Ray’s new demon was the worst he’d encountered.

With Dr. Treadwell’s help he’d conquered all the others. First the demons that told him he was a bad child. Then the ones that told him he was stupid, not up to his studies. The big ones that said he was incompetent at his jobs. And always in the background there were those demons that told him he could never attract a girl, never satisfy a woman. These particular demons continued to torture him after he met Lorna, the endlessly sweet and understanding girl he married.

The killer demon told him he was a failure at everything, even the years of psychoanalysis to which he had resorted half a lifetime ago for a cure. This was the demon that whispered to him in his sleep that his sudden and overwhelming passion at age thirty-seven was beyond disgusting and immoral. Love, for Raymond Cowles, was a fall from grace into the deepest pit of depravity from which abyss he was bound to fall even further into the very fires of Hell.

In the months prior to his death, as Raymond fell deeper from grace into lust and corruption, he wanted nothing more than to surrender at last to the first real feeling of contentment and joy he had ever experienced. But he wanted to fall and be saved with his love absolved. Surely everyone had the right to surrender to passion and be released from the excruciating anguish of sin. He had that right, didn’t he?

But absolution didn’t come, and once again Raymond Cowles’s dreams were full of far-off women—high on cliffs when he was on the ground, or on shore when he was way out at sea. In dream after dream, these women waved their arms at him and told him, “Watch out, watch out.” And each time he awoke in a panic because he didn’t know what to watch out for.

Then on October 31, at the very start of his new life, Raymond’s world collapsed. He felt he had no warning. He was cornered. For a few moments he was alone. And then he wasn’t alone. He was trapped with a person who wanted to kill him.

“Save me, save me.” He tried to scream into the phone, into the hall, into the lobby of the building, out on the noisy street. Save me!

He longed to reach for a life preserver, but there wasn’t one. Where was one? Where was a lifeboat? Where was safety?

Help!

At the end he was mute. He couldn’t cry out for help or make the move to save himself. In his last moments of panic, when Raymond Cowles was too frantic and distraught to make a sound, the very thing he had never been able to watch out for slipped out of the noisy Halloween night of dress-up and reveling on Columbus Avenue and took his breath away.

At midnight on Halloween, two hours after Raymond Cowles died, Bobbie Boudreau slouched into the French Quarter. His mood matched the atmosphere of the seedy bar perfectly. To a Cajun from Louisiana, this was as far from the real French Quarter as a place could get. The old jukebox was a poor stand-in for even the worst live band and there was no compensation for the lack of a weary stripper migrating slowly back and forth across the bar. Charlie McGeoghan liked to tell Bobbie he’d named his dump the French Quarter because he’d heard New Orleans was a wild place, and even the word French sounded pretty wild to Charlie.

The old Mick got ony two things right. It was too dark to see the menu, and newcomers’ drinks were always watered. Bottom line was, Charlie hated anything wild, and his hole was nothing more than an advertisement for missed chances. Which was pretty much how Bobbie himself felt tonight. He didn’t like basic principles like justice, wisdom, and truth getting all fucked up.

Bobbie had been told a long, long time ago that the Lord always evened things out in the end. But sometimes it just didn’t seem that way. The Lord’s mysterious ways were awful slow, too slow for Bobbie Boudreau. Bobbie liked to hum a little tune to the words “The Lord’s too slow for Bobbie Boudreau.” When he got tired of the wait, Bobbie had to step in as the Lord’s agent and speed things up. He was working such a case now. In just a few days the coin would drop in the slot, the wicked would slide down the tubes, and the meek would inherit the earth. He was looking forward to it, banged the door of the bar going in.

“Hey, Bobbie.” Charlie’s skinny wuss of a nephew glanced up from mopping the counter. “How’s the war going?”

Bobbie grabbed a stool. “We lost, frère. Lost on all counts.”

“Well, as they say, time heals all wounds. What can I get you?”

Bobbie shook his head. “No, Mick. It don’t. Fact is, time makes it worse and worse.”

“Oh, come on, Bobbie, don’t start that Mick stuff. You know how my uncle feels about that.”

“Fuck your uncle.”

Brian McGeoghan’s nervous eyes raked the murky, nearly empty room. “Good thing Charlie ain’t here, Bobbie. He told me to throw you out when you get like this. He can’t afford any more insurance.”

Bobbie jerked his head at the vacant bar stools around him, his sullen mouth softening at the happy reminder of those occasional, teensy-weensy scuffles that occurred when he was forced to avenge some asshole provocation. “Throw me out with not one soul here to bother me? That’s a good one. Give me a beer. Just one, I’m working tonight.”

“Okay … One’s fine as long as you don’t make trouble.” Brian McGeoghan smiled suddenly. “Wouldn’t want you drunk in the operating room either, would we?” He pushed a frothy draft across the battered surface.

“Hey, frère, I’d never do anything to hurt a patient,” Bobbie intoned solemnly, Bobbie hadn’t been a surgical nurse since his MASH days in ’Nam a long, long time ago, but Brian didn’t need to know that. “Never.”

The beer tasted like shit. Bobbie drank it down quickly, then had another. Then two assholes came in, sat a few stools down from him at the bar, and began talking softly. One was bigger than Bobbie was, a mean-looking white with fleshy pockmarked cheeks and a drunk’s red-veined nose. The other looked like an Irish mole. Bobbie didn’t feel like breaking any bones tonight, so he paid up and went outside.

At one A.M. the streets were finally quieter. No more parents hustling along clumps of kids in costumes. Not so many dressed-up faggots. A few here and there. Faggots never bothered him. Anyway, Bobbie had things on his mind. He was working a case, wasn’t looking for trouble. He wandered over to Riverside across the stretch of dead grass to the Henry Hudson Parkway. He liked watching the cars speed along next to the Hudson River, the mile-wide slash of black water that separated New York from the rest of the country. In Rivrside Park he would sit on the grass or a bench and tell himself the stories of his life exactly the same way, over and over—all the horrors right up to the day the bastard Harold Dickey and the bitch Clara Treadwell unjustly cut off his balls and destroyed his life after a thirty-year career in nursing. Because of them Bobbie Boudreau was no longer a nurse, not a nurse of any kind. For almost a year he’d been a cleaner, floor polisher, garbage collector, lightbulb changer—not even a plumber, electrical engineer, or handyman. His asshole boss said he had to work his way up for even that kind of work.

When he wandered along the labyrinth of underground passages that connected the six buildings in the huge hospital complex dressed as a janitor—a fat clip of official keys banging against his hip—Bobbie looked as if that seniority was already his. He was both big and broad, still hard enough in his spreading midsection to look disciplined. There was an air of authority in his movements. His face was solid with concentration and purpose. He had the belligerence of someone in charge. Seldom did anyone stop him. When they did, it was usually for directions. Doctors, nurses, administrators, maintenance, even security intent on their own troubles rushed past him every day. Those who took the briefest second to glance his way felt immediately reassured that he was just your average good-guy hospital worker, like they were—honest, trustworthy, caring. A person who would not waste a second before fixing something gone wrong. And he did fix things gone wrong.

He was about to cross the viaduct that formed a bridge over the Ninety-sixth Street entrance to the Henry Hudson Parkway, when a powerful stench of excrement startled him. He was filled with disgust even before the bum shambled from behind a bush. The bum was muttering to himself; his sorry-looking penis still hung out of pants not yet buttoned and zipped.

Bobbie swerved to avoid him, but the bundle of rags figured he’d found a mark and didn’t want to let him go. “Hey, pal,” he called, forgetting to zip his fly as he hurried after Bobbie.

“Fuck off.”

“Hey, pal, that’s no way to talk. You got a dollar? I’m hungry.”

The bum followed Bobbie onto the bridge, whining. “I’m hungry, man. You know what it feels like to be hungry? All I need is a dollar. One dollar. What’s a dollar to a rich man like you?”

The piece of shit was disgusting, had no control. He stank; he defecated in the bushes like a dog. And now the filthy mongrel was following him across the bridge, mocking him. It was a mortal insult.

“I said fuck off.”

The bum grabbed at his arm, whining some more. Bobbie didn’t like to be crowded. A thin stream of traffic, heading north, whipped by behind them on the parkway. The light changed and a car crossed the intersection below.

“Hey, pal, think of Jesus. Would Jesus walk away from a friend in need?”

Bobbie stopped short and drew himself up to his full height. He was six two or six three and weighed two hundred and thirty pounds. The piece of shit was talking to him about Jesus. Bobbie stared.

The guy figured he’d scored. “Yeah, Gimme a dollar. But for the grace of God I could be you, pal.”

He was wrong. Bobbie could never be him. Bobbie was good. Bobbie was clean. He was efficient. He was in control. Bobbie didn’t stop to think any further. He picked up the offense that thought it could be him and tossed it over the railing. His move took two seconds, maybe three. Some deeply soothing sounds followed: a grunt as the asshole was picked up, a scream as he fell, then the thud as he hit the ground. If the bum survived the fall, he didn’t live long. Almost instantly there was a series of crashes as an oncoming car, speeding up to enter the parkway below, struck him, braked abruptly, and was in turn bulldozed by the car behind. Bobbie kept walking. It all felt exactly like the Lord reaching down with His grace and punishing the wicked.

At three A.M., feeling on top of the world—like the right hand of God itself—Bobbie slipped into the Stone Pavilion of the hospital through a service door on an empty loading dock at level B2. After the incident with the bum, he had gone home to change into the gray uniform of a maintenance crew he didn’t work on and to pick up a toolbox that was not part of his job. He hadn’t yet acquired the correct jaket, so he wasn’t wearing one, even though the temperature had dropped way down again. The stolen plastic ID clipped to the stolen shirt identified his own slightly freckled, flat-featured, unsmiling face below slicked-back, gray-flecked curly hair as that of a senior maintenance worker in the Psychiatric Centre where he was no longer allowed to go.

Bobbie liked thinking that if the two bastards who ruined his life knew he was still around, they’d finish him for good. They thought they could kill people and get away with it. Bobbie snorted at the fact that he was too smart for them. They didn’t know he was still around. He hummed his little God ditty. “The Lord’s too slow for Bobbie Boudreau.”

He turned down a branch in the tunnel that began its descent to level B3. He heard the clicking of the relays in the machine room that provided electricity to the nearest bank of elevators. He passed on to the long, long pump room that drove hot water through the pipes and radiators of all twenty floors of the Stone Pavilion and heard the fierce hiss of steam, jetting harmlessly into the air from dozens of safety valves. Then he passed the deep-cold quiet of the morgue at the center of the H in the building’s courtyard, a ridiculously long way from everything.

Abruptly the ground started to rise up to level B2 again. The color of the stripe on the floor changed from yellow to blue, signaling passage into another building, the Psychiatric Centre, the funny farm. Whatever you want to call it, Bobbie Boudreau was coming home to finish the work he’d started.

The detective squad room of the Twentieth Precinct was a long room on the second floor with windows facing the north side of West Eighty-second Street. Nine desks stuck out from the windows, like boat slips. Seven had a telephone and a typewriter, an ancient tilting, rolling chair, and a metal visitor’s chair. So far only two desks had computers. But not everybody knew how to use them anyway, and there weren’t enough printers. Opposite the marina was a holding cell.

The place didn’t look much different from the set of Barney Miller, the TV comedy series about detectives that had made Detective April Woo think when she was a kid that it would be fun to be a cop. The difference between then and now was that a lot more people died and you couldn’t ever count on a happy ending.

Tilted back in her old swivel chair, the phone tucked under her ear, April was thinking about Barney Miller because Monday had hardly begun and already she was having a Barney Miller conversation. She looked up at the ceiling, her small nose wrinkled with exasperation.

“Yes, ma’am,” the police do care that your toilet is clogged, but we can’t come over right now and fix it.”

“Why not?” The demand was nearly a shriek. “You’re right across the street. You can send someone across the street, can’t you?”

“No, ma’am. We can’t send anybody anywhere for a flooding toilet. We’re not plumbers.” April had already explained this several times.

The shrill voice rose. “You mean there isn’t a single person in that whole fucking precinct who knows how to fix a toilet?”

April smelled Sanchez long before he stood over her desk, guffawing and trying to get her attention. The powerful, spicy-fruity sweetness of his unnameable aftershave traveled way ahead of him wherever he went. She had known the moment he entered the little ell at the entrance to the room, where there was a bench for people to sit on while they waited for a detective. It had taken her almost a year to get used to his smell, but a lot of people never did. Occasionally Mike had to punch out some fellow officer who didn’t know him and thought he could get away with calling Mike a spic or a faggot.

“So? Are you sending someone?” the woman screamed in April’s ear.

April had the feeling this call might be a leftover trick-or-treat from Halloween. Cops were always pranking each other. She had a powerful urge to sneeze. But maybe it was Mike’s aftershave. The need to sneeze came from way back behind her nose. It was unpleasant, worse than a tickle. It felt as if the explosive seed of a chili pepper had lodged up there in her sinuses.

Sai Woo, April’s mother, liked to tell the story of April’s birth to explain her daughter’s occupation, which was unlike those of any of her friends’ children. From the start of her life, Sai said, April had been difficult. She said April had resisted coming into the world, so her poor mother had to push her, push her out by force. When she finally emerged from the womb, April’s head was elongated like a squash, and her nose was badly twisted out of shape. She looked as if she smelled a really bad smell. That’s how April became suspicious, the reason she was a cop, Sai explained.

To offset the bad omen of her resistance to life, April had been given the Chinese name Happy Thinking, just in case her head remained the shape of a squash. But even though she had grown up beautiful and smart, she was still disobedient in many ways. Insisted on always seeing things from the worst side, never the best. And refused to get married, have children, be happy.

April held the receiver away from her ear. “No, ma’am, I already told you we can’t assign a police officer to a clogged toilet.”

Unless the toilet happened to be stuffed with body parts that wouldn’t go down the drain. Briefly, April considered asking if that was the case here, then decided against it. Even in New York it didn’t happen that often.

“You have to.” The woman wouldn’t give up. “The man downstairs is a maniac. If the water goes through the ceiling, he’ll come up here and kill me.”

“Sounds like you should call a plumber right away.” The chili seed exploded and she sneezed, shaking her head just like the dog did when it was annoyed.

The sneeze made April think of the dog. She had given it to her mother to divert Sai from her preoccupation with April’s unmarried state. The orphaned poodle puppy came from a case April had had several months before. A famous dog, it had been the only witness in two homicides. April had worried that her mother might not accept any creature that wasn’t Chinese, but after the case was closed, she went through all sorts of paperwork to get it anyway.

Turned out to be worth the trouble. Even though the puppy wasn’t a Shih Tzu or Pekingese, the Chinese dogs of emperors, Sai had liked the poodle and solved her problem by making it Chinese. She gave it the name Dim Sum, which meant Touch the Heart Lightly. And immediately the strong-willed animal and its many needs took over all the attention in the house.

The puppy had to be trained, and to have lots of toys and learn not to teethe on the furniture. Had to have special cooking. When Dim Sum arrived, she had weighed hardly three pounds and didn’t even know how to play. Now she was nearly six pounds of confident apricot-colored poodle that behaved like a tiger. Whenever Dim Sum was annoyed or impatient or angry, she shook her tiny head and sneezed hugely. Sai Woo, who had never had a moment of true enchantment in her life, was enchanted. And forgot about her daughter’s wasted childbearing potential.

April sneezed again.

“God bless,” Mike said.

The woman on the other end of the phone line continued to scream. “Oh, my God, you should see it. I’m not kidding, Niagara Falls.”

April giggled.

“Are you telling me you’ll come only if I’m dead? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“No, ma’am. I’m just telling you we can’t fix your toilet.”

“Bitch!” The woman slammed down the receiver with a crash.

Finally, April glanced over at Mike, now innocently sitting at his desk with his back to her, a file open in front of him. Only a slight tightening of her lips betrayed her suspicion.

She was a classic beauty with a delicate, oval face, expressive almond eyes, rosebud lips, swan neck, and willowy figure. She didn’t look like a cop.

“Buenos días, querida,” Mike said without turning around. “Cómo estas?”

Her lips tightened some more. She didn’t answer.

He swiveled around. “What did I do?” he demanded, palms up.

“That woman just called me a bitch because I wouldn’t come over and fix her broken toilet.”

Mike shook his head. “That’s what’s wrong with this city. Can’t ever get a fucking cop when you need one.”

“Nice.” She gave him a hard look. “Anyone you know pranking me?”

“Querida, please. Who would do such a thing?” He smiled his big, friendly, engaging, seductive smile that was so sexy and so un-Chinese.

“Yeah, yeah. Who would do such a thing?”

Sanchez grinned.

April did not at all feel like grinning back. It really annoyed her how Mike Sanchez projected himself as the sincere, stand-up kind of guy the public could rely on, and everybody bought it. Women went for the Zapata mustache and the powerful aftershave. Juries believed his testimony. In spite of his being a bit on the laid-back and relaxed side, rumor had it he was a comer in the Department.

“Busy night last night?” Mike slapped some files around on his desk and changed the subject.

“You mean because of Halloween?”

April checked her watch. Eight-thirty-three. All crimes and misdemeanors that had occurred the night before were on color- and number-coded forms, waiting for the Detective Squad Supervisor, Sergeant Margaret Mary Joyce, to assign them for investigation.

Major cases brought a million people swarming in. April had heard about the accident involving a homeless male who either jumped or fell off the bridge at the Ninety-sixth Street entrance to the parkway. One car hit the victim, the other rear-ended. It had been a mess to clean up. A twelve-year-old, who hadn’t been wearing a seat belt in the front seat of the second car, slammed into the windshield and was in a coma. Two other people had been hospitalized. The John Doe was in the morgue. April shrugged again. “Guess nobody important died,” she murmured.

The call about Raymond Cowles came in at ten-thirty. Some wife who didn’t appear to have access to her own apartment wanted them to check out her husband. He hadn’t turned up at the insurance company where he worked and was expected at some important meeting. Sergeant Joyce said it sounded like a case for the two of them.