“Sunday,” he prompted. “You had a date on Sunday. Braun called us in on the McLellan thing. Remember?”
“You know, I hate to get in the car with you. What is it with you? Get in a car, and you get personal.” April’s face flushed with fury. “What is it with you and cars?”
“It’s the only time we’re alone,” Mike murmured.
“So?”
“So, I know guys who get turned on in elevators. Can’t control themselves.”
“So?”
“So, with me it’s cars. We may have to sit here for hours. Might as well, you know, communicate. Talk. You’ve heard of that, haven’t you?”
“No,” she said flatly.
“No what? You haven’t heard of it, or you don’t want to?”
“I don’t want to talk about my personal life. It’s not a good idea. You want to talk about the case, we’ll talk about the case.”
“So it was a date,” Mike said triumphantly. “I knew it was a date.”
“What it was is none of your business.” April groaned. Braun and Roberts were still ringing the damn doorbell.
“I can be interested, can’t I? It’s not so easy to have a relationship in this business.” Mike checked his watch. “Take it from me.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“So, you agree.”
“It wasn’t a damn date.”
April glanced at him quickly to see if he bought it. He nodded.
“Yeah? He was a cousin?”
“No, he wasn’t a cousin. He’s the son of a sister-cousin.”
“What’s a sister-cousin?”
“Guess you don’t know as much as you think you know.”
“Never heard of it. You’re either a sister or a cousin. Can’t be both,” Mike insisted.
“Oh, yes. In Chinese you can be both.”
“How? You got some family lines nobody else in the world has?” Mike drummed his fingers on the wheel.
“Yes. In old China the families were really big. I mean really.”
“Yeah, so families are big in Mexico, too. Lots of children. Same kind of culture.”
The sky turned midnight blue as the light slowly faded. The two dicks still stood ringing the doorbell. The smell of fall was in the air.
“Unh-unh. In China lots of wives for
“Let me figure this out. Your mother is a multiple wife and this guy Dong is your brother.”
April gasped. “How’d you know his name?”
“You told me his name.”
“I never told you his name,” April fumed. “I never mentioned him at all. I can’t stand this. You’re spying on me again. I thought we talked about this. I don’t ask about your life. I don’t care what you do. I don’t care,” she insisted.
Mike regarded her with delight. “You know, we should do this more often. I love it when you get excited.”
“You can’t spy on me like this.” April was almost choking on her fury. “And my mother wasn’t—
“I thought you said—”
“Forget it. Sister-cousin used to mean part of the family even if there was no real blood tie. But now it means closer than a friend. A relationship that’s like a friend but has some tie that makes it more than a friend. Okay? Got it?”
Mike nodded again. “So, how did it go?”
Braun and Roberts gave up on the doorbell and approached the unmarked car with identical determined strides.
“Uh-oh. Here they come.”
All the windows were rolled down. The car was facing downtown. Mike was driving. Lieutenant Braun approached April’s side.
“Look, she must be out for dinner or something.” He made a quick check of his watch. “We’re going to go out for a bite. You stay here.”
“Yessir,” April said.
“If she comes back, don’t approach her,” Braun ordered. “I want to do this.”
Neither one in the car said anything.
“Got it?” Braun demanded.
“Don’t approach her,” April repeated.
“Right.” Braun turned away, headed downtown toward the Irish bars.
After a minute Mike said, “You know, none of this plays.”
“I know.”
“I mean none of it, from the beginning.”
“Maybe we’ve just been going at it from the wrong direction.”
“How about now?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t see a woman strangling women, do you?”
April shook her head. “Not in general, but there’s the makeup and dressing the body up. And did you see the size of the sister?”
Mike shrugged. “Big.”
“Big and redheaded.” April was silent for a minute. “I’ve seen women who could kill.”
Mike laughed. “Their husbands, maybe.”
“Other women, too. Ever see a fight in a women’s prison?”
“I saw a skinny girl try to give her rival an unscheduled mastectomy with a carving knife once.”
They sat watching the building as the sky darkened. After a few minutes a light went on in an upstairs window.
“Well, look at that.” April opened the car door and got out.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Mike demanded.
“He only said not to approach her if she came outside. He didn’t say we couldn’t go
“Right.” Mike closed the windows, then got out and locked the car.
46
An intercom was set into the plaster next to the doorbell on the short piece of putty-colored wall that turned the corner into the doorway. The whole building was dilapidated and sad-looking, the black paint on the doorframe cracked and gray with city grit. A faint odor of urine rose from the corners of the worn stone threshold. The door looked as if the top half had once sported a glass insert of some kind. Now it was crudely paneled and painted over and had a peephole in the middle. The lightbulb over the door was blackened with age.
No nameplate indicated who lived there.
April pushed the bell, then stepped back to look up at the windows, as Lieutenant Braun had half an hour before. A few feet away, Mike leaned against a streetlamp, peering up. He shook his head. Nothing.
