Loving Time (47 page)

The Chinese detective had given Gunn her business card last Friday, just in case she thought of something else. Gunn had put the card in her purse to be polite. This morning she took it out. She still felt guilty about letting the detective into
her apartment and then not telling her the truth about what she’d done. Maybe Bobbie had seen the cop come in last night and was too unnerved by it to come home. Gunn was pretty sure Bobbie hadn’t slept in the building. Maybe the cop had gone to find Bobbie at work this morning and that was the reason he hadn’t shown up. Gunn hadn’t shown up at work, either. She hadn’t slept and was terrified because she was out of her depth and didn’t know what to do. She wished Bobbie would come back so she could explain everything to him.

From time to time she played with the Chinese cop’s business card. It wasn’t a real business card. It was a police department card that said on it
20 Detective Squad
and below that
Det. ———
. April Woo had written her name in the blank by hand. The blank below that was for a case number, but no number was written there. Maybe Bobbie’s case didn’t have a number yet. Gunn thought about calling the cop and asking what was going on about Case number-nothing-yet. She thought about calling all day, about giving herself up. Then it got too late.

At eight o’clock she went downstairs and peeked out the glass front door to see if someone was watching the building. She didn’t think Bobbie would come home if there were cops around. She prowled around the back windows of her bedroom, but it was dark out there in the garden and she couldn’t see anything but the shapes of old heaps of garbage. She went down the stairs a second time at nine, then a third time at ten-thirty. There was no light under Bobbie’s door. Each time she returned to her own apartment she had a few drinks. At eleven, she went down the stairs one last time. This time something didn’t feel right. The last of the three dim light-bulbs in the hall ceiling fixture had gone out. It was dark in the hall, and dark under Bobbie’s door. It didn’t feel right. Gunn leaned close to the door. She heard the toilet flush.

“Bobbie?” Gunn whispered. “Bobbie? Are you there?”

Nobody answered.

T
uesday was a quiet night in the squad room of the Two-O. Except for the Boudreau case, nothing much was going on. One detective was at his desk on the phone; everybody else was out. Mike and April sat at the table in the locker room, the tension between them unrelieved. It had been a long day. Their shift had been over many hours before, but neither wanted to go home. April knew that she would be out of there tomorrow, headed toward another life, but she wasn’t ready to detach from this one yet. Mike had sent Detective Andy Mason to watch Boudreau, whose only response to his interview with Daveys had been to ask for a lawyer. The D.A.’s office felt there was only circumstantial evidence, no direct evidence, that the suspect had tampered with Dickey’s scotch bottle. In addition, Boudreau’s prior history, though persuasive to Agent Daveys, was also based on circumstantial evidence. In any case, nothing he’d done in the past would be admissible in court in the present instance. They needed a stronger case before they could make an arrest Behind the mirror, April and Mike had watched Daveys put on a show for nothing. They didn’t feel good about him.

Boudreau had been released for the moment, and a completely unapologetic Daveys took off after him. A bad day was turning out to be an even worse night. After Daveys had gone without leaving a forwarding address or beeper number, they’d received some disturbing information from the lab. Lab techs confirmed the presence of Elavil in the Johnnie Walker bottle found in Boudreau’s apartment. Boudreau’s fingerprints had been found on the bottle along with those of the deceased.

But the print experts also found smudges and partials of a third person on the bottle. Those partials turned out to match the only other set of prints found on the folder containing Boudreau’s file: Gunn Tram’s. Dickey’s fingerprints on almost
all of the pages of Boudreau’s file suggested that the file had been in his office and he had read it. Gunn’s prints were mingled with the dead man’s in such a way as to suggest that she had handled it after he had, and she had probably been the one to return it to her office. If Boudreau had taken the file from Dickey’s office, April and Mike reasoned, he would never have returned it to the personnel office. He would have destroyed it.

Gunn’s prints showing up in two places where they weren’t supposed to be bothered the two detectives enough to keep them sitting at the table with their notes, and Boudreau’s file, for many hours. April dialed Gunn’s number a few times to make sure the little lady hadn’t gone anywhere. Her line was always busy.

At ten
P.M
., they’d been on the job for fourteen hours, and they were still debating what they should do next. A lot of people would have gone home hours ago, waited for another day, another supervisor to deal with it. Tomorrow was their day off; whatever came down would be off their watch. But Mike and April didn’t see it that way. They had one suspect they considered dangerous out on the street who was being tailed by one or more FBI agents, as well as by one of their detectives. And now they had a brand-new suspect, the first suspect’s girlfriend, who happened to be a little old lady. Suddenly the case was beginning to sound like a boyfriend/girlfriend thing after all. April sighed gustily. They had to bring Gunn in and talk to her. Should it be now or tomorrow?

At ten-thirty Andy phoned in to say Boudreau had gone into his building and looked as if he might have settled in for the night. April suppressed a yawn. If all was quiet, maybe she could go home now. She picked up the phone and dialed Gunn’s number again just to make sure the old woman was all right. She let the phone ring ten times, then hung up, shaking her head.

“It’s been busy for hours and now suddenly she’s not there.”

Mike tapped a pen on the arm of his chair. “Maybe she’s in the bathroom.”

April made a skeptical face. “Maybe she’s not.”

“You’re worried?”

“Yes, aren’t you? Boudreau was harassing the one doc; and he, or Gunn, or both of them, killed the other doc. The whole thing stinks.” April actually looked at him for the first time in hours. “You know we have to make a move.”

“Hey, I don’t have anything scheduled right now. I’ll go over and bring the lady in for a chat. Would that make you feel better?”

“Yes.”

“Fine. You go home and get some sleep. I’ll go get her.” Mike tapped the pencil, shrugged again. “Will I see you in the morning?” he asked.

April shook her head. “They’ve probably got somebody new coming in here tomorrow.”

“Look, April, I’ve been thinking about what happened this morning and I know you’re wrong about me being a loose cannon. I’m not a wild man. I just—” He took a breath and let it out. “I just didn’t know it was there, that’s all. Sometimes you just go along with certain assumptions and then something happens to knock them out.”

Uh-huh.

He gave her a helpless look. “You
know
I’m a gentle person.”

She frowned and looked at her hands. “No, I don’t know that anymore.”

“Yes, you do. You know me. That wasn’t me. That was …” He searched for a word.

April didn’t help him find one.

He dropped the pencil and started tapping his finger against his lip, glanced through the open door at the other detective out in the squad room. He was a young black man, new to the
squad, talking heatedly on the phone. From the tone of his voice it sounded like an argument he didn’t want to lose. “You’re making it hard,” Mike murmured to April.

She didn’t say anything.

“Okay, you’re right. I did play with some rough people in my time. I did get into some trouble, but it was a long time ago. I never hurt anybody who didn’t deserve it, and I got out of it, didn’t I? You know I’d never hurt
you
. You know that, don’t you?”

That was the excuse they all gave: every thief, every abuser, every batterer, every killer. Now April looked out at the other detective on the phone. He was winding down now. It was time to go.

“I didn’t know it was there. I know now, so it’s a factor,” Mike said.

“What’s the factor?”

He glanced around, caught—guilty, lifted a shoulder. “I guess I love you.… It took me by surprise. I didn’t know I would get … violent about it.”

April glanced down at her hands as the heat rose to her face. There hadn’t been a lot of people in her life who’d said that to her. Certainly not any of the people who should have. Somehow that made it worse.

“¿Y qué más?”
he said softly.

She shook her head. Somehow it hurt not to feel the way she’d always thought she would when a man she admired finally said he loved her. Safe and secure and happy like in the movies. A lot of things were in the way. A cop couldn’t be unpredictable, couldn’t fly off like that—should never, never fall in love with a partner and go crazy over her honor. Love made Mike dangerous, not safe. He was always going to be dangerous. She wondered if real love was like this.

“¿Y qué más?”

“
Nada más
. Let’s go.”

“You’re coming with me?” He was surprised.

“Yeah.” Wearily, she reached for her bag.

B
obbie left the police station on Eighty-second Street and headed west toward Broadway. He had a lot of things to be angry about—the humiliation of cops coming to get him at work was the least of it. Then, as he thought about it, he got angrier and angrier. The cops had evicted him from his home, from life itself. He wanted to go to work, back to his patients and his old life at the Centre, even headed in that direction. But even as he walked west, he knew he couldn’t risk going back there right now. Maybe later.

He told himself he didn’t give a shit about the tail. He didn’t see a tail, but he knew there had to be one. The cops and the FBI asshole thought he’d killed Dickey. That had to be the biggest laugh of all time when they were the ones who almost killed him. Where was the justice? There was no justice. Had to be cops and FBI behind him. They wouldn’t let him go without a tail.

Whoever it was, Bobbie wasn’t about to give the bastard the satisfaction of turning around. He didn’t care. He didn’t give a shit, craved a drink, wanted to think things over. The temperature was dropping. It felt as if there’d be another freeze that night. Bobbie was wearing his nylon zip jacket. He needed something warmer, couldn’t decide where to go.

If he went to the French Quarter, the Mick might bother him. It wasn’t safe to hang out at the hospital now. Someone might hassle him. He picked up a bottle in a liquor store he never bought from and walked around with it for a while, trying to figure out where to go. He didn’t like not having a place to go. It upset him. He drank from the bottle as he wandered the area. When he was tired of looking at people, he headed over to Riverside Park and watched the Hudson turn into a choppy black oil slick.

He was angry that the only thing the assholes did all day was
bug him about old stuff from his life, real old stuff nobody in the world could possibly care about anymore. Who gave a shit what happened thirty years ago? It didn’t matter anymore. No one cared. Bobbie sat on the cold ground and watched the lights in New Jersey, knowing that the old bitch was responsible for all this. She’d given his file to Dickey. She’d talked to the cops. She’d told them things about him that were private, that he’d never told anybody else. He didn’t know why he’d ever bothered to talk to her. He felt hurt and wounded. After all those things she said about loving him, she turned out disloyal, just like everybody else. She talked to a douche bag of a cop who didn’t know anything—anything about life at all—and who tried to kill him. A piece of shit who worked with a slope almost killed him. She’d told the FBI guy that he’d killed Dickey. That really made him mad.

As he sat in the park, he was aware of the dog walkers and joggers running on the paths after work. He knew the old bitch was out there somewhere anxiously trotting around like someone hunting for a lost dog. He was pretty sure if he went one block up Riverside Drive, he’d run into her. He hoped a car ran her over.

As he took some time to think about that, Bobbie was aware of some black guys hanging around thirty yards up the hill from him. The hoods of their sweatshirts covered their heads, and they were smoking dope. The sweet smell of grass drifted out toward the Hudson in the frosty air. The whole thing disgusted him. He’d never smoked dope himself. He thought it was dangerous, made a person stupid. He muttered to himself, really annoyed about these coons menacing people and polluting the environment. For a while he thought they were going to come over and try to mug him. If they did, he knew they’d be stupid, and he’d bash their coon brains in.

They left him alone, and after a while he was mad enough to go home.

B
obbie liked the basement apartment even though the heat from the hot-water pipes was so intense, no one else could stand it. He said it reminded him of Louisiana. Sometimes in winter the pipes were so hot a splash of water could turn the place into a steam bath. Bobbie said where he came from there had always been a lot of steam rising off the bayous, where his father and brothers went out fishing almost every day before the war in ‘Nam changed everything.

Bobbie said he never did have the patience for fishing himself, and even now the smell of fish made him sick. He told Gunn how his father used to tease him about his chickens. The men in his family fished and never did anything else since time in Louisiana began. Gunn imagined Bobbie as a good boy. He always gave his mother the money he made from those eggs.

Bobbie, Bobbie, Bobbie. Gunn’s head was full of him, his stories of the oyster pies and tickling the crayfish holes in the hard ground with a stick to tease them out, and the heat, and the father who wasted away for years before he finally died coughing up streams of bloody phlegm. And his brother who went to prison for killing a man Bobbie knew for sure his brother never even got close enough to touch. And Bobbie’s humiliation in Vietnam, where everybody saw things through the haze of drugs and Bobbie was the only one sane enough to see what was going on. He was too good. Gunn reviewed the events of the last year in the light of the questions the Chinese cop had asked.