Burning Time (3 page)

Jason had been beaten up pretty badly once when he was fifteen. In the Bronx where he came from, the cops had been less than sympathetic. They saw him as just another bellicose street kid in a fistfight. They searched him, found the knife he’d never had a chance to take out of his pocket, and threatened to take him in for possession of a concealed weapon.

Jason considered himself fully analyzed. He knew being middle-class was very important to him. He had liked the last patient’s analysis of him. But now, for a reason he couldn’t pinpoint, the tape upset him. The more he thought about the questions that were raised on it, the less sure he was about where he stood on them.

Suddenly he felt anxious again about his wife, as if he had left her too long, or overlooked something he should have noticed. It began to snow as he looked for a taxi.

Detective April Woo neatened up her desk for the night shift and covered a small yawn, even though the squad room was empty except for Ginora, the glorified secretary who answered the phone and took the messages, and Sergeant Sanchez. Both were at their desks hunched over their phones talking rapidly in Spanish. Neither looked her way.

Detective Bell was at the range in the Bronx. Detective Davis was at the range at the Academy, and Sergeant Aspiranti was in the field. It was three-thirty. If nothing new came up, April was due to go home in half an hour.

Her eyes slid over to the couple who had been sitting for almost an hour on the bench just inside the door. The Squad Supervisor, Sergeant Joyce, was out on a call. No one else could make an assignment. They’d have to sit there until Joyce got back, or the duty changed and Sergeant Rinaldi took over at four.

April studied them, wondering what the complaint might be. These were the kind of people who always made her a little nervous. Clearly educated, affluent, Caucasian.
Her mother was old-style Chinese. Even now she sometimes called whites round-eyes, or ghosts. That made April nervous, too.

One of the first things she was taught at the Police Academy was, “We’re only one color here. Blue. Whatever prejudices you have, leave them at the door.” April didn’t forget it.

After six years of being one of New York’s Finest, which was in fact one-third African-American, one-third Hispanic, and one-third white—with Asians at maybe three percent, a few hundred in thirty-five or so thousand officers—April Woo thought of herself as pretty much color-blind.

Even without the professor’s warning to keep an open mind about people, it wouldn’t have taken April many months to see that underneath the skin colors and cultural differences everybody wanted pretty much the same things. But the combination of education and class and money in people like this couple still intimidated April. When they were white and educated and rich all at the same time, she couldn’t help feeling inferior. She might have a chance for one, but she’d never have all three. April went two nights a week to John Jay College of Criminal Justice where she was getting her degree so slowly she was afraid her hair would turn gray before it happened.

“Bastard!” the woman said fiercely.

April looked her over without opening her eyes all the way. The woman had a lot of dark brown, possibly dyed hair—a huge mane of it, elaborately styled—and was wearing a short fur coat. Very short. Her skinny legs in their sheer black stockings stuck out a long way. Must be cold walking around in that all winter, April thought.

The woman’s face had been painstakingly made up earlier in the day, but now the eyeliner was mostly gone,
there were traces of mascara under her eyes, and her blush-on was all cried off. The man beside her looked like a lawyer or a doctor. He wore a dark business suit and had a camel hair coat and a silk paisley scarf over his arm. They argued quietly on and off as they waited for someone to take their case. Must be a robbery.

The squad room had a little jog in it, a short hallway which widened out into a good-sized room with six small metal desks equipped with not much more than phones and manual typewriters. The desks were all in a row by the windows that faced Eighty-second Street. The only place for people waiting for a detective was on that one bench in the narrow hall. Across from the desks was a single holding cell with thick iron bars. Suspects brought in for questioning were kept there. But none today. It had been a pretty quiet day, but a successful one for April.

For the first time in a long time, she had a case that made her feel good. Well, not her first call. Her first call that day was a DOA on Amsterdam. Old guy hadn’t been heard from by anybody for several days, and finally someone called the police. April and Sanchez went in and found him on the toilet, where he had died straining for his last poop. Lot of old people in the neighborhood. They died in front of the TV. They died in their beds. Occasionally, one fell down in the bathtub, broke something, and couldn’t get help. But a surprising number of them died on the pot. This time it must have happened sometime in the night. The lights were on. His teeth were in a glass. His hearing aid was on the night table. He was a tiny guy with a dapper mustache, sitting there perfectly balanced, his red-and-white striped pajama bottoms around his ankles and his eyes wide open in shock as if he had been caught in the act.

About midday, when April was still looking around the
apartment for numbers of relatives to notify, and waiting for the ambulance to take the old man away, a request came in just for her. Up here on the Upper West Side, on Columbus Avenue only one block from Central Park West, where there was a lot of money around and very little need for a Chinatown expert, it didn’t happen a lot.

It was a case in the Westminster, one of the famous buildings on Central Park West. They sent her out to interview a Chinese maid, and she relished every second of it. Turned out the woman, Ling Ling Jee, had been assaulted when she discovered two robbers in the apartment busy pocketing her mistress’s jewelry. Ling Ling was a broad-faced woman of middle age and stoical peasant stock who couldn’t speak English. She was terrified by the two men, and even more frightened of being blamed for their entry into the apartment. Worse, her employers were out of town on a skiing trip. Ling Ling didn’t know where they were, nor was she absolutely sure what skiing was.

The Haitian maid across the hall had called the police for her. Two police officers arrived on the scene, but couldn’t get enough of a story to fill out a report. Eventually April got there and sorted everything out. She calmed the woman down, got her story, tried to ascertain what was missing, explained to her what skiing was, and found the Barstollers up in Vermont. Tomorrow Ling Ling was coming in to look at mug shots.

Sorting things out for confused and terrified newcomers was what April felt she had been born to do. And for five years she had been a happy detective down in Chinatown. She knew all too well the terrors of people who didn’t know what to do or who to believe about what the rules really were.

Almost nobody in Chinatown had come into the country legally. So when they got there, they lived in constant
anxiety about being discovered and sent back. This and the fact that they couldn’t speak the language made them perfect victims—for each other, for the authorities, and for the people who employed them.

Sometimes the people who sold them fake papers for thousands of dollars then sold their arrival dates to associates in New York, who kidnapped them at the airport and ransomed them to the desperate relatives who were waiting for them. In her years in the 5th, April had had many cases that made her happy. Not so many up here, where she felt like a fish out of water.

Sergeant Joyce came in and brusquely motioned for April to come into her office. It was three-forty. April knew by the Irish set of her supervisor’s jaw that she wasn’t getting out of there in twenty minutes. Something had come up.

Two minutes later she came out of the office with the Missing Persons form that had only been partially filled out at the desk downstairs. She approached the anxious couple on the bench.

“Mr. and Mrs. Roane,” April said. “Come with me.”

Three blocks from home Jason looked out the taxi window and was startled by a movie marquee that hadn’t been there when he left town.
Serpent’s Teeth
. What in the—?

“Stop,” he said suddenly.

The taxi skidded to a halt at Broadway and Eighty-third Street. Jason paid the fare and dragged his things out into the cold. It was a foggy March afternoon, still dead of winter in New York. His flight from Canada had taken less than two hours. He hesitated outside the theater, studying the poster. There were just two faces on it, with all the names at the bottom too small to read. One face he knew well. He shivered as the cold mist turned to rain, intensified, and began pelting down. Jesus. Jason bought a ticket to get out of the deluge and ducked into the moldy old theater.

Inside it was dark and smelled powerfully of popcorn. Jason chose a row in the back and put his suitcases on the seat beside him. The film had already started. The camera pulled in tight on a girl sitting on a couch with her legs crossed. She was tracing patterns on her bare thigh with
her index finger. A man sat behind her watching on an angle, so that he could see what she was doing but she could not see him. Jason frowned. He didn’t want to see a story about a psychiatrist. No one ever got them right.

He drummed his fingers on the grubby armrests.

For some long moments there was no sound on the screen and nothing else happened. There was some shuffling and coughing as the movie audience became impatient. Then, just as the stagnation on the screen reached the point of being unbearable, the woman stretched out her legs and leaned back, arching her back slightly. She had been an attractive woman, but suddenly she was dazzling. Her presence in the film took ordinariness, a simple story of corruption, and gave it a dark little twist that sent it spinning into a kinky sexual corner that was scary, erotic, and disturbing.

The story was of a pretty, vulnerable woman slowly drifting into a relationship with a vaguely sinister young man with a hard empty face and very little in the way of a life. They were shown taking a number of aimless walks in various New York parks, and sitting in restaurants. The only relief from walking and restaurants came when the woman was with her therapist.

He was a paunchy, unattractive man who managed to be both passive and sexually menacing at the same time. The audience couldn’t hear what they said to each other. The patient’s lips moved, but only the sound of flushing toilets, of cars in the streets, a radio from next door, could be heard. The scenes looked like they had been shot through a keyhole, as if someone could imagine how therapy looked, but not how it sounded. And it looked like an unsavory seduction.

The woman sat up or lay down, turned on her side, used various kinds of body language that became more and
more provocative. The psychiatrist responded in kind. Without words there was no way of knowing what the content of the scene between the two really was. Jason became tense and anxious at the thought of having to watch the code he lived by violated.

Then suddenly the scene changed and she was naked with the other man. The young hoodlum was wearing jeans and a leather jacket with a zip front. It hung open. He leaned over the woman and rubbed the zipper back and forth across her flawless neck and breasts. Then he sank to his knees on the floor in front of her.

Jason did not want to see what he was going to do, or what she was going to do. He wanted to be magically out on the street and miss the rest. He didn’t like a second of this, didn’t like it at all. But the woman was mysterious and unusual, mesmerizing. He couldn’t leave.

She leaned over the arm of the chair, arching her back as she had earlier in the psychiatrist’s office. Her rich wheaty hair hung down, and her head was bent back in that way that never looked right in films because most people couldn’t do it in life. Her legs were very long. The man buried his face in her lap. She clasped him with one bare leg around his back, then the other.

Jason swallowed and looked furtively around. He could see that the men in the audience were aroused, as he was himself. Every man wanted to be that character, that aimless hoodlum making love in his black leather jacket. The shirt that had been under it was suddenly gone. Jason’s unease reached the stage of extreme discomfort. He crossed his legs the other way.

Then the scene changed. They were back in the psychiatrist’s office. The woman was talking with no sound. Jason’s heart beat faster still. He didn’t want to see her naked now with the shrink. Perspiration broke out on his
forehead as the screen went white and a hum filled the soundtrack. It was unbearable. What was happening now?

Slowly the picture cleared. The woman and the hoodlum were in a room with little colorful picture transfers all over the wall. It was a tattoo parlor. Jason’s heart raced. What was this about? They were looking at each other intensely. The hoodlum had his shirt off. He was on a stool with his hairless chest filling the screen. The woman caressed his shoulder as another man appeared on the screen, fiddling with some sort of instrument.

A whine that sounded like a swarm of bees filled the theater. The man took the instrument and began to tattoo the shoulder of the hoodlum. The woman watched with intense excitement as the tattoo grew. The lovers looked at each other. Their feet touched. Their fingers entwined.

Finally, the mean Chinese-looking symbol in blue and black was finished, and the young man got up. Jason looked at his watch, thanking God it was over.

But it wasn’t over. Now the woman took his place on the stool. Slowly she unbuttoned her blouse and lowered it over her shoulders until her whole back was bared. The man began caressing her neck and arms, encouraging her as she had him. Her expression changed to one of sly satisfaction as the whine began again, and the tattoo needle moved toward her naked shoulder. Freeze frame.

Jesus Christ. Jason shook his head as the credits began to roll. Emma Chapman’s name came first. She was the actress Jason had come to see on the screen for the first time. He felt dizzy at the sight of his wife’s name, as if he had the kind of food poisoning that shot toxins straight to the brain. Somehow, in all the months of preparation for the film and the shooting of it, she had neglected to tell him what she did in this film and what it was about. He sat there in shock for a long time.