Judging Time

a break in the winter misery.

On Thanksgiving, April Woo had not been on duty in the 20th Precinct on Eighty-second Street and Columbus Avenue for the Thanksgiving Day parade. She'd made sergeant ten days before and was reassigned twenty-seven blocks south to a supervisory position in the detective squad of Midtown North. When April reported for duty at 8 a.m. on her first day, there had been a lot of activity going on, but not one of the six detectives working the phones at that time had looked up and said, 'Hi, how are ya,' given her a high five, or done any of the friendly guy things they usually did when a new fellow came in. The thing they did when she arrived new to the job was pointedly ignore her.

Five five, 116 pounds slender. Perfect oval face and almond eyes, rosebud lips, swan neck. As usual, April had been wearing her own personal cop uniform of navy slacks and navy blazer, and that first day, a thick red turtleneck for warmth and good luck. Only the 9mm strapped to her waist gave her away as a cop. That and the fact that there were no earrings in her ears, no jade ring on her finger, no gold necklace around her neck, and she was wearing no makeup except for the barest frosting of Gingembre dore on her lips. The lack of these items cost her quite a bit because she valued her femininity as much as her job. She enjoyed her jewelry, craved her makeup, and felt both ugly and stupid without them.

Midtown North was a bigger and more important house than the Two-O, but the detective squad rooms were all broken up and gave the effect of looking smaller. As April had stood there on her first day taking in the empty holding cell and the backs of her colleagues in her new home, the guy with the big office and an actual name plaque on his door, LT. HERNANDO IRIARTE, frowned and wiggled a finger at her.

Come in here.

Ah, a frowner. April opened the lieutenant's door with the glass window and went inside. 'Sergeant April Woo, reporting for duty, sir,' she said.

Lieutenant Iriarte was a good-looking man with a carefully clipped mustache that was much shorter and thinner than that of her would-be lover, Detective Sergeant Mike Sanchez, whom she hadn't seen in almost two weeks because of their ill-timed days off. Iriarte also had a more serious short haircut than Mike's and very classy clothes, like those of a businessman who considered himself a success. A pair of half glasses were tucked in his jacket breast pocket, along with a snowy handkerchief. The lieutenant took the glasses out, hung them low on his nose, and peered at April over them as if he were going to interview her about her qualifications.

She waited, eyes slightly lowered in the Chinese pose of modesty and self-denial that she had learned at birth and had to unlearn over and over to be a good cop.

Iriarte finished looking her over. 'I won't say women can't be good cops,' he said at last. 'We happen to have a woman commander in this house. You might take your cues from her.'

'Sir?' April hadn't met the commander and was unsure what this meant.

'It is not difficult to ascertain that men and women are not the same,' Iriarte said. 'They are very different . . . in fact.'

'Yes, sir.'

'I want those differences clearly defined.'

'Yes, sir,' April repeated, still uncertain where he was going with this.

'I don't like women who act like men, talk dirty, and sleep in the men's dorms. We had one like that, claimed she was a professional and had a right to stay in the dorm. We got rid of her.'

April nodded. Uh-huh.

'You can sleep in the women's dorm,' he added.

'I go home on my turnarounds,' April told him.

'Good. Keep to yourself and keep your femininity.' The lieutenant folded his glasses and tucked them back in his pocket. He pointed at an empty office catty-comer to his. 'There's your office, then. I run a tight ship.'

'Yes, sir. That's what I've heard.'

'I have a good feeling about this.' He showed her the back of his hand in dismissal. That was six weeks ago. Since then she'd covered a couple dozen burglaries, couple of rapes, two homeless deaths from exposure. A 'justifiable' homicide involving a cop apparently threatened by a suspect flashing a 'knife' (shiny object). But who knew. She did the best she could. She was the one who had to explain the situation to the seven members of the dead man's family who came to the precinct to find out what had happened to him. They had arrived without knowing he was dead.

In six weeks not a lot had changed. At 12:45 A.M. on the Monday that began the first full week of the new year, April caught sight of her new boss Lieutenant Iriarte through the window in the closed door of her first office. Lieutenant Iriarte exited his own exceptionally clean and tidy office wearing his dove gray (probably cashmere blend) overcoat. The commanding officer of the detective squad plopped his dark gray fedora on his head, tilted it rakishly, then crossed the squad room to the locker room where all the detectives except for April ate their meals. Lieutenant Iri-arte passed from April's view. A few seconds later he passed her door again, showed her the back of his hand without looking at her, and left the precinct house for the night. For the next fifteen minutes until 1 A.M. when she could go home, April was in sole charge of the detective squad. All was quiet. She sighed and started cleaning up her desk.

At 1 A.M. she glanced at her watch. 'Time to go,' she murmured. No one to talk to so now she was talking to herself. She pulled on her coat, grabbed her shoulder bag, and left the squad room.

She took the stairs to the main floor, where a uniform getting ready to go off duty was busily mopping into a single grimy film all the dirty puddles of melted snow and ice that had pooled in worn spots on the green linoleum floor. At the forbidding front desk the desk crew (not the most cheerful she'd known) worked the phones and signed in everyone who entered the building.

Over the desk a sign, hand-lettered with red marker and decorated with gold garlands, read MIDTOWN NORTH WISHES YOU A HAPPY NEW YEAR! On the wall nearby a cartoon showed a hand slipping into a jacket pocket with the words WATCH YOUR WALLET in several languages. Sitting at a table below the front desk, an irritated female uniform spoke rapid-fire Spanish to a sulking Hispanic male.

As April headed for the front door, the bald sergeant at the desk put his hand over the receiver and called out to her. 'Where you going, Woo? There's been two homicides at Liberty's Restaurant. Get over there ASAP or night watch will fuck it up.' At two minutes after 1 A.M. April caught the call.

The crime scene was at Forty-fifth Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. Midtown North was on Fifty- fourth Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. From the front desk April called the detective squad room upstairs for a detective to go with her. The only one still around was Charlie Hagedorn. April had nothing against Hagedorn, but nothing for him, either. Hagedorn was a white male, early thirties. Five nine, weighed about 190. Didn't appear to work out. His pale, light brown hair was baby fine and soft. It lay flat on his crown as if lacking the energy to stand up like a man's. His lips were thin and chapped, his nose was thin and red. He had chubby cheeks and brown baleful eyes.

April's mother, Sai Woo, who was old Chinese to the core, would diagnose Hagedorn as 'not in harmony,' too much yin, not enough yang. A person in perfect harmony had to have the right amount of yin and yang. Yang was male—intellectually strong and action-oriented. Yin was female—passive, receptive, relaxed, pleasing, generous. Extreme yin, of course, made for a person who was passive and vague, physically soft and weak, emotionally anxious and vulnerable, intellectually indecisive and uncertain. A yin was not the kind of person you'd want in the alley with you when that 250-pound man (the one the males were always throwing at female cops to try and make the point they couldn't do the job) cornered you in an alley with a chainsaw and two assault rifles blazing. Could be April was wrong about Hagedorn, though, and just didn't know him yet. There were a lot of people around who said the same of her.

Hagedorn took the time to wait for an elevator to carry his chunky body down the one flight of stairs to the precinct lobby where April was impatiently cooling her heels. One of the problems being a boss was you couldn't always move at your own speed or deviate from protocol, which was different from procedure. With protocol, in every situation there were about ten thousand or more things that one just couldn't do. In this case April couldn't go get a car. She had to wait for Hagedorn to lumber out into the lot for an unmarked unit to drive her to the location. What a sorry idiot. Turning the very first corner on old tires and a patch of ice he spun out the forest green Pontiac. In the passenger seat April held on and said nothing even though she'd probably have to take the blame if one of her men cracked up the unit while she was in it.

Hagedorn said nothing as they pulled up to the address of the call and stopped behind a line of blue-and-