Loving Time

thirty-six

“What kind of car is it, Mr …” April’s eyes dropped to the complaint on her desk, but her mind was on the two young women grabbed off the street and raped in empty classrooms at the university on Monday at six P.M. and that morning at ten-thirty.

It was two P.M. on Wednesday, November 10. At three, she had an appointment with Jason Frank, but for the third time this week she didn’t think she’d make it. Today she’d just spent two and a half hours in the emergency room with the second rape victim, an exquisite, espresso-colored, nineteen-year-old student from France. Nicole Amendonde had been raped, sodomized, beaten on the head, and bitten on the breasts and inner thighs.

A professor found the young woman naked and bleeding profusely and called for help. In the hospital, however, the girl refused to talk about what happened. She didn’t want the police involved, didn’t want her parents to know. She was terrified she’d be blamed for the attack and her parents would be angry at her. The hospital called the precinct for a female detective to come to the emergency room to talk to her.

April had encountered this kind of resistance before in Chinatown. She knew how to get Nicole to tell her what happened, and she knew how to persuade the girl to agree to let the ER doctor use the rape kit. Then, as soon as she’d gotten back to the precinct, before she’d even had time to grab a cup of coffee, Sergeant Joyce had sent her this clown.

“Dr. Lobrinsky.” The plump, deeply tanned little man sitting by April’s desk in a single-breasted camel hair coat buttoned all the way up was convulsed with rage. His yellow toupee, no longer straight on his head, had realigned his part so that now it seemed to originate from the top of one ear. Two tightly compressed fat lips busily worked their tension from one cheek to the other.

Absolutely furious at the perfunctory way he was being treated, the fat man thundered out his name in the crowded squad room as if it had the power to bring his case the deep respect he felt it deserved. No one, however, had ever heard the name, and no one turned a head in his direction.

The week had started badly and was getting worse. Sergeant Joyce had heard the rumor that she was about to be promoted to lieutenant after having made the short list nearly a year ago. That was the (maybe) good news. The bad news was the rumormonger either didn’t know or wasn’t telling where the assignment would take her. So the good Sergeant was in a state of partially preoccupied hysteria over her future. One just never knew until it happened what a promotion meant. It could just as easily signal the end of a career as the advancement of one. So far the Sergeant had nibbled away all the skin around both thumbnails and begun chewing on the nails themselves.

It didn’t help that the neighborhood seemed to be having a rash of car thefts and two young women had been viciously raped with the same MO in a three-day period. Sergeant Joyce had once been in Sex Crimes and demanded a game plan on this even before the second case. The second case occurring that morning in a different building put the perp’s cycle of recidivism at three days. Three days for gearing up to this kind of assault was a bad sign. It meant the guy was way out of control and would keep at it until he was stopped. Never mind that the sites he chose were well-peopled or that subconsciously he might want to be caught, the odds of his eluding them were still in his favor. And, of course, at any moment he could always get on a bus or a train and leave town.

In addition, the two victims were black college students and the rapist was white. This added a politically sensitive and potentially explosive element to the case. The Department didn’t want another girl hurt. Already powers in the Department had sent word down from above that there would be no time or expense spared on this one.

No time spared on anything else with the exception of the time April had to waste on this Dr. Marcus Lobrinsky, who happened to be some kind of bigwig doctor from the hospital. It was unfortunate for him that his 1992 Mercedes 500SEL, double-parked in front of Zabar’s at Eightieth and Broadway, was stolen when he went into the gourmet-food store for his weekly supply of smoked fish and caviar. And it had to happen just when the whole precinct was galvanized on a more pressing matter.

So when he bellowed his name, only April was available to nod respectfully. “Dr. Lobrinsky.” As he jabbed a surprisingly slender finger at her, she wondered what kind of doctor he was.

“I want my car back immediately. The car cost me over eighty-five thousand dollars. And that was in ’92,” he said contentiously.

April pretended to study the complaint. The problem she had here was that Dr. whatever-he-did Lobrinsky had absolutely no chance of getting his car back. Not immediately or ever. It just didn’t happen. No one got his car back anymore. Stolen cars weren’t lost sheep that wandered home wagging their tails behind them. Neither were they taken for joy rides and abandoned on some quiet side street in Queens or New Jersey, where they sat waiting for recovery by alert police officers a couple of days later. They weren’t snatched for resale in their present form, either.

Car theft had become very big business, was an organized-crime thing. Cars were taken for the sum of their parts. Twelve hundred dollars each for the airbags, thousands of dollars more for the radio, the tires, the seats, the bumpers, the wheels, the steel frames, the halogen lights, the muffler, the gas tank—every single part had a value and an outlet. And everybody profited—except maybe the people who lost their rides and the insurance companies who had to shell out for new ones. Dr. Lobrinsky’s Mercedes had been gone for only an hour or so, but April had little doubt that it was already stripped to the ground and no longer a car. She sighed.

“I’m going to have to hook you up with Auto Theft,” she told the doctor. “I’ll give you the name of someone to contact down there.”

“Shit,” Lobrinsky exploded. “Down where?”

“I think the office is located at One Police Plaza.”

“Downtown? Why the hell can’t you take care of it up here?”

“Your car is not likely to be in the neighborhood any longer.”

“You mean you can’t take care of it.” The look beamed at April was hateful and contemptuous in the extreme. It said that while the police in general might be stupid and inept, she, April Woo, personally had to be the most stupid and inept member of the whole Department. She’d seen it before.

Usually the next question was “Are you a real cop or what?” In this case, April was sitting at her desk in the detective squad room and there could be no doubt as to her status.

Whatever accusation the angry doctor was going to make next, however, was drowned out by an eruption of noise as two large police officers brought someone in. He was wearing a red baseball hat backward, dirty jeans, and a stained One World sweatshirt with holes in it. The guy was white, medium build, maybe an inch shy of six feet. His greasy brown hair hung below the baseball hat to his shoulders. He was held in an upright position by the two cops, seemed to have some fresh scratches on his pasty face, and his eyes gave the impression that his address was some other planet. Then it got quiet.

April strained to pick up the vibes that would tell her what was going on, but Dr. Lobrinsky, sitting in her metal visitor’s chair with his expensive coat still buttoned over his chest and his hair on all wrong, was fully focused on his own problem. Completely unaware of the drop in air pressure, the doctor came to a decision. His fist hit the desk and he began to scream.

“I don’t have time for this shit! It’s not a hard one. Go out and find the fucking car. That’s what you’re here for. If you can’t even locate a 1992 canary-yellow Mercedes—what the fuck are you good for?” His words hit the crowded room like the roar of an Uzi machine gun.

Sergeant Joyce popped out of her office with the speed of a Jack sprung from its box. Her yellow hair, only an inch longer than the doctor’s, also seemed attached in the wrong place. The crowd of uniforms and detectives moved aside as she advanced toward April’s desk. At the moment there were fewer than the usual number of coffee stains on her blouse, but she was frazzled and harried nonetheless. Her look said, Can’t you see we’re in the middle of something here? Can’t you see we’re busy and don’t have time to take this kind of shit from anybody?

Her face also told April that she was deeply rattled by what had happened to those two girls and had changed her mind about wasting time on nasty, arrogant, disgruntled victims of auto theft. She cocked her head at April. Get into my office.

April excused herself and headed for Joyce’s office. Thirty seconds later Sergeant Joyce stormed in and slammed the door. “I got a call from a path in the M.E.’s office,” she announced, collapsing in her desk chair.

April leaned against the windowsill. What passed for heat in the precinct hadn’t been turned on yet even though it had been a cold month. The air leaching in around the window frame was truly frigid. Already she could feel her fingers beginning to stiffen. Sergeant Joyce shuffled some papers around on her desk importantly.

“I’m not exactly clear on how this one came about,” she muttered, looking for the note she had written to herself. She lifted one shoulder and let it drop as she shifted bits of paper from one untidy pile to another. She couldn’t find the scrap she was looking for. “Tox screening of apparent heart attack DOA comes up with drug overdose. Check it out.”

April frowned. What? With all that was going on right now? She jerked her thumb back toward the squad room. “What about Lobrinsky?” What about the rapist?

“I told him his yellow bird was a pile of scrap by now and it wasn’t productive to talk to people like that.”

“What was his response?”

“He went ballistic and his hair fell off.” Sergeant Joyce’s teeth clicked as she tore a chunk of nail from the top of her thumb. “Then he left.”

Well, that wasn’t surprising. Sergeant Joyce often had that effect April changed the subject. “Who’s the DOA?”

The Sergeant excavated a piece of lined paper covered with her scrawl. “Ah, here it is. Guess who? Dr. Harold Dickey. Age sixty-eight, apparent good health. No sign of heart disease, no embolism or anything like that Unusually high blood levels of—Ami—” She squinted at her writing. “I don’t know what this is, tripty something. The file isn’t complete yet.”

“Harold Dickey?” April frowned. “The shrink in the Cowles case?”

“The very one. Suddenly turns up dead.”

“Dickey told me he didn’t know Cowles, had never spoken to him,” April said. But people lied. Maybe Dickey committed suicide because he had been involved. Would anybody do that in this day and age? She shook her head. Maybe it was a homicide.

“Check it out.”

“Okay. Do you have the name of an officer at the scene I can talk to?” April asked.

“Apparently there wasn’t one.”

“What? Then how did the M.E.’s office get the case?”

“Don’t fucking hock me, Woo. It’s a little hazy, a little unclear, understand? Maybe somebody saw something and said something to somebody. Maybe the attending was nervous about signing the death certificate. How can I fucking know how the M.E. got involved? All I know is they took the case. And now they want to know how the Ami—whatever it is got into the guy.”

April risked one more question. “Did you get the feeling there’s any suspicion of—”

In her frustration, Joyce reached for a clump of hair to pull. “Christ on the Cross, April. It’s just a routine fucking investigation. Could be the guy took the wrong medicine, could be he got too much of the right medicine. Could be an accidental overdose. Could be a suicide. It’s just not a natural.”

April didn’t like having to go to the Psychiatric Centre again so soon. There was something not quite right about those people. The doctors were as creepy as the patients, and now another person was dead. “What about the rapist?” she asked finally.

“We’re getting a profiler from downtown. Mike is talking to the university about warning the girls.” Abruptly, Sergeant Joyce got tired of talking and closed her mouth around the next victim, her left pinky.

April pushed off from the windowsill. So the guy they just put in the pen was not a suspect in the raper case. She opened the office door. Out in the squad room there was a lot of noise and a number of plainclothes she’d never seen before. She stopped at her desk to grab her bag from the bottom drawer. It looked as if a lot of extra people were about to fan out on the streets looking for a squirrel, and she wasn’t going to be one of them.