Loving Time

“What …? Oh.” Sergeant Joyce accepted a tissue and dabbed at her mouth distractedly. “What do you mean, you touched?”

“I know you’re not supposed to touch anything. I threw up,” Lorna said flatly. The Chinese cop wouldn’t let her clean the sink. Her eyes flickered at the clicking sound inside the apartment. “What’s that?”

“They’re taking pictures.”

Down the hall a door opened. A gaunt elderly woman in a pink flannel bathrobe cautiously emerged from her apartment with a garbage bag. “What’s going on?” she demanded querulously. “I’m a sick woman. I’m not supposed to be disturbed.”

Sergeant Joyce motioned with her head toward the woman. Without a word, April crossed the hall to talk to her.

“Who are you? What is this, a convention?” The woman peered at April through watery eyes.

“We’re with the police. There’s been an accident,” April told her.

“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. Just get out of here as soon as you can.” She thrust the garbage bag into April’s hand and closed her door with a bang.

In the six years April had worked the Fifth Precinct in Chinatown, first walking the beat, then as a detective, no one had dared call her a bitch or hand her their garbage for disposal. In Chinatown, people believed the law existed for one purpose only: to cause trouble for perfectly innocent citizens. The police were there to imprison or deport them, steal their money, and maybe beat them up in the process. In Chinatown, police were treated with fear and respect.

But here, on the affluent Upper West Side, no one was afraid of the police. No one respected them, and no one was grateful when they did their job. Here, the police were held in contempt by the rich, and cursed and shot at by the poor. Considering the fact that the police department was the city’s only hedge against chaos, April sometimes thought being a cop was worse than a thankless job; it was a cruel joke. Maybe that was the reason so few Chinese wanted it.

She marched to the door marked EXIT with the old woman’s garbage. Near the door something touched her. She brushed her face with her free hand. Nothing was there. Still, for a wild moment, her armor was pierced and she felt elation. What was it? No one was anywhere near her. At the end of the hall, Sergeant Joyce stood talking to Lorna Cowles.

Must be her mother who traveled around with April sneaking her ideas in whenever she could. Many years ago Sai Woo had told April that the air was in constant motion, not with wind and rain and snow and sleet but with the activity of powerful gods and ancient spirits that could do whatever they wanted to human life. She had warned April to watch out for them and try to decipher the hidden meaning in everything in order to make the gods work for, not against, her. For spirits could blow hot or cold in a person’s face and alter his feelings and his life in an instant. Turn a man away from his wife, toward evil and ruin. Turn a woman toward the golden light. You never knew what they were going to do.

This was another way in which April was disobedient. She refused to believe in golden lights and shabby gods that had been lost even to China for more than half a century. She was American, lived in a rational world where things could be explained. Where things had to be explained. Every day of her life, every case she worked had an official beginning, had to be written up on numerous forms. Every case had to be officially opened, investigated, and officially closed. The blanks on the forms were small. There was no room for subtlety.

Yet the system turned out to be more tricky and complicated than any capricious spirit her mother could invent. Even when the laws were crystal-clear, lawyers and judges shrouded the path to punishment in an impenetrable fog, putting a dozen different spins on every count against every criminal. People killed one another in riots, on the streets, murdered them brutally in their own homes, and their lawyers got them off. They stole cars and sold drugs and assaulted children and were out on the street again without blinking. Who knew why this was happening?

Every day April tried to make sense out of events that made no sense whatsoever. And still, every once in a while, she had a golden moment of absolute happiness that challenged reason. Now, standing in the hallway of Raymond Cowles’s apartment building with an old woman’s bulging plastic bag in one hand, she wondered if perhaps the flooding toilet and the old woman’s garbage were spirits telling her she was wasted and unappreciated here in this uptown Caucasian world.

It occurred to her that this part of her life was a test that was over, like the sergeant’s test she had taken. Except her sergeant’s test had been a retest. Months ago, she had missed her scheduled appointment for the exam because a suspect had been trying to kill her at the time. So they had given her another chance at it. Only this time no board of real people was there to ask her questions and evaluate her answers. Instead of a board of three, one sour-faced uniformed Sergeant had given her the written exam, then set up a video camera as if she were a suspect in a particularly nasty homicide.

“Please direct your answers to the camera,” he’d told her.

Who knew if anyone ever actually looked at the tape. Maybe they—whoever they were—just decided it was time for a change for April Woo, as they had when she was transferred out of the Fifth Precinct. Perhaps it was her destiny to return there now because she was an Asian and that’s where she belonged. Only this time maybe she would go in triumph, as a Sergeant, a Supervisor.

Maybe wearing a uniform and eating delicious Chinese food every day was her future. The correct future. Recently she had met a doctor who had his office in Chinatown. George Dong seemed to be interested in her despite her age, which was nearly thirty, and her job, which was demanding at best. Maybe something would come of it. The thought shot a shiver down her spine, sending the golden moment on its way. She opened the exit door.

The building was too small for a back elevator. Only a landing with a recycling bin, a shelf for newspapers, a garbage chute, and the back stairs were behind the door. The recycling bin and the shelf were empty. Whatever had been in Raymond’s garbage had already been removed. April remembered that his Monday paper was on the carpet in front of his door, but there was no sign of a Sunday paper. Most people kept at least a few sections for a day or two. Funny. She dumped the old woman’s garbage down the chute.

The hall was empty when she came out. Sergeant Joyce must have taken Lorna Cowles to the precinct to answer some questions of her own. April headed back into the apartment.

No one from the M.E.’s office had arrived to pronounce the corpse dead yet, so Raymond Cowles was still in his bedroom lying on his back on the bed with the plastic bag neatly taped around his neck. The photographing was finished, but someone April didn’t know was sketching the room, measuring everything and labeling distances and angles. He was shorter than she and weighed twice as much; he was working intently and ignored her.

She moved closer to the bed to get a better look. The beige covers of the bed were pulled back in an untidy mound. The body lay on a rumpled sheet that had some stains on it. Whatever body hairs had been there earlier were gone now. If Raymond Cowles had struggled at the end, there was no sign of it. His arms were by his sides. Under the plastic, his unseeing eyes were just slightly open. April reached out to touch his hand. It was cool, rigid. She crouched down to look at the long, slender fingers with their short nails buffed to a low luster. His left ring finger had the indentation of a ring, but there was no ring on it now. The only visible bruise was on his neck—a hickey, round and red and put there before his death. There was no guessing what kind of marks might be hidden under the shirt and trousers.

“April,” Mike called from the living room.

April straightened up. The sketcher continued to ignore her. She opened the drawer of the bedside table with the crook of her finger, even though she knew Mike would already have looked there. Inside was a large jar of K-Y jelly and about a year’s supply of latex condoms in packets of three.

The man had been interested in eating and sex. She closed the drawer and left the room. Mike had arranged some items on the dining-room table, which was still gritty with gray fingerprint powder. The items were in clear plastic bags, already neatly labeled. Among them was a pill container with twenty-five Kaminex remaining from a prescription of seventy-five, a notepad with the name Harold Dickey and a phone number written in blue ink on it, and a copy of Final Exit.

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