Loving Time

forty

“Anything?” Sergeant Joyce stormed into the empty squad room as Mike Sanchez was on his way out. There was no question she was pissed. A case from when she was in Sex Crimes three years ago had finally come to trial, and the A.D.A. had promised her she’d be up and could testify first thing.

“What took so long?” Mike asked. It was already after one.

“Some damn thing with the judge. The opening of the trial kept getting delayed and delayed. Bailiff wouldn’t let me go, and I wasn’t called until eleven-forty-five. What’s new?”

“Your unnatural at the Psychiatric Centre left a mess in his office.”

“What kind of mess?” Sergeant Joyce was something of a mess herself. First thing in the morning, in her black suit with the wraparound skirt that just grazed the top of her chubby knees and apple-green blouse, she must have looked pretty put-together for her court appearance. Now the four-leaf clover pin with a tiny green stone in the center, which may or may not have been an emerald, was the only thing about her still on straight. Everything else looked like yesterday’s well-thumbed newspaper. Almost the whole of her blouse had worked its way out of the wrinkled skirt. Her hair was wild, her eyes were watery, and her upturned Irish nose was red and raw. Balled up in her fist was a green handkerchief, which she clapped to her face suddenly but too late to stop the explosion.

“Achoo!”

“¡Válgame Dios!” Mike said.

“Thanks. Both my kids are sick,” she muttered, snuffling angrily as if illness, too, were a purposeful act intended to further complicate her life. “Can you believe that? Both of them at home with flus and fever, and I don’t feel so hot myself.”

“Too bad,” Mike said. “Have you taken anything?”

“Nah.” She shrugged it off. “Where are you going?”

“I’m on my way over to see what’s up with Woo. Seems this guy Dickey took a lot of files over the weekend when they were supposed to be secured, and the hospital wants them back.”

“Uh-huh. What’s the problem?”

“April says there’s something wrong.”

“Yeah, so what’s wrong?”

“Lot of mess in there, but the doc was known for never working on the weekends. Something was up with him. Also there were no medications of any kind on the scene.”

“So he swallowed the pills somewhere else. Anybody check on what medications he took? Guy was in his sixties, wasn’t he? Maybe he took his medication, forgot he’d taken it, and took it again.” She edged the side of her thumb into her mouth and started nibbling at it, her red nose leaking. She didn’t want a homicide here.

Mike looked away. “We’re checking on it.”

“Aw, shit. Let’s take a look.” She sneezed again. “Anything new on the rapes?”

“No. Squirrel must be new in the area. No one knows him.”

“What about the street people?” Joyce sloped reluctantly out into the hall.

Mike followed her at a distance. Suddenly his throat felt a little scratchy. “Yeah, well, we got a few of the street people say they saw someone who looked kind of like the guy in the sketch hanging around earlier this week. But we have no leads on who he is.”

“I don’t want any uniforms out there. We have to let him think he got away with it.”

“No uniforms,” Mike confirmed. A lot of people, but no uniforms. He put his hand over his mouth and coughed, testing. Now he had to get in the car with her. All he needed was a bad cold. The temperature had gone up again. Maybe that was the problem. Hot, cold. Everybody wore the wrong thing, got sick, passed it along.

In the lot Sergeant Joyce headed for the navy unit she’d used that morning to go to court With her there was never any argument about who drove. She always sat on the passenger side and told whoever was at the wheel how to drive. Mike got in and opened his window all the way. It was only a few blocks to the Psychiatric Centre. Today Joyce clearly didn’t feel well enough to tell him how to get there.

Instead she sneezed and complained all the way, didn’t like being pressured into a big investigation at the Centre when young girls were getting brutally raped a few blocks away on their college campus, didn’t like the way she felt, didn’t appreciate spending the morning in a closed witness room waiting for a case three years old to come to trial. Then she started all over again. Without exactly saying it, mostly Sergeant Joyce seemed uncomfortable about going into the Psychiatric Centre, where cops had to hand over the bullets in their guns and walk around with the anxious feeling they were buck naked.

The hospital parking lot was down the hill nearly two blocks away from the Centre. In the interest of time, Mike parked inside the white diagonal lines a few feet from the entrance. And still it was twenty minutes before they found April and Serge on the nineteenth floor. The ritual of finding the head nurse on the third floor, emptying their guns and turning them over to her, did indeed worsen Sergeant Joyce’s mood. She headed for the uniform, drew him aside, and talked to him for a few heated minutes.

“Yo, querida” Mike smiled at April. “What’s up?”

“Nothing’s up.” April was cool. “What’s going on? You said in ten minutes two hours ago.”

Another angry woman. He shrugged. “Unavoidable delay.”

“Oh, yeah? What kind?”

He cocked his head toward the uniform, who was suddenly galloping off down the hall toward the elevator bank. Sergeant Joyce turned to them, honking into her handkerchief. “So what am I doing here?” she demanded.

April closed her mouth and led the way to the late Harold Dickey’s office. She repeated the facts as she knew them while the two Sergeants looked around.

“Dr. Treadwell told me she locked the office after Dickey died, and no one’s been in here since. No way to know, though.”

April pointed out the almost empty glass with its greasy coating. They all crouched around the glass studying it.

“Smells like scotch,” April said. “So where’s the bottle?”

Joyce turned away to sneeze on a stack of spilled files.

“¡Válgame Dios!” Mike said automatically. He caught April’s eye, then smiled. Nice, huh? The place had probably been contaminated thirty different ways to Christmas before. Now they had a whole new set of genetic markers and a germ farm. A tiny jerk of April’s chin indicated a slight thaw.

Joyce finished mopping her face. “Bag it.”

“You want the place dusted, sealed?” Reluctantly, Mike turned his attention to her.

Joyce shook her head, rolling her watery eyes. “How many people were in this room when the guy collapsed? What, ten, fifteen?”

“Probably not that many. Maybe seven,” April said.

“I got a call on this last night.” Joyce wiped her eyes. “Seems this Dr. Dickey treated a lot of important people in his day. One of the trustees claims Dickey saved his kid’s life when she had a breakdown a few years ago. Three or four seem highly motivated to know what happened to him.”

Mike’s scrutiny focused on the laptop. He could feel April looking at him.

“So it’s not going to go away,” she said.

“That’s right. They want it clean. No mystery,” Joyce said.

So the Sergeant had known it before they even met in the squad room. Known she was coming here and there was cause to investigate further. Mike chewed on the end of his mustache. Nice of her to tell him.

“So you want the place gone over.”

“Yeah. And don’t release the files.”

Mike pointed at the laptop. “You been into that yet?” he asked April.

She shook her head. “Didn’t want to touch it.”

Suddenly Joyce fixed her attention on April. “You been here all morning?”

“Since nine-thirty.”

“You haven’t interviewed the wife?” the Sergeant demanded accusingly.

“No, ma’am.”

“Why didn’t you go interview her?”

“Ah, I was concerned about leaving the scene. I’ve had two requests for the return of the files,” April replied evenly. “The hospital lawyer was down here. He told me we couldn’t have access to them. Said they’ve been patient with us so far. But the files are confidential and have to be returned today. As far as I can tell, nobody’d given them a thought until this morning, when we turned up. There seems to be a lot of anxiety around here.”

“What’s his name?”

“The lawyer? Hartley.”

“Fine, I’ll talk to him.”

“He may want a higher authority,” April muttered.

“Oh, yeah? Whose?”

“I don’t know. The Captain, an A.D.A. I get the feeling different parties here have different agendas.”

“Fine. I’ll take care of it.” She sneezed again.

“¡Válgame Dios!” Mike grimaced.

“All right, already. I heard you the first time,” Joyce barked at Mike. “I take it you’ll be wanting to go, too?”

To Westchester to interview Dickey’s wife? Mike lifted his palms. Of course he did.

“Great. Now we got an efficiency problem.” Joyce’s beeper bleated. She sighed. “Where’s the nearest phone?”

Mike pointed to the one on the dead man’s desk.

“Not that one.” Idiot.

“There are some secretarial offices at the end of the hall. I used the phone there earlier,” April said.

Sergeant Joyce went to find a phone. A few minutes later she returned and said, “You wait for the crime boys. I’m out of here.”

She paused for a second, then told them the phone call was to tell her that half an hour ago one of their African-American decoys had been pulled off the street by a soft-spoken, well-dressed Caucasian twice her size who wanted extra help with directions to a certain part of a building. They had a suspect in the rape case.