Loving Time (39 page)

“Just wrapping for the day.” Mike checked his watch.

“Did you find that file on the boy nurse?”

“I told you it wasn’t here,” April said.

“Bastard must have taken it.”

“Yeah,” April muttered. Or someone else had. Gunn had sworn Dickey never mentioned Boudreau. She tapped her fingers on the files. Time to go.

“There’s a neat coffee bar over on Broadway. Let’s go there and make a plan of action,” Daveys said. It was not an invitation.

Mike glanced at April. “We’re still investigating. We’re not ready for action yet.” He pushed a few buttons to shut down the computer.

“All the same, it’s time to powwow.”

“You going to tell us something we don’t know, Daveys?”

“Many things, many things, children. This way to truth and justice.” Turning around, Daveys bumped into Maria Elena, who was charging through the doorway.

“Oops, sorry.” She backed her breasts out of Daveys’s chest with a big smile.

“All yours, sweetheart. You can lock up now.” Daveys swept by without even a peek at what he was missing.

S
unday, November 14, dawned clear and bright. Maria Sanchez awoke deeply worried about what the day would bring. For two Sundays in a row Diego Alambra had walked home from church with her, and she was disturbed because she didn’t know what such a handsome man could want from an old woman like her. She also worried because Señor Diego Alambra was something of a mystery. He had a Spanish name but spoke Italian.

The mysterious Diego had started coming to her church some months before, and she could not help noticing him. He was a handsome man with hair still mostly black, like hers. Her hair was pulled straight back into a low roll at the base of her neck. His was swept up in a high curling wave above his forehead and cascaded gracefully down the back of his head to the top of his shirt collar. His mustache lay like a twig between his lips and sloping nose. He had full lips over slightly protruding teeth, a long face out of which deeply serious eyes watched her while she prayed. Sometimes his eyes were sad, sometimes thoughtful; always they seemed intelligent. He moved closer to where she sat in the very front so the priest would always be sure to see that she was there. He moved slowly, pew by pew, as the weeks passed, perhaps drawn to her by the intensity of her prayers.

Diego Alambra began by nodding at her, then bowing. And when he finally spoke, he called her “
la bella signora
.”

Maria Sanchez was an old woman, nearly fifty-five, and for a long, long time she had been oppressed with a deep sadness that made her feel closer to a hundred. This sudden attention from a handsome man when she had not expected ever to be noticed again made it not seem proper to leave the apartment without a touch of powder on her nose, a touch of color on her round, dusky cheeks.

She was deeply disappointed when Diego finally spoke to
her and his words came out Italian. Maria Sanchez did not think highly of the Italian men in the neighborhood, so she ignored him, caressed the plastic beads of her rosary, looking severe, as the organ music swelled and the Mass ended.

“
Bella signora, sì, sì”
He nodded vigorously and told her his name. “
Mi chiamo Diego Alambra, e Lei, cara signora?

What? The name made no sense.

Her lips curved up without her permission. A giggle as old as time rose from the deep well of memory and slipped out. “He, he.” She laughed.

Then came Father Altavoce’s command for the Kiss of Peace and suddenly, without her knowing how it happened, Diego Alambra had taken her hand and was holding it in both of his, gazing into her eyes so deeply it gave her a stomachache.

“
Sì, sì. Molto bella
.” This Italian who called himself Diego had to be over fifty himself but certainly had a young man’s enthusiasm for the single idea.

It was a small opening, but he bent so low over her hand, the gesture could not fail to be noticed elsewhere in the church. Maria Sanchez’s faded flower of a mouth, unrenewed for many years by lipstick or the hope of ever tasting a man again, smiled in spite of itself.

“Español?”
she ventured tremulously.

“
E
.” He shrugged eloquently.

She had to turn the other way to move toward the exit. She felt a little stunned by the encounter and was glad she did not see him again on the street. Then later, when she was home, she worried that she had somehow done something wrong but wasn’t sure what.

This fear of being wrong was not a new feeling for Maria. For a long time she had been worried about doing things without meaning to and being punished for it. She was deeply fearful that she might have grievously sinned in the past, that she was continuing to sin even now, and the constant accumulation of those unknown sins (for which she could never atone) was the reason for her past suffering, her present suffering,
and quite possibly a future of suffering that would never end.

This was the deepest and most tightly held of her concerns. Maria did not know the nature of her sins but believed only sins committed by her could be responsible for her present condition, which was a sadness that went beyond reason. She was familiar with loss. She had lost her mother and father when she was very young, had lost two sons in infancy before she was twenty. Mysteriously, she could not have more children after Mike. She and Marco did not question that. They had their sorrows, but they had a long life together, nearly thirty-four years. She did not believe she deserved more.

It was the loss of life within life that defeated her. Her son who ran around all night, worked in places that worried her. Married a woman who was cursed with so many troubles she couldn’t go out, couldn’t shop or cook, just sat by the window and cried all day until finally one day her brother came and took her away. Inexplicably, Mike’s wife, Maria, had gone back to the pitiful, broken-down house in the border town she had come from.

After that Mike fell even further away from his beliefs. He fell away from her and his father. He went back to his old ways, didn’t call them and didn’t come home. Maria would never forget the night her son came home—how surprised she was to see him, how he took her arm by the front door of the apartment and led her back into the room. “
Papi
is dead,” he had told her. “He had a heart attack and died at the restaurant.” He took Maria in his arms and held her so tight, she could feel the gun tearing at the armhole of his jacket.

Marco had died while making a crab quesadilla. He had not, as she had always feared, been assaulted on the subway coming home late at night from Manhattan. He had not been run over by a cab or a bus or a truck. All his life Marco had been a quiet man, so quiet Maria had often felt alone when she was with him. But when he was gone, it felt as if he’d taken her spirit with him. She did not understand how such a thing
could happen. They had not talked together very much through all those years. But with Marco she had never felt constricted. Living with her son, she was tied in many knots.

This Sunday morning it had become cold again. Mike was still asleep in his room. The powder was on her nose. Rouge tinted her cheeks. Maria was ready to go to church. As she sipped her thick sweet coffee early in the morning, she studied the frosted dead grass on the playing fields in Van Cortlandt Park and worried about Diego Alambra. What if he walked with her a third time, would politeness require her to ask him in? What would she do about her son? What did she want?

She licked up the last and most syrupy drop, then washed the cup and looked around. The kitchen was perfectly neat. There was coffee in the pot for her son. As she closed the door of the apartment, her guilty wish was that Mike would wake up and go someplace far away. Her prayer was answered. As soon as he heard the door close, Mike threw the covers off, shivered, and headed for the shower.

A
t nine
A.M
. Mike Sanchez met Judy Chen in her family’s deserted real estate offices in Astoria, Queens.

“Where’s April?” she asked when he arrived alone.

“Oh, she had things to do.”

Judy handed over the list of apartments she had to show him. She was a smaller woman than April, with a flat chest, wide hips, and curly hair. She looked him over appraisingly as he studied the listings at her desk in the window of Chen Realty, which never opened until noon on Sundays.

He looked at the last column first, frowning over what seemed to be very high rents.

“What’s the story with you two?” Judy asked.

He didn’t answer, had moved on to WBF, EIK, RIV VU, UTL INC, and thirty other abbreviations that weren’t familiar to him.

“You wear that gun even off-duty?”

“Yeah.” His eyes were focused on the information on the sheet. It didn’t exactly tell him the things he wanted to know, like which one of these places April would like. He was a detective, but he didn’t know what April liked, only knew she had class. Her Chrysler Le Baron was classy. Her clothes. So was the way she moved around, elegant, not flashy. He wanted a place where a classy woman would feel comfortable.

“You always wear it?”

“The gun? Yeah, I do.”

“April doesn’t wear hers.” Judy leaned over, breathing in Mike’s strong, sweet scent.

“Yeah, she does.”

“You sure?”

Mike looked up, finally distracted. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

“So what’s the story with you two?”

He gathered some of the ends of his mustache into his
mouth and sucked on them without being aware of it, then shook his head as if he weren’t sure himself. It used to be that he just reached out for whatever female attracted him at the moment and didn’t think about it too much. He might even have reached out to flat-chested Judy Chen if the mood hit him just right.

He never saw any reason to get personal. They wanted it. He wanted it. The idea was to satisfy the urges without getting attached or diseased. He’d always been careful about both those things. Then he got personal with Maria and they got married. Look what that led to.

After that eight-year disaster for which Mike felt deeply hurt and responsible, he developed into a first-rate detective and lost interest in the opposite sex. In his free time he hung out in bars, drinking and smoking and suppressing a profound rage. Then a year or so ago nature kicked in again. He got back to liking the easy-smiling, earthy ones with the big
chichis
who spread their legs without asking a lot of questions.

He got interested in April Woo only because she was sitting there beside him every day, not looking in his direction, not interested at all. It pissed him off and injured his healing ego. She just kept her head down and did her work, wouldn’t let any man near her. He was intrigued, was impressed when she thought of things he hadn’t thought of. When the other guys teased her, he started stepping in.

April Woo had sneaked up on him. He’d never met a female who said she didn’t play around and meant it for more than a week—two weeks max. April had him
pendiente
for months. She meant what she said. She didn’t fool around, wasn’t going to sleep with someone she worked with. It was sad.

“What’d
she
say about the two of us?” Mike said finally.

Judy had a round eager face, a lot of powdered shadow around her eyes. Her curly bangs grazed the penciled-in eyebrows. She smiled slyly. “She said not to mess with you.”

Mike sat back with a pleased laugh. “Oh, yeah? You likely to do that?”

“Of course not. I don’t date my clients.” Judy sulked a bit, pulling on her curly hair. The gesture made him think that’s just what Judy did. Mike guessed she was older than April, over thirty and getting anxious.

He pointed to the listings. “What do you think I should look at?”

“Well, what are your priorities? What are you really looking for?” She gazed so deeply into his eyes, he had to look away or laugh in her face.

“I don’t know. Something a woman would like. Sun, sky. Maybe a terrace or a little garden …” He stared out the window at the quiet Sunday street. “Bedroom,” he murmured, and felt himself getting excited at the thought of April in his bedroom.

Judy Chen laughed. “They usually come with a bedroom. What’s this for, getting married or getting laid?”

Two hours and five apartments later, Mike parked behind April’s newly washed Le Baron on the street in front of the Woo house and waited as if it was a stakeout. It took five minutes before a window opened on the second floor.

“What’s up?” April yelled across the frozen grass.

He got out of the car. “Want to come out for a while? I want you to meet someone.”

“Yeah, who?” Without waiting for an answer, she shut the window.

A few minutes later she appeared at the front door. “What’s the matter with you? You look sick.” She was wearing her red turtleneck sweater and black slacks. The week before when he had turned up she’d demanded to know what he was doing there. This week she seemed to be expecting him. Probably Judy Chen had called and told her they were finished.

“You want something to drink?” she asked, stunning him with an invitation to come in.

“Sure.” He followed her inside, looking around for her disapproving parents.

No one else seemed to be home, not even the dog. Still,
April avoided the open door to the living room, where Mike could see a hard-looking sofa, two hard-looking Oriental chairs, some of the cheap red and gold things with tassels and paper coins that could be found in Chinatown, and not a lot else.

April entered the enclosed staircase to her place, gesturing for him to follow. At the top of the stairs he wiped his cowboy boots on a welcome mat that had lotus flowers and two Chinese characters on it. He didn’t ask what they meant.

“It’s kind of a dump. I never had time to finish it, and it’s a real mess.” Nervously April admitted him to the neatest place he’d ever seen.

“It’s beautiful,” Mike said, and meant it. “Really.” He took in the plush deep pink sofa with two tapestry pillows of matching pavilions among the clouds and mountains with blooming cherry trees embroidered in pale pinks, blues, and gold. In front of the velvet sofa were two carved wooden tables. One had April’s new nine-millimeter on it. It was still in its box because she had not yet taken the training to qualify for carrying it.