Judging Time (40 page)

Five minutes later Marvin Farrish was quiet on the other end of the phone line as Rick Liberty blasted him.

"Marvin, I always thought you were a smart man. I know you've done a lot of good in this world. You have a great TV station, good radio. You're a faithful husband and a good father. I thought your heart was in the right place. But shit, man, this stunt you pulled with me was the stupidest, the most dangerous, Goddamned dumbest cock-up I've ever seen. I don't know where your brain is. You know what happened up here last night, you fucking idiot?"

"Hey now, brother," Marvin finally joined the conversation, "that's no way to talk to a friend."

"Friend! You know what happened. Answer the fucking question!"

"Is Belle all right?" The impassive voice tensed for the first time.

"I don't know if she's all right. Because of me, she got her head kicked in by an elephant. I don't have people getting hurt because of me. This has got to stop now."

"Let me ask you again. Is Belle all right, is she conscious?" Marvin's voice became more agitated. "This is important!"

"Of course it's important. She won't call anyone to take care of "her. She won't leave me alone."

"She must like you. You sound angry, man. You sound real angry." Marvin heaved a dramatic sigh.

"Oh, I'm more than angry. I'm in a fucking mess here. You understand? You know what's happened to me? I lost the only person in the world I really trusted, and the whole world's come down on me, insisting I killed her."

"That's the way, man," Marvin said softly. "That's the American way. It's show business. Raise a man up high as he can go, make him a hero, let him feel the glory so intensely he thinks he's above it all. Then expose his weakness and cut his drooping flag so bad he can't even pee anymore."

"Is that what you're doing to me, Marvin?"

"No, man. I'm telling you how it is."

"Okay, so that's how it is. And I'm a weak son of a bitch because I couldn't handle the cameras—the questions from the police. You know, man, they pushed all my buttons, kept asking me how often I forgot myself when I had a migraine, how often I did things I wasn't aware of doing. I couldn't take it."

"Uh-huh." The unasked question hung in the air

"Fuck you, Marvin. Your little friend and I walked into a shooting last night."

"Yeah, I heard that chauffeur Jefferson got shot. I'm sorry, man."

"You're
sorry!
You sent us into it. And you know what? For some strange reason, the asshole who shot Jefferson, instead of taking off, crossed four lanes of traffic, with cops al over the place, and tried to kill Belle and me with a stiletto."

"Praise Jesus, Belle just got a kick in the head. You okay, man?"

"Oh, I got a few stab wounds in the chest."

Another great sigh traveled the phone line. "Where are you now?" Marvin asked.

Rick hesitated, then he said, "I'm on my way home. I'm ready to make a statement, Marvin." "Are you sure about that? What about your frame of mind?"

"I said I'm ready," Rick insisted.

"Okay, I'll set it up. . . . What are you going to say?"

"You'll have to wait to find that out, won't you?"

"You want to do it in the New York studio? We'll have some control over the situation there. And, Rick, I wouldn't advise going home just now. Why don't you take a little rest? Calm down. Write a speech or something. You know, think it through, work it through with Belle. She's done this before. And Rick, I'm going to risk millions of dollars and my whole future to tell you this. Because any lawyer in his right mind would never let you do anything this dangerous. But I'm your friend before I'm a businessman and I have to say it. Maybe you should consult a lawyer before you go ahead with this."

"I don't need a lawyer," Rick insisted. "I haven't done anything wrong,"

"Fine, if that's your decision. At least I asked.

Where are you? We'll pick you up, get you cleaned ___ »

up—

"I don't want to be cleaned up," Rick snapped. "This is a dirty story."

"Okay," Marvin said quickly.

"And I don't want to go to the studio."

Silence.

"Did you hear me, Marv?"

"Don't be an asshole, Rick. Think about what you're doing. You want to look like a fugitive? Come on, what do you think is going to happen after the interview?"

"I know what's going to happen. I'm going to call the cops. Those two cops who've been bugging me. I'm going to call them up and tell them what happened to me, what I saw last night—"

"What about Belle?"

"I won't bring her into it."

"You promise? You gotta promise me."

"Yeah, I promise, but that woman has a mind of her own. She's—"

"That's all right. I'll talk to her."

"Listen, Marv. I'm a witness to a shooting. Now I do have something to talk to the police about."

"This is good. This is good. The police try to finger you for your wife's murder. But instead of sticking around to take the fall, you go out and try to solve the crime yourself. But the one person who could shed light on the picture is rubbed out in front of your very eyes. Then the shooter tries to kill you. You have the stab wounds on your chest to prove it, right?"

"I'm not taking my shirt off on TV."

"Well, we'll talk about the details later. Rick, this is a big story, a very big one. Trust me, we'll do a good job, a tasteful job, and we'll nail them. We'll nail them for what they tried to do to you. . . . Rick, you with me on this?"

"We still don't know who killed Merrill."

"Yeah, but we can get the police for what they did to you. I like it. I'll set it up. Great, we'll set it up for the seven o'clock news. I'll have a car pick you up at five. Now, put Belle on the phone. I want to talk to her."

43

T
he sky was still clear, though the light was fading fast at four-thirty when April illegally parked her white Chrysler Le Baron in front of a fire hydrant fifty yards from the 5th Precinct on Elizabeth Street. She glanced at her watch, aware that she had to check in with Mike soon. When they'd parted earlier, he'd taken Merrill Liberty's minkcoat over to Ducci in the lab. They probably knew by now if they had the piece of physical evidence they needed to make a case. She hoped things were finally coming to a head.

For a few seconds she forced herself to linger in the driver's seat while Skinny Dragon chattered excitedly in Chinese. April longed to get away from her mother, to jump out of the car and pay a visit to the 5th Precinct, a landmark building in the middle of renovation. She wished she could check out the ceiling in the detective squad room, see if it is still leaked. See if her old boss was still there, or if he'd retired as he'd been threatening to do for the last ten years. She could use the phone to return Jason Frank's call. He'd told her he'd be home about now with some new thoughts about the murder weapon. She wondered how he'd take being proven wrong in a diagnosis.

April was distracted by her mother's shrill excitement over the funeral. She herself was not looking forward to the viewing of Dai's body in a funeral home fitted out to look like the Buddhist temple from hell. Lots of red everywhere, folding chairs, clouds of incense, an altar dazzlingly bright to scare off any evil spirit that might want to come in. And the body strategically placed in front of the altar, face serene for the voyage and dressed in best clothes, with stacks of fake (red) paper money and ritual good-luck food gifts in shopping bags scattered around as sacrifices. But duty demanded that she attend.

Skinny was rattling on about the virtues of the dead man. Sai considered Uncle Dai a great man, a pillar of the community. Always good to his friends. Dai had helped April's father when he first came to America. Dai had come first, in the early fifties, and had never paid a single cent in taxes. A truly great man, not afraid of anything. This last was a snide reference to April's high level of honesty that baffled and annoyed her parents. Sai believed that the gods had played her a cruel trick at April's birth and given her the wrong baby. April worked in a corrupt police department, paid taxes for no reason, ran around all night with Spanish man, didn't honor the ten thousand years of Han dynasty ancestors. Or drive her mother where she wanted
when
she wanted. Today Sai had had a lot to say about the police department and the personal inconvenience she was forced to suffer because of it. She almost went so far as to blame the police commissioner himself for causing the death of her old friend. But she stopped short of
that
in case the gods were listening and heard the insult to April's boss.

It was fully dark now. Sai hauled herself out of the car and breathed the air of home. She turned to look April over as if she were a child making an important appearance at a grown-ups' party, then marched down Elizabeth Street, carrying her two shopping bags of offerings. They passed the apothecary she liked that sold nasty powders of ground insects and plants and bones of mythical animals guaranteed to cure any ifl-ness known to man. The rank-smelling store April had visited only a few days ago would still be open when they came out.

Near the bottom of the hill, they turned into the funeral parlor. As April had predicted, the room was cloudy with incense. On one wall, the large cross with a vivid depiction of Jesus Christ's suffering was not illuminated. Nor was the small, kneeling statue of Mary praying at his feet. Sometimes it was a mixed crowd and both Christian and Buddhist rituals had to be observed. Not today. Chinese music played softly in the background. A crowd of some twenty, mostly old people, had drawn the chairs away from the center . to better display the coffin—best quality, white with much brass, look like gold. The people sat in two lines on either side of the coffin, talking, and in some cases, screaming at each other.

The room became silent when Sai and April Woo entered. Sai did not greet anyone. Silently, she staggered (the better to exhibit her grief) over to the coffin. She carefully examined the features of the corpse, as if to make sure it was really he. And then she burst into tears, wailing loudly. Three people held out boxes of Kleenex tissues. Ostentatiously she grabbed a handful and blew her nose. Then wept some more. April stood beside her, exactly as she had all those times in her childhood when her mother had dragged her along to funerals to show respect. She felt like a complete fool. Suddenly her mother whispered, "Look good, much makeup." April thought she was going to be all right.

Then, out of the corner of her mother's mouth came the old command, same as it used to be when April was four or five. "Cly,
ni,"
she demanded.

April glanced at the crowd of old people in their best clothes. They were watchful, silent, waiting for her. She knew the only way she was going to get out of there and get down to the prosecutor's office in a building a few blocks south was to make the correct display and save her mother's face. April let all the frustrations of the case wash over her. Her problems with Iriarte and Rosa Washington, Dean Kiang, and Mike's butterfly kiss that she couldn't help thinking about all night. Lumping it all together she managed to summon a tear. Then an actual sob erupted from deep in her throat. She wanted love, sex, a high rank in the department, and a happy life. Why was it so hard to get those things that were supposed to be within the reach of every American? Tears streamed down her cheeks. She hiccuped. Skinny jabbed her hard in the side with an elbow.
Don't go overboard and show me up.

But the crowd was happy. An approving murmur rose from the mourners as more boxes of tissues appeared. A woman April had known from the cradle, Auntie May Yi, jumped up to congratulate Skinny on her obedient and loving daughter, the cop who could cry. Then everybody started speaking at once, and April's beeper went off, letting everyone know how important April Woo was to the safety of every citizen in New York.

44

T
he computers in the detective squad of Midtown

North were a big step up from the typewriters of years past, but the unit still didn't have a modem. Without a modem Hagedorn couldn't go on-line and reach deep into the system to tease out the secrets of the phone numbers behind the entry codes. Hagedorn had to move downstairs to the main precinct computer room, where Mark Salley, the lean, anal-retentive sergeant who manned it, was not pleased to see him.

"Hey, wait just a little second. What do you think you're doing here?" Salley demanded when Hagedorn marched into his computer room, heavily laden with two Styrofoam cups of coffee, light on the milk, a fistful of sugar packets, and a six-pack of cola.

Hagedorn had come downstairs to the main floor of the precinct, trotted quickly past the open door of the precinct commander's office, where Bjork Johnson, the brand-new commander, was at his desk talking into the phone with some urgency.

"Nobody told you I got a priority assignment here?" Hagedorn asked, his watery eyes opening wide with surprise.

Salley sneered. "I mean that shit there." The sergeant pointed to the drink supply.

"Gotta have sustenance." Hagedorn held the cans by one finger hooked through the plastic harness. He rattled them for emphasis.

"No, no. Not in here, not with my equipment, you don't." Salley shook his head and gave a little whistle. "Outta here."

Hagedorn whined. "Oh, come on. I can't think without my caffeine."

"I don't give a fuck." Salley gave Hagedorn his back.

"What's going on here, Sergeant?" lriarte trotted into the room, pushing Hagedorn aside.

At the sound of Iriarte's voice, Salley made an quick about-face. "Well, hello, Lieutenant, how ya doin'."