Loving Time

fifty-six

April didn’t sleep well after the lunch with Mike’s mother and the boyfriend he hadn’t known anything about, and after she saw the place he wanted to rent in Queens. Her insomnia didn’t have anything to do with the food, which had been impressive even to her. The apartment was all right, too. It had a terrace and was higher up than either April or Mike had ever lived. Judy was trying to get Mike a special deal on the rent because the landlord wanted a nice quiet cop in the building.

There were a lot of problems with change. April tossed around, worrying about why she was driven to push so hard for advancement when advancement would only take her away from the Two-O, where at least she knew who her enemies were. She had no idea where she was headed or what would happen to her and Mike if they messed up on the Dickey case. Nothing was exactly crystal-clear in this case except that there were a number of songs playing simultaneously and all they had picked up so far were the tunes of the dead men.

The easy homicides are the boyfriend/girlfriend cases. There’s no mystery there. You can see them coming a mile away. Ten miles away. Was Dickey’s death a boyfriend/girlfriend thing? Or was it a revenge thing by a guy who’d poisoned a patient with an antidepressant, harassed the head of the hospital—who conveniently neglected to tell anybody about it for a full six months—and then spiked a doctor’s scotch bottle with the same drug that made the crazy patient a flier a year ago? It was pure speculation, right down to the spiking of the scotch bottle, because the bottle, if there had ever actually been one, had disappeared. April made a mental note to check the building’s garbage even though it would be some job to find a bottle tossed out a week before.

And what was the story with this guy from the FBI? Daveys seemed pretty hot on Boudreau as the killer. But if Dickey’s death was really connected with the Cowles suicide, then how did Boudreau fit into that scenario? Was he really the perfect suspect?

April rolled around in her single bed worrying about the case, trying not to think about sex with Mike in his apartment with its western exposure and view of the sunset. Clara Treadwell had had an affair with Dickey years ago when he was Clara’s teacher. What if Dickey hadn’t been able to handle Treadwell’s being his boss? What if Dickey’s wife was right and Dickey had wanted to renew the romance and his influence over Clara? Clara had a boyfriend in the Senate. Maybe she had been trying to get rid of Dickey and Dickey had been blackmailing her. That played. Clara could have mixed the alcohol and Elavil, not necessarily to kill Dickey, but to make him act crazy so she could discredit him and force him out.

April was also troubled by Daveys. She’d worked with the feds before, down in Chinatown, and she’d never seen a Feeb working on his own. Generally if you saw one Feeb out there in the open, there were dozens more holed up in a building down the street, watching and listening, waiting for a break while partying—eating and drinking on taxpayers’ money.

Feebs and money was a sore issue with cops. Feebs made a lot more of it than cops, and they had an endless supply of federal money for their expenses. Feebs also had the kinds of labs and computers and technical equipment cops only dreamed of. So where were the rest of the Feebs on this case? What were they up to, and how were they about to ruin April Woo’s chances for good luck and a long life?

“Ni,” Skinny Dragon Mother screamed up the stairs just as the sky was graying with dawn. “Ni, you not in hamony. That is the probrem. Not in hamony.”

April did not love it when her mother called her “you,” especially when she was miserable and trying to sleep. She dragged herself out of bed and found a note on her door. The note read, in Chinese:

In order to contract,

It is necessary first to expand.

In order to weaken,

It is necessary first to strengthen.

In order to destroy,

It is necessary first to promote.

In order to grasp,

It is necessary first to give.

It was a description of the transformation process—or what to do when things are out of harmony. A person had to be advised which one of the above things to do when something was out of whack. According to Chinese traditional thinking, the world and all its parts were in a delicate balance of Yin and Yang. Yin the dark—the passive, the brooding female—and Yang the bright—the positive, the active male.

When Yin and Yang were in balance, a person was in good health and good relationship with others, in an excellent position for long life and other good things like job security and status. When Yin and Yang were not in balance, the body became sick in ten thousand ways and relationships with others were bad. Work became impossible, and all kinds of things went wrong.

According to the same ancient Chinese philosophy, bad luck, illness, a rotten character (whatever was wrong) was never a person’s actual fault. The fault was disharmony. If one was lucky and received the correct cure, harmony could be reestablished by one of the transformations described in the note on the door. Yin and Yang could be restored to their rightful balance and happiness achieved.

“Ni,” Skinny Dragon continued screaming up the stairs. It was clear from the piercing tone of her voice that she had not slept a wink the whole night, either. Her voice was so violent, not even the dog was visible when April opened her door, found the note, and peered down the stairs, yawning.

“Yeah, Ma, what?”

This morning Skinny Dragon Mother was wearing black pajama bottoms and a padded blue peasant jacket to fool the gods into thinking she was poor. Suddenly she started smacking her chest with an open palm and screaming in operatic Chinese that April’s Protective Qi was weak, and this defect was the cause of all her troubles.

“What troubles?”

“You need treatment right away to get in hamony before your jing is so weak it’s too late for anything.”

“Jing? What’s that?” April demanded.

“Neva mind what is. Clock ticking, losing more every day.”

April yawned, bleary-eyed. If a clock was ticking, it had to be hormones. Jade Treatment was not for hormones. Any idiot knew that.

“Velly bad news. Come here,” Sai screamed.

April padded down the stairs to her mother’s kitchen, the official place of bad news. There Skinny Dragon told her that the Chinese newspaper had reported New York City was blanketed with a great fog of impure air so disease-ridden that no one outside or in a public place was safe from the dangerous colds and fevers all around. April was outside and in public places every day, Skinny Dragon said, scowling at her daughter. April breathed the impure air of rapists, thieves, and murderers. So April was in special danger.

April thought of Sergeant Joyce and knew this was true. The rest of yesterday’s disaster she deduced from her mother’s tirade about fat Foo Chang. Apparently the word had spread all the way to New Jersey (where Woo parents were visiting the Chang family) that April’s monkey business with Spanish had spoiled her chances with George Dong and now no one worth marrying would ever have her. Foo Chang told Sai Woo that George Dong’s mother, Mimi, had a cousin whose daughter’s best friend was a Harvard docta. The girl was small size, only four foot ten, and not good-looking. She had curly hair, freckles, and a boxy figure. Also much older than April but … she was successful docta of women at Lenox Hill Hospital on Park Avenue, Manhattan. This small, old women’s doctor, Lauren Cha, and George Dong had played tennis together twice in the big Queens bubble, and now there was rumor of a spring wedding.

Foo then mentioned April’s Spanish boyfriend—everybody knew all about him—and this bitter news prompted Sai to tell the getting-very-fat Foo Chang that Spanish was highest-quality Sergeant, almost a Captain and a personal friend of the Police Commissioner himself. Foo countered by consoling Skinny Dragon with many kinds of food she did not want and by telling her she didn’t have to have the same unhappy, unlucky life as all other parents whose children fell away from golden path never, ever to return.

The only way April could think of to appease her unhappy mother was to swallow the nasty steaming liquid Skinny gave her. It was a suspicious color. April sniffed it anxiously, almost fearful that her mother was angry enough to poison her. This Jade Treatment was unpleasant in the extreme, but Sai promised it would strengthen her Protective Qi.

Protective Qi was the energy of throat and lungs—not the energy of the whole body—only the upper respiratory system. To protect the whole immune system, you went for the Protective Qi, the energy of the throat and lungs. But who knew what it really was? It could be something to weaken her spirit and confound her purpose. It certainly didn’t taste anything like the Jade Treatment she’d given Mike, and taken herself, yesterday to fortify them against Sergeant Joyce’s cold. That Jade Treatment was like a eucalyptus tea, deeply green and spicy, an opener of the chest. Mike said he liked it—even though he hadn’t known what it was for. April was eager to see if he was better today.

Leaving her mother lighting joss sticks for the gods of harmony, April left early for the Two-O.