Tracking Time

by Leslie Glass

  A voice broke through the static with a radio run. April heard the 4th division radio dispatcher hit the alert button usually reserved for 1013s-officer needs assistance or other crimes of a serious nature.

  "All units in the vicinity of the West Drive and West Seventy-seventh Street. Caller states someone is screaming in the area of the rowboat lake."

  April checked her watch and leaned over to activate the siren to attract Woody's attention. Almost instantly he burst out of the restaurant and galloped across the sidewalk empty-handed.

  "What do we got, boss?" Suddenly hot to trot, he flung open the car door, leapt inside, slammed the door on his foot, yelped, gunned the engine. A nice show if his love happened to be watching from the window.

  "Call for help in the park. Go in at Seven-seven," April ordered. She reattached her seat belt as Woody abruptly pulled out into the traffic on Columbus.

  The driver of the BMW behind them braked sharply to avoid a collision. He leaned on his horn in fury and speeded up to catch them, maybe to have a shouting match, maybe to fight, maybe to take out a gun and shoot them. Clearly he had no idea they were cops.

  "Christ, Woody," April muttered.

  "Sorry, Sergeant," he said without contrition. He hit the siren to alert the BMW driver and the world in general to their status. Magic. The car behind them fell back suddenly. The cars ahead of them moved aside.

  April tensed as Baum played his favorite game. He had to run through all five lights to Seventy-seventh Street without stopping, no matter what color they were or what was going on with the traffic around them. His own personal rule was he could slow down when running a red light, but if he had to come to a complete stop to avoid an accident, the game was over and he lost.

  April thought the game was puerile, but didn't fight the premise. In law enforcement, you did what you had to do. When a life was on the line, every second counted. Force of habit made her check her watch again. It would be noted how long it took officers to respond to the call. She didn't think of herself as competitive, but she wanted to be there first.

  Traffic wasn't too bad. Baum was driving unusually aggressively, either to impress the honey who could no longer see him or to make up for the seven minutes he'd kept his supervisor waiting. April's verdict on him was still out. He was a wild card, but people couldn't hide their colors forever. The smart ones got ahead. The dumb ones got left behind. The squirrelly ones made trouble.

  Baum was smart enough, but he was also squirrelly. He'd been in one of the rough and tumble anticrime units for several years and was having trouble coming in from the street. This kind of wild driving was an example. Baum sometimes went so far as to gently "nudge" the car ahead of him to get it to move over. He made other mistakes in judgment, too, which April tried to overlook on the grounds that he was green. They were all green in the beginning. Her motive for having him as her driver was that Lieutenant Iriarte, the CO of the unit, disliked the Jew almost as much as he disliked her. That kept Baum fiercely loyal to her, which was a refreshing change.

  Woody was silent as he sped along the back side of the Museum of Natural History, made a gleeful left turn, and stormed the park without slowing down for the light at Central Park West. They entered the park, heading the wrong way on the drive. It was a good thing the lane was cleared for them.

  Coming toward them at the same time, a blue-and-white 4X4 with two uniformed officers from the Central Park Precinct raced down the hill, and a female mounted officer cantered south on the bridle path from the Eighty-first Street entrance.

  "Turn it off," April barked.

  Woody turned off the siren, pulled onto the grass, and stopped. All seemed to be quiet in the area now. There were no bystanders to a fight, no sobbing victim sitting or lying on the ground, nobody screaming or calling for help. April and Baum got out. The officer in the 4X4 pulled up beside them but remained at the wheel. Daylight was nearly gone now. Only a few lights punched an eerie glow into the fog.

  April lifted her department radio and spoke. "Mid-town North Detectives Supervisor to Central. Units on the scene, Central. Will check and advise." Then she went to investigate.

  Central Park was eight hundred and forty-three acres of terrain that was unusually varied for a city park. It was both wild and cultivated, with broad, shaded avenues for walking, playing fields south and east of where they were, the zoo across town at Fifth Avenue and Sixty-fifth Street. Tennis courts in the northwest, a five-mile running track that went up to Harlem, a bridle path, a rowboat lake in the lower west, a sailboat pond and Bethesda Fountain at Seventy-second Street. The notorious Ramble-thirty miles of unlighted, unpaved wooded paths, a hangout for adolescents smoking pot, gays looking for action, addicts looking for a hit or a mark, and the homeless-was not far away. Since the Giuliani administration strictly enforced zero tolerance on disorderly conduct and all the other quality-of-life values that were the new hallmark of New York City, there were not that many homeless. When dark came, the third tour of the Central Park Precinct, patrolling in cars, on scooters, horses, bicycles, chased them out.

  "Hey, boss, it's probably some fag getting corn-holed in the bushes," the uniform in the 4X4 called out in a who-gives-a-shit tone. April heard and ignored the crude remark. Most likely he was right. Still, they didn't take any risks about people in trouble anywhere, and especially in the park. Every 911 call was thoroughly checked out.

  The mounted officer joined the party. She slowed the panting horse to a walk, then reined in close to the Buick. The chestnut she was riding was a beautiful animal. It tossed its head and dropped a steaming load. "Anything?" the officer asked, unperturbed.

  "Looks like whatever it was is over," April remarked. "But we'll check it out. Come on, Baum, let's take a walk." She stepped off the pavement onto the part of the Ramble that skirted the water. Large boulders on either side formed a minicanyon. Between them, tall grasses still thick with their summer greenery rose over six feet high. In the cooling air there was no sound but the rustle of the grass and the leaves above. Baum pulled out his flashlight and shined it into the bushes and into the water as they walked along the shoreline. A family of ducks glided toward them, rippling the surface and almost taking her breath away with their beauty.

  Then a sudden noise to her left lifted hairs on the back of April's neck. Reflexively, her hand brushed the 9mm Glock semiautomatic at her waist.

  "Jesus, look at that." Baum shone his light on a rat the size of a lapdog, scurrying across the rock.

  All over the city April had seen plenty of those. "Maybe that was the cause of the trouble. Quite a specimen," she said with the cool of a connoisseur.

  Farther on, the unmistakable sweet smell of marijuana smoke was trapped in a stagnant pocket of heavy air. The smokers were nowhere to be seen.

  For ten minutes April and Woody walked around the area. If they'd found the smokers and they'd been kids, April would have given them a talking-to. She would have taken their names and called their parents. She often took young offenders into the station to give them a taste of the law. She liked to think that occasionally it did the job and scared them straight. But tonight nothing. No sign of the 911 caller, no sign of anyone in trouble. All they saw was the usual array of people minding their own business. And the rat. Finally the two detectives got back in their unit and drove away.

  Three

  Dr. Maslow Atkins was due at Dr. Jason Frank's office for a supervisory session at eight-fifteen to discuss Allegra Caldera. As Jason waited for him, he couldn't help feeling just a touch manipulated by the younger doctor's urgent request for extra time that evening-not tomorrow or some other more convenient date. Jason did not get paid for supervising analytic candidates, nor for any of the teaching he did, but he rarely thought about that. His problem these days was stamina. He'd already been exhausted in the late afternoon when he agreed to extend his working day another half hour, and Jason wasn't taking fatigue as easily these days as he used to.

  A year ago Jason Fr
ank had reached his thirty-ninth birthday determined to devote his life to his patients, his teaching, his myriad speaking engagements, books, and articles, and whatever free moments he had left, to his actress wife, Emma Chapman. But now he was over forty and the birth of his daughter, April, had changed his priorities.

  Tuesday was always Jason's longest day. Since seven a.m., he'd seen ten patients. The difference the baby made to his life was in what he did between and around them. Previously, he'd spent his fifteen minutes between patients opening his mail, returning phone calls, and fiddling with his clocks. Jason had an antique clock collection that measured time in a bunch of quirky and inventive ways and that required his constant attention. Other men loved cars, gadgets of all kinds, stereo equipment, big-screen TVs, sports. Jason was fascinated by time, the completely neutral force that worked for both good and evil. Without time there could be no change in the universe, no seasons or life cycles of any species, no growth of babies to adulthood. Time was many other things to humans, too. It was the good medicine that healed many wounds, and it was the poison that deepened others. Time's effect on a devastating blow to the ego could turn a person into a victim forever, or alternatively, a sadist, even a killer.

  Mediating time's impact on the psyche was a big part of his job as a doctor. Jason's own preoccupation had been to create a diverse collection of mechanical clocks, all over a hundred years old, that accurately exhibited time's advance. His goal was to coax them to tick more or less together, neither gaining nor losing minutes as the day progressed. With a host of different movements, however, the clocks did not make uniformity of measurement an easy task.

  Since the baby's arrival, Jason had allowed many previously important activities to lapse, including the constant winding of his thirty-three clocks. For him, it could be said that although time was marching on, it was no longer measured by the sweep of a pendulum, but rather by the feeding times, the developmental milestones of his child. That day, during his lunch break, he'd run three miles (instead of his previous five) and spent the gained time with Emma and April, who was now nearly six months old and vocalizing freely for her besotted psychoanalyst father.

  Jason's office was two rooms that he'd separated from his apartment years ago. Before the arrival of the baby, he'd rarely gone home during the day. Now he moved back and forth between the spaces almost on an hourly basis.

  On Tuesday evening, after his last patient left, he picked up his messages. Two were cancellations for tomorrow and one was a request to speak in California in March. When he was finished rescheduling the appointments, he glanced at the row of clocks on the bookcase and realized that Maslow was late. He dialed home to tell Emma.

  "Hi, sweetheart, when do you want to eat?" she asked when she heard his voice.

  "I'm sorry, honey. I'm a little hung up here. You go ahead without me," he replied.

  "I'll wait for you," she promised.

  "I may be an hour."

  "I'll wait."

  "Up to you. How's the baby?"

  "Sleeping." Emma yawned, and Jason's heart swelled. "I love you," he murmured.

  "Love you, too."

  He hung up, sighing. He was tired, and anxious about a number of things, but life was good. All he needed was a nice dinner, a glass of wine. And to go to bed soon with his beautiful wife. The very last thing he wanted was to spend another half an hour or so dissecting Maslow's difficult patient session.

  Four of Jason's own ten patient sessions that day had been painful. Marshal, a physician with AIDS, said he constantly fantasized flying to a splendid vacation spot to end his life there. Jason didn't think he meant it as a threat, but he was left with a nagging doubt. Daisy, a borderline personality he'd been struggling with for years, came in this morning claiming she'd been raped at a fraternity party on Long Island the previous weekend and now wanted to drop out of school for the fourth time. Then, Jason had visited Willis in the hospital where he was on suicide watch after his estranged wife got a court order to keep him away from her and the children. Last Friday Willis had attempted to gas himself with car exhaust in the family garage. The fourth case was Alicia, a former tennis prodigy managed by her father. Her father had given her a dog as a reward for her athletic talent when she was ten. He'd allowed her to pet and play with the animal only when she was playing well. In a rage, after Alicia lost a crucial juniors match just before her eleventh birthday, he'd given the dog to the ASPCA, where it was put to sleep. At the present time, Alicia was almost eighteen, weighed two hundred and thirty pounds, and for the very first time was seeking help, against her parents' clearly stated wishes.

  Jason had no doubt that he would be brooding for some time about the things these patients had said to him and he had said to them. Still, having to address the therapeutic skills, or lack thereof, of the spectacularly insecure Maslow Atkins was a duty he would not dream of shirking. Psychotherapy was a skill that had to be rigorously taught, one on one, by master to beginner.

  At a quarter to nine, Jason's mood changed from impatience to alarm. It happened like the audible click in many of his clocks when the second hand advanced to the half hour, just a beat before the peal of the chime. He experienced a cold shiver and felt something was wrong. Maslow was compulsive about time. He was always five minutes early. Jason knew how many minutes Maslow was early because he could hear the hinges on the door squeal each time someone came or went from his waiting room.

  He frowned at the phone. As he did so, he realized that the two skeleton clocks on his desk, always four minutes apart, had both stopped at the same time. Spooky. Jason didn't like spooky. He wondered if Maslow could possibly have gone out to dinner and forgotten the appointment. He picked up the phone and dialed Maslow's number. It rang six times before the answering machine picked up. Jason hung up without leaving a message and sighed again. He reached for the knot in his tie, pulled it loose, and stuffed it in his pocket. Uneasy, he wound and reset the two clocks on his desk. Then he dialed Maslow's number again, and this time he left a message. When a very compulsive person like Maslow wasn't where he was supposed to be and didn't call, something was wrong.

  Jason had worked with the police often enough now to know how they thought about this kind of thing, how they acted when something turned up funny. Cops didn't wait overnight to see how a suspicious circumstance sorted itself out. They acted on the first shiver. Jason realized that in this particular situation he was thinking like a cop and fearing the worst. But he reminded himself that he wasn't a cop, so he left a note for Maslow on his office door and went home to Emma for dinner. The next morning the note was still there.

  Four

  On Wednesday morning April got up before dawn and dressed for a quick run. She put on a tank top and thin black sweat pants. Summer wasn't officially over for another week, but already the air offered its first taste of fall. When she trotted down the stairs of her second-floor apartment and opened the front door of the house she had been tricked into buying for her parents, she felt the first autumn chill bite into her cheeks, her bare arms and shoulders. All grogginess passed. She was fully awake now, reminded of her name on the thirty-year mortgage for a house in which she no longer wanted to live and could not escape without the benefit of riches she did not possess. Having agreed many years ago to support and live with her parents, April now felt she was in an unlucky and undesirable position for marriage. Without her salary to put in the wedding pot, she could not marry. The loss of face of having such a debt was so disgraceful to her that she could not even tell her lover her problem. It was a secret.

  She sighed and started off on her favorite route in the Astoria, Queens, neighborhood where the Woos lived. It followed Hoyt Avenue under the approach to the Triborough Bridge. At five to six that morning, dense fog blurred the mammoth structure and paled the resolution of the lights necklaced above. At street level the house lights had a yellow cast. After nearly a decade as a cop, April had come to love the intimacy of night. Even more, she liked early mornin
g, after the bad guys had gone to ground and before the commuters were out.

  Now that she was spending nearly all of her precious off-duty hours with Mike, April's few solitary dawns had taken on almost a mythic importance to her. Just before the sun lightened the sky had been the time she used to jog every single day. When daylight arrived, she would return home, work with free weights, and finish her leg lifts. Hard exercise had always been part of her ritual. As a small-boned woman cop, she had to be extra tough both mentally and physically so no one could make the allegation stick that she wasn't up to the job.

  Shivering slightly, April stepped out onto the street to scan the houses and cars of her neighbors. Always the cop, she carried her gun with her everywhere and looked for signs of trouble. At this hour the workers on graveyard shifts were not yet home, and workers on day shifts were just getting up. Astoria was no yuppie area. Around here people worked hard for a living, and not many jogged for exercise. Only once had a tough guy tried to bother her. He changed his mind when he saw the gun. Today nothing was out of the ordinary.

  April's feet took off down the pavement. Until Mike had come into her life, she'd always been alone at dawn. She'd swallowed hot water with lemon, and eaten whatever her mother put in her refrigerator-cold rice, or sesame noodles, slices of drunken chicken, roast duck, or twice-cooked pork. Dry-fried beef with orange peel. Softshell crab, in season. Pickled vegetables. Things her father brought home at the end of the evening from the upscale midtown restaurant where he was a chef.