Hanging Time

33

Between Twentieth Street and Eighty-second Street the traffic was pretty badly jammed up. Labor Day weekend traffic was already assembling for its mass exodus out of the city. Mike turned onto Sixth Avenue in spite of the complication of construction there and got stuck around Twenty-eighth Street.

“So, what was that all about with Ducci?” April asked.

Mike negotiated the car around a bulldozer. “Jesus, last year Central Park West, this year this. What a mess.”

“Umm. So what was the ‘rest in peace’ all about?” she persisted.

“Ah—nothing. Let it go, April.” Mike stopped at the next red light, scowling. The intersection had a big hole in the middle of it, and the green Pontiac Grand Am ahead of them had pulled into the space beside it, blocking all cars trying to cross the other way.

“Will you look at this asshole.” Mike didn’t bother to ask for a turret light to slap on the roof of the unmarked gray car they’d taken. He just hit the hammer. His siren screamed its little “hello-out-there” warning, and miraculously the traffic slowly opened up.

“So, what was Duke doing, huh? Putting down women?” She didn’t let it go.

“No, he was putting up women. So let it go.”

“He sure got to you.”

“Yeah.”

Mike lapsed into silence. She let it be for a whole block.

At the next light she asked, “What woman?”

Mike heaved a great sigh, punctuated by an irritated “humph” at the end. “Jesus, April, not you. My ex-wife. Okay?”

“Oh.” April looked straight ahead, her cheeks flushed. What a jerk. She just forced her way into Sanchez’s private space. She shook her head at herself, wishing she were in China.

Why was it that the cause of death in a badly decomposed, mutilated corpse was the kind of thing that kept her up at night, but she didn’t want to know about the frailties of the still-beating, physically healthy heart of her partner? Yeah, in a funny kind of way Mike was her partner. She looked out the window, hot all over. What was it about this love thing? She could see it, feel it in the air around her. Books and TV were filled with it. Movies showed how it was supposed to happen. But with her the phenomenon was just a ghost that passed her by.

Skinny Dragon Mother said how it happened was you meet someone with a good character and you get married. It was as simple as that. Everything else so what.

Every time April told her it didn’t work that way in America, you had to fall in love first, Sai Woo would produce the shell of a melon seed she’d been harboring somewhere deep in her mouth. Who knew for how long. Maybe for an hour or so, or ever since she left China. She’d spit it out with the word “love” to demonstrate her disgust for it. “Pah. Rove. What’s that? Just riry brooms one day.”

Sai Woo couldn’t even get the words right. She meant love was a lily that blooms only for one day. A day lily, in fact. Years ago she had planted day lilies in her garden to prove the point. April didn’t get it. All her life she worried that the lost l’s in her mother’s English meant she, as Sai’s daughter, could never find the right emotions she needed to be a true American. Couldn’t fall in love and get married because Chinese didn’t believe in it, and couldn’t even say the word.

One thing April had noted about the lilies in her mother’s garden though. It was true each one did bloom only a day so you couldn’t pick them and bring them in the house. But as each flower died, another grew in its place. The lilies proliferated. The roots spread under the ground, and the clumps of lilies had multiplied until they were all over the backyard.

So Mike had some trouble with love and marriage, too, and the last thing she could ever do was ask him about it.

“Well,” he said somewhere in the fifties, “I guess you want to know why I went to Mexico.”

“Uh, no. That’s okay—I mean you can tell me if you want to. I—”

“You know I’m married, right?”

“Ah.”

“You didn’t know?”

“Yeah, I knew that.” So what? What did that have to do with her? Except the shit had been coming on to her for months. So much for the heavy breathing. She blinked, her face impassive.

“Yeah, well, she was young, came to New York from Matamoros. Beautiful. Sweet, you know, not like the girls from here. I, uh, really liked her.”

There it was—Sanchez in love. April bit her lip, blushing again.

“So, we got married. And you can guess what happened, right?” He turned to look at her.

April shook her head. She had no idea what happened.

“Well, she couldn’t stand any of it. The noise, the weather, the rough city life. She missed growing things, the sweet perfumed air of Mexico. Couldn’t really speak English and didn’t want to go to school. She was scared all the time, scared of me—you know, my being a cop.… Everything.

“Maybe I wasn’t much of a husband.” He shrugged. “Anyway, after a while she went back to Mexico. And then my father died.” He shrugged again, staring out at the traffic.

“I’m sorry.” She couldn’t think of anything else to say. “So what about her—”

“Maria? She’s dying of leukemia.” He shook his head. “You know, all these years she refused to get a divorce. I thought it meant she planned to come back someday. But the truth was her priest told her if we were divorced she wouldn’t get to heaven. Isn’t that something?”

“Yeah. It’s something.” Absolutely unbelievable. What kind of woman would leave a man like Sanchez for any reason whatsoever? Without thinking, April put her hand on his arm. Neither said anything the rest of the way back to the precinct.

Thirty minutes later, Gina at the desk in the squad room waved them over.

“Sergeant Joyce wants to see you right away.”

“Thanks.” Mike pointed at his desk. Still littered with the Wrigley’s wrappers, it was uninhabited now. “Gone,” he said, grinning at April. “Who said the odds were ten thousand to one? I think you owe me.”

“Not so fast,” she murmured, pointing to her desk that no longer had the thick Wheeler case file on it.

They headed across the squad room. Aspirante and Healy were out. The flamboyant shoplifter was no longer in the pen. In his place was one of the panhandlers on Broadway who usually launched verbal assaults on passersby, but occasionally chased one with an empty wine cooler bottle. Right now he was singing “Happy Birthday” to himself.

Sergeant Joyce’s door was open. “Yeah, come in,” she said when she saw them. She was sitting at her desk, her blond-streaked hair sticking straight out at the sides as if someone had been pulling at it. Her eyes were pouchy, and her skin was the color of unbaked cookie dough. Her blouse that might have been white when she put it on now looked like coffee had been coughed all over it. Both sleeves were unevenly rolled. Her lips were two thin lines of unhappiness.

April felt sorry for her. Sergeant Joyce was the kind of woman to whom stress was no friend. Everything showed on her: ambition, anger, jealousy, loss of face.

“Where’ve you two been?” Joyce demanded. “I wanted to talk to you.” She looked April up and down, scowling some more.

“At the lab, talking with Duke,” Mike replied. “What’s up?”

“We’ve had a Lieutenant from downtown assigned to the Wheeler case.”

“The guy who was sitting at my desk this morning? Lieutenant Braun?”

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

Mike took a seat. “Nice guy. Neat. Friendly.”

April took her usual seat on the windowsill and stuck her finger in the dirt of one of the ivy plants. The leaves were drooping and the dirt was bone dry.

“How did the Captain take it?”

“Gee, I don’t know, Mike. You weren’t here when it happened and he doesn’t exactly communicate directly with me.” Sergeant Joyce glanced at April. “What’s with you?”

April shook her head. “Nothing. Just thinking about what Duke said, that’s all.”

Sergeant Joyce turned back to Mike. “Captain Higgins called me up and told me.”

“Uh-huh. Did the good Lieutenant bring his own people?” Mike asked with no trace of the resentment Sergeant Joyce was using to electrify the room.

“Unh-unh. Apparently they couldn’t spare anybody else. So you’re going to be working for Braun. He’s got the file. I want you to cooperate with him fully.” Her eyes were doing something funny. April couldn’t tell if their supervisor was having convulsions or giving them a different message.

“Yessir,” Mike said. “Where is he?”

“The Captain put him upstairs, three-o-four.” She smiled grimly. The empty office next to the men’s room had a heady odor no amount of disinfectants seemed to help. It was full of filing cabinets, and used mostly as a storeroom.

“I want you to go up there and introduce yourselves, brief him on what you’ve got so far.” Sergeant Joyce gave Mike a hard look.

This prompted Mike to ask, “Has he done anything yet?”

“Yeah, he pulled surveillance on Block.”

“Well,” Mike assured her, “that was probably all right.” Then he filled her in on the kind of suspect Ducci had told them they were looking for.

“You got to be kidding. He-shes don’t kill. They get killed.”

“So what about the long hairs on her dress?” April asked.

“You know how hairs stick. Shit, they could have been on the dress already.” Sergeant Joyce’s skimpy lips turned up at the corners for the first time since they arrived. She threw her head back and honked out a hearty laugh. “A transvestite boutique killer. With a poodle as the only witness. Ducci is really something. If you’ve got spatters, he’s a spatter man. If you’ve got glass breaks, he’s your glass-break man. Now two red hairs and he tells us to look for a he-she. And I thought I’d heard everything.”

“What if it was a woman with a poodle?” April murmured.

Sergeant Joyce laughed again. “You find that, and I’ll buy you both the best dinner you ever had.”

“Deal,” Mike said. He got up to leave.

April stopped him in the hall. “If that’s what we find, do we have to eat the dinner with her?”

“Cute, real cute.”

They trudged back through the squad room and climbed the stairs to locate the exiled Lieutenant Braun.

“This is some shithole” were the Lieutenant’s first words when they appeared at the door of his assigned “office.” Looking around, they couldn’t disagree.