by Leslie Glass
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.
fifty-seven
When April walked in at seven-forty-five, it was still dead in the squad room. The only person already busy at his desk was Mike, turning the pages of his notebook. Maybe he couldn’t sleep, either.
“Yo, querida, how was your day off?” he asked without looking up.
“A real bummer. Pasé el día en blanco,” she grumbled.
“You didn’t do a single thing? ¡Qué lástima! You must be hanging with the wrong people.”
“Must be. ¿Qué pasa, chico?”
He smiled. Now he was chico. “What’s happening is our new best friend wants a meeting this afternoon. He says he wants to give us a present. All we have to do is pick it up and it’s ours.”
April dumped her shoulder bag on her desk. She sank into her chair. “The last time I heard a Feeb ask a cop to make a pick-up, it was an unauthorized search-and-seize they didn’t want to take the heat for if we got caught.”
“Oh, yeah? You do it?”
April looked him over for signs of fever. Today Mike was wearing a red shirt and a black tie, his first foray into color. Must want to attract a bull. She smiled. “You’re looking better today, Mike. That Jade Treatment must have worked.”
He made a face. “You mean that nasty green stuff you made me drink? What was it supposed to do, shrivel my balls?”
“A girl does what she can.”
Mike leaned back in his chair, stroking his mustache and wearing his pirate’s smile. “Well, it didn’t work. You’ll have to try again.… ” He stared at her until she blinked. “So did you go in for the Feebs? Do the search-and-seize?”
She laughed. Laughing didn’t feel too bad. “Not me. I don’t take falls.”
He changed the subject. “Well, we have to do a little homework here. Let’s make a plan.”
April nodded. They decided who would do what and where they’d meet to discuss their findings before meeting with Special Agent Daveys for lunch at the Lantern Coffee Shop. By nine-thirty April was back in the Psychiatric Centre. Gunn Tram hadn’t told her the truth the last time they’d talked. April thought it was about time for another little chat.
Gunn Tram, however, wasn’t in her office. She’d called in sick that Monday. The young African-American slumped at the desk in the outer office said Gunn had a bad cold and sounded terrible. April asked the woman if she knew an employee by the name of Boudreau.
“Uh-uh.” The nameplate on her desk read Malika Satay. Malika had a spectacular head of braids that dusted off her shoulders as she shook her head emphatically with every statement. “Nobody by that name working here.”
“How about a little over a year ago, in the summer?”
“Wouldn’t know about that. I started last year at Christmastime.” Malika clicked the gold beads at the ends of her extensions with her long gold-painted fingernails.
“Would you check for me?” April asked.
“Huh?”
“Would you look in your files and see if you can find a Boudreau in there—B-O-U-D-R-E-A-U.”
“You with the cops? I seen you in here yesterday with that other guy.”
April leaned against Malika’s desk. April hadn’t been there yesterday. Neither had Gunn; neither had Malika. “What other guy?”
“I don’t know. Some other guy. Hung around all day bugging Gunn.”
“You mean Friday.”
“Whatever.” Malika figured she’d done enough talking and shut her mouth.
“Whatever isn’t good enough.”
“I don’t remember what day. One day last week.”
“Okay, why don’t we check the files?”
The woman got up sullenly. “Is that what he wanted?”
“The guy? What did he say he wanted?” April followed Malika’s heavy steps to an interior space lined with banks of files.
“Uh-uh. He had a gun on his ankle. Made Gunn real upset.”
“I can see how it would. What did this guy with the gun say he was looking for?”
“He just say Gunn knew what he wanted, and he’d stick with her till she tole him.”
“Did you see this guy around here today?”
The secretary swung her heavy braids around, shooting April a look she couldn’t read. “What’s it to you?”
“You like Gunn? Is she a good person to work for?”
Malika turned back to the cabinet, pulled out one of the B drawers, shuffled through the files around B-O-O. “Yeah, she’s all right.”
“Then help her out, okay?”
“She in trouble? I knew she in trouble.” The woman slammed the drawer shut. “I tole you, there’s nobody with that name in here.”
“It’s B-O-U,” April said patiently. “Try it again.”
“Huh?”
“B-O-U-D-R-E-A-U.”
“I done that.”
“You’ve checked before?”
“Yeah, when that guy was here.” Malika headed back to her desk.
“The file wasn’t there then?”
“Uh-uh.”
April turned back to the cabinet, wanted to see for herself. She shuffled through the B’s, found a file upside-down in the B-u section, and felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck. She pulled a pair of disposable rubber gloves from her bag and put them on before touching it. It was Robert Boudreau’s disappeared, now magically reappeared, file. She looked around for a supply cabinet, opened a few drawers until she found a large manila envelope. The file disappeared again into the envelope. April went to see Malika.
She was slumped at her desk again. “Bye,” she said without enthusiasm when April stood in front of her.
“I’m not finished. Did Gunn know which files were gone?”
“She real upset after Dr. Dickey died. Real upset. She say she the only one knew which files was missing. She had to get ’em back right away. All of’ em.”
“Gunn told you she’d made a list of the files Dr. Dickey took?”
“Yeah.”
“Did she tell you where she put it?”
“I tole you—that guy upset her real bad. He say she gonna go to prison. I heard him tell her.”
“The guy with the gun?” April said.
“Uh-uh, the one with the ponytail.”
Oh, now there was a guy with a ponytail as well as a guy with a gun. April’s stomach churned. She could feel the burning acid attack a new clot of anxiety. There was another guy hanging around Gunn. Did Daveys know that? Neither April�
��s voice nor her eyes betrayed the impatience her body was beginning to vibrate.
“Any of these guys have a name?”
“I didn’t hear one.” Malika didn’t even bother to shrug. She didn’t give a shit.
“Can you tell me what they looked like?”
“Uh, one guy looked like a cop.”
Uh-huh. Cops came in all colors, shapes, and sizes. “The one with the gun on his ankle?”
Malika thought it over. It seemed to be a difficult question for her. “Yeah.”
“What did he look like?”
Malika sighed at April’s denseness. “Looked like a cop,” she insisted. “Like Tommy Lee Jones.”
April didn’t know any cops who looked like that. “Okay, and the other one?”
“Looked like a doctor.” Malika nodded.
“The one with the ponytail?” April asked doubtfully.
“Yeah. He was wearing a white coat.”
That didn’t exactly make him a doctor. “Could you see what he was wearing under the white coat?”
Malika looked surprised at the question. “It was buttoned.”
“Yeah, but could you see a dress shirt, a tie, a sports coat, the kind of pants he was wearing? Could he have been an orderly? A male nurse?”
Malika thought about it but stayed silent.
“What about his ID? Did you see that?”
“No.”
“No ID or you didn’t see it?”
“No ID. The cop had no ID, and neither do you.”
Daveys would have a pass like hers. April pulled it out so Malika could see it. “One last question. Have you seen the guy with the ponytail before?”
“Yeah.”
“Many times before?”
“A few times.”
“When?”
“A while ago. Maybe a month, two months.”
“Was he wearing a white coat the other times you saw him?”
“No.”
“What was he wearing then?”
Malika pursed her lips with annoyance. “Street close.”
“What kind of street clothes?”
“The kinda close you wear on the street. Jacket, sweatshirt, pants.” Malika prolonged her skimpy description because April was jotting down what she said.
“Where did you see this guy with the ponytail, the jacket, the sweatshirt, and the pants?”
“Huh?”
“On the other occasions when you saw him. Where was he?”
“He and Gunn walking on the street. They drinking in a bar.”
“Which one?”
“This is more than one question.”
“You have more than one answer to give me, Malika. What bar?”
“French Quarter.”
April nodded. She knew where it was. “This guy, was he white, black, Hispanic, tall, short? Fat, thin?”
“He beige, and he big.”
Beige, now that was descriptive. “How big? Six foot? Hundred and seventy pounds, eighty pounds? Two hundred pounds?”
“Yeah.”
That was all Malika was prepared to say at the moment. The guy had a ponytail. He was light-skinned with mixed blood of some kind and wore street clothes when he was not wearing a white coat. That did not put him in the doctor class. And he drank in a less-than-upscale bar way west on Ninety-ninth Street. April took Gunn’s phone number and address, then headed to the lab to have the file dusted for prints.
fifty-eight
Gunn lived in a Gothic-style, highly decorated, four-story building with a heavy, curved stone staircase leading to a front door of leaded glass on the second floor. April shuddered when she saw it. The entrance to the apartments on the street level and below was hidden underneath the stairs, directly visible neither from the street nor the upstairs entrance. Arching over the sidewalk, the roof corner on each side restrained two attacking cement dogs with permanently gaping mouths and straining fangs. On the second and third stories three yawning bay windows with pointed vaults over dark stained-glass were faintly lighted from within. The house had a predatory look about it, almost as if it were alive and hungry. April parked her unmarked unit in a fire-hydrant space and hurried up the steps. She didn’t have a lot of time to get this thing with the file sorted out.
Inside the front door, a tiny lobby had been created a long time ago with an inner door that was locked. The intercom system was very old. Gunn lived on the top floor. April pressed the button by her name and almost immediately heard static.
“Gunn,” she said loudly into the intercom, “this is April Woo. Remember we talked on Friday?”
Crackle, crackle was the only response.
“Gunn, I need to talk to you. It’s very important.”
“Well, I’m sick. I can’t talk.”
“Listen, Gunn, this is urgent.”
“Really, I can’t—”
“Gunn, this is a homicide investigation. You don’t have a choice.”
There was a prolonged silence, then a click as the door lock was released. April let the door close behind her and trudged up a flight of creaking stairs that seemed to drag itself down as it turned the corner. Only one of the five bulbs glowed dimly in the ancient ceiling fixture high above. Gunn lived in the back apartment on the fourth floor. Her door cracked open as April rounded the corner at the top of the stairs.
“Hello, Gunn,” April said.
Reluctantly, Gunn opened the door enough for a thin person to enter. April slid through. Gunn scanned the hall before shutting the door.
The apartment consisted of two small, very cluttered rooms with a galley kitchen tucked into one corner of the front room. The bedroom was in the very back of the building. The front and back rooms were separated by two huge, sliding wooden doors that were open most of the way.
“What do you want?” Gunn’s eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, but she did not look sick. She was dressed in shiny black pull-on pants and several layers of tee shirts and sweaters. April could see the flickering light of the TV in the bedroom. She could tell that Gunn had not been lying on her bed watching it. The weepy-eyed little woman smelled as if she had spent the last few days on a diet that did not include any of the four food groups.
“Gunn, you lied to me about Bobbie Boudreau.”
Gunn reeled back, bumping into a floral-upholstered rocking chair with a white lace napkin thing draped over the top, vibrating her head in tiny arcs of palsied denial. “No, I don’t know anybody with that name.”
“Oh, come on, Gunn, sure you know Bobbie. He’s a drinking buddy of yours.”
“Who said so?” Gunn looked surprised, moved away from the rocking chair, and collapsed onto a floral loveseat.
“Gunn, you’ve been seen with him in the neighborhood, in the French Quarter, right around the corner and other places.… ” April paused to let her words sink in. “We know Bobbie lives right here in this building with you. We know everything.”
“What? You can’t.”
“What we don’t know this minute, we can find out by tomorrow.”
“How? How can you find out?”
“By asking questions, Gunn. By asking a lot of people a lot of questions. One way or another we’re going to find out, so you might as well tell me about you and Bobbie right now.” April cautiously moved to the back of the apartment, her hand on the gun in her waistband. “Is he here now?”
“No, I haven’t seen him since you people started hounding him,” Gunn said sullenly.
“Fine, then we can talk.”
“I didn’t tell that other guy and I’m not telling you.” Gunn shook her head. “Bobbie got a bum rap the last time. He has nothing to do with this. You can kill me if you want to.”
“Nobody’s going to kill you.”
“Well … good. Now you can go.”
“Gunn, you know I can’t go.”
“The other guy did.”
“No, the other guy didn’t go away. He told you he’s with the FBI, didn’t he? Well, the FBI doesn’t ever go
away, Gunn. You’re going to have to tell one of us. Him or me.”
“Well, Bobbie had nothing to do with it. You’re just looking for someone to blame.”
“Blame for what?” April asked.
“I know what you’re trying to do. I’m not stupid. You think Bobbie killed Dr. Dickey the way they say he killed that patient last year, but he didn’t have anything to do with either one.”
“How do you know that?”
“How do you know the things you know? I know. Some things you just know, right?”
“Sure. Except it doesn’t work that way in homicide investigations.”
“I know how it works. Something bad happens and somebody has to take the blame. Her job was to blame Bobbie. Your job is to blame Bobbie.” Gunn crossed her arms over her chest, mashing her bread-loaf breasts together. “I’m not going to help you do that.”
“Who’s her? Dr. Treadwell?”
“Yeah.”
“She have it in for Bobbie?”
“How would I know? I’m only in Personnel.”
April checked her watch. It was eleven-thirty. She was due to meet Mike and Daveys at one. This plump little lady was in trouble up to her pale blond eyebrows. April had a feeling Gunn knew every single answer, but she’d have to get all tangled up in lies before she’d start telling the truth. She said, “It’s nice and cozy in here, Gunn. Do you mind if I take my jacket off?”
Gunn shrugged her square shoulders. “Do what you want; you will, anyway.”
“Not necessarily.” April unbuttoned her jacket and the navy blazer under it, revealing the scarf tied around her turtleneck. It was silk, one of the fake Chanels she’d bought on the street in Chinatown. The scarf had big gold chains and buckles on a blue background. Sometimes the chains looked like handcuffs to her. Tension pinched the muscles in her neck and shoulders. She took out her notebook and flipped over pages until she came to a clean one. Somebody had put Boudreau’s file back in the personnel drawer—somebody who wanted it to be there but not readily visible. Now what kind of person would do that?
