by Leslie Glass
fifty-two
The sound of the radiator in Harold Dickey’s office sounded like a hammer pounding on a lead pipe in an echo chamber. It felt about the same to April as Chinese water torture. She wondered how anyone could think in such a place. The radiator clanked relentlessly all through Saturday as she moved around the office sorting through the scattered personnel files while Mike sat at Dickey’s desk retrieving and printing out what Dickey had labeled “special cases” from the dozens of documents in his laptop computer.
The laptop had been impounded to certify the chain of evidence. The D.A.’s office and the hospital lawyers had ruled that nothing in the computer could be tampered with or changed, nothing removed from it without being initialed by witnesses. That meant Maria Elena Carta Blanca was there with them all day, hanging on Mike’s neck and peering over his shoulder at the screen, clicking her tongue at the sensitivity of the material that she had to initial as it spewed forth from the printer.
April glanced up from her perch on the ugly green couch from time to time to observe Maria Elena’s large breasts grazing at Mike’s shoulder like some hungry animal. By midafternoon April had a bad headache. Most parts of her job she enjoyed, but she was not enjoying today. The files she was searching represented disharmonies of monumental proportions. She was also sickened by Maria Elena’s blatant play for Mike.
The sheets of papers from the files were a hopeless tangle of reports to and from and about social workers, nurses, nurse’s aides, residents, supervisors, attendings, and private physicians. They involved case accidents with outcomes of varying degrees of seriousness and contained some hair-raising stories. Dickey’s notes in the computer revealed his own thoughts about the more egregious cases of staff negligence—and a completely different set of cases involving young doctors.
“Listen to this, querida,” Mike said in a rare moment in the early afternoon when Carta Blanca was out of the room relieving herself and they were alone.
“ ‘Second day of July.’ That was last summer. ‘Resident with one day of experience screens a suicidal person in ER. Suicidal person had a long history of drug and alcohol abuse and numerous visits to ER. Resident wrongly diagnoses situation, discharges patient who walks out of hospital and suicides an hour later.’ ”
Clank, clank, clank from the radiator and not the slightest hint of warmth. April shivered. “What was the outcome for the resident?” she asked.
“Not a thing. Dickey says, ‘Why ruin a young doctor’s whole career?’ ”
“What did they do, alter the chart?”
“Looks that way. Here Dickey says about the suicide, ‘I hate these Goddamn coke addicts fucking up the system.’ I guess they protected the resident.”
“You see anything in there about a resident or a doctor being dismissed?”
Mike gazed at her contemplatively, stroking his mustache seductively. He shook his head. “Not so far. The disciplinary action seems limited to the staff.… And they say we’re a blue wall.”
“You find anything about Boudreau in there?” April was thoughtful, too. Dickey had collected these personnel files because he was concerned about another patient’s death. So far, they hadn’t found the details of the one they were looking for.
April sat cross-legged on the green couch used by patients telling about their dreams and desires—their sex lives. She had read about therapy in psychology courses she’d taken at John Jay. It sounded disgusting. The last file listed off her lap. She held the papers down with one hand.
“Oh, yeah, here it is. Dickey writes, ‘That troublemaker Boudreau has really done it this time.’ Yeah, this is it. Unipolar depressive, sixth floor north, checked in Monday A.M. At four P.M. guy goes manic, walks off the ward in his pajamas to the next floor. That’s the manics-on-lithium floor. Door’s locked, he can’t get in, trots down another floor. It’s an office floor, stairway door is not locked. The patient goes to the end of the hall, where there are French doors and a small terrace. It’s a beautiful day and the doors are open. Apparently smokers go out to that terrace to smoke. Guy walks out on the terrace, jumps off before anyone can stop him, and hits the spikes on the fence around the garden. Guy’s impaled on the spikes. According to Dickey’s notes here, guy came down by the windows of the adolescent outpatient clinic, where a dozen kids saw the body. Boudreau was the one who gave him the overdose that made him manic. Dickey says, ‘Bobbie Boudreau can’t weasel out of this one. No one trusts him. It’s just the last straw.’ Well, there’s more …” His voice trailed off, and he suddenly looked sad.
“What?” she asked.
“Oh, nothing. I may not be at the Two-O for long. I’ll miss this.”
“Oh.” For a few seconds April’s headache had eased. Now it started pounding again.
“But then, neither will you,” he added with a smile.
The son of a bitch. April’s head split in half. “We going somewhere, Sergeant?” she said, struggling for calm.
“Maybe, baby,” he teased.
“You going to tell me where?”
“You want the short-term or the big picture?”
Who had Mike gone to? What had he asked for? How could he make requests on her behalf when she didn’t even know what she wanted? She stared at him, furious. “How do you know these things?”
“After you’ve been around for a while, you get a few friends. Some of them move up.” He shrugged again. “You have some friends, too. You just haven’t discovered it yet.”
April’s cheeks burned. Hijo de puta jumped into her head. She didn’t say it. Mierda. It occurred to her that she knew Spanish.
“Pendejo,” she muttered.
Mike laughed uproariously, almost exploding with mirth.
“What’s so funny?” April put the file down carefully.
“Pendejo, querida? You think I’m a pendejo?”
April lifted a shoulder. “What’s it mean?”
“I’m a pubic hair? I’m a good-for-nothing, a coward, a pubic hair? Is that what you think?” Now the laughter was gone. Mike’s voice rose with anger at his injured honor.
The door to the tiny office swung open. It wasn’t the pushy Latina lawyer. It was the pushy FBI. Special Agent Daveys shoved himself into their space, his humorless face gray as stone. “Hi, kids. What’s up?”
“Just wrapping for the day.” Mike checked his watch.
“Did you find that file on the boy nurse?”
“I told you it wasn’t here,” April said.
“Bastard must have taken it.”
“Yeah,” April muttered. Or someone else had. Gunn had sworn Dickey never mentioned Boudreau. She tapped her fingers on the files. Time to go.
“There’s a neat coffee bar over on Broadway. Let’s go there and make a plan of action,” Daveys said. It was not an invitation.
Mike glanced at April. “We’re still investigating. We’re not ready for action yet.” He pushed a few buttons to shut down the computer.
“All the same, it’s time to powwow.”
“You going to tell us something we don’t know, Daveys?”
“Many things, many things, children. This way to truth and justice.” Turning around, Daveys bumped into Maria Elena, who was charging through the doorway.
“Oops, sorry.” She backed her breasts out of Daveys’s chest with a big smile.
“All yours, sweetheart. You can lock up now.” Daveys swept by without even a peek at what he was missing.
fifty-three
Sunday, November 14, dawned clear and bright. Maria Sanchez awoke deeply worried about what the day would bring. For two Sundays in a row Diego Alambra had walked home from church with her, and she was disturbed because she didn’t know what such a handsome man could want from an old woman like her. She also worried because Señor Diego Alambra was something of a mystery. He had a Spanish name but spoke Italian.
The mysterious Diego had started coming to her church some months before, and she could not help noticing him. He was a hands
ome man with hair still mostly black, like hers. Her hair was pulled straight back into a low roll at the base of her neck. His was swept up in a high curling wave above his forehead and cascaded gracefully down the back of his head to the top of his shirt collar. His mustache lay like a twig between his lips and sloping nose. He had full lips over slightly protruding teeth, a long face out of which deeply serious eyes watched her while she prayed. Sometimes his eyes were sad, sometimes thoughtful; always they seemed intelligent. He moved closer to where she sat in the very front so the priest would always be sure to see that she was there. He moved slowly, pew by pew, as the weeks passed, perhaps drawn to her by the intensity of her prayers.
Diego Alambra began by nodding at her, then bowing. And when he finally spoke, he called her “la bella signora.”
Maria Sanchez was an old woman, nearly fifty-five, and for a long, long time she had been oppressed with a deep sadness that made her feel closer to a hundred. This sudden attention from a handsome man when she had not expected ever to be noticed again made it not seem proper to leave the apartment without a touch of powder on her nose, a touch of color on her round, dusky cheeks.
She was deeply disappointed when Diego finally spoke to her and his words came out Italian. Maria Sanchez did not think highly of the Italian men in the neighborhood, so she ignored him, caressed the plastic beads of her rosary, looking severe, as the organ music swelled and the Mass ended.
“Bella signora, sì, sì” He nodded vigorously and told her his name. “Mi chiamo Diego Alambra, e Lei, cara signora?
What? The name made no sense.
Her lips curved up without her permission. A giggle as old as time rose from the deep well of memory and slipped out. “He, he.” She laughed.
Then came Father Altavoce’s command for the Kiss of Peace and suddenly, without her knowing how it happened, Diego Alambra had taken her hand and was holding it in both of his, gazing into her eyes so deeply it gave her a stomachache.
“Sì, sì. Molto bella.” This Italian who called himself Diego had to be over fifty himself but certainly had a young man’s enthusiasm for the single idea.
It was a small opening, but he bent so low over her hand, the gesture could not fail to be noticed elsewhere in the church. Maria Sanchez’s faded flower of a mouth, unrenewed for many years by lipstick or the hope of ever tasting a man again, smiled in spite of itself.
“Español?” she ventured tremulously.
“E.” He shrugged eloquently.
She had to turn the other way to move toward the exit. She felt a little stunned by the encounter and was glad she did not see him again on the street. Then later, when she was home, she worried that she had somehow done something wrong but wasn’t sure what.
This fear of being wrong was not a new feeling for Maria. For a long time she had been worried about doing things without meaning to and being punished for it. She was deeply fearful that she might have grievously sinned in the past, that she was continuing to sin even now, and the constant accumulation of those unknown sins (for which she could never atone) was the reason for her past suffering, her present suffering, and quite possibly a future of suffering that would never end.
This was the deepest and most tightly held of her concerns. Maria did not know the nature of her sins but believed only sins committed by her could be responsible for her present condition, which was a sadness that went beyond reason. She was familiar with loss. She had lost her mother and father when she was very young, had lost two sons in infancy before she was twenty. Mysteriously, she could not have more children after Mike. She and Marco did not question that. They had their sorrows, but they had a long life together, nearly thirty-four years. She did not believe she deserved more.
It was the loss of life within life that defeated her. Her son who ran around all night, worked in places that worried her. Married a woman who was cursed with so many troubles she couldn’t go out, couldn’t shop or cook, just sat by the window and cried all day until finally one day her brother came and took her away. Inexplicably, Mike’s wife, Maria, had gone back to the pitiful, broken-down house in the border town she had come from.
After that Mike fell even further away from his beliefs. He fell away from her and his father. He went back to his old ways, didn’t call them and didn’t come home. Maria would never forget the night her son came home—how surprised she was to see him, how he took her arm by the front door of the apartment and led her back into the room. “Papi is dead,” he had told her. “He had a heart attack and died at the restaurant.” He took Maria in his arms and held her so tight, she could feel the gun tearing at the armhole of his jacket.
Marco had died while making a crab quesadilla. He had not, as she had always feared, been assaulted on the subway coming home late at night from Manhattan. He had not been run over by a cab or a bus or a truck. All his life Marco had been a quiet man, so quiet Maria had often felt alone when she was with him. But when he was gone, it felt as if he’d taken her spirit with him. She did not understand how such a thingcould happen. They had not talked together very much through all those years. But with Marco she had never felt constricted. Living with her son, she was tied in many knots.
This Sunday morning it had become cold again. Mike was still asleep in his room. The powder was on her nose. Rouge tinted her cheeks. Maria was ready to go to church. As she sipped her thick sweet coffee early in the morning, she studied the frosted dead grass on the playing fields in Van Cortlandt Park and worried about Diego Alambra. What if he walked with her a third time, would politeness require her to ask him in? What would she do about her son? What did she want?
She licked up the last and most syrupy drop, then washed the cup and looked around. The kitchen was perfectly neat. There was coffee in the pot for her son. As she closed the door of the apartment, her guilty wish was that Mike would wake up and go someplace far away. Her prayer was answered. As soon as he heard the door close, Mike threw the covers off, shivered, and headed for the shower.
fifty-four
At nine A.M. Mike Sanchez met Judy Chen in her family’s deserted real estate offices in Astoria, Queens.
“Where’s April?” she asked when he arrived alone.
“Oh, she had things to do.”
Judy handed over the list of apartments she had to show him. She was a smaller woman than April, with a flat chest, wide hips, and curly hair. She looked him over appraisingly as he studied the listings at her desk in the window of Chen Realty, which never opened until noon on Sundays.
He looked at the last column first, frowning over what seemed to be very high rents.
“What’s the story with you two?” Judy asked.
He didn’t answer, had moved on to WBF, EIK, RIV VU, UTL INC, and thirty other abbreviations that weren’t familiar to him.
“You wear that gun even off-duty?”
“Yeah.” His eyes were focused on the information on the sheet. It didn’t exactly tell him the things he wanted to know, like which one of these places April would like. He was a detective, but he didn’t know what April liked, only knew she had class. Her Chrysler Le Baron was classy. Her clothes. So was the way she moved around, elegant, not flashy. He wanted a place where a classy woman would feel comfortable.
“You always wear it?”
“The gun? Yeah, I do.”
“April doesn’t wear hers.” Judy leaned over, breathing in Mike’s strong, sweet scent.
“Yeah, she does.”
“You sure?”
Mike looked up, finally distracted. “Yeah, I’m sure.”
“So what’s the story with you two?”
He gathered some of the ends of his mustache into his mouth and sucked on them without being aware of it, then shook his head as if he weren’t sure himself. It used to be that he just reached out for whatever female attracted him at the moment and didn’t think about it too much. He might even have reached out to flat-chested Judy Chen if the mood hit him just right.
He never saw
any reason to get personal. They wanted it. He wanted it. The idea was to satisfy the urges without getting attached or diseased. He’d always been careful about both those things. Then he got personal with Maria and they got married. Look what that led to.
After that eight-year disaster for which Mike felt deeply hurt and responsible, he developed into a first-rate detective and lost interest in the opposite sex. In his free time he hung out in bars, drinking and smoking and suppressing a profound rage. Then a year or so ago nature kicked in again. He got back to liking the easy-smiling, earthy ones with the big chichis who spread their legs without asking a lot of questions.
He got interested in April Woo only because she was sitting there beside him every day, not looking in his direction, not interested at all. It pissed him off and injured his healing ego. She just kept her head down and did her work, wouldn’t let any man near her. He was intrigued, was impressed when she thought of things he hadn’t thought of. When the other guys teased her, he started stepping in.
April Woo had sneaked up on him. He’d never met a female who said she didn’t play around and meant it for more than a week—two weeks max. April had him pendiente for months. She meant what she said. She didn’t fool around, wasn’t going to sleep with someone she worked with. It was sad.
“What’d she say about the two of us?” Mike said finally.
Judy had a round eager face, a lot of powdered shadow around her eyes. Her curly bangs grazed the penciled-in eyebrows. She smiled slyly. “She said not to mess with you.”
Mike sat back with a pleased laugh. “Oh, yeah? You likely to do that?”
“Of course not. I don’t date my clients.” Judy sulked a bit, pulling on her curly hair. The gesture made him think that’s just what Judy did. Mike guessed she was older than April, over thirty and getting anxious.
He pointed to the listings. “What do you think I should look at?”
“Well, what are your priorities? What are you really looking for?” She gazed so deeply into his eyes, he had to look away or laugh in her face.
