Loving Time

twenty

At four P.M. on the second day of the Raymond Cowles case all the phones were ringing at once. Some of the second tour was hanging around chewing the fat, ignoring the tinkling bells. The third tour was half in, half out. Mike Sanchez wandered into the squad room looking queasy.

As he sank into his chair at the desk next to April’s, she leaned across the notes she’d been reviewing and wrinkled her nose to sniff at him.

“What’s the matter?” he demanded.

April closed her eyes, trying to identify the odd odor that clung to his leather jacket and the front of his shirt. It was a familiar scent, but one she had never before associated with him. In her mind’s eye she saw gold and red, coins and ribbons, knew what it was. She opened her eyes. Got it.

Mike was frowning at her. “I smell or something?”

“Just a scientific experiment,” she murmured.

“Oh, yeah?” Now he was sniffing at his armpits. “What?”

“I told you. I was just trying to figure something out.”

“I never tell who I’ve been with. It’s nobody’s business.”

“What are you talking about? You don’t have to tell me. I know where you’ve been, so I know who you’ve been with.”

“Oh, yeah? Where and who?”

“Well, could be one of two places.” She ticked them off. “You’ve either been to a Buddhist funeral or a Catholic church.”

“Uh-huh, and how do you know that?”

“Incense,” she said triumphantly. “And you’re no Buddhist. So that means you went to church with your mother, had a lot to eat, and feel like throwing up now.”

“You knew that,” he protested. “I already told you that.”

She shook her head. “You didn’t.”

“Yes, I told you yesterday. You told me you had a date with that asshole Ding Dong, and I told you I was going to Mass with my mother on account of its being the Mexican Day of the Dead.”

“Shit, Mike, I did not tell you that.” April slammed the flat of her hand on the papers, then looked at it because it stung like a son of a bitch.

“Ha,” he said. “Ha.”

Now he thought he was speaking Chinese. “Wǒ ni hèn,” she spit out.

“Oh, no, you love me. You just don’t know it yet.”

Sergeant Joyce hated it when anyone had a happy moment. Now she stomped over and stood looking from one to the other. “What’s going on?” she demanded, hands on chunky hips.

“The regular doorman’s on at Cowles’s building. I was just going over to question him.”

“Yeah,” Mike said. “And we’re going to have another chat with Mrs. Cowles.”

“Fine, then stop playing and get the fuck out of here. Check when the autopsy’s scheduled and see what they’ve got in the way of prints while you’re at it.”

“I checked on the prints already,” April said, glad to have a bomb to toss at them. “Two sets of prints all over the apartment. Raymond’s and someone else’s.”

“Oh, anything else you’d like to tell us this year, like whose they are?” Joyce shrilled.

“They’re running a computer check.” April’s eyes were innocent. “Maybe we’ll know something tomorrow. Maybe next week.” She shrugged. “You know how it is.”

“What about the plastic bag and the masking tape? Anything on that?” Mike asked.

April shook her head. “Raymond’s prints, only Raymond’s. Looks like it just might be a suicide.”

Joyce raked her fingers through her hair. “Okay, get going.”

Mike got up, the grin still on his face.

Joyce hit him with one of her paranoid stares. “What’s so fucking funny? Want to share the joke?”

“No joke, Sergeant. Just indigestion. You wouldn’t believe what I had for lunch.”

April reached for her bag. She didn’t think they’d believe what she’d had for lunch either.

The sun made a stunning show of an autumn afternoon as they emerged from the precinct. It was warmer today, almost springlike.

“Let’s walk. I could use the exercise,” Mike said.

“Fine.” They turned right and strolled slowly to the corner.

“You have only one day of the dead?” April asked as they waited for the light.

“Nah, there are a ton of obligations. Every family member has a saint’s day. Even when they’re dead you’ve got to remember them all. Aunts, uncles—you name it. Then there’s birthdays. You’ve got to remember those, too, even after they’re dead. Also the day they died. Day of the Dead, that’s kind of like All Saints’ Day.”

The day before yesterday. April turned her face to the warmth. “You have a saint?”

“Saint April.” He laughed. “How’s Dong doing, any better than me?”

The light changed. They crossed the street to the east side, where the sun slanted from the west, warming the sidewalk and obscuring the view into store windows with its glare.

April squinted through the sunlight. “In Chinese, you know, every day is the day of the dead, kind of makes being alive torture. You mess up and every ancestor back to creation curses you.”

“Why?”

“Because the responsibility of doing the right thing keeps going from one generation to the next. They think when you lose the fear of angering the ones who came before, you have no reason to be honorable. You can do anything, like the kids in the gangs, kill anybody.”

Mike was thoughtful. “Isn’t there such a thing as forgiveness?”

“Nope. You mess up, and you have to kill yourself.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. Right now it looks like suicide. You think that’s what happened to Raymond?” They reached Seventy-ninth Street and crossed to Raymond’s corner.

“You believe in all that honor stuff?” Mike shook his head incredulously.

April gave him a hard look. Mike hadn’t divorced his wife after she’d left him years ago. And today he’d gone to church with his mother to pray for relatives he’d never met and eaten the Day of the Dead foods she’d been cooking for him all week, enough of them to make him sick. “A lot of people do. What about you?”

“I never think about it,” he said.

The regular afternoon doorman was nut-colored, middle-aged, scrawny. His cap of black hair had white patches all around the edges. He shot them an inquiring look as he opened the door for them. April pulled her ID out of her shoulder bag.

“Are you Tomás Torres?”

He dipped his head.

“Detective Woo.” She pointed at Mike. “Sergeant Sanchez.”

Torres dipped his head again.

“We’re here about Raymond Cowles. He died on Sunday night. You hear about that?”

Torres let his head bob some more.

“You remember anything about him?”

“Like what?” The voice was soft and wary.

Ah, he could speak. “Like his habits, who came to visit him, things like that.”

Torres glanced at Sanchez. “Por lo visto está una mariposa,” he told Mike.

Sanchez smiled at April. She frowned. He looked like a butterfly?

“You want to say that in English for the lady?” Mike said.

The doorman turned to April. “He was a very exactly man, kept to himself.”

Not an exact translation. “Visitors?” she asked.

“One visitor.”

“Only one?” That narrowed things down.

“Yeah, name was Tom, like mine. That’s why I remember.”

April’s brow cleared. Oh, a butterfly. Raymond Cowles was a butterfly. That clarified things.

“Know this Tom’s last name?” Mike asked.

With a little smile, Torres shook his head. “He only had the one name. Tom’s coming up. That was his name.”

Mike asked for a description. Torres gave them one. Tall, dark, handsome in an effeminate kind of way. The two guys looked like two peas in a pod, almost like brothers.

“Maybe Tom was Raymond’s brother,” April said as they headed back to the police lot to pick up a unit.

“Sure, and maybe they came out of the closet together. Maybe Tom didn’t like the result and whacked Raymond for messing with him.”

April shook her head. “Only Ray’s prints were on the plastic bag.”

“So maybe the other guy wiped his off.”

“Then they’d all be gone. Anyway, this doesn’t have the look of a gay killing. Sounds like Tom seduced Raymond and Raymond couldn’t handle it. How about that?”

Mike shrugged and went in for the car keys.

Next stop, Raymond’s wife.

Lorna Cowles lived on East Seventy-fourth Street in a smallish building not unlike the one to which her husband had moved when he’d left her. The second coincidence was that she also lived in 5E. This doorman, a rotund person with a German accent and powerful B.O., said he’d just come on and didn’t know if she was there or not He rang up on the intercom to find out.

“Mrs. Cowles.” The doorman kept his eyes on April as he spoke into the intercom. “There’s a foreign lady here to see you.”

“Detective Woo,” April prompted.

The doorman shook his head at her. “She says she already has a maid,” he told April.

April flushed. This was the first time she’d been taken for a maid. “Woo, tell her it’s Detective Woo.”

“Foo,” he said into the receiver.

April took it out of his hand. “Mrs. Cowles. It’s Detective April Woo from the police, remember we talked with you yesterday? Sergeant Sanchez and I want to talk with you for a moment.… Thank you.”

April scowled all the way up in the elevator. At the end of the hall, Lorna waited for them by her open door, a tiny, snow-white Maltese in her arms. The dog reminded April of Dim Sum when she first saw her. The poodle puppy had been so beautiful, she had lured two young women to their deaths. She sneaked a look at Sanchez. His mustache twitched at her. She wondered if they’d ever feel quite the same about dog lovers.

Lorna studied them anxiously. “Did you find something out?” she demanded.

“Nice dog,” Mike said. “May we come in?”

Lorna led the way to her living room. It was in the back, its windows facing a garden where a number of trees had grown so tall their leafless branches reached past the fifth floor.

As a cop, April wasn’t supposed to feel anything, either pleasure or pain, so she tried to calm down, to listen to her instincts. The woman was a jerk, but her husband most likely had left her for another man, and now he was dead. Looking around, she was startled to see a style of decor she’d never encountered before. The room to which Lorna Cowles had led them was painted deep orange and had an unusual array of plants in it. A bamboo tree spread out from the corner and rose so high it brushed the ceiling. Around it were potted ferns and spiky bromeliads. African violets in deep purple, lavender, and white sat on tiered trays filled with wet pebbles. Pink begonias layered a baker’s rack. A humidifier whirred mist into the air around a camellia bush bursting with sweet white flowers. It was hard to imagine a man living there.

The furniture consisted of undulating wicker chairs and love seats that looked as if they had come from colonial Vietnam or Egypt or India a century ago. An elephant’s foot served as a footstool. April checked the corners for snakes.

“Nice place,” Mike remarked.

Today Lorna Cowles was wearing a tweed skirt, gray with flecks of pink in it. Her blouse was pink silk. The pearls around her neck were the size of mothballs. She stroked her dog.

“I didn’t want it to look like a New York apartment,” she answered distractedly, making a motion for them to sit.

Well, she had nothing to worry about on that score. April regarded the low seat of the nearest wicker chair, then decided to remain standing. Mike made the same choice. They stood there in a tight circle facing one another as if about to play ring-around-the-rosy.

“What have you found out? When can I bury him?”

Mike raised his chin a fraction. This one was for April, his gesture told her. She took a breath and decided they had all better sit after all. She slid into one of the chairs, her bottom finally coming to a stop a few inches from the floor.

“Mrs. Cowles,” she began, “how well did you know your husband?”

“What? What do you mean?” she demanded.

“Well, you had some marital problems. What were those problems about?”

“We had a wonderful marriage,” Lorna said stiffly. “We loved all the same things.”

“You don’t have children?”

“No, we didn’t want children. We had each other. Why are you asking me these questions?”

“Marriage problems usually center around certain issues: money, sex, religion, jealousy.” April said it as gently as she could.

“We didn’t have any of that,” Lorna said flatly, pressing her lips into the soft fur on her dog’s head.

“Good. We need to rule some things out. So I’m going to ask you what kind of person he was, the kind of friends he had, his habits.”

Lorna settled the fluffy creature on her lap and began stroking it from head to tail. Her fingers were long and thin. She was still wearing a modest diamond solitaire and a gold wedding band. “All right. Money. I have some money of my own. He earned a good salary. We attend St. Stephen’s. Ray was in the choir. Is that what you want to know?”

“Yes.” April opened her notebook and made a note.

“St. Stephen’s—the Episcopalian church around the corner on Lexington?” Mike asked.

Lorna looked at him. “Yes.”

“What about family?” April asked.

“We’re both estranged from our families,” she said softly.

“What about his friends? Did he have any special friends?” Mike this time.

“Friends … you mean women friends?”

“Or male friends. What about male friends? People from church, from the choir.”

“I don’t think he had any. He may have been friendly with some people in the choir. And Father Hartman. He called on us. But close friends …” She shook her head.

“What about work? Any special friends at work?”

“Ray never talked about work.”

Now April. “Your husband moved out. Did he give you a reason?”

“I told the other lady yesterday. Ray was unhappy. It had nothing to do with me. He said he loved me, but he felt something was missing.”

“Did he tell you what?”

“He didn’t know. Look, I’ve been doing all the talking. What’s going on? What have you found out?”

“The postmortem report hasn’t come in yet, so we can’t rule out foul play completely,” April answered. “But our preliminary findings seem to indicate that your husband took his own life.”

Lorna was confused. “But what about the woman who was with him? I saw the food, the wineglasses …”

“The doorman said Raymond had a frequent visitor—a tall, dark-haired man called Tom. Do you know somebody by that name?”

“A man?”

Mike nodded.

“A man?” Lorna looked puzzled. “Tom Hartman?”

“The minister?”

“He’s not tall and he’s not dark.” Still puzzled. “Are you telling me you think Ray was a fag?” She didn’t have to think about it, got it right away.

“Is that possible?”

“No! Ray hated fags, hated them. He thought there was no place for gays in the church. He hated them, I’m telling you.” Lorna’s voice had become shrill with rage.

“Well, thank you for clearing that up, for being so open with us.” Mike struggled to get out of his chair, had to make two attempts. He was quiet all the way back to the station.