The Silent Bride (41 page)

"He doesn't have a license. I didn't want him to get in trouble." Clio spoke with a flat voice, then turned around to look at Mike. He was standing behind her by the front door, letting April talk. "He wouldn't hurt anybody, I know."

"Did you know he had a gun?"

"He doesn't have a gun," she said scornfully. "Where would he get a gun?"

April didn't answer. "Did he ever talk about any of the young women whose gowns he worked on?"

"He talks all the dme. He has some crazy ideas," she said softly.

"What crazy ideas?"

"I don't know. I don't listen." She started rocking back and forth with the dog. "And he doesn't come home sometimes. It scares me."

"What scares you, Mrs. Alma?"

"The men he meets. He's doesn't understand anything about bad people."

April glanced at Mike. "What do you mean?"

"He's too trusting. He could get hurt."

"Does he have any particular friends he visits?" April asked. Maybe they could find him with a friend.

"Someone in a bar gives him money...." Clio lifted her shoulders. "I told him to stay away from men who offer him money. He doesn't listen."

"What kind of crazy things does he say about brides?" April asked, back on the brides.

Relieved to be off the subject of Kim's friends, Cho said, "He talks about angels. He loves angels," she said, smiling a little.

"Angels?" Click. April got a sick feeling. Hadn't Ching said something about an angel being embroidered in her gown?

"Yes, like that show on TV. He thinks when people die they become happy angels, like on TV."

Oh, shit!
Ching a happy angel. April glanced at Mike. She needed to call the lab and check something about Prudence's gown. Tovah's. Andrea Straka's. Ching's. Her stomach churned.

"Did you ever hear him mention Tovah Schoen-feld?" April asked, just wanting to get this straight.

"I don't listen."

"How about Prudence Hay?"

"I told you. I don't know."

"Andrea Straka."

"Oh, yes, Andrea. That girl who died in the subway. He was very sad about that. Something's wrong with the lawn mower," Clio said suddenly.

"What's wrong with the lawn mower?" April asked, still horrified by that angel in Ching's wedding gown. Had Tang requested it, or was this Kim acting on his own? She didn't remember what Ching had told her.

"I don't know. Maybe somebody came in the gate and did something to it."

Mike went outside to take a look. Clio had a small patches of lawn in the front and back. The lawn mower was chained to the fence in the back.

April stayed in the living room. Her heart thudding over Ching. "What about Tang Ling?" she asked. "Do she and Kim get along?"

Clio's cat eyes narrowed down to slivers. "She's a bad woman/' she said. "Bad for Kim. You looking for him, he's probably hiding under her skirt."

"Thanks. Here's my card. If you get scared you can call me anytime."

April found Mike in the back puzzling over the small motor in the lawn mower. It looked all right to April until he stood up and brushed off his hand. Then she realized that Clio was right. Something was wrong with it. The muffler had been removed.

Fifty-nine

A
pril was in a panic as they hurried back into Manhattan from Queens. Not since the attack on the World Trade Center had murder been something that could only happen to someone else. After thousands of people died in just a few minutes, everybody in New York felt close to death. For April, every murder since was personal. But the killings of Tang's brides brought death too close, way too close to home.

Clio's knowledge of Andrea Straka, Kim's driving the car for which he didn't have a license to Tovah's wedding. The missing guns still out there. The presence in Kim's house of the comic book for crooks that explained the items in his basement—the PVC pipe, the bottle caps, copper sponges, tennis balls, copper screen, metal washers, rubber stoppers. The muffler from the lawn mower. Kim had been making his own crude silencers from crude household materials to take the sonic boom of a heavy load down to subsonic whimper. Kim's past reliance on Tang when he was in trouble. The angel on Ching's gown. Ching's plan to have dinner with Tang that night. It was coming together way too close to her.

Ching had left her cell phone home. She'd already left work. April wanted her safe and sound, somewhere far away from Tang. Her heart hammered in her chest. Her stomach churned. Why had Kim marked Ching? She wasn't a client of Wendy's or Louis's. She was just a girl, a plain girl! And the closest thing April had to a sister. It didn't matter why.

Her cell phone rang. She grabbed it.
Private
came up on caller ID. "Sergeant Woo."

"Where are you?" came the irritated voice of her boss.

"Lieutenant, thank God. Do you have something for me?"

"What's up with this guy Kim Simone?"

It was amazing from how many places in Queens you could see the skyline of Manhattan. You could be on the road, out in the borough, everything all quiet and low, on a highway or a back street, and all of a sudden you'd go up a little rise and there it was, Citicorp, Empire State Building, and everything in between, all spread out. The towers were gone, but New York was still there. At night the halo of lights still brightened the dark sky. It happened then just as the sky was fading to navy. The city loomed up ahead, and she was scared.

"We think he's the one," she said faintly. "What do you have?"

"Guy has a sheet. Joined a cruise ship as a steward some five years back. Jumped off at Cancun three and a half years ago. He was picked up on a local bus in El Paso, soliciting. Spent two months in an INS camp. His now wife, Clio Alma, helped him out with a lawyer."

The phone crackled for a moment as they hit a dead zone.

"April?"

"Okay now?"

"Yeah." He went on. "Simone's position at his deportation hearing was that he'd be in danger in the Philippines if he returned."

"Uh-huh, any particular danger?"

"His mother was denounced as a witch and stoned to death by neighbors when he was twelve. He and his sister were badly beaten and left for dead."

"True story?" April asked. Nothing surprised her anymore, but this was a new one. Witches now.

"True story."

"What about the sister?"

"She married a general or something. They had a dispute over a girlfriend. He shot her."

"Oh, God."

"There's more. Clio Alma paid his fine, and the two got married soon after he arrived in New York. And get this. He's been arrested several times since then."

"Let me guess," April said.

"You don't have to guess. I'm going to tell you. Indecent exposure, soliciting. And right here in Midtown North."

"No kidding. Does he have a favorite spot?"

"Forty-second Street, theater row, near the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. He's a repeater, so I've got people out there now."

"Any drug angle?"

"No, no, this guy is strictly sex, and no history of violence that we know of until now."

"What about the Straka case?"

"Okay. That occurred in the Nineteenth. At the

Hunter College subway station. Happened during rush hour, around seventeen hundred. Very crowded platform. A lot of people left right away."

It was the closest subway stop to Tang's shop. Another piece.

"You owe me," Iriarte growled.

"Yes, sir, I always owe you. One more question. How did Simone get his job at Tang Ling's?"

"Your florist met his bail twice. My guess is he and Kim first met up in the bars, or on the street. The florist definitely had him working in the shop for a while. After a dispute, he set Kim up with Tang because Kim knew how to sew. I'm going out now, and I'm staying out until we get him. I don't want him on my turf."

"Yes, sir. Be careful. He's A and D."

"Okay, are you with Sanchez?"

"Yes. We're coming in from Kim's home."

"You got someone watching out there?" he asked as if they were total dummies and he the one in charge.

"Yes, sir. Two."

"See you, then," were his last words.

Monday evening the traffic was still heavy getting onto the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. April had plenty of time to tell Mike Kim's story. After she finished, he smacked the wheel angrily.

"We had him all along," Mike said. "We had his ear."

"A little ear, perfect seashell. I noticed it right away in the wedding photo, but I didn't want to jump on it until we knew it was him."

"Shit. We had him on day one. We could have put

this together in twenty-four if everyone around him hadn't covered for him. Wendy, Louis. His wife."

"They made it hard," April agreed.

"So he had a chance to kill somebody else. And still Wendy didn't say anything." He was furious.

"It was her gun," April said slowly. "She's a thief. She can't restrain herself. It's a sickness. That first day I questioned her I hit her with her weakness. She didn't want to get branded as a thief so she drove up to the Vineyard to get some of the stuff out of her apartment. But she also wanted to check out her guns. She wasn't absolutely certain one of her crew hadn't taken one. Remember when I asked her how many guns she had? She said she didn't know. She said they'd been stolen years ago. But after Prudence was killed, she knew she couldn't wiggle out. She just hit the bottle. Whether or not she wanted to die only she can say."

Traffic slowed almost to a stop on the bridge, and Mike hit the siren to open it up. "Bleeding to death like that is a hell of a way to die," he muttered.

"Maybe she didn't know what was happening." April didn't want to think about Wendy's lethal binge while they were on Martha's Vineyard.

"Yeah, Prudence Hay went that way, too. Wendy had that on her conscience." April's thoughts shifted to another member of the team, Louis the Sun King, not exactly an expert in pain management. He'd been Kim's first friend—after Kim had married Clio for citizenship. Maybe he was the man Clio was talking about, still Kim's special friend. Someone should check.

Mike hit the siren again, more insistently this time, and a little frantic maneuvering of the cars around them got them moving toward the off-ramp.

April punched some numbers in her phone. Mike glanced over at her.

"Who are you calling?"

"Tang. I'm worried about Ching."

"Why?"

"Mike. This thing has just been bothering me all day. Why is Kim doing this? How does he choose the girls? And then I realized Louis and Wendy have nothing to do with it. It's about the girls and their dresses. He's turning the girls into angels, dressing them in their white dresses, and marrying them to God so they don't have to marry men."

Mike whistled. "But what does Ching have to do with it?"

"Ching told me Saturday that Tang put an angel on her gown. But she must have been mistaken. My guess is that Kim did it on his own."

Sixty

A
fter leaving the bar, Kim went back to the Dumpster on Fiftieth Street. Seeing Tang on TV offering so much money for the chance to punish him made him feel terrible. He was wandering around, dazed and wounded. When he got back to the Dumpster, there were policemen around it, and he left right away.