Judging Time

12

What you doing?" Sai Woo screamed at her daughter.

April stopped so short she almost felt as if she'd been halted by a bullet. What she'd been doing was trying to sneak up the stairs to her part of the house without an encounter with her mother. Mike told her she always worried about the wrong things, like her mother's feelings and not her own. Almost thirty years old, and she was still so worried about what her mother had to say that every little verbal foray felt like the beginning of another battle in a long and bloody war that April could never win. Hearing her mother scream now, April held in a deep sigh.

The snow and sleet had stopped that morning. The temperature had held at around freezing all through the day, but started dropping again in the early evening. The streets were so icy that the mayor had gone on the radio warning people to keep their cars off the streets and particularly to stay out of Manhattan. April had heard his voice give the same command repeatedly on her hazardous trip home in the white Chrysler Le Baron that she sometimes felt she would still be paying for at the turn of the century. The last thing she wanted was the confrontation her mother had clearly been waiting for all day.

"Where you shreep rast night? Where you been aww day?" Sai Woo demanded.

Reluctantly, April turned around and made eye contact with Skinny Dragon Mother whose eyes had narrowed into slits of war.

"At work, where do you think, Ma?"

Long ago Sai Woo told April about the meaning of dragons and April knew her mother was one. Dragons had demon eyes, the ears of a cow, the neck of a snake, the belly of a clam. On its camel head is a lump, a "gas bag" that allows the dragon to fly through the air swooping in from the sky to bring rain and snow and all manner of storms to undeserving human worms, exactly like April. Of its 117 scales, 81 are good-influence scales (yang) and 36 are bad-influence scales (yin). Sai said there were several hundred different kinds of dragons, but they all had the same kind of power and ruthless personality. When one of them swooped down out of a golden cloud, it was anybody's guess whether the good-influence or the bad-influence scales were going to be dominant.

Tonight, as usual, this particular dragon was in disguise as her mother, now beautifully dressed in black peasant pants and a thick silk padded jacket, turquoise, sprigged with cherry blossoms. The dragon lump on her head was hidden under two inches of freeze-dried seaweed that looked like, but was not, in fact, a wig.

April stared at the jacket, wondering where it had come from. "Nice jacket, Ma. Is it new?"

Sai shook her head and the hair didn't move. "Owd," she announced. "Velly owd." She stroked the sleeve, stroked the tiny French poodle that was sitting on her lap. The dog, Dim Sum, did not lift her head at April, though her apricot fuzzball of a tail made a feeble attempt at a wag. "Where you shreep, no rie. I can terr."

"I worked all night," April said, glad that it was true.

"No bereave."

"Well, it's true." And she had worked through the day, too, except for a few minutes at lunchtime when, exhausted, she'd broken her own rule by sacking out on a bunk in the detective dorm. With Mike camped out across the hall in the office marked SPECIAL CASES, and everybody on edge because of the unusual aggressiveness of the press, it had been a strange day.

"What can I tell you, Ma?" April could not break the force field that insisted on contact with the demon eyes of her mother.

And there was no way to avoid it. The house was set up so that April had to come through the front door to get to the stairway leading to her apartment. There was an arch in the wall dividing the hall from the living room. Skinny Dragon Mother was in her command post in the living room, framed by the arch and looking like the photo of the all-powerful nineteenth-century dowager empress she wished she could be in Queens, New York.

Skinny Dragon Mother sat on one of the carved hardwood Chinese chairs that was a copy of the kind noble families had in old China. There were two of these black chairs in the living room, one for her father and one for her mother. They had no cushions on them and were the symbol of the classless society of America to which Ja Fa Woo and Sai Yuan Woo had fled half their lifetime ago. They had come to a place where anybody could become rich, buy a brick house in Astoria, Queens, and sit in a throne with a thousand-dollar French poodle on her lap that no hungry neighbor would ever be able to get his hands on and eat.

Despite the paper label under the seat that said MADE IN TAIWAN, Sai should have been a happy woman. She had almost everything she wanted. She believed that the chair in her living room had once belonged to a great silk merchant with many wives. And this illustrious, best-quality chair that she now called her own had been the seat of power of the first and most important of his wives, which was now her.

The truth was Sai was the descendant of peasants so poor they routinely abandoned their female infants to the elements, or sold young daughters as slaves and concubines to those who could better afford to feed them. This fate had nearly been hers. But instead, she had some other unspeakably terrible experiences before coming to America. These she referred to frequently (without actually revealing what they were) to shame her daughter into some semblance of obedience.

Sai was not the happy woman she could be because her daughter refused to come up in the world in the same proportion she had. Her shame was that April had not turned out to be the kind of daughter a Chinese mother would want. April was a policeman, stayed out all night chasing the worst kind of human scum, occasionally going so far as to wrestle with them in the street. Sometimes she came home smelling of death. The rest of the time she spent with men of questionable character—oh yes, she knew all about corruption in the police department from TV and stories in the Chinese newspaper.

She thought April had no shame and had no honor, for if worm daughter had either, she would quit her terrible job, marry a Chinese doctor, and produce many children for her to brag about and properly discipline. This was a grievance she addressed every day and intended to correct in time. She stroked her baby the dog, frowning at her daughter.

"Boo Hao, ni. You rook bad."

"I'm tired," April admitted, standing in the arch. After her nap, she had gone into the women's locker room and showered when none of the officers was around. She'd felt bad having to do this, but it was better than using the bathroom for the public. She'd changed into the rumpled jacket and pants she kept in her locker for those occasions when close contact with a malodorous corpse clung to her relentlessly, refusing to go away lest she forget to do her duty. Not that changing her jacket and sweater could purge the smell of death from her hair follicles or her sinuses.

Sai's face softened. "You change crows. Notha muda?"

April nodded. Yes, there was another murder; and even though the bodies had been outdoors in winter for a very short period of time and contaminated her not at all, she had changed her clothes. Skinny Dragon was right on both counts.

"Know awleddy," Sai said with satisfaction.

"I'm sorry I didn't call. I didn't have time for anything. It was a bad day."

Sai nodded. "Know awleddy. You boss. Priece no can do nothing. Oney top boss Apra Woo can do."

April smiled in spite of herself. "Thanks, Ma. I appreciate your good opinion."

"No good pinyun. Oney say tooth." Sai spat out the shell from a pumpkin seed into her hand for emphasis, then put it in a dish on the table in front of her. Her mood changed abruptly.

"I velly sad, ni. Rike Elicka velly much. Velly solly brack man kirr. You allest?"

April moved through the arch into her parents' space without actually meaning to. "What are you talking about?"

"Tawking about Elicka Frinree," Sai said angrily, as if April were playing dumb with her on purpose. "Know awleddy you woking Elicka Frinree case. Happen rast night. Leason you no come home. You good girr, ni. You catch kirra."

Baffled, April stared at her mother. "Who's Elicka Frinree?"

"Big sta. Watch elly day."

Oh, now they were talking TV. This happened frequently. Skinny Dragon couldn't keep the lines clear between reality and outer space where the dragons and ghosts lived. April dealt with crazies like her every day. What one had to do was kind of social-work them into silence. Only then would they let you go to bed.

"Someone you watch on TV," April prompted.

"No mo." Sai shook her head angrily.

"You don't watch anymore," April translated. Could she go to bed now?

"Watch TV no watch Elika."

"What show is this, Ma?"

"This TV show. You know."

April did not watch TV. She didn't know.

"You know," Sai hissed. "Don't be douba stupid."

"What did you see on "TV?" April asked, trying to soothe down the hysterical yin scales.

"No see you. How come you boss, not on TV?" she demanded angrily.

"You mean as a spokesman for the police?"

Sai nodded. "You make mistake?"

"I don't make mistakes, Ma."

Sai snorted and spat out another pumpkin shell. April frowned. She hadn't seen a new seed go into her mother's mouth and wondered how the second shell had gotten there.

Sai snorted some more and lapsed into operatic Chinese. "You make many mistakes," she screamed. "You didn't marry Dr. George. He liked you, you could have married doctor. Big waste, now marry doctor himself."

April didn't bother to comment on the likelihood of chubby George Dong marrying plump Dr. Lauren Cha anytime soon. This subject reminded her that she had spent part of last night with a Chinese ADA and liked him quite a bit. She wondered what her mother would have to say about a Chinese lawyer.

"Police say husband killed her because she make monkey business with best friend." In more operatic Chinese Sai changed the subject.

April sucked in her breath. "Who said that?"

"TV say police say."

April let her breath escape. "What show are we talking about?"

"Sarad Day."

April's heart beat furiously. She felt lightheaded with frustration, chewed on her bottom lip to keep from screaming back. Sometimes she actually had the evil thought of drawing her new 9mm on the dragon disguised as her mother and blowing it back to China where it belonged. "You're not talking about the news, are you, Ma?' '

Sai clicked her tongue with disgust, put the dog down on the floor, then stood to her full height. Maybe four ten on a good day. "TV say brack man kirr. What you say?"

April got it at last. "Merrill, her name was Merrill Liberty. Not Ericka Findley. Ericka Findley was a soap opera character, not a real person. Merrill Liberty was the real person, and we don't know who killed her."

"Brack man," she insisted.

"I'm going to bed."

"Spanish kirr girrs same." She was talking about jealousy. Now the dragon was really hitting close to home. "So, what you say now, ni?" Sai screamed.

April sighed wearily and let the fury go, if only for the moment. Another opportunity to slay the dragon passed without incident. Once again her mother won a battle in her own mind. April went back through the arch and headed home at last. "I say you watch too much TV," she called over her shoulder.