Stealing Time

CHAPTER 39

A

pril slumped on the backseat of the blue-and-white taking them back to the 5th. Oh God, she was going to puke. Never in her life had she puked on the job. Hadn't even seen a dead body or anything, and she was going to puke. The backseat of the car was moving in a different direction from the front seat, was tilting off the edge of the world. God. She could feel it coming.

"Stop," she said suddenly.

Alfie turned around. "What's the matter?"

"Stop the car, for God's sake."

"Stop, you heard the sergeant," Alfie shot out.

The car stopped on Grand. April opened the door and crawled out. The sidewalk came up to meet her as she lowered herself onto the curb. "I can't do this in front of the lieutenant," she mumbled to herself. Can't do it. Can't heave in public, can't wimp out in the middle of a case. I can't.

"Hey, hey. You all right? Want me to call a doctor, huh? An ambulance?"

April concentrated on the water in her mouth.

"Talk to me, April. You don't open your mouth this minute, you're coming out of here on a stretcher. Got it?" Bernardino let her know who was boss. These men. Bullies, all of them. She swallowed.

"Sorry, sir. I have to make a phone call. Get him to pull up a little, will you?"

Alfie gave her a look she'd never forget. "Are you pregnant, sweetheart? Is that what this is all about?"

"Get outta here." April tried a joke, but nausea struck before she could say anything else. She managed to make it to her feet and lean over the back end of the cruiser just as her stomach turned inside out, emptying itself on the street. She had nothing to cover her face or cover her head or kill herself with except one of her own guns. The god of humiliation and losing face was working overtime. Mercy would be to let her die.

Luckily Alfie had seen a lot worse, and he had the manners to turn his back. He got back in the car whistling a little tune, pretending nothing was going on, thinking she was pregnant. April surveyed the shoppers looking for bargains on the Lower East Side. She was glad she wasn't in uniform, because that would have caused a street fair. When she was finished making an ass of herself, she scrabbled around in her shoulder bag for a moist towelette she'd picked up in a restaurant about two years ago. She finally found it and tore it open with her teeth. It was still moist. She mopped her face and hands, took a deep breath. Felt better and got back in the car.

"Everything all right now?" Alfie asked.

"Yeah, just had to make a quick call."

"Uh-huh."

They resumed the trip. No one said a word. April breathed in and out, trying to be Zen about this, clutching her cell phone as if it were a lifeline. When the car stopped, Alfie got out of the front seat and opened the back door for her. Another first. Behind gluey eyes, April tried to regain her tattered dignity. She took a second to count accessories. Shoulder bag? On her shoulder. Gun? One at her waist, one in the bag. Scarf? Hanging askew around her neck. Moist towelette, still in her hand. She used it to dab at her forehead. Cell phone? Still in her pocket. She was not about to call her mother to find out what was going to happen to her next.

Inside the precinct, it took a second for her eyes to adjust. In that second a handsome Chinese in uniform came out of the commander's office. It took April a moment to figure out that this was Chew, the commander she'd been wanting to meet for a year. She was confused. He looked too young to be an inspector.

Alfie introduced them.

"It's a privilege to meet you, sir," April said, bowing in spite of herself.

"The privilege is all mine." One whiff of her, though, and Inspector Chew took a step back. He said a few things behind his hand to Lieutenant Bernardino, then retreated to his office and closed the door.

April put her hand to her head, trying to brush away the devil. Oh, God, she was truly being punished.

Upstairs in the squad room, the gray-haired woman she knew as Annie Lee sat in the visitor's chair by her old desk. The woman was about the size and age of April's mother but the opposite in all other ways. Skinny Dragon was fieshless and dry, about as nourishing as last year's cornhusk. Her dyed black hair was crimped and curled. Annie Lee, on the other hand, was plump, soft, and damp-looking. Her thick gray hair was blunt-cut, in a bowl shape. She was dressed in black pants and a gray padded jacket. Underneath the jacket, begging to be seen, was a shirt of shiny material printed in a riot of colors. The outfit, face, and expression told April a lot. The woman was shrewd, greedy, and a sweet eater. She did not appear either frightened or nervous as she talked earnestly in Chinese to Madison Young. Like a good Chinese son or grandson, Detective Young was busy taking her seriously, nodding and writing down everything she said. When April came in, the self-proclaimed witness turned her head toward the door and saw her. Suddenly her mouth closed.

"How about your office?" April asked Alfie when she saw the reaction of the Chinese grandmother to the female Chinese detective she'd met before. "Mind if I sit at your desk?"

"Go ahead, just don't touch anything," Alfie said.

"There's nothing the matter with me. I'll be fine."

"Don't touch anyway."

Insulted, April marched into the glass office and sat at Alfie's desk. On another occasion this might have given her pleasure. Now it did not. Between her puking and fainting spells, she'd been wondering whether interrogating Annie Lee in the precinct was the right way to handle this. There was always a variety of ways to go. Sometimes it worked really well to take a frightened person out of the bosom of his family with all the neighbors watching, parade him down the street to a blue-and-white parked a hundred yards away so everyone had an excellent opportunity to see him. Then they'd parade him through the station house, let him visit the holding cell in the squad room and wait there for a while behind bars to think about what might happen if he never got out.

This didn't work with everyone. Sometimes the sight of the bars, the front desk, and so many officers in uniform made people angry and resistant. Sometimes just the experience of arriving at the precinct in a cruiser, before a detective even said a word, set them off. The nearness of the officers suggested the threat of a beating (which was strictly forbidden but happened sometimes anyway) and was enough to provoke resistance.

With every person there was always a choice to make: Be tough or be nice. The god of messing up made sure the cops didn't always make the right choice. Take Anton Popescu. A number of detectives had "spoken" with him. They'd investigated and sur-veilled him, canvassed his building, done a background check on his life, right from his date of birth. They knew he'd flunked his bar examination the first time he took it. They knew his wife "fell down a lot." They knew what his partners thought of him. But they hadn't gone far enough. Numbers of detectives were still wandering around in the fog of mystery. The result was that Anton had never gotten a proper taste of the enforcement side of the law. He hadn't taken the cops seriously enough. Error on their part. So many errors. April motioned Madison Young to bring the old woman to her. He did so with a great show of deference. This made the old woman's face wary and appeased April only slightly.

Annie Lee moved her dense body into the glass room and sat down in front of the lieutenant's desk. Her face was empty, so April knew she'd decided to go with stubborn. Suddenly the woman made some sniffing noises as if something smelled bad. April knew the bad smell was her. She ignored it. She plunked a black tape recorder on the desk between them, punched the button, and started speaking in Chinese. She gave her name, the date, the time of day, the location, and who was in the room with her. Then, with a sense of amusement at the annoyance this would cause the lieutenant, she conducted her interview with Annie Lee in Chinese.

"Would you state your name and your address for the record," April asked.

Annie stared resentfully at the black box, then looked around for Madison Young. He wasn't available to offer the support she craved.

"Didn't someone take your statement at the scene last night?" April asked her.

"Not with one of these. Why do we need this?"

"It's for your protection. So no one can ever claim you said something you didn't say." April gave her a fish-eye stare.

The woman stared back.

"I'm Sergeant April Woo." April took out her notebook and turned to a clean page.

"I Annie Lee," the grandmother conceded and gave her address.

"Where are you employed, Annie?"

Annie Lee let her face reveal how much she did not like a much younger woman (especially a ranking one) calling her by her first name. "Work at Golden Bobbin. You know that already."

"We need to hear it in words. How long have you worked there?"

"Twenty years."

"Twenty years. That's a long time. What are your duties?"

"I'm a supervisor." Annie sat up a little straighter as she said this.

April didn't look up from her note-taking. "How long have you been a supervisor?"

"What does this have to do with the accident?"

April's stomach started to churn again. "I don't know yet. Are you in some kind of hurry?"

April was counting the silent communications. Now she got silence number 14:

You are inconveniencing me by taking up my important time, but I will accept it without complaint.

"How long have you been a supervisor?"

"Twelve years."

"And the eight years before that?"

"I worked on a sewing machine."

"What are your duties as a supervisor?"

"I'm charge of time clock. I open up. I count number of garments of each girl. I watch the girls. I watch the door."

"You watch the door. What do you watch the door for?"

Silence number 3:

You already know the answer to that question.

"You have to answer me in words, Annie. Why do you have to watch the door?"

"So nobody disturb."

"Nobody disturb what?"

"Busy place. Bosses no like trouble."

"Nobody like trouble, Annie. But you have some. You told me you're a boss yourself, a supervisor. So you must know all the girls very well. Tell me about the dead girl."

Annie shook her head. "Don't know."

"Well, I have a copy of the statement you made earlier to an officer on the scene that a woman jumped out of a window in the place where you are, by your own description, the supervisor. You are the one who called 911, and this call was made at ten p.m. Let's get a few things straight here. What were you doing at the Golden Bobbin at ten p.m.?"

"Just passing by."

"You were passing by at ten o'clock? You said you live on One hundred and tenth Street. That's thirty-five minutes away by subway."

"I saw someone jump from window," Annie said stubbornly.

April let the notebook drop to the desk. She looked up at the ceiling as if trying to figure this out. "You were passing by where?"

"Passing by Allen."

"Annie, the girl was found in the alley. You could not have seen her jump."

"No see her jump from street, from building."

"I thought you were passing by." "Yes, passing by. Then I went inside."

"How did you get inside?"

"The door was open. The light was on. I boss, so I worried."

"Annie, you've been working there for a long time. You have a lot of responsibility. You know all the girls who work there, you know what they get paid and what their stories are. You take care of things and watch the door. Do you like your boss? Is he good to you?"

Face impassive, Annie nodded.

"Is he so good to you that you're willing to go to prison for the rest of your life?"

"Not my fault. Stupid girl jumped. I see her jump, that's all."

"Annie, I'm going to tell you a little about how the law works. The law says if you kill someone, you go to jail."

"Not my fault."

"The law also says if someone else kills someone and you happen to be there and you tell lies about what happened, you go to jail for helping a murderer."

"No murder, accident," Annie insisted, clearly shocked. "I citizen," she added. That meant to her no trouble could come her way. She didn't care what the law said.

"Congratulations, but you can still go to jail if you break the law. Tell me the story of the dead girl. What's her name?"

"She very sick."

"In what way was she sick?" April asked angrily.

"Sick in head. Sick here." Annie banged her chest. "She like to stay there at night. Quiet."

"Oh, come on, Annie, that isn't going to work. What was a sick woman doing at the factory at night, and how did she happen to get her head beaten in?"

Annie looked startled for the second time.

"You weren't even there, were you?"

Annie opened her mouth to say something, then closed it.

"The girl was already dead when she went out the window. She was thrown out the window after someone beat her to death." April said this matter-of-factly. But her heart was racing, and she was furious.

"How do you know?" Annie asked.

"We know these things. We have the report from the doctors who examined her. She had head injuries that could not have been caused by a fall. You are the supervisor of this girl. Did you hit her and throw her out the window?"

Annie hung her head. "She was crazy girl. Sometimes you get a crazy girl."

"Did you hit the girl, Annie? I'm asking you a question."

No answer.

"I guess you have to be pretty crazy to jump out a window after you're already dead. But you didn't answer my question. Did you beat her and hit her on the head?"

"Not my fault if a girl is crazy."

"It's your fault if she dies in your factory."

"Not my fault. Talk to boss."

"Annie, I was just going to tell you that we

will

be talking to your boss. And your boss will not be talking to you again. So the next time you and I talk, you will not have him to tell you what to say. If you killed this girl, you will go to jail. If he killed this girl, he will go to jail."

Annie got a bright idea. "Someone else kill," she said.

"Okay, I'll bite. Who else?"

"Someone opened the door; that's why I went inside. I saw the door open. That's what I told them the first time." "What were you doing downtown at ten o'clock?"

"I was visiting a friend."

"What's the name of the friend?"

Annie thought about it but didn't come up with a name.

"Annie, where's the baby?"

Annie had been confused but defiant. Now a shadow of anxiety crossed her round face.

"We know about the baby. We know Heather Rose Popescu gave the baby back to his mother. We know the baby was last seen in front of this building, and we know the dead girl was his mother. We don't know who the baby's father is, who beat her up, or where the baby is right now. But we'll find out. We always do."

Annie got another bright idea. "I don't know."

"What do you watch the door for, Annie?"

No answer.

"Where's the baby?"

"No baby. I don't know."

"As supervisor of this worker, you must know all about it. You're clearly not the father, but you could have taken the baby and done anything with it. You could have beaten and killed this poor girl. You could have thrown her body out the factory window, then called the police with a silly story."

"I do nothing wrong, only what my boss say," Annie repeated stubbornly.

"A judge might not feel the same way. That's enough. I have many people to talk to right now. But I need to know where that baby is today. And if I don't find out today, we're going to keep you here until you tell us. And you won't be a supervisor of anybody ever again."

"Don't know about baby. Talk to boss."

"I will, but I need the girl's address. You must know that."

"Yes."

Annie wrote it down for her. April got up from the desk quickly and ran to the bathroom to puke again. This time it was not her mother's medicine but the horror of the case and all the lying that had made her sick.