by Leslie Glass
April left the precinct without returning her calls. She didn't notice Baum's driving and didn't hear a word he said, though he chattered all the way downtown.
Bernardino's first words when she entered his glass
office were "You look bad. What's the matter with you?"
April sniffed her hand. "Don't worry about it."
"Who said I was worried? You just look green, honey pie." He called out into the squad room, "Madison, would you get the sergeant here some coffee? Baum, you want some coffee, too?" he asked Woody.
"Sure, why not?" Baum said.
Alfie returned to the subject. "You, ah, smell like a—"
"Swamp?" April helped him out.
"And you're green."
"So people have been telling me."
"You coming down with something?"
"Where's your witness? I haven't got much time."
Alfie regarded her uneasily. "You want me to get you a doctor?"
"No."
Madison came in with a single cup of precinct coffee and offered it to April. She took it, nodding her thanks. "Woody, you want to run up to the Popescu apartment and get hold of a photograph of Heather Rose?" she asked him.
"You want me to go up there now?"
"Yes. Don't call first, and don't say what you need it for. Is it okay if Madison brings the grandmother in here to ID Heather Rose?"
"Where are you going with this, April? We got a death to deal with."
"It's all connected. Madison's grandmother with the stroller saw Heather Popescu give the baby to a young woman. If we can get her to ID Heather, and ID the woman she saw Heather give the baby to as our dead girl, bingo. I just hope we don't turn up a dead baby down here."
"You think she may have killed the baby before she killed herself—or was helped along?" Alfie asked.
"Anything's possible," April murmured. She put her hand to her mouth and waited until Baum was out in the squad room. "I want to see where the body was found."
"I'll go with you."
"Then I want to see her."
"Annie Lee?"
"No, the body."
"Whatever you need, but I want you to talk to Annie."
"I only have until noon," April warned.
"What happens then, do you turn into a pumpkin?"
"Probably."
Alfie laughed. April didn't. They trooped downstairs and got into an unmarked vehicle parked down the street. A few minutes later they'd crossed the Bowery and were cruising Allen. The two-way divided avenue that bore the unassuming name of Allen Street had seen many changes over the years. Now, in addition to pockets of five- and six-story tenements from the turn of the century, and even smaller buildings like the one owned by the Popescu family, there were twenty-story apartment buildings with terraces and the large Hong Kong Supermarket where the daughter of the blue Perego stroller's new owner worked.
April stared out of the backseat window at the Popescu building. It hadn't been much to look at when it was built and was now lost in time, unexceptional in every way, just waiting for the wrecking ball. Nothing gave away what the property was used for. No air conditioners were installed in the blackened front windows. No signs identified the business. No brass plate named the tenants. And there were no yellow crime-scene tapes on the sidewalk where she assumed the dead girl had been found. April didn't believe for a moment that the girl had jumped. She guessed that the girl had killed the baby after Heather gave it back to her, and that one of the Popescus had thrown her out the window in a rage.
"Where's the scene?" she asked suddenly.
Alfie turned around and flashed her a look from the front seat. "Didn't I tell you? She was found in the alley."
No, he had not. April felt really sick. The uniform driving them killed the motor. April grabbed her purse and got out of the car slowly. It was her fault for not tumbling to this yesterday. If they'd been more agressive, maybe both mother and baby would still be alive. What were the chances of finding the baby alive now? She was afraid that the god of messing up had bewitched her last night. That faceless demon was responsible for making her think of shopping, of food. And yes, for making her so hot for love that she'd thought more of Mike, more of Emma and her pregnancy, more of searching birth records for a live Eurasian baby, than of pressing the Popescus about their employees. She'd followed the tangent instead of the lead, and now a woman was dead and had been thrown out, another piece of useless garbage.
Her face flushed. Drops of cold sweat sprouted like seedlings on her forehead—whether from sickness or shame, she didn't know. But she did know she couldn't just run away, just return to Midtown North and obey Iriarte's command to avoid involvement in this death that had occurred way out of her precinct. Alfie's concerned face told her that Madison Young had not taken her place in his estimation. She didn't have a choice. She had to stay and find out what happened to make that poor woman end up in an alley. She checked her watch. Now she doubted her wisdom in sending Baum uptown to get a photo of Heather. He'd been gone for more than forty minutes. Even with his driving style it would take upwards of two hours to get uptown to Fifty-ninth Street, wheedle a picture from the Popescu apartment, get back to show it to the stroller grandmother, and make a positive ID on Heather Rose. They also needed a photo of the dead woman for Heather Rose to see. April's gut clenched. She was getting soft. She was doing it backwards. And of course she needed to talk to the supervisor who'd said she'd seen the dead woman jump. It was already a quarter of eleven. No way was she getting back to Midtown North by noon. She looked around for a phone, thinking she should call her boss, had forgotten she now carried one in her pocket. Her right leg felt strange, weak, stuck with pins and needles. Another needle was lodged behind her right eye, stabbing outward. She wondered if this was what dying felt like.
"Hshh, hshh, hshhh."
Alfie was making the kind of sniffing noises in her direction that excited dogs make when they're close to dead meat. April's heart accelerated in a sudden surge. She could feel the
thud thud thud
as the crucial muscle kicked into gear, shooting boiling blood through her veins. She didn't want to die.
"You okay?" he asked.
"Yeah, let's go."
They crossed the sidewalk and passed through a chain-link gate into a junk-filled alley festooned with the yellow police tape April had somehow thought would be out front on Allen Street. Why had Alfie given her the impression the girl had gone out the front windows? She shook herself.
"What?" Alfie read her mind.
The cracked pavement around where the body had been found had been picked clean, possibly swept up or even vacuumed by the Crime Scene Unit. Only a few spots of dried blood were visible. April looked up at the sky. The eyes of dozens of uncurtained windows stared down at her. The alley streaked west across rows of building backs on the two blocks perpendicular to north-south running Allen Street. On the side streets moving west most of the buildings were small and had laundry strung out the windows. But directly opposite, with an entrance on Allen, was a modern apartment house, more than twelve stories tall. One side of this building had ringside seats on the backyard. Alfie followed her gaze and read her mind once again. "Yeah, we have people in there now."
April's pocket burbled, unnerving her with the unexpected vibration. After a few pulses, she managed to pluck out the plastic flip-down and gingerly punch the Talk button. She was upset and distracted by the interruption. In a normal and healthy state she would have grumbled and snapped. But now her voice came out like warm honey.
"Where are you,
chico?
' Oh, she was in trouble.
"I have a prelim on your Jane Doe," Mike said without introduction. "Guess what?"
"What?"
"Guess."
"How do you know about this?" she asked.
Mike made a sound that managed even on the phone to sound arrogant and impatient at the same time. "The woman was already dead when she hit the grou
nd."
April's eyes swept the few spots of blood on the cement.
"Tell me something I didn't know."
"Okay. She was young, a teenager, a seamstress from the looks of the calluses on her thumbs, index, and pinkie fingers. She was undernourished, dehydrated, and had some real bad pelvic infection. The doc said she also had herpes and pneumonia. She was not a healthy lady."
April's spirits sank. "Anything else?"
"Yeah, she'd had a baby."
"Uh-huh."
Alfie scowled at her, tapping his foot impatiently. "What?"
April held up a finger to silence him.
"Might be the mother you're looking for."
"Uh-huh."
"What
?" Alfie punched her arm. She ignored him.
"What was the COD?" April asked.
"Someone bashed her skull in."
"Oh, God." More green spots drifted across April's field of vision. She had a brief vision of Anton's angry face and wondered if he was the killer. Maybe he'd retrieved the baby already and had hidden it somewhere. April wanted to tell Mike that she was sick, that people around her were sniffing her as if she smelled of death. She knew that sick smell and was scared of it. She'd been so out of it when she left home that morning she hadn't known the putrid odor was clinging to her. She didn't know how to tell him any of those things on the phone.
"You don't sound good. Is something wrong?"
"Yeah. What's your involvement in the case?" she asked weakly.
"I'm in. Where are you?"
"Allen Street. Maybe there is a God," she murmured, surprised she was so relieved.
"What?"
Alfie demanded again.
April handed the phone to him. "It's Sergeant Sanchez of Homicide. He seems to know all about it. Talk to him yourself."
The two conferred while April swayed on her feet. I'm dying, she thought. Then, Better find the baby first.
Alfie hung up and handed her the phone without turning it off. It took her a few seconds to hit Power, flip it up, and put it away.
"What's the plan?" she asked.
Bernardino turned to a detective smoking a cigarette at his side. "Annie Lee?"
"Okay." April wondered where Mike was and when he planned to join her.
Now she was irritated as well as faint. Baum hadn't come back from uptown yet. Mike had hung up before she could tell him she was seriously sick. She didn't remember his cell number so she couldn't call him back. She might have beeped him if she'd thought of it, but she didn't think of it. Instead she gazed bale-fully at Alfie, who was being high-handed just like the old days. Only one person knew how long her legs would hold up; her mother. She wasn't going to call Skinny Dragon.
Alfie approached her, stepping over some soiled rags to get there. He put a solicitous hand on her shoulder. "You're not looking too good, April. Come on, I'll take you back."
Back where? April heard thunder, but the sun was out, shooting blinding white light into the Ming-blue sky. She looked up at the blacked-out windows in the Popescu building, her brain scuttling like a rat in a maze. They were going to talk to Annie Lee, but why weren't they going up there to examine the rooms behind the windows first? Her vision clouded and her brain shut down before she had a chance to ask.
CHAPTER 36
H
eather Rose was discharged from the hospital early Friday morning. The doctors had given her the green light and there was no excuse to keep her any longer. The day before, when she'd finally awakened from her protective sleep and been fully aware of what was going on, she had at least three guards around her at all times. There was a policeman outside her door. And finally, unimpeded by the opposing will of her husband, her parents had come from San Francisco to be alone with her for the very first time since she was married nearly six years ago. These two hardworking, gray-haired people, who had labored eighteen hours a day in a dry-cleaning store so she could fulfill their dreams and attend the number one university in America, climb the ladder of success, be rich, and live in splendor the rest of her life, were there to see her shame. They sat by her bed, solemn-faced, talking quietly in Chinese and eating the food they brought in from a Chinese take-out place across the street that was not first-rate. They did not leave her room unless the nurses or the doctors or the police came and told them to go out into the hall. They left the hospital only one at a time, and only to get food and return to their post.
If Heather Rose could have hung her head, her forehead would have been knocking the ground. She knew that they, and everyone else, could see she was a walking piece of human shit. And no longer even walking. Just a lump of human shit in a hospital bed. She knew that she did not deserve to be alive. Better to have been drowned in the bathtub, better to have been pushed under a subway car. Better to have died of poisoning. Anything would have been better than the eye swollen and purple like a bursting plum, her lips deformed, her scalp split and her ribs aching so that she could hardly think straight, and the burn marks on her arms and inner thighs—all revealed for her parents and the police and the doctors and nurses to see.
Luckily for her, her parents were the only ones who did not ask what had happened to her. And she knew that as long as they lived, they would never ask her. They might see her every day, feed her and scold her and advise her to do any number of things, push her this way or that way. But they would not ask what had happened after she married Anton and went to live the rich life with him in New York City. To ask, and to receive the answers, would mean they would have to swallow her pain and be destroyed by it, and they would never do that.
When she was little, Heather's mother used to tell her that in China people would eat anything. They would eat lice and maggots and rats, scummy things from ponds and seas, crusty things from trees and fields, even stones and earth and bones. They would dry and pound into powder whatever was dreadful, frightful, or dangerous to them. They would ingest it, and in this way they would both consume their fear and acquire its power. They believed that horrors could be eaten; but sadness could not be so easily conquered and exterminated. The many sad parts of life had to be the most deeply held secrets, unvoiced and rigidly contained in an iron box of a soul. To give sadness a name was to make it unendurable for others, so the highest form of love was to say nothing. And so Heather Rose's parents prepared for her release from the hospital, bought her a ticket to return with them to San Francisco, and asked her no questions.
She was sitting up when the psychiatrist Jason Frank came to see her, very early, at a quarter past seven. Her parents quietly left the room. As soon as they were gone he said, "You're looking a lot better."
She blew air through her nose. "Today is Friday; Clinton is still President, but maybe not for long. My name is Heather Rose Kwan Popescu, I don't hear voices from outer space, and I don't think the devil lives in the television set."
The doctor laughed. "Well, that clears a lot of things up. I gather they've been asking you those questions to see if you're disoriented, or hear things that may not be there for anyone else."
"Dr. Frank, the psychiatrist, right?"
"And you have an excellent memory. Yes, I'm one psychiatrist. Have there been others to see you?"
"I'm told this is a coming attraction for me. I'll miss it, though."
"Oh, how will you manage that?"
"I'm going home in a few minutes."
"Really, are you feeling that much better?"
"Yes. They gave me brain scans and everything. I guess I'm lucky—just a concussion." She gave him a look. "I'm not a suspect. I'm the victim. If I don't know who assaulted me, I can't help the police. They, in turn, can't keep me here. Anton wants me to come home. My parents want me to go back to San Francisco."
"What do you want?"
She rubbed her arm. "Do you think I'm crazy?"
"There are many kinds of crazy," he said, as if being
crazy were no different from having red hair. "Some kinds of crazy aren't so bad."
"You said that before."
"Must be because it's true." He gave her a little smile. "We were getting somewhere last time, and then all of sudden I lost you. Something really scared you, and you went out like a light. My guess is you're terrified of your husband."
"Have they found the baby?"
The shrink shook his head. "Not that I know of."
"Oh God. I hope she didn't hurt him." Tears filled Heather's eyes. "I thought giving him back to his mother was the right thing to do."
"Yes, you implied that; but you didn't tell me who she is. That's why they can't find her."
"I don't know her name." Her tears were falling harder now. "Everything was arranged through Annie."
"Annie?"
"Annie is the family's Chinatown connection. She works in the factory, kind of manages the personnel side of the business. Annie told us about the baby in the first place. She arranged it when I decided to give him back to his mother."
"Did you tell your husband?"
"No," she wailed. "I couldn't talk to him about anything. I just did it. I don't know what I thought would happen. I just had to. . . . He's an angel baby. Oh, God, I hope he's all right."
"How did you get involved with your husband?" the doctor asked her suddenly.
She blew her nose and pulled herself together. "We met in college."
"Where was that?"
"Yale. Only number two," she said softly.
"Number two?"
"For my family there's only Harvard. After that, forget it. I'd failed. You asked about Anton. He was a senior. I was a freshman. I'd never been away from home before."
"San Francisco, right?"
"Yes. You saw my parents: very strict. I couldn't go out at all. I'd never had a boyfriend before. I guess you could say I've never had a boyfriend."
"What do you mean?"
She moved her head on the pillow.
"Did your parents approve of your husband?"
"No, of course not."
"Why not?"
She shook her head again. Any idiot should know why not.
