Loving Time

Lorna Cowles reached out, as if somehow to connect with the last bottle of wine her husband had drunk. “Poor Ray,” she murmured.

“Don’t touch,” April said quickly. “Don’t touch anything else.”

The woman’s hand jerked back. “Don’t touch,” Lorna Cowles told herself. “Don’t touch.”

nine

Ten minutes later Lorna Cowles was out in the hall of her estranged husband’s new apartment, weeping noisily. “Ray would never kill himself. He’d been analyzed. He was saving for his retirement.”

April handed her a tissue.

“We were so close, liked all the same things. Neither of us cooked. Restaurants were our thing. We went out a lot.… ”

April waited for her to blow her nose.

“I don’t understand. He said he needed to be alone for a while. That’s all I know. Maybe his psychiatrist knows.”

April could hear Mike’s voice on the phone. Then everything was quiet. She knew Sergeant Joyce was on her way over.

“He couldn’t have killed himself.” Lorna started again, shaking her head so hard, her fine pale hair flew back and forth.

April let some silence build up for a few seconds. More silence. Finally she asked, “What makes you think so?”

Lorna frowned. “He didn’t know how to make pleats.” She held her hands up and pleated the air with her fingers to show April what she meant. “The bag was pleated around his neck. Didn’t you see that? How could he have done that?”

He probably did it before he put the bag over his head. Suicides often planned everything. April cleared her throat.

“Ray wasn’t manually dexterous,” Lorna insisted. “He couldn’t cook, couldn’t hammer a nail. You see?”

What April saw was a pale, slender woman who no longer appeared helpless and tragic. The tension and fear that had been engraved so deeply on Lorna’s face when they’d first met her was gone. Now she was angry, indignant. April wondered what kind of life insurance the deceased had. She fell silent, waiting for the widow to tell her more.

Just then, down the hall, the elevator door slid open. Sergeant Margret Mary Joyce, her hair awry and her face set in a scowl, slouched out. As April’s favorite color was blue for the Department, Sergeant Joyce’s favorite color was green for her heritage. Today she wore a forest-green jacket over an un-matching green blouse and dark-brown trousers.

On Sergeant Joyce’s bad days April thought she looked like a badly dressed fire hydrant with a badly dyed blond wig. On good days April acknowledged that her supervisor’s small Irish nose—which tilted up at the tip instead of becoming flat and spreading out as April’s did—was quite appealing. Her skin was nice and white, even in summer, because she never went outside except on a call. She was plump, but hardly fat. And her hair was not really so terrible in and of itself. It was just hacked off without a plan, dyed the wrong color, and not often enough. Sometimes the front of her hair stuck straight up, and April itched to do something about it.

Sergeant Joyce’s eyes were dark blue, too close together, and she squinted when concentrating, which was most of the time. But she was very serious, wanted to prove to the world that women were just as good in law enforcement as men. Maybe better. She, too, was a comer. That’s why she was there, didn’t want anything in her squad to get by her, just in case the squeal turned out to be an important one.

She walked past April without acknowledging her. “Are you Mrs. Cowles?” she asked with no attempt at sensitivity.

As Lorna looked the newcomer over, her uncertainty returned. “Are you with the police?” she asked anxiously.

“Yes, I’m Sergeant Joyce.” Commander of the Detective Squad, she didn’t say.

Right away April could see that Lorna didn’t like her. “I already told the officer everything I know.” She cocked her head toward April, who was suddenly busy with her notebook.

“You mean Detective Woo?”

Lorna glanced at April. “Uh, yes.”

Sergeant Joyce looked doubtful. Looking doubtful or scathing was her thing. “Well, you’ll probably think of some more things over time.”

“I may think of a lot of things,” Lorna replied sharply, “but I know my husband, and I know he didn’t kill himself, so you better start looking for the monster who did.”

Nothing like antagonizing the cops. The way Sergeant Joyce hammered her flat feet on the worn hall carpet as she walked away gave every indication that it was not up to the newly widowed Lorna Cowles to tell the police what their job was. Without another word, she went inside. Eager to get into the apartment to view the deceased.

ten

Sergeant Joyce’s lips were gone when she returned. They had disappeared into her mouth, where she chewed on them thoughtfully as she considered the situation. Inside the apartment the Crime Scene team had already begun its work. Joyce made a slight motion with her head at April as she stared steadily at Lorna. April knew that scrutiny. It meant We’re going to strip all the covers off this woman and see what’s underneath. It was a common police tactic that April and Sanchez used only on alternate Tuesdays with clearly guilty suspects. Today was Monday. The woman was the victim’s widow, and clearly not at her best. With her, they wouldn’t have used it.

April’s left eyebrow arched at her supervisor. You want me to go or stay?

Joyce raised her shoulder a half an inch in reply.

Stick around.

Inside the apartment, muffled conversation as the two men from Crime Scene went about their job of dusting for prints and photographing and sketching and measuring and bagging anything that could conceivably be used as physical evidence in whatever case might be made in court many months from now. If it ever came to that. Sanchez was searching for an address book, for leads on the girlfriend, Cowles’s dinner companion. April wanted to be in there with him.

Out in the hall, silence. Now the Sergeant was guarding the door like a brick chimney, her hair on end and her mouth shut tight on her lips. She studied the widow this way for what seemed like a few eternities. Lorna’s beige coat had fallen open. Underneath, a tan sweater was unevenly tucked into a straight plaid skirt of the palest blues and browns. It appeared the woman had dressed in a hurry and rushed over. Still, her tights matched and so did the paisley scrap of silk tied around her neck. Sergeant Joyce’s eyes finished the tour of Lorna’s person by scanning her polished tasseled loafers, which were similar to those of her dead husband except hers were not suede, and the shoulder bag that had seen better days. A most conservative-looking person. A drink of water. Pale and exhausted, Lorna did not give the impression of a killer. But April had seen her change colors three times in an hour, now, and had a picture of her as a chameleon.

Sergeant Joyce released her lips from behind her teeth. Her pink lipstick was now outside the lines. She was ready to speak. “Mrs. Cowles, are you all right? Would you like a cup of coffee?”

Confused by this sudden concern for her well-being, Lorna glanced quickly at April, the cop who had seen her vomit in the sink without gagging herself.

“I touched. I’m sorry,” she said, so softly the brick chimney was taken aback.

“What?” Sergeant Joyce turned to April for an answer.

April reached into her own shoulder bag, pulled out her diminishing pack of tissues, and offered it to the Sergeant, pointing to the bow in her own lips.