Loving Time

twenty-five

Sergeant Joyce grabbed a fistful of hair with one hand as she studied the top piece of paper on the mountain of number-coded forms on her desk. She was wearing a short-sleeved green shirt with plump black hippopotamuses on it similar to the hippos on a tie often worn by the Police Commissioner at important news conferences. She appeared to be pulling the clump of hair out of her head as April arrived at her door.

April cleared her throat to get the Sergeant’s attention. Joyce glanced up, letting go of the yellow bundle, which did not flop down as normal hair would do but continued to stand straight out as if the woman were electrified.

“Got it?” she demanded.

“Yes.” April held out the envelope with the M.E.’s report on the cause of death of Raymond Cowles in it but remained in the doorway. She didn’t exactly trust her supervisor and wished Sanchez would hurry it up in the men’s room so they could do this thing together and get it over with. She edged her arm around so she had a view of her watch without seeming to be anxious about time. Fifteen minutes it took him. What was he doing? The man took longer in the bathroom than she did.

“Useful?” Joyce demanded, eyes on the envelope.

April nodded. Very useful. “I think you’ll be pleased.”

“Come in then and give it over.”

The furrows between Sergeant Joyce’s drawn-on eyebrows eased up on her a little and her small grim mouth curled into something resembling a smile. Clearing the Cowles case in less than a week would be a very good thing. She waved her hand toward the two empty chairs in front of her desk, but April preferred her usual spot by the window. She handed over the manila envelope as she headed across the tiny office to the window, where she checked out the vital signs of the three plants spread across the sill.

Recently Sergeant Joyce had added a new plant to the two dusty ivies. It was a fernlike thing that had started to die almost the minute it arrived. The length of brown on the spiky ends increased every day. April saw that soon it would be as dead as Raymond Cowles. She edged her finger into the dirt, thinking of Lorna Cowles’s lush, moist garden. Lorna sure knew a lot more about plants than men. The dirt in the asparagus fern was dry as a desert and filled with cigarette butts. April withdrew her finger hastily.

Mike slipped in while the Sergeant was reading. He sat in the chair closest to the door, his face thoughtful. Sergeant Joyce got to the relevant parts and started to mutter.

“Perianal scarring, evidence of perianal infection. Looks like he was into it for a while. Broken collarbone, very old, possibly a childhood injury. Hah, his arteries were not in good shape.” Sergeant Joyce had the front clump of hair back in her fist.

“Look at the alcohol and Kaminex levels in his blood,” Mike said.

“Uh-huh. Certainly could be a suicide. He had enough to relax, but probably not enough to pass out before he got the job done.”

“He was HIV negative,” April threw in. Which meant Cowles hadn’t been motivated by the fear of a long and nasty decline followed by a horrible death.

“Yeah.” Sergeant Joyce threw down the report. “No evidence of foul play.” She glared at them. “Doesn’t mean someone didn’t help him out, though. What do you say?”

Mike stroked his mustache, doubtful. “His boyfriend, Tom White, swears Cowles was euphoric when he left Sunday night. Said they were making plans to live together.” He raised a crooked eyebrow. “Come out of the closet.”

“Maybe he couldn’t handle that.” April tapped her foot, eager to get away.

Mike shrugged.

“What about the wife?”

“There’s no evidence she was involved in any way. No witness to say she was ever in his apartment,” April said. “There’s nothing on her.” She went over it again, reviewing Lorna’s behavior in the light of her husband’s homosexuality, wondering as she did so how it must feel to be married to someone who preferred his physical life with a person of his own sex. She thought of the scarring and infection in Cowles’s anus, the stains on the sheets. The second was the giveaway of two men engaged in mutual masturbation. He clearly had done it before. Why end it this time? Shame? Had White been threatening to expose him if he didn’t come out of the closet? Did it matter?

She turned to Sanchez. He was gazing at her with the familiar pirate’s smile that said “I’ve got what you want and I’m waiting to give it to you.” Her stomach lurched and the blood rose to her cheeks. Sometimes Mike’s eyes became liquid smoke. Inside was an evil spirit that distracted her, made her wonder about things like her parents all those years ago in China. How did they choose each other and how did they feel, those two skinny people, modest as monks?

The Chinese were prudish, no doubt about that. They were too busy trying to survive to have much tolerance for the concept of love or romance. Marriage was business. For women, anyway. In old China men got to marry as many women as they could afford, do whatever they wanted to them. And the great reformer Chairman Mao had had no qualms about carrying on the tradition. He had hundreds of girls, liked them young, tired of them quickly, and needed new ones all the time. American Presidents seemed to be like that, too. Nobody bothered about love, and nobody ever died of shame. Why had Raymond Cowles done so in this day and age? And why did she have to be so tough?

Sergeant Joyce had caught her blush and was smirking. She enjoyed watching April squirm. Joyce returned to the question at hand. “So, Raymond dies around ten P.M. What time did the boyfriend leave?”

“He told me he left around nine. He had work to do.”

“So Raymond places a call to his shrink, either to tell her he’s getting married to a guy or to say he’s checking out. Did he speak to her?” Joyce demanded.

Mike and April exchanged glances. They hadn’t told Treadwell that her number was the last one Cowles had dialed. They purposely held back everything but the news he was dead.

“It doesn’t change the case for us, does it?” April asked.

Mike shook his head. “No, Forensics says he definitely prepared the bag by himself. His prints were on the inside and the outside, and there were some partials on the tape. He was really cool when he did it. He knew what he was doing, pleated it up all nice and tight, made it airtight. Then he must have taken the Kaminex. After a while he put the bag on his head, lay down on the bed, and went to sleep.”

Sergeant Joyce pursed her lips. “Anything we might have missed that could come back and bite us on the tail later?”

Mike shook his head again.

Joyce sighed. “Fine, that about ties it up on Cowles, then. Get the report in by tomorrow.”

April waited until Sanchez was out of the room before she pushed herself off the windowsill. Sergeant Joyce bent her head over her mountain of paperwork. April could see the Sergeant had moved on to something else. As far as she was concerned, the Raymond Cowles case was closed.