Stealing Time (19 page)

"Uh-uh. You'll have to show them to me." Marc opened the upstairs door. Only five of the sewing machines were going. Steam burst from the iron in short blasts, but no one was pressing finished trousers. The heads bent over work were white and gray.

Annie was admonishing an older woman to work faster. Bernardino's teeth closed around the filter tip on his cigarette. Tobacco dropped on the floor. "Oops." He bent over to pick it up. Marc stiffened.

"You want to see the roof?" he asked. "The storage room?"

Bernardino sniffed. "Yeah, and tell me about your brother."

"What?" Marc was shocked. "Are you local cops in on this witch-hunt, too?"

"We're looking for a missing baby." The female spoke for the first time.

"Yeah, this is bad news." Suddenly, Marc realized Annie was listening. "Let's go for a walk, huh? It's hot in here."

"Yeah, you ought to get someone to turn that iron off when it's not in use." The female climbed the stairs to the storeroom, looked around, apparently didn't see what she was looking for, came back down.

"These girls don't have any respect for anything." Marc and the lieutenant both knew that the sewing machines and the steam presser had been abandoned by the girls who were working without green cards the minute the cops appeared at the door.

"Come on, Lieutenant, let's get away from my cantankerous relative. He doesn't always know the score, know what I mean? How about a walk? I'll tell you everything I know." Marc got the two cops outside without further trouble. They were heading north in the sunshine when the female hit him with a question he wasn't expecting.

"Did your brother always beat up women?"

"Oh, shit. Oh, come on. This is getting personal. Your friend here knows us. He knows better than to bug me about rumors involving my family. It's not true. My brother would never touch his wife, so don't follow that path with the rest of the scum." He shuffled his feet, kicking an empty soda can along the sidewalk.

"You don't look too happy with that line," she said.

"What's your name again?" he demanded.

"Sergeant Woo."

"Well, Sergeant Woo, I know my brother, and I'm telling you, he might get mad, but he'd never touch Heather. He adores her, same as I do and all the rest of the family."

"That's not what I hear. I hear he beats the shit out of her all the time."

"It's not true," Marc said gloomily. "I'll never believe that of him. Never!"

"So what about the baby?"

"I don't know nothing about that. This whole thing makes me sick."

"It's making a lot of people sick. Heather Popescu didn't give birth to a baby, so whose is it?"

"What are you talking about? Of course she did," Marc said vehemently.

"You know, the phone records show you guys are on the horn to each other every day. If you know your brother so well, and he claims he's the baby's father, then who's the baby's mother and where is she?"

"Whoa. Stop right there. Where are you going with this?" He stared at the Chinese sergeant. This was making him really angry.

"The Health Department doesn't have any record of any Popescu birth, and Anton says he's the father, so who's the mother?"

Marc whistled to cover his rage. "Don't look at me. This is new to me. I don't know nothing about it. Honestly, this is way out there." He whistled again. "That's what he said? He said he's the father?"

"That's what he said."

"Wow."

Bernardino cut in on the questions. "How come Anton isn't in the business with you?" he asked suddenly.

"He's a lawyer, he makes more than I do," Marc said sharply.

"No kidding."

"Yeah. Every family has to have one professional. In our family it was Anton. It was never in the plan for him to go into the business."

"Did he want to be in the business?"

They'd been walking slowly, but now Marc stopped. "I said it wasn't in the plan. He was the lucky one. He's uptown in a fancy office, eating caviar. We're down here in the slums, eating deli and working our asses off. What does this have to do with the price of tea?" He looked away, knew he was losing it. All this family crap was painful. He didn't want to talk anymore about it. He turned around to go back.

Bernardino shrugged and followed suit. "You tell me. I'm looking for a missing baby. This missing baby we're looking for doesn't seem to have a birth certificate. That means we don't know whose it is. So we're going to keep digging until we find out."

Marc made a rude noise. "I'm sure this can be cleared up."

"So, clear it up for us."

"Look, I'm not in the loop. I don't know any more than you do. I can ask, that's all I can do. The minute I hear something you'll be the first to know. Okay?" Marc didn't want to leave Ivan alone too long. He picked up his pace, eager to get back.

"Yeah, do that. Hey, and the next time you tell the girls to get out, you might remind them to take their garments out of the machines before they go."

"Oh come on. You didn't see anything up there. You know we're on the up-and-up with the labor."

"INS will be interested."

They came to a red light. Marc walked into the street anyway. "I
said
I'd ask around. But now I'll tell
you
something. These girls are pregnant, they're not sentimental. They get abortions. If they don't get abortions, they keep the kids. I know these people. They'd rather drown an infant like a kitten than give it away."

"Who said anything about giving away? I'm talking selling away. But whatever you're looking at—killing, selling—they're both against the law. Maybe you better think about having that baby turn up, huh?"

Marc tripped on the curb on the far side of the street. The lieutenant grabbed his arm to keep him from falling on his face. He made another of Ivan's noises. His fuse was slower, but he was sputtering now, trying to contain his fury and hang on to himself. He hated letting go the way everyone else in his family did. His brother and his cousin were the volatile ones. He'd always been the mediator, the gentleman. He wanted to keep it that way.

"I'll see you later," the cop said as he walked away.

CHAPTER
21

A
t nine
P.M
. on Wednesday Mike Sanchez closed the file on the castrated corpse he'd studied in the ME's office for the third time a few hours ago. Only a week ago Schlomo Abraham had been living in Israel with his wife and three children. By the wife's account, they'd been living a perfectly happy life. Their perfectly happy life had ended during a routine business trip to New York, when he was stabbed several dozen times in the chest and abdomen, presumably for the diamonds and cash he was carrying. This was a bad thing for this family, a bad thing for the Israeli Trade Consulate, and a bad thing for the city of New York.

Schlomo's tearful partner, Mickla, another Israeli, had told Mike that Schlomo always got himself a girl and suggested Mike look for prostitutes who worked the hotel. Today Mike had done just that, located the last person to see the victim alive. It was someone who worked the hotel on a regular basis, a hooker who called herself Helena. Turned out she was a guy. Real name Roberto Portero, always dressed like a girl, managed to stay out of trouble, had no priors—which was unusual because some customers got real upset if they found out they'd gotten a flavor they hadn't ordered. Some guys had simple tastes, though, and never found out. Mike didn't know about Schlomo yet. He shook his head, thinking about it. He always got the queers. He'd talked to the he/she for three hours, trying to ascertain if the guy was their suspect. Helena was really spooked, crying half the time, and all that Mike had found out so far was his taste in clothes and designer drugs. This particular boy-girl was clueless about anything else, a real ditz. Afterward Mike had gone back to the ME's office to try communing with the body. Not everybody did this kind of thing. But a couple of points kept bothering him: the wife's insisting everything was fine in the marriage, and the fact that it took more than a ditz to slice a guy's dick and balls off. After looking at the body again and coming up with no new ideas, he'd gotten a message that April wanted to see him and had gone home to meet her at his place.

In the old days, before he'd fallen in love, Mike would not have taken a break from a major case to see a
chica.
He would have stayed with Roberto/ Helena and seen the
chica
later, if the timing worked out. But here he was, waiting for half an hour in his apartment before the doorbell finally rang. When he opened the door, April was bedraggled and dripping in the hall.

"I couldn't find a place to park. All the spots were taken—Oh."

His embrace finished her sentence. He hadn't noticed it had started to rain, but rain always turned him on, reminded him of all those times he and April had been stuck in a car during radio runs and she wouldn't let him touch her. At the moment she was cold and wet. He figured he had to warm her up, so the kiss took a while. She resisted for about a second, then dropped her bag and her jacket on the floor and let herself be swept away by it.

Her reactions always surprised him. They'd been in some difficult situations, had their clothes burned off, witnessed autopsies of men and women in various states of decay. They'd seen violence, deviance, and death and had brought in nutcases exposing themselves, masturbating on the street. April herself had restrained a drunken security guard who'd shoved the barrel of his loaded pistol up his girlfriend's vagina. He was threatening to pull the trigger when April came in to deal with the situation. She'd also been the one to locate the severed head of a twelve-year-old who'd been decapitated in a five-car crash on the Henry Hudson Parkway. The girl might have lived if she'd been wearing her seat belt. Instead, her head landed in the woods, sixty feet away, and April had found it. Yet, after all that, she balked at leaving the lights on when they made love; she didn't want her mother or any Chinese ghosts to know what she was up to.

"Chinese are kind of puritanical about sex," she'd explained their first time together. "No one in my family ever mentions it. It's something you do only to get a doctor to marry you." She didn't elaborate.

It had been a big step to get her into the shower with him. But then, everything was a big step with her. She might have seen just about every horror imaginable on the job, but she'd been bullied and sheltered by her parents and hadn't experienced much pleasure. He liked opening her eyes to it, seeing her amazement.

Right now, she wasn't in the mood for fun, though. She stepped out of his embrace and shook her head. "I'm sorry, I'm having a bad day. I just needed a break."

He went to get her a towel. "I didn't mean to rush you," he said a little sheepishly when he came back.

"No problem." She toweled her head, then raked her fingers through her damp hair. "Actually, I came because I wanted to talk to you."

"That's nice. Have a seat. What's on your mind?" He cleared his case file from the sofa, sat, and patted the cushion beside him.

"I don't know. Maybe I got used to you as a partner. And I don't like this new thing." She didn't want to sit down.

"Come on, sit down. I won't bite. What new thing?"

She lifted her shoulders. "You know."

"You mean
amor, queridal
You're having a little trouble with
amor?"

"I'm not in love." She flushed as she said it, though.

"Okay, you're not in love. What's the problem, then?"

April sat down as far from Mike as she could get. "This case is really bugging me. Mixed marriage;
she's
battered and loony. The baby's missing.
He's
lying about everything. The family is weird and has this sweatshop in Chinatown that's mixed up in it somehow. His cousin is a maniac and, you know, the bottom line is I think the baby is dead. I really think so." Her eyes teared up.

"Oh,
querida."
He moved over and put his arms around her.

"It shakes me up. I never even wanted a baby myself, did I ever tell you that?" She said this into his shoulder.

"No, you never mentioned babies one way or the other."

She pulled away to look at him. "And now I'm seeing them everywhere. It just feels so bad. They're great, you know, really cute, like puppies." She shook her head again.

"You're so maternal." Mike laughed. "Nah, babies are better than puppies."

"Why would anyone kill a puppy?" "It's not a puppy,
querida.
And it hasn't even been forty-eight hours. You may find him yet."

"I don't want to just find him. I want to find him alive." April rooted around in her bag for the photo of Paul. She found it and held it out to him.

Mike took the snapshot and studied the baby for a while. It was a pretty generic-looking baby, wrapped in a blue blanket. "He has blue eyes," he said finally.