Loving Time

by Leslie Glass

  “Oh, Jason, this is something different This is your turf. I’m not feeding you information so you can house-clean before we get the facts.”

  Would he do that? He opened his mouth to protest. The elevator doors slid open. The elevator was full of people.

  “Hey, Jason. Good to see you. I heard you’re—”

  Jason pushed in. “Is this a down? Oh, sorry, getting out.”

  Too late. The doors slid shut.

  forty

  “Anything?” Sergeant Joyce stormed into the empty squad room as Mike Sanchez was on his way out. There was no question she was pissed. A case from when she was in Sex Crimes three years ago had finally come to trial, and the A.D.A. had promised her she’d be up and could testify first thing.

  “What took so long?” Mike asked. It was already after one.

  “Some damn thing with the judge. The opening of the trial kept getting delayed and delayed. Bailiff wouldn’t let me go, and I wasn’t called until eleven-forty-five. What’s new?”

  “Your unnatural at the Psychiatric Centre left a mess in his office.”

  “What kind of mess?” Sergeant Joyce was something of a mess herself. First thing in the morning, in her black suit with the wraparound skirt that just grazed the top of her chubby knees and apple-green blouse, she must have looked pretty put-together for her court appearance. Now the four-leaf clover pin with a tiny green stone in the center, which may or may not have been an emerald, was the only thing about her still on straight. Everything else looked like yesterday’s well-thumbed newspaper. Almost the whole of her blouse had worked its way out of the wrinkled skirt. Her hair was wild, her eyes were watery, and her upturned Irish nose was red and raw. Balled up in her fist was a green handkerchief, which she clapped to her face suddenly but too late to stop the explosion.

  “Achoo!”

  “¡Válgame Dios!” Mike said.

  “Thanks. Both my kids are sick,” she muttered, snuffling angrily as if illness, too, were a purposeful act intended to further complicate her life. “Can you believe that? Both of them at home with flus and fever, and I don’t feel so hot myself.”

  “Too bad,” Mike said. “Have you taken anything?”

  “Nah.” She shrugged it off. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m on my way over to see what’s up with Woo. Seems this guy Dickey took a lot of files over the weekend when they were supposed to be secured, and the hospital wants them back.”

  “Uh-huh. What’s the problem?”

  “April says there’s something wrong.”

  “Yeah, so what’s wrong?”

  “Lot of mess in there, but the doc was known for never working on the weekends. Something was up with him. Also there were no medications of any kind on the scene.”

  “So he swallowed the pills somewhere else. Anybody check on what medications he took? Guy was in his sixties, wasn’t he? Maybe he took his medication, forgot he’d taken it, and took it again.” She edged the side of her thumb into her mouth and started nibbling at it, her red nose leaking. She didn’t want a homicide here.

  Mike looked away. “We’re checking on it.”

  “Aw, shit. Let’s take a look.” She sneezed again. “Anything new on the rapes?”

  “No. Squirrel must be new in the area. No one knows him.”

  “What about the street people?” Joyce sloped reluctantly out into the hall.

  Mike followed her at a distance. Suddenly his throat felt a little scratchy. “Yeah, well, we got a few of the street people say they saw someone who looked kind of like the guy in the sketch hanging around earlier this week. But we have no leads on who he is.”

  “I don’t want any uniforms out there. We have to let him think he got away with it.”

  “No uniforms,” Mike confirmed. A lot of people, but no uniforms. He put his hand over his mouth and coughed, testing. Now he had to get in the car with her. All he needed was a bad cold. The temperature had gone up again. Maybe that was the problem. Hot, cold. Everybody wore the wrong thing, got sick, passed it along.

  In the lot Sergeant Joyce headed for the navy unit she’d used that morning to go to court With her there was never any argument about who drove. She always sat on the passenger side and told whoever was at the wheel how to drive. Mike got in and opened his window all the way. It was only a few blocks to the Psychiatric Centre. Today Joyce clearly didn’t feel well enough to tell him how to get there.

  Instead she sneezed and complained all the way, didn’t like being pressured into a big investigation at the Centre when young girls were getting brutally raped a few blocks away on their college campus, didn’t like the way she felt, didn’t appreciate spending the morning in a closed witness room waiting for a case three years old to come to trial. Then she started all over again. Without exactly saying it, mostly Sergeant Joyce seemed uncomfortable about going into the Psychiatric Centre, where cops had to hand over the bullets in their guns and walk around with the anxious feeling they were buck naked.

  The hospital parking lot was down the hill nearly two blocks away from the Centre. In the interest of time, Mike parked inside the white diagonal lines a few feet from the entrance. And still it was twenty minutes before they found April and Serge on the nineteenth floor. The ritual of finding the head nurse on the third floor, emptying their guns and turning them over to her, did indeed worsen Sergeant Joyce’s mood. She headed for the uniform, drew him aside, and talked to him for a few heated minutes.

  “Yo, querida” Mike smiled at April. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing’s up.” April was cool. “What’s going on? You said in ten minutes two hours ago.”

  Another angry woman. He shrugged. “Unavoidable delay.”

  “Oh, yeah? What kind?”

  He cocked his head toward the uniform, who was suddenly galloping off down the hall toward the elevator bank. Sergeant Joyce turned to them, honking into her handkerchief. “So what am I doing here?” she demanded.

  April closed her mouth and led the way to the late Harold Dickey’s office. She repeated the facts as she knew them while the two Sergeants looked around.

  “Dr. Treadwell told me she locked the office after Dickey died, and no one’s been in here since. No way to know, though.”

  April pointed out the almost empty glass with its greasy coating. They all crouched around the glass studying it.

  “Smells like scotch,” April said. “So where’s the bottle?”

  Joyce turned away to sneeze on a stack of spilled files.

  “¡Válgame Dios!” Mike said automatically. He caught April’s eye, then smiled. Nice, huh? The place had probably been contaminated thirty different ways to Christmas before. Now they had a whole new set of genetic markers and a germ farm. A tiny jerk of April’s chin indicated a slight thaw.

  Joyce finished mopping her face. “Bag it.”

  “You want the place dusted, sealed?” Reluctantly, Mike turned his attention to her.

  Joyce shook her head, rolling her watery eyes. “How many people were in this room when the guy collapsed? What, ten, fifteen?”

  “Probably not that many. Maybe seven,” April said.

  “I got a call on this last night.” Joyce wiped her eyes. “Seems this Dr. Dickey treated a lot of important people in his day. One of the trustees claims Dickey saved his kid’s life when she had a breakdown a few years ago. Three or four seem highly motivated to know what happened to him.”

  Mike’s scrutiny focused on the laptop. He could feel April looking at him.

  “So it’s not going to go away,” she said.

  “That’s right. They want it clean. No mystery,” Joyce said.

  So the Sergeant had known it before they even met in the squad room. Known she was coming here and there was cause to investigate further. Mike chewed on the end of his mustache. Nice of her to tell him.

  “So you want the place gone over.”

  “Yeah. And don’t release the files.”

  Mike pointed at the lapt
op. “You been into that yet?” he asked April.

  She shook her head. “Didn’t want to touch it.”

  Suddenly Joyce fixed her attention on April. “You been here all morning?”

  “Since nine-thirty.”

  “You haven’t interviewed the wife?” the Sergeant demanded accusingly.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Why didn’t you go interview her?”

  “Ah, I was concerned about leaving the scene. I’ve had two requests for the return of the files,” April replied evenly. “The hospital lawyer was down here. He told me we couldn’t have access to them. Said they’ve been patient with us so far. But the files are confidential and have to be returned today. As far as I can tell, nobody’d given them a thought until this morning, when we turned up. There seems to be a lot of anxiety around here.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “The lawyer? Hartley.”

  “Fine, I’ll talk to him.”

  “He may want a higher authority,” April muttered.

  “Oh, yeah? Whose?”

  “I don’t know. The Captain, an A.D.A. I get the feeling different parties here have different agendas.”

  “Fine. I’ll take care of it.” She sneezed again.

  “¡Válgame Dios!” Mike grimaced.

  “All right, already. I heard you the first time,” Joyce barked at Mike. “I take it you’ll be wanting to go, too?”

  To Westchester to interview Dickey’s wife? Mike lifted his palms. Of course he did.

  “Great. Now we got an efficiency problem.” Joyce’s beeper bleated. She sighed. “Where’s the nearest phone?”

  Mike pointed to the one on the dead man’s desk.

  “Not that one.” Idiot.

  “There are some secretarial offices at the end of the hall. I used the phone there earlier,” April said.

  Sergeant Joyce went to find a phone. A few minutes later she returned and said, “You wait for the crime boys. I’m out of here.”

  She paused for a second, then told them the phone call was to tell her that half an hour ago one of their African-American decoys had been pulled off the street by a soft-spoken, well-dressed Caucasian twice her size who wanted extra help with directions to a certain part of a building. They had a suspect in the rape case.

  forty-one

  At three-thirty it was still an unseasonably warm afternoon as Mike and April headed up the Henry Hudson Parkway in Mike’s red Camaro toward the town of Hastings to meet with Harold’s widow, Sally Ann Dickey. April swallowed the last of her coffee and squashed the cup. It seemed a bit too coincidental that two unnatural deaths had occurred while, or very soon after, the victims had talked to Clara Treadwell. Okay, Cowles was a suicide, but what about Dickey?

  April shook her head. Oh, sure, there were thousands of coincidences in police work. In fact, sometimes it seemed as if coincidence was the detective’s only ally. Consider the car-jacked Chinese jewel merchant hit on the head and locked in his own trunk as thieves sped away to keep his diamonds and dispose of his body. He happened not to be dead, however; he had his cellular phone in his pocket, came to, and called the police, who rescued him within the hour.

  According to Sai Woo, this was a perfect example of Confucius alive and well in Chinatown, New York. Clear as day. No coincidence. Even a worm daughter should be able to see it Heaven—which always did and always would rule the universe—made its own connections as the Earth and other planets traveled their course, providing every change necessary for the cycle of life and death.

  “Heaven does not speak, but the four seasons proceed in their course and a hundred living things are produced, yet Heaven does not speak.” This tidbit from the Analects was a scroll on the wall in the roach-ridden Chinatown tenement where April had grown up.

  It meant four million things. One was that Heaven was the perfect being that determined what was coming down at all times. Two was that Heaven in its apparent silence actually never shut up. And three, one could hear what Heaven was not saying if one learned how to listen. Nothing, not one single thing, was random. Nothing happened by chance. April was taught she was put on this Earth to be quiet and listen while her mother interpreted Heaven’s intentions for them both, according to Sai’s own hopes and wishes.

  Fortunately or otherwise, Heaven, like every member of the hospital staff and every member of the NYPD, had its own agenda. Always. April knew if she could only be still and quiet enough, others would reveal themselves to her. The deceitful Sergeant Sanchez always did.

  On the surface April was thinking about what part Dr. Clara Treadwell really played in these two unnaturals. She was thinking of Sex Crimes expert Sergeant Joyce “interviewing” the hapless raper suspect. She was thinking of the possible reassignments of the Sergeant and herself and where the future would take them in the Department. But underneath her totally passive facade, she was fuming over the death of love.

  For two and a half hours, they had hung around in the halls of the Centre organizing their case. April collected the names and fingerprint sources of people known to have been in Dickey’s office for matches in the event others turned up. In addition, her list of people to interview had grown from twenty-five students, secretaries, colleagues, and patients to fifty—with the inclusion of the Centre’s two security guards who had initially responded to the call and the paramedics, doctors, and nurses on call in the emergency room at the time.

  The two Crime Scene Unit partners photographed and sketched the exact locations of all files and papers and furniture; took samples of the dried vomit and other material on the carpet; listed, labeled, and categorized every single feature in the room including the nearly empty glass on Dickey’s desk. Among dozens of other items, they found traces of blood and some white hairs on the corner of the desk; two shirt buttons under the green vinyl couch; several shiny brunette hairs about four inches long; a soiled woman’s handkerchief, as well as the imprint on the carpet by the door of some black substance from the front wheels of the gurney used to take the victim away. The CSU partners had a few witty things to say about working on a site without a corpse but were able to piece together where Dickey had been standing when he fell, how he had fallen, and some of what may have happened after that.

  Still at issue was the hour and a half Mike had spent in the hall negotiating with Ben Hartley and a person to whom April had taken an immediate and violent dislike when first she careened into view teetering on black patent-leather spike heels with her boss striding ahead of her—Hartley’s snotty, fat-assed associate, Maria Elena Carta Blanca.

  “Like the beer,” she’d said, letting the words “Carta Blanca” roll off her fat red lips, as if she personally owned the company and reaped its profits.

  Maria Elena was at the other end of the spectrum from the tall, thin, gray-suited, white-shirted, blue-and-red-striped-tied, uptight, upper-class, white-bread Hospital General Counsel Benjamin Hartley. Whether she had been hired for her legal skills or her ability to communicate with the largest portion of the local community the hospital served was not immediately clear. What was clear was that Maria Elena was the generic rival of April’s high school and police academy days, one of those cliquey, showy, flashy, cheesy girls whose walk was a male reveille—those girls who bounced their bodies around like Ping-Pong balls, talking dirty, acting dirty, eating men for breakfast. Getting all the attention. They were the kind of girls who made a Sergeant Margret Mary Joyce look like a debutante and April Woo like a flat-faced, flat-chested prude.

  Maria Elena was a woman with lots of very curly black hair and an extremely pink suit several sizes too small for her that emphasized her large round butt. Under her suit jacket she wore a white crocheted blouselike thing with holes in it that allowed her flesh to bulge through, and a huge cross on the unavoidable bosom. And, unlike the self-effacing, modest, attentive, perfect person of Taoist teaching, she did not remain silent for a single second. She glommed onto Mike with an avidity that churned the acid in April�
��s flat and empty belly.

  “I’ll be your contact,” she told him, licking her plump, moist lips in anticipation. “I’m Mr. Hartley’s associate.”

  April took that to mean Maria Elena was a lawyer and not his secretary. Then, before any discussions were even begun, Maria Elena whipped out two—count ’em, two—of her personal business cards and wrote her home number on the back in case Mike needed to reach her at night. Mike pocketed one of the cards and ceremoniously offered the other to April, who did not want to take it.

  Then the negotiations began. Hartley told them as spokesman for the hospital, he would have to ask them to limit their investigation to personal interviews, as that would be the least disruptive to the organization and its staff, and to get these personal interviews over as soon as possible. Mike said that was not possible because of the nature of the material found in the deceased’s office and the bearing such materials might have on the case.

  The ensuing bickering centered around whether the police would box the files and the laptop and take them away or whether they would remain exactly where they were with the office sealed. Sergeant Joyce had indicated that impounding the files and laptop was her first choice. Hartley was insistent that Maria Elena be present to document and initial every single document. Further, Hartley’s stance was that while the personnel charts could be reviewed by the police investigators, the patient files were privileged information and therefore could not be examined for any reason by any outsider, death or no death. Beyond that the lawyer was fundamentally and unconditionally opposed to having a single document leave the building. That meant the detectives would be forced to return there many times to examine them.

  After two telephone consultations with some unidentified person at the Two-O and the D.A.’s office, Mike was finally able to strike a deal that made him look extremely reasonable and magnanimous. The files would be impounded where they were, completely confidential for the time being. April knew all it meant was that they were starting at the other end of the string. It was when Mike gave his card to the big-chested Spanish beer bottle with the cross on her chest that April became seriously annoyed.