Tracking Time (3 page)

O
n 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 morning, 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.

More yang than yin by her mother's calculation, April had lived thirty years in a strange isolation-her thoughts focused on getting ahead and her body prepped for the cop's job. But now, her life had changed. She was in love, and the deadly yin had moved in to weaken her resolve. Night and day she dreamed of her lover's anatomy-his legs and lips. His eyes and arms. The curve of his back and butt. His chest. His soul and manhood-
duke, suave, siempre duro.
She loved him and she was afraid of loving him because of the many complications.

For starters, the prospect of a Mexican-Chinese union sent her old-style Chinese mother into a frenzy. An annoyance before Mike had come along, her mother was a nightmare now. Skinny Dragon hated everyone who wasn't Chinese. She absolutely despised all foreigner ghosts with complete democracy. Independent of her mother's bias, of course, April wasn't entirely open-minded on the subject of cultural mythologies herself.

For example, Mike had many girlfriends before he met her. Most of them had been just a few dates; but some had lasted longer and of those, several kept calling him to check if he was still off the market. Occasionally April would hear him on the phone, being nice, talking longer than a truly committed man should talk. Skinny Dragon liked to tell her that all Spanish ghosts were cheaters, and this one was sure to break her heart in the end. How could she not worry constantly about that? This morning, though, the endorphins kicked in and April's spirits soared into the stratosphere, all financial and fidelity concerns forgotten.

Forty-five minutes later, just as she was getting out of the shower, the phone rang. She grabbed a towel and ran into the bedroom to pick up. "Sergeant Woo."

"Hey, April. It's Jason. Sorry to bother you at home."

"Jason, my friend. How's that gorgeous baby of yours?" April toweled herself dry and grabbed some underwear from the top drawer of the dresser. Her bedroom was about the size of a postage stamp. From where she stood, she had a good view of the chaos in her closet-summer clothes and winter clothes, mostly slacks, jackets, and calf-length skirts-were all stuffed together in such bulging disarray that the door hadn't closed for years. She contemplated her huge wardrobe with dismay, thinking she didn't have a single thing to wear.

"She's a doll," Jason was saying.

"I'd love to see her. What is she, six months now?" April combed the tangles out of her wet hair with her fingers.

"Five and a half. Why don't you come over? Emma would love to see you. She's not shooting her new film until the beginning of November."

"Wow. Where does this one take place?" April couldn't help being impressed that she personally knew a movie star.

"Oh, here in New York, of course. Emma doesn't want to leave our daughter till she's twenty. I didn't wake you, did I?"

"No, Jason. You didn't wake me. What's up?" The alarm button had gone off at the sound of his voice. Jason was an important doctor, a busy man, who wouldn't call her just to make small talk.

"A psychoanalytic candidate I'm supervising, a young psychiatrist, didn't turn up for a meeting last night. He didn't answer his phone this morning, and he didn't call in. I'm concerned."

"Any particular reason?"

"He's just very conscientious, very obsessive. If he had a medical emergency, he wouldn't forget to call and cancel."

"Hold on." April padded into the other room for her notebook, took it out of her shoulder bag, and came back. "Okay, give me the info."

Jason gave her the pertinent information. Maslow Atkins was the man's name. His address was in her old precinct, the Two-O. The right thing to do would be to call one of the detectives from her old squad to take care of it. She told Jason she'd let him know who'd be looking into it.

"Thanks," he said. But he sounded disappointed that she wasn't taking care of it herself.

The suite of small, windowless, detective squad rooms on the second floor of Midtown North was just waking up at eight o'clock when April came in to work. No one was in the holding cell, and Lieutenant Iriarte was holding court in his office. Like every unit commander, he had his favorites. In his case they were the unlikely trio of Creaker, Skye, and Hagedorn. Skye was tall and brawny, of Irish-Native American extraction, so he said. He had a broken nose, blue marbles for eyes, and a number of scary-looking scars on his shaved head. Creaker was a short bodybuilder with a boxer's blunt face and arms so thick no jacket sleeves were wide enough to hide the muscles. Hagedorn, the computer expert and Iriarte's absolute favorite, was big and soft, and had a pale pudding of a face, and limp, discouraged-looking, mouse-brown hair. These two yangs and a yin, by April's estimation, were among the least evolved humans on earth. But they were not as bad as the detectives she'd worked with in the Two-O-always watching the surgery channel on TV. And she had to admit that Hagedorn was a first-rate hacker who'd helped her out with background checks on the computer more than once.

Iriarte was a small, good-looking Puerto Rican, a really snappy dresser with a matchstick mustache suspended exactly midway between his nose and upper lip, and strong family values. At the moment he was wearing a gray suit with a slight lavender tinge, a yellow shirt, and a black tie. He gestured through the glass wall of his office for April to join them. She did.

"Hey, Woo, what's up?" he asked, acting real nice.

"Not much. Some little stuff. It was pretty quiet last night. What about your rape victim?"

"She's still in the hospital, guy beat her up pretty bad.

Turns out she's a hooker. Her pimp thought she was dealing on the side, followed her on board, locked up her customer in the stateroom, then raped her and knocked her around. The suspect says the three of them were friends, were partying, and the other guy got out of hand. The DA's not even considering rape charges, and the customer doesn't want his wife to know, so the scum may get lucky and walk away." Iriarte shook his head. His three ugly henchmen shook theirs in unison. Disgusting what went down.

He finished his narrative and glanced down at the short stack of sixty-ones, the complaints that had come in during the night. Down to business, he called in the other five detectives on duty, went over pending cases and assigned the new ones. When he was finished with that, April returned to her office and dialed the number of Maslow Atkins, Jason's young shrink. She didn't expect him to answer, but it was worth a try.

She listened to the voice on his answering machine, soft and regretful that he wasn't available to take the call. Something about his tone struck a chord in April. She was a cop who worked on instinct, always assumed the worst. The bottom line was Jason Frank was a fancy doctor, but he was also her friend. They'd worked on many cases together, and he always helped her when she asked him.

The correct procedure was for Jason, or some relative, to fill out a missing person complaint in the precinct where the person lived. April always went by the book, but today she swerved off the straight and narrow. All she did was decide to check out this missing person herself. As a boss herself now, she often acted on the saying "Better to rumble like rocks than tinkle like jade." But no independent action in policing goes unpunished.

T
he girl who called herself Allegra Caldera did not kill herself Tuesday night after the terrible incident with Maslow Atkins. She thought about killing herself. She
wanted
to kill herself. She longed to throw herself on the subway tracks in front of an oncoming train. The pressure to end her miserable life was tremendous. When her train rolled in, she didn't throw herself in front of it. But when she got home at midnight, the urge to cut herself became unbearable.

She considered filling the tub with hot water, then cutting her wrists and watching her blood pulse out in the bath. If she drank a bottle of vodka, she'd be high and wouldn't even know she'd died. The problem was it wasn't so easy to kill herself. Especially since her mother and father were home. They went to bed early at night and didn't hear her come in, but they would definitely wake up if she turned on the water. Also she had a paper on Hawthorne due in American Lit.

Like a lush on the wagon, she brooded and longed for the knife, but in the end she kept away from that, too. She promised herself she wouldn't even look at it. She holed up in her room and took a Dex to write the paper. The paper was about people who hurt other people, who did bad things because they couldn't help it. It centered around the selfishness of men in all ages and how women were destroyed by them. She knew a lot about that and enjoyed writing it.

In the early Wednesday morning hours, she was wired and overtired. And like many, many early mornings in the last six years, she had the powerful desire to cross the hall and stick a kitchen knife into her parents' chests a dozen, maybe two dozen times. She wanted to stab them, hack away at them. She thought a lot about Lizzie Borden, what Lizzie might have been feeling a hundred years ago on that hot day in Fall River, Massachusetts, after a heavy lunch, with no air conditioning in the sweltering upstairs rooms, and the smell of garbage wafting everywhere through the house. She imagined everyone sweating in their beds, snoring-maybe as loudly as her father with the deviated septum did.

Allegra wished she had the guts to explode on the scene, like Lizzie Borden, and destroy the people who hurt her. She wished she could splatter their guts everywhere. She lusted for their blood and feared her rage. After she finished writing her scathing paper she took a few Valiums to calm down and sleep. Then in the morning she couldn't even get out of bed.

She decided not to go to her American Lit class at Hunter College in Manhattan to hand it in, after all. The novel they were studying was one of her least favorites-
The Scarlet Letter.
She hated that smug novel about adultery among the Puritans, and she loathed the grad student teaching assistant who taught it and whose comments about her work were so stupid and vicious. She already knew what the TA would say about her paper on
The Scarlet Letter.
Allegra was always in trouble with the TA, an arrogant little twit who'd graduated from Harvard and thought he was so smart.

But she was in trouble in general. Her father and mother wanted her to be a professional like them so she would always have a way of supporting herself. She knew that meant they didn't want to take care of her. They wanted her to graduate so they could be done with her, and she didn't know what the hell to do with her life. She was hopeless; she knew she could never do what they did. She didn't know what kind of job she could do.

At six-thirty, right on schedule, her mother stood by her bed with a cup of coffee in her hand. The five-foot-five, size-four, hundred-and-fifteen-pound, blond-haired, amethyst-eyed Puerto Rican beauty was trying to get her daughter's attention. As usual, she was full of questions, and her lovely face was set with anger and concern in equal measure.

"Honey, I worried about you. Where were you last night?" she complained and queried at the same time with not a hint of Spanish in her voice. She was born here, but had a brain from another planet. Allegra had complete contempt for her.

"I had a date." Allegra turned over.

"You had a date in the middle of the week?" Her mother pursed her pink lips. "What kind of date?"

"Shouldn't you be at work, Mom?"

"No." She checked the clock on Allegra's desk. "I have five minutes for my daughter. What kind of date?"

Allegra turned over again and sat up. She had a heart-shaped face, black hair, her father's dark eyes, a splattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks. Her mother and everyone else thought she was pretty, but with a drop-dead gorgeous mother like hers, how could she believe it?

"Here, take your coffee,"

Allegra knew her mother's motherly smile was a fake.

"Thanks. Just put it down," Allegra said.

Grace studied her. "You don't look very happy for a girl who's had a date. He isn't married, is he?" She set the cup down on the night table, frowning. "Drink the coffee."

Allegra hated her. Under the sheet, she pulled her nightgown down. "What's in it?"

"Just milk. Drink up."

Allegra turned her head to examine it. "Looks like cream to me," she said. She'd rather die than drink cream.

"Would I give you cream? I wouldn't give you cream. It's milk. You need it for your bones. I love you so much, sweetheart. Tell me about your date. How old is he? What's he do? Is he cute?"

"He's very cute." And he hates me, she didn't say. "Go to work, Mom."

"Not until I know who you had a date with. I never hear anything about your life anymore," she complained. "How do I know what you're up to?"

Allegra stared at the coffee and said nothing.

"You missed dinner last night. What date could be worth hurting your father?"

"What?"

"We both missed you last night, but he was really hurt."

Allegra made a disgusted noise. "He's always hurt."

"There was no date, was there? You just stayed out to avoid your father." Her pretty little mother shook her head sadly.

Allegra felt bad for her misguided mother. "You're wrong. I had a date," she said.

"Who was it?"

"None of your business."

"How can you talk to me like that?" Grace took her hand off her perfectly formed hip and left the room, shaking her head. "I know there's no man," she murmured. "You just want to hurt us, that's all."

"There is a man. There is," Allegra said softly.

As soon as her mother was gone, Allegra poured the cream-spiked coffee down the sink. Then she hung around all morning thinking about
The Scarlet Letter.
She brooded about why people did what they did. Why did Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina have to commit suicide because of their love affairs? Why fall for a jerk in the first place? Why not kill the men who hurt them? Why kill themselves? Where was the
sense
in the thing? She couldn't figure life out at all.

After her mother left for work, she lay there dreaming about Maslow Atkins. She wanted to go on CNN, on
60 Minutes,
on
Sally Jesse
or the
Springer Show
and tell the truth about her "doctor." She wanted to tell the whole world about the fraud he was and the fraud she was, too. She knew it would make a good story.