Stealing Time

CHAPTER 25

A

t the time of April's meeting in her boss's office, Jason Frank was again sitting by Heather Rose Popescu's bed. Her face was still badly swollen, but despite the early hour, both eyes were open now, and she seemed aware of what was going on around her.

"Hi. I'm sorry to get you up so early," he told her. "I have patients all day. This is the only chance I had to talk to you until this evening."

"You didn't wake me up," Heather said softly.

"How are you doing?"

"The doctor told me I'll live." She swallowed hard.

"Do you remember what happened?"

"I was thinking about it when you came in. I remember the doorbell ringing. I went to open it. That's all. My mother came last night. She told me the police think I killed the baby. She's very angry."

"She and your father have been here all night. I spoke to them a minute ago. They're not angry at you."

"Are you a policeman?"

"No, I'm a doctor. A psychiatrist."

She looked up at the ceiling. "I'm crazy," she said softly. "I must be crazy." The fingers of one hand moved toward the scars on her arm.

"Some kinds of crazy aren't so bad," Jason said smoothly. "The baby is missing. You want to tell me about that?"

"Everybody in the whole world thinks I killed my own baby." She turned her devastated face to him. "My mother told me."

"No one knows where he is, that's all. We have to find him and clear it up," Jason said.

"He's not my baby."

"I know."

"I lied to her and said it was. Now she's mad because she has no grandson. To her it's the same as killing him."

"Where is he?"

Heather ignored the question. "She was so mad at me when I married Anton. How could I tell her the baby wasn't mine?" Her eyes teared.

"Where is he?" Jason asked again.

Heather's head and magnificent hair moved on the pillow, but she didn't answer.

"Did you give him to his mother?"

"Didn't anyone tell you?"

"I don't think your husband knows where he is. Did he beat you up?"

"We couldn't keep him. It's my fault." The tears spilled over and ran down her cheeks.

Jason handed her the tissue box. "What's your fault?"

"I know I'm going to hell, but I'm already in hell."

"Why are you in hell?" Jason asked.

"Don't you know it's a sin to lie?"

"What's the lie?"

"That he was ours." Heather sobbed, wiping her face with tissues too small for the job.

Jason waited for a moment, then dug a little deeper. "Your husband mentioned that you've had some health problems."

She was quiet a long time. "Health problems?" "Yes, he told me you couldn't have a baby and that upset you."

Her eyes filled again. "He said that?"

"Yes."

"He told everybody I couldn't have a baby?"

"No, only me. But isn't that true?"

"How could he say that?"

"Isn't it true?"

"No."

"When you were taken to the hospital your husband told the police the baby was yours. The doctors examined you and knew right away that you hadn't given birth."

She grimaced. "They examined me? He must have been upset." Again, she sought out the scars with her fingertips.

"Did he have a baby with another woman?" Jason asked.

Heather made an angry noise in her throat. "No."

"You know when something like this happens, the police check everything in people's lives."

"I don't have a life. I lost my life a long time ago." Heather's eyes returned to the ceiling.

"You want to tell me about it?"

"I'm dead now, just dead meat."

"Your husband doesn't have a girlfriend, and I don't think you have a doctor."

She blew her nose. "What difference does it make?"

"People with health problems go to the doctor, but my guess is you didn't. The doctors here have been wondering about the bruises and scars on your body—"

"What does he say about that?"

"I'm asking you. Do you hurt yourself, Heather, or does he hurt you?"

Jason's clock was ticking. He had a only a few precious minutes. He was in a hurry and asked the question too soon. Heather broke down on the subject of her injuries. This time she wept uncontrollably and he couldn't calm her down soon enough.

"Just tell me where the baby is, and we'll work on everything else."

"He's with his mother." That's all she would say.

The nurse came in with Heather's meds. Jason had to leave. He called April from the hospital, but she'd already gone out. All morning he screened his calls waiting to hear from her, but she didn't phone.

At noon he left the double doors to his office slightly ajar and waited for his eleven-fifteen appointment, a thirty-seven-year-old advertising copywriter named Alison, to leave. He heard her sigh deeply and knew she was stalling because of his lack of respect for one of her periodic threats to jump off a bridge that afternoon instead of returning to work. Alison had been abused by her parents as a child; her goal now was to elicit sympathy from Jason and avoid the hard work of getting better. She had stopped dead in the middle of the waiting room to consider her options. She might return to knock on his door with a question, a demand that he do something, tears. And then again she might not. She was a big tester; she needed to reassure herself that Jason was paying close attention to her. Because he knew she wasn't really suicidal, he had to set limits for her.

His next patient, a physician named Albert, was dying of AIDS that he'd contracted from someone he'd met in a bar when his lover of a decade left him a year and a half ago. It was a heavy morning for human misery. While Jason waited for Alison to decide whether to go on with her day or torment him a little more, he compared the time on his three newest antique skeleton clocks. He couldn't help tinkering with them between patients, adjusting things here and there, cleaning the parts to see if he could get them in sync with one another. His clocks, and the fact that time marched on regardless of the pain and suffering he witnessed, soothed him.

The tallest one ticked away on his desk, a magnificent steep brass triangle filled with complicated mechanics, a fine example of nineteenth-century man's desire to simultaneously harness, pay tribute to, and display the passing of time. Jason had last reset the clock when he'd come in this morning. Now it was five minutes slower than the others. Another skeleton clock stood on a side table, the third in the center of the bookcase in a position of dominance over a small collection of quite nice carriage clocks. By late afternoon the discrepancy would be increased by another minute or so. He wondered where April Woo was, and why she hadn't called.

A long ninety seconds passed before the door slammed and Jason stopped fussing over the clock. Then the phone rang, but it was Albert calling to say he'd been to the doctor and his T-cell count was way down. He didn't feel up to coming in. He sounded depressed. This meant Jason had a free hour now but would lose it later when he visited the dying patient in his home across town.

Instantly, the phone rang again. "Are you free?" It was Emma calling to ask if he wanted lunch.

"Yes, please." His early-morning visit with Heather had disturbed him deeply. Now he was thrilled at the prospect of an unexpected hour of peace with his wife.

He locked the office, walked the ten paces down the hall to his apartment, and opened the door to the sound of his home collection of clocks, some still chiming noon at seven minutes past the hour. He didn't pause to look at the mail on the table because he was puzzled by the sound of voices in the living room. Stepping through the open French doors, he saw Emma sprawled awkwardly on the sofa. Her eight-months-pregnant belly protruded so far that the knot of her navel showed through her cotton T-shirt. Opposite her, trying not to look at it, were April Woo and the young detective who was her new partner.

"How long have you been here?" he asked, taken aback by the unexpected visitors.

"Just a few minutes. We were hoping to catch you between sessions." April stole another look at Emma's belly, and Emma grinned, clearly pleased at the stunned reaction she was getting from the two cops.

"She's pregnant," April said, clearly shocked. "So that's why she quit the show."

"It was getting kind of hard to convince audiences I'd been a sexually repressed and spurned wife for ten years." Emma laughed, then beamed at her husband, clearly happy at last.

"Thanks for telling me," April grumbled. She was just crabby enough to make Jason wonder if she was a little jealous. Her eyes slid down to her own stomach, so flat the front of her skirt was undisturbed by it even when she was sitting down.

He smiled shyly. Yes, they were having a baby. His and Emma's lives had changed for the better. Heather Popescu's beating and the missing infant had come at a bad time for him. He glanced at Detective Baum, shifting uneasily in the comfortable club chair, and blew air through his nose in sympathy for the male embarrassment at fertility. Then he sat on the sofa next to Emma and took her hand.

"Here we are again," she said, squeezing his hand. "Just when I thought a normal life was possible."

"There's no such thing as normal life." Jason nudged her with his elbow because for April, barging in on people at inconvenient times with a lot of cop questions

was

normal life.

"Oh, I'm not mad," Emma responded, so quickly that Jason got the feeling that the two women, who'd met under the worst possible circumstances, were actually beginning to hit it off.

"Didn't you get my message?" Jason asked April.

"I wanted to talk to you in person. Are you coming home for lunch now that you're going to be a father? It would be a good thing to know." April was clearly proud that she'd found a way around his office and telephone rules by conspiring with his wife.

Jason couldn't help smiling at Emma. "You got me over here for them, didn't you? Sneaky."

"You beat me to the hospital this morning," April said. "By the time I got there the patient was out cold again. I talked to her mother and father, but she wouldn't talk to me. Thank you, Jason. Now I have to rely on you for my updates."

"Look, you asked for my help. You can't have it both ways."

"The nurse said you two had quite a talk. What did she tell you?"

"The baby is alive and with his mother."

April leaned forward. "Where? Who's the mother?"

"Didn't tell me. Heather Rose was very upset about Anton's lies. It's clear he lies, or she lies, or they both lie, about a lot of things."

"Poor woman," Emma murmured. She got up and left the room.

"It was when I asked her about the old injuries that she broke down. I still don't know whether they're self-inflicted. Either way, I can see why the husband would want to cover it up."

"We monitor domestic violence cases now. It's state law. Every time we're called to a domestic dispute we have to make a report on the incident and determine who the primary aggressor is. We have to follow up— a month later, two months later, six months later, depending. We have the computer data on all domestic dispute cases, and we're supposed to keep letting people know we're watching them."

"So you're telling me there are no priors on this couple."

April smiled at his use of the cop term. "Right. No priors. Hospital visits, but no police visits. No

history

of abuse. No follow-ups. That doesn't mean there wasn't abuse."

"What do you think?"

"A woman like Heather Rose might not yell and scream and call the police, or signal the neighbors to call the police if her husband was hurting her. She might think his violent behavior reflected shameful things about her, like she was no good. He said she couldn't have children. She wouldn't want anybody to know her husband thought she was worthless."

"Do you think the husband beat her because she gave the baby back?" Jason asked.

"The broomstick that hit her had her hair and traces of her blood on it—and his fingerprints."

"Could the prints have gotten there on some earlier occasion?"

"What are you, a defense lawyer?" April asked irritably. "Yes, of course they could have. But Popescu doesn't strike us as the kind of guy who'd sweep up the kitchen after dinner."

"What's your plan?"

"We're checking birth certificates of babies born in the last three or four weeks to see what we can come up with. We're also checking out the husband's family. They have a factory in Chinatown."

"What's your thought?"

"In Chinatown people will do some unbelievable things for money," April said slowly. "It's no secret that immigrants pay twenty, thirty thousand dollars to get here, and not on fancy cruise ships. They pay big money to be hidden in the holds of the most disgusting—well, never mind. Whole families pitch in to send a relative here. If they really have a lot to spend they can get forged papers and come on an airline. At the airport this precious and lucky relative—who might be the key to a whole family's future—might be met by a 'friend' of the person who arranged the trip. This 'friend' might kidnap the relative. Then a lot more money is extorted from families desperate to protect their investment and save their loved one. Sometimes the victims get a few of their body parts cut off. Sometimes they're kept in slavery even after they're ransomed, so they never get their money back."

April said all this matter-of-factly, but Jason could tell it was a subject that upset her.

"Greed is one of the seven deadly sins. It's not a uniquely Asian thing," Jason told her. "Kidnapping is common in a lot of countries these days."

"Yeah, but in other places it's the rich who get nailed," April pointed out. "The ones who have the money to pay. These people are the poorest of the poor, and they have no one to help them. They're as afraid of the police as they are of the people exploiting them."

Emma came back into the room with a tray of fancy open-faced sandwiches, a glass of milk, and some cans of Coke. Jason did a double take: the love of his life was serving lunch. Then he got a better look at the two combinations: grilled peppers, eggplant, mozza-rella, and anchovies and blackened chicken, provo-lone, avocado and sprouts. Honey-pepper relish on the side. Very creative. He hoped they wouldn't have the leftovers for dinner.

"So, I'm wondering if someone didn't get the idea of extorting a newborn from some poor woman, then selling it to an uptown couple for a lot of money," April was saying.

"Oh, my God." Emma flinched, almost dropping the tray. Baum jumped up to take it from her. April gave him an approving look as he set it down on the coffee table.

"Honey, you okay?" Jason put his arm around her. "You don't have to listen to this."

"I'm not an invalid. I made lunch; eat up."

Jason glanced at the tray of food without seeing it. April was staring at Emma's protruding navel again. "You sure you're okay? Aren't pregnant women supposed to think only happy thoughts?"

"Eat something. I have to feed people now. I'll get my happy thoughts from that."

Baum raised his eyebrows at his boss.

Could he take a sandwich?

"Take one," Emma insisted. "I need reassurance, really."

"Take one," April told him.

Jason took a sandwich and examined it. He knew he was going to have trouble eating it but didn't want to ask where the top of the roll was or when she'd made it. "Thanks, Emma. This is terrific."

Emma nodded at him proudly.

See, I'm going to be a good mother.

Jason liked very simple food, like tuna fish and chicken salad. As he struggled with the Cajun chicken paired with Italian cheese and soapy avocado, he wondered how wild Emma was going to get in the coming years with her cooking and if she knew that the sudden urge to supply food at regular intervals was part of nesting. But he couldn't complain about the impulse or the result. At thirty-four and forty, they were ready for domesticity. It had taken them both a while to grow up and settle down enough for children. Now they were truly exuberant parents-to-be. The baby they were expecting in just a few weeks had become the focus of their lives, and along with that, apparently, came lunch.

As for the case at hand, Jason had mixed feelings about Anton Popescu and felt terrible for Heather. The truth about their relationship had yet to come out. Depending on which of the clocks all around him he consulted, he had between five and twelve minutes of his free hour left. By the time the first one started chiming, the exotic lunch was over and the two detectives were gone.