Loving Time (5 page)

For a few seconds, she stood on the sidewalk jingling the car keys. It was only the first of November, but already the air was cold and damp, just slightly on the pungent side. Maybe they’d have another bad winter.

Walking the Chinatown beat for four years, April used to gauge the changing seasons by the intensity of the garbage smell as it sat on the sidewalks waiting for pickup. Last winter there had been no less than eighteen snowstorms in New York. The city had been paralyzed again and again as mountains of snow and garbage cut off access from the sidewalks to the frozen streets. Yet the air had smelled sweet and fresh.

Most of the year that April had been in the Two-O, she had traveled around in an unmarked car working cases with Sergeant Sanchez even though there was no such thing as partners in detective squads. He called their relationship “close supervision.”

Close supervision of one cop over another could have several meanings, April knew. It could mean her work wasn’t up to standard and needed watching. Which it didn’t. It could mean Mike was her rabbi, showing her the ropes. Which he thought he was. Or it could mean he was just constantly hitting on her. Which he also was.

April hadn’t liked the arrangement. She didn’t like being second-guessed or watched, didn’t like being close to anyone or involved. Cops who were too involved made mistakes in the field. They got hurt. Mike had jumped in front of her gun once to save her life. She could have accidentally shot him. It still upset her to think about it. He knew as well as she did that involvement could mess up judgment, could be lethal. And still he worked pretty hard at involving her.

“I’m nostalgic already,” she muttered, buttoning her jacket.

Mike shot her a glance. “You mean that?”

“Well, it’s not so bad here. Bad would be Brooklyn. Staten Island. Lots of things worse than being here.”

They found the car in the police lot in a tight spot, squeezed inside carefully, and banged the doors shut at the same time.

“Why didn’t you just get the pay, then?” he demanded.

“You know why.” April slammed the car into reverse and made a number of tight maneuvers that almost resulted in disaster for two blue-and-whites and the Commander’s navy Ford Taurus.

“Hey, chill out. It’s not the end of the world.”

“I’m fine.”

“Yeah, then why wreck the Captain’s car?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I made a mistake.” It was the first time April had said it, maybe even the first time she had thought it. But now that the truth was out, it hit her hard. “I liked being a detective. I mean I
really
liked it.”

She pulled out into the street and jerked to a halt, narrowly missing a speeding bicycle messenger. “Sorry,” she muttered as Mike’s lowered head hit the dashboard.

“Get out. I’m driving,” he snapped.

“I’m sorry.” April leaned over solicitously. “Are you all right?”

“No, you nearly killed that kid. Get out.” Mike’s Zapata mustache quivered with outrage as he smoothed back his fine head of hair with both hands, checking his profile in the mirror.

“I didn’t even get close to him,” April protested. “Get off my case.”

She’d said it a thousand times.
Back off. Leave me alone
. What did she want with a vain, sweet-smelling, overheated, hairy, smiling non-Chinese person who would not stop calling her “darling” in Spanish no matter who was around to hear him? She wasn’t his darling.

“Fine.” Now he probed a nonexistent bruise on his forehead. “Fine. You fucked up, and you want me to stay off the case. Fine, I’ll stay off the case.”

“
I
fucked up? I made the list, didn’t I? You know how many good people didn’t make the list?”

April pulled out into the street carefully and stopped on Columbus at the red light.

“Fine,” Mike said a fourth time. “You wanted the rank more than the pay. You wanted a command of your own some day. Huh? Was that it? Maybe you like me so much you wanted to get away before you did something your
mother
wouldn’t approve of. How about that?”

“Okay, you win. You can drive.” April unfastened her seat belt and flung open the door.

“Get back in here. I don’t want to drive. It’s only two fucking blocks.”

“Damn,” April muttered, slapping her seat belt back on. Yes, yes, and yes. She’d wanted the rank. A lot of cops didn’t give a damn. They got promoted to detective and made it to first grade. They got a lieutenant’s pay and were happy without the rank. But she wanted the rank. The catch-22 was this: To get the rank you had to take the test. If you were a detective and scored high enough to make sergeant, you lost your job as detective because each advancement in rank meant
going back into uniform and out on the streets again as a supervisor.

So, by forcing herself to study for and finally take the sergeant’s test, she’d put herself in the position of possibly losing her status as a detective, her accrued days off, and a lot of other things. There was no telling where she’d end up and how long it would take her to get back into the detective bureau. If ever.

So why had she done it, when she already had sergeant’s pay? She did it because only after you got to the rank of captain could you be promoted further without taking any more tests. Since the sergeant and lieutenant and captain tests were given only when the ranks got thin, you could hit them right or not. Five years ago, when the last sergeant’s test had been given, she had been too green to score well. Mike had taken his sergeant’s test when he was twenty-nine. He was already a sergeant when he went into the detective squad. Last time he had the chance, Mike passed on taking the lieutenant’s test because he already had the pay and liked his job. If he had another opportunity now, he’d probably take it. They were silent for two blocks. April double-parked on Columbus. She tossed the car keys at Mike before getting out.

Raymond Cowles occupied an apartment on the fifth floor of the building located on the corner of Seventy-ninth Street and Columbus Avenue. On the ground floor was Mirella’s, one of the many popular, pricey restaurants in the neighborhood that the officers from the Two-O never patronized.

The first thing April did was look up toward the fifth floor. The building faced the park at the back of the Museum of Natural History. The park looked gloomy now in the gray autumn light, with the few remaining leaves on the trees shriveled and brown.

The doorman was a small, skinny man with a uniform that bagged out all around him. He held a handkerchief up to his runny nose and began protesting as soon as Mike and April were in the lobby.

“Well, I couldn’t go up and open the door just because she asked me to. I don’t have the key, now, do I? What did she want me to do, break down the door?”

April produced her badge.

“Yeah, yeah. I know who you are. You were in that other case. A couple of months ago. The salesgirl, right …?”

April made a vague movement with her head.

“I thought I remembered your face. You came around asking—”

“Does the super have a key to the Cowles apartment?” Mike interrupted impatiently.

The doorman turned to him with a frown. “No, not everybody wants to give you their keys. Can’t make ‘em if they don’t want to, can you?” He pushed the button to summon the elevator. The door slid open. “Five E, end of the hall on the right. Probably just sleeping off a drunk.”

“Let’s hope so,” April murmured.

A
ll morning Bobbie Boudreau had trouble concentrating on the heavy polishing machine that could so easily spin out of control and hurt someone bad. Something about what Brian had said in the French Quarter last night pissed him off. Brian had said the old Mick had told him to kick Bobbie out before he made any more trouble. Where did the old shit get the idea that he made trouble?
He
didn’t make trouble.

All he wanted, all he’d ever wanted in his whole life was to be treated with simple justice. Where was that justice? It pissed Bobbie off thinking about it. So he punched someone’s lights out in a bar a few times. So he went to the bitch’s office and took a few things out of her desk. So fucking what? That wasn’t trouble.

Trouble was his asshole of a father beating the shit out of him when he was too little to fight back, then shooting every single one of Bobbie’s precious chickens—the business that was going to bring electricity and a telephone and a TV to the house and make them rich. Trouble was that crazed drunk running inside for his fucking hunting rifle, the only thing in the house worth owning. Bobbie could still see his raging bull of a father, still big even with the sickness, still powerful as God, as he stumbled out into the yard shooting at the fifty screeching hens that charged in all directions trying to get away, only to collapse in bloody heaps of feathers. The fit didn’t let up all the times the old man had to keep reloading to get them all. He could hardly stand up, but that didn’t stop him from shooting at everything in sight, shrieking at Bobbie all the time. Something like “You little shit, you shit-eating dreamer! I’ll kill you, too.”

The cancer and a few other things finally took the bastard out soon after Bobbie decided to join the Army. Bobbie could pinpoint the day his father started spitting blood to the day
Bobbie made up his mind to believe the recruiter who came to his school. That soft-voiced black Major told him personally the Army was the only place in the country a black man could get a fair shake.

“Only in the service is everybody—and I mean
everybody
—treated the same.”

The Major personally offered Bobbie Boudreau, who had never in his life owned a new pair of pants, pay every month no matter what, a place to live, a uniform that would give him respect and make him look good.

“You want to look good, boy, don’t you? You want to develop your abilities? Get an education and have a career?”

You gonna believe this bull? Boy?

The man had to be kidding him. A new pair of pants. A jacket, boots that laced up above the ankles. A career for him? The blood in Bobbie’s family had been so mixed up for so many generations that by the time he was born, the seventh of ten calico children, no one even knew anymore what aunt, what uncle, what granpappy, or granmammy came from which racial and ethnic background. He had black, Indian, French blood. You name it. He wasn’t anything
specific
, and that was the problem that bothered him most growing up. Who did he get to be? Wasn’t nobody like him either inside or out.

He was a strange mixture of colors, his skin freckled, his hair a reddish frizz, his eyes the only ones in the family that were a mild-seeming washed-out blue. Big, gawky, shy to the point of paralysis, Bobbie Boudreau was called
nigger
by the white kids he knew,
white
by the black kids, and
trash
by the Creoles. There wasn’t a single place he fit in.

Sure he wanted to look good, be treated like a man. He wanted to look every bit as good as that black Major. A light-skinned black, but not as light as he. He wanted to sound like him, too. Be him, in fact. If that guy could get ahead, why not Bobbie?

Every time he saw that tape recorder in the bitch’s drawer, Bobbie was reminded of the hard road he’d traveled, how
desperately he’d tried to get past it all, and the nowhere he’d gotten. He’d started at the top and one asshole after another had shot him down just like those chickens. He’d had perfect fitness ratings in his military training. Perfect. He knew he wanted to be a medic. He had good hands, followed orders well. He got the highest ratings in his MASH training unit.

Then before ’Nam
one
tiny mistake. During a surgical procedure when he was assistant to the surgical nurse, Colonel Stasch asked for a hemostat. Bobbie took one from the green tray, handed it to the nurse, who handed it to the surgeon. Colonel Stasch was from the Midwest somewhere. He was known as the Hitler of surgeons, made all the nurses cry.

“It’s the wrong size.” Colonel Stasch threw the hemostat across the operating room and glared at Bobbie—not the nurse who’d handed him the wrong thing.

He snarled at
Bobbie
, “What’s the matter with you? Yes,
you
, fuzzball. Are you a moron? Can’t you speak English? Answer the question. Can’t——you——speak——English?”

Bobbie almost choked trying to get the words out. “Yezzuh, ah trah,” he’d murmured, head down so the bastard couldn’t see the hot blood burning behind his pale blue eyes.

“Trah
, what the fuck is that? You come from some kind of swamp, boy?”

The patient lay on the operating table, all covered up with green sheets except for the slit in his gut nearly six inches long, with a drain stuck in it and the nurse swabbing away at the oozing blood with sponge after sponge while the procedure was delayed. Bobbie raised his eyes as far as the instrument tray. A small streak of blood was visible on the scalpel Colonel Stasch had used to make the incision. It lay on the green cloth alongside several others. “You’re not worth shit, boy. We should send you back to where you came from.”

Bobbie’s own blood suddenly blurred his vision. He was bigger than the skinny doctor, and he had quicker hands. He could grab the scalpel and slit the bastard’s throat before anyone knew what happened. He ached to do it, could see it
all. But even as he saw himself kill the bastard, he made a decision. He would not slit the asshole’s throat. He would find other ways to cope. He’d let Justice wait awhile.

Ever since school Bobbie Boudreau had been ashamed of the way he talked. In the Army, he was teased about the way he talked. He’d already begun listening very carefully to the way the doctors he admired talked. It was after the incident with Colonel Stasch that he bought a tape recorder and started practicing simple words. Hello. Good-bye. How are you? Yes, sir. Right away,
sir
.

Last night he’d ached to pick up the tape recorder in the bitch’s desk and say something into it.

“Hello, bitch. I’m here.”

No, better would be, “Hello, bitch, count the days.” He could say in the tape recorder, “You’re dead.”