by Leslie Glass
Jason arranged his mouth for another, “What’s not to like?” kind of answer. So, she had to get him out there to show him how gorgeous it was. How the sun shone down on her and her red convertible, bathing her in golden serenity and the well-being of the truly self-sufficient, while he rotted unhappily by himself, locked in with the crazies of New York.
Her eyes were almost pleading. What did she want from him? Forgiveness? His blessing? He looked away, already worrying about having to sleep up there in the loft.
“It’s great. Really terrific. I’m just—flabbergasted at how great it all is.” Seeing how great it all was had given him a headache. He needed a drink, too.
She nodded, picking it all up right away. “Must be strange, huh? Want to go out for a drink?”
“Yeah.” The frown behind his smile eased just a little for the first time. He wouldn’t turn down something to eat either.
She was looking him over. His blazer and khaki pants were wrinkled. He hadn’t changed his style, probably never would. “You look very thin,” she concluded. “Better eat something, too.”
“Yes.” Everything about their relationship was different, yet the feeling of togetherness was still there. He didn’t know what to think. To take his mind off the subject, he glanced over at the telephone. Emma followed his gaze, a little frown beginning to organize itself between her eyes.
He turned away from the phone. “Let’s go, sweetheart.”
For once in his life he decided not to call in for his messages.
36
At five past twelve on the Sunday afternoon before Labor Day, April slid into a seat at a tiny back table at the Dim Sum Tea House. Next to her a chubby young woman with badly permed hair cooled a spoonful of noodles in her mouth, then fed the half-chewed mess to her baby. April looked away as the baby spit it out.
George Dong shook his head and resolutely studied his menu. “Delightful. What do you feel like?”
April smiled politely. Like going right home. Right away she didn’t like him. She didn’t care if he was a doctor. He had to be a fool, taking her to the kind of place where mothers make baby food in their mouth, then expecting her to choose something from the menu when it was a dim sum place. It was a no-win situation, like a trick question she couldn’t possibly get right. She glanced at the menu. It was a long one.
“I don’t know yet.” She decided the polite thing was to consider the menu. She’d been a cop long enough to know Dr. Dong was solemnly studying her as if she, too, were an item on the list.
She was wearing blue trousers, as usual, with a white blouse and red jacket. She had wanted to wear her white vest and jacket, very chic; but Skinny Dragon Mother, who came upstairs uninvited to give her advice before she left, said white was bad luck, the color of death.
“Led good ruck cuwa, wedding cuwa for blides.” Sai Woo absolutely insisted on red.
There was no point in telling her blides wore white in America. It was a good ruck color here. Sai would only have argued that bad Chinese spirits can go anywhere, don’t respect borders.
A surly waitress with a protruding gold tooth unceremoniously dumped a pot of tea on the table. April poured some in the two tiny cups. In her cup one lone tealeaf drifted gently to the bottom. She hadn’t waited long enough for it to steep. Probably meant she’d blown her whole life.
A few seconds later the same surly waitress stopped beside their table with a rolling metal thing that looked like a hospital supply cart. The top-shelf offering was bamboo steamers filled with some unidentifiable gelatinous mass.
George waved her away. He turned out to be the second kind of Chinese body type—five seven, maybe five eight, his physique undefined and on the pudgy side. His lightweight navy warm-up suit with red stripes down the arms and legs didn’t help. April guessed he wanted to look sporty and athletic, not overdressed for the occasion. His round face was studded with wholly unremarkable features, small mouth, small nose, deeply set serious eyes that didn’t want to make contact with hers. April was unimpressed and couldn’t get her mother out of her mind.
“Be nice,” Sai Woo had warned. “Tomolla, I don’t wanna hear you stick up.”
“I’m not stuck up.”
“Everybody say you stick up.”
Yeah, well. Chinese didn’t trust the police. Even one of their own. April spotted another cart heading toward them through the crush. She watched the steamed buns filled with barbecued pork that were her favorite disappear along the way. Suddenly she felt old and remembered her mother’s other warning: Smart girl loses innocence but not hope. Stupid girl loses everything.
Nowadays when April went to Chinatown, she saw it with a more critical eye. When she had lived and worked there, she never thought about the garbage that shopowners threw on the street. It was nothing to see fish guts floating in fetid puddles in the gutters along with crumpled newspapers, rotten fruit and vegetables, rags. Roaches and rats ran around like honored guests. Now the place looked like a slum to her. Why couldn’t they clean it up? What was it with Chinese and garbage?
The cart got to them. No roasted pork buns were left.
April shook her head at the ancient fried wontons that remained. This was some place for a first date. The noise level was deafening. There were too many people in a very small space, and dozens more blocking the sidewalk outside. Along with frying smells, the air was charged with the powerful odor of old garlic from what felt like ten thousand eager Chinese mouths, all shouting and eating a mile a minute. This dim sum parlor on Doyers Street, a tiny cul-de-sac off Mott, was packed all day every Sunday. Chinese from all over the tri-state area came into town for their weekly food pilgrimage, brought the family, and ate all day long, pausing long enough only to buy more food to take home in their overburdened American station wagons.
“You wanted that?” George asked, looking her in the eye for the first time.
April shrugged. “When she comes back.”
George stopped the waitress and spoke rapidly in Chinese, telling her to bring a cart of the best dim sum, not the stuff that had been sitting there in the kitchen, waiting all morning for the noon rush. “Hurry up, and don’t stop on the way—” He turned to April. “How about a beer?”
At her nod he added, “And bring us two Tsing Tao.”
That done, he picked up his chopsticks and fiddled with them. “So, your mother knew my mother in China. Know anything about that?”
“Might have known each other, but they didn’t come from the same place,” April replied. “We never met.”
“They call each other sister-cousins,” he pointed out.
“Yeah, well, if they’re sister-cousins, how come they live in the same city and were out of touch for twenty-two years?”
His smile lit up his face. “You’re the detective.”
He had a nice, cultured voice. Without intending to, April smiled back. “Maybe some kind of feud. Maybe they’re not such good friends.”
“Then why introduce us?”
“Could be spite,” April speculated. She was known to be stuck up, hard to please. Her rejecting the doctor son of an old enemy would make the enemy lose face. On the other hand, if the doctor rejected her, Sai Woo would lose face. All around it was risky. Pretty much a no-win situation.
“Could be desperation.” George laughed, opening his mouth wide enough to reveal white, even teeth. “Anything for a grandson to carry on the name.”
“My mother would settle for a granddaughter. Where did you go to school?”
“Queens. Then Columbia all the way.”
April guessed he meant college, medical school, and all that other training. She frowned. And then he came down to Chinatown to practice when he had never been stuck here in the first place? That didn’t make sense. Why would he return to a place he’d never been? Most ABAs who got to college and learned to blend married Caucasians if they possibly could. They didn’t exactly come stampeding back to live with the immigrants just off the plane.
&nbs
p; “You live down here?” she asked.
He shook his head.
The steamed buns came. April bit into one. “Ummm. Food’s good.”
He drank down some of his beer, nodding. “You have to be in the right mood though.”
Ah, so that was it. He hadn’t known what kind of girl she was, and didn’t want to be seen with her if she wasn’t up to a better place. She flushed, feeling put down by the Ivy League graduate. Last spring she’d laid eyes on Columbia University for the first time. She had a missing person from there. Seventeen-year-old girl. The girl was killed in California, and April Woo was the one who located her.
All right, so maybe she was a cop, a street person, not a doctor, not exactly a first-class medical school graduate. Okay. Maybe she was just a cop. But in a month she’d be a cop with a college degree herself. And if she had anything to do with it, she’d be a sergeant in the department, too.
“Is that a tennis bag?” She jerked her chin at the bag at his feet.
“Yes. You ask a lot of questions.”
“I’m a cop. It comes with the territory. How did you get to be a doctor?”
He smiled again, sipped more beer. “I studied for a lot of years. And my parents wanted a docta.” He twisted his face into old style. “You know how that is. Ten thousand pounds of steaming guilt a day. ‘Have dumpring. Study book. Be docta. Take care palents.’ I really didn’t have much choice.”
Another cart came by. This one was filled with pearl balls and shui mai. April took the shui mai. She’d heard that in old China dim sum was served in tea houses for breakfast. The words “dim sum” meant “touch the heart lightly.” She tried to concentrate on the meaning of the words and the delicate taste of shrimp and dried mushroom. Yes, she knew exactly how much ten thousand pounds of steaming guilt a day weighed on a child’s shoulders. She liked the image and his joking about the accent, liked the gold signet ring on his finger.
He drank down half the beer and looked at her appraisingly. “What made you become a cop?”
She tasted hers, considering an answer. She didn’t want him to think badly of her parents for not insisting she go to Columbia. Didn’t want to insult her parents by implying poverty. She put her glass down. The beer was warm. “There seemed to be a need.”
In response to that, her beeper sounded from inside her lucky red blazer.
George looked surprised. “What’s that?”
“My beeper. Something must have come up. I’m sorry. I have to call in.”
She pushed her chair back and made her way through the crush to the front of the restaurant, where a pay phone hung prominently behind the cash register. She dialed the squad number.
“What’s going on?” she asked when Sanchez came on the line.
“Where are you?”
“Doyers Street.”
“Chinatown. What’re you doing down there?”
“It’s lunchtime, my day off. I’m having lunch.” April tried not to sound impatient. “What’s coming down?”
“Braun wants you in here now. Third floor, examination room.”
“Yeah, what for?” Adrenaline and alarm shot through her in equal measures.
“He’s got Maggie’s boyfriend.”
“No kidding.” April’s heart thudded. How did he do that, when she and Sanchez had missed him? Son of a bitch. This wasn’t going to go down well with Sergeant Joyce or Captain Higgins.
“No kidding. And get this. Braun wants his team there with him.”
Oh, now they were a team, great. April looked at her watch. She’d been with George Dong all of twenty-three minutes. So much for dating. “Twenty minutes max,” she promised.
Sanchez hung up without comment.
April pushed her way back to the table through an even larger crowd than had been there earlier. George Dong, the doctor, was smiling at her. She noticed he was not so very ordinary-looking when his mouth turned up at the edges. As she approached the table, she had a minute to wonder if he really played tennis or if he just carried the racquet around for show. Lot of people were sneaky like that.
“You have to go, right.” It wasn’t even a question. He knew.
“Sometimes it happens. I’m really sorry. The case I’m working—something’s come up.”
“It’s okay. I know how it is,” he said magnanimously.
But she knew it wasn’t okay. All the way uptown, she had a really sick feeling about the whole thing. She didn’t know if there was any way to make it all right with him. She figured the worst case was he’d bad-mouth her to his mother. His mother would bad-mouth her to her mother and her mother would kill her. Best case he wouldn’t say anything.
37
Lieutenant Braun was still wearing his powder-blue jacket. April spotted it across the squad room when she arrived. Braun was crowding Mike’s desk, talking fast, and poking a finger at the air. He turned around at Mike’s welcoming smile.
“Ah. Detective Woo,” Braun said. A hint of sarcasm edged into his voice.
“Lieutenant Braun.”
April’s desk appeared to be unoccupied by anyone on the Sunday shift. She put her bag down on it. “What’s happening?”
Mike raised a crooked eyebrow, jerking his head at the farthest desk down the line. A preppy-looking young man in a seersucker sport jacket seemed to have tied his body in a knot around a telephone, and was relating to it intimately.
April took him in. Light brown hair, blue eyes, a spattering of freckles across the nose. Medium build. Looked not unlike Dan Quayle, the former vice president. Five eleven to six foot. Where did Braun dig him up?
Braun nodded. “I’m pretty hot shit” was written all over him. He smirked and folded a fresh stick of gum into his mouth. “Name’s Roger McLellan. Says he left town a week ago Friday. That’s the day before Maggie got hit. Easy enough to check out. Claims he has no idea what this is all about, none at all. He consented to come down here to help us out with whatever our problem is. But lo and behold, the second he gets here he changes his mind and decides he better not say anything without his lawyer present. Hey, does that look like a guy who doesn’t know what this is all about?”
“What kind of guy that young knows a lawyer? He knew the number by heart, didn’t even have to look it up. I’m running a sheet on him,” Mike added.
“Maybe they’re friends,” April murmured.
McLellan’s body was still wrapped around the telephone receiver as he whispered into it heatedly.
“Who?” Braun looked at her.
“Him and the lawyer.”
“Yeah, sure. Who’s friends with a lawyer?”
They watched McLellan reluctantly put the receiver back on the phone and straighten up, visibly pulling himself together. When he approached the three detectives, it was with an air of nervous belligerence.
“My attorney is on his way. He told me to tell you I have nothing to say until he gets here. Where would you like me to wait?” McLellan glanced at the barred enclosure opposite the line of desks.
Braun shook his head at the holding cell. Not so fast. “We’ll go downstairs. You want something? Cup of coffee?” he asked. Real friendly.
McLellan said no. They all trudged downstairs to the same questioning room April and Mike had used to interrogate Albert Block five days earlier. April guessed Braun still wasn’t thrilled with his accommodations next to the men’s room.
Peter Langworth, a near-twin of Roger McLellan’s right down to the seersucker jacket, appeared forty-five minutes later.
“Okay, what’s this all about?” the attorney demanded.
What a pair of tough guys. April glanced at Mike, who had one of his sudden coughs.
Braun introduced himself, then nodded at the chairs. “Why don’t you gentlemen take a seat. Mike, go check on the sheet you were talking about.” Braun turned his back on Sanchez.
Stunned, April caught Mike’s eye. What was that little power-play all about? First he gets Sanchez down there on his day off and then he s
ends him out of the room. She watched Sanchez’s retreating back. Not one to show his frustration, Mike closed the door quietly as he left.
“Sit down, Detective.” Braun pointed to a chair, then waited for the sitting and scraping to stop. Finally he addressed Roger McLellan. “You know Maggie Wheeler?”
“She’s not in the movement,” McLellan said. “It’s my thing. She has nothing to do with it.”
Braun furrowed his brow at April. What movement?
“Why don’t you tell us about it,” he suggested.
“Maggie has nothing to do with it. She doesn’t want to be involved—”
His lawyer leaned forward. “You don’t have to say anything else, Roger. Lieutenant—”
“Braun.”
“Lieutenant Braun. Why don’t you tell us what this is about.”
“Fine. Maggie Wheeler was murdered last Saturday night—”
The gasp was audible. “What?” McLellan croaked.
April’s heart plunged. Shit. The guy didn’t know.
Braun went on, unperturbed. “So we’re looking into who killed her.”
“Maggie’s dead?” The lawyer paled. So he knew Maggie Wheeler, too.
“Yes, she’s been dead for a week.” Braun shot them a get-real look. “If you didn’t know that, how come the lawyer?”
“I’ve been out of town. I didn’t know,” McLellan protested. He suddenly got interested in his bitten cuticles, examined one finger after another. “Jesus, all I wanted was to save it,” he muttered. “… So that’s why she never called me back.”
“What?”
“You want to establish Mr. McLellan’s whereabouts on the Saturday Maggie died, is that correct?” Langworth demanded.
“We want to know Mr. McLellan’s relationship to the deceased as well as his whereabouts.” Braun had not spit his gum out. April could see it wadded in his cheek.
“I was in Albany. We had an agreement. She promised me she would wait.”
“Wait for what?” Braun’s face did a little dance. It was clear neither patience nor tact was one of the Lieutenant’s virtues.
“Just wait a second, Roger. You were in Albany. You don’t have to say anything. Lieutenant—uh—”
