'Hey, Woo, what's up?' he asked, acting real nice.
'Not much. Some little stuff. It was pretty quiet last night. What about your rape victim?'
'She's still in the hospital, guy beat her up pretty bad.
Turns out she's a hooker. Her pimp thought she was dealing on the side, followed her on board, locked up her customer in the stateroom, then raped her and knocked her around. The suspect says the three of them were friends, were partying, and the other guy got out of hand. The DA's not even considering rape charges, and the customer doesn't want his wife to know, so the scum may get lucky and walk away.' Iriarte shook his head. His three ugly henchmen shook theirs in unison. Disgusting what went down.
He finished his narrative and glanced down at the short stack of sixty-ones, the complaints that had come in during the night. Down to business, he called in the other five detectives on duty, went over pending cases and assigned the new ones. When he was finished with that, April returned to her office and dialed the number of Maslow Atkins, Jason's young shrink. She didn't expect him to answer, but it was worth a try.
She listened to the voice on his answering machine, soft and regretful that he wasn't available to take the call. Something about his tone struck a chord in April. She was a cop who worked on instinct, always assumed the worst. The bottom line was Jason Frank was a fancy doctor, but he was also her friend. They'd worked on many cases together, and he always helped her when she asked him.
The correct procedure was for Jason, or some relative, to fill out a missing person complaint in the precinct where the person lived. April always went by the book, but today she swerved off the straight and narrow. All she did was decide to check out this missing person herself. As a boss herself now, she often acted on the saying 'Better to rumble like rocks than tinkle like jade.' But no independent action in policing goes unpunished.
Five
The girl who called herself Allegra Caldera did not kill herself Tuesday night after the terrible incident with Maslow Atkins. She thought about killing herself. She
She considered filling the tub with hot water, then cutting her wrists and watching her blood pulse out in the bath. If she drank a bottle of vodka, she'd be high and wouldn't even know she'd died. The problem was it wasn't so easy to kill herself. Especially since her mother and father were home. They went to bed early at night and didn't hear her come in, but they would definitely wake up if she turned on the water. Also she had a paper on Hawthorne due in American Lit.
Like a lush on the wagon, she brooded and longed for the knife, but in the end she kept away from that, too. She promised herself she wouldn't even look at it. She holed up in her room and took a Dex to write the paper. The paper was about people who hurt other people, who did bad things because they couldn't help it. It centered around the selfishness of men in all ages and how women were destroyed by them. She knew a lot about that and enjoyed writing it.
In the early Wednesday morning hours, she was wired and overtired. And like many, many early mornings in the last six years, she had the powerful desire to cross the hall and stick a kitchen knife into her parents' chests a dozen, maybe two dozen times. She wanted to stab them, hack away at them. She thought a lot about Lizzie Borden, what Lizzie might have been feeling a hundred years ago on that hot day in Fall River, Massachusetts, after a heavy lunch, with no air conditioning in the sweltering upstairs rooms, and the smell of garbage wafting everywhere through the house. She imagined everyone sweating in their beds, snoring-maybe as loudly as her father with the deviated septum did.
Allegra wished she had the guts to explode on the scene, like Lizzie Borden, and destroy the people who hurt her. She wished she could splatter their guts everywhere. She lusted for their blood and feared her rage. After she finished writing her scathing paper she took a few Valiums to calm down and sleep. Then in the morning she couldn't even get out of bed.
She decided not to go to her American Lit class at Hunter College in Manhattan to hand it in, after all. The novel they were studying was one of her least favorites-
But she was in trouble in general. Her father and mother wanted her to be a professional like them so she would always have a way of supporting herself. She knew that meant they didn't want to take care of her. They wanted her to graduate so they could be done with her, and she didn't know what the hell to do with her life. She was hopeless; she knew she could never do what they did. She didn't know what kind of job she could do.
At six-thirty, right on schedule, her mother stood by her bed with a cup of coffee in her hand. The five-foot-five, size-four, hundred-and-fifteen-pound, blond-haired, amethyst-eyed Puerto Rican beauty was trying to get her daughter's attention. As usual, she was full of questions, and her lovely face was set with anger and concern in equal measure.
'Honey, I worried about you. Where were you last night?' she complained and queried at the same time with not a hint of Spanish in her voice. She was born here, but had a brain from another planet. Allegra had complete contempt for her.
'I had a date.' Allegra turned over.
'You had a date in the middle of the week?' Her mother pursed her pink lips. 'What kind of date?'
'Shouldn't you be at work, Mom?'
'No.' She checked the clock on Allegra's desk. 'I have five minutes for my daughter. What kind of date?'
Allegra turned over again and sat up. She had a heart-shaped face, black hair, her father's dark eyes, a splattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks. Her mother and everyone else thought she was pretty, but with a drop-dead gorgeous mother like hers, how could she believe it?
'Here, take your coffee,'
Allegra knew her mother's motherly smile was a fake.
'Thanks. Just put it down,' Allegra said.
Grace studied her. 'You don't look very happy for a girl who's had a date. He isn't married, is he?' She set the cup down on the night table, frowning. 'Drink the coffee.'
Allegra hated her. Under the sheet, she pulled her nightgown down. 'What's in it?'
'Just milk. Drink up.'
Allegra turned her head to examine it. 'Looks like cream to me,' she said. She'd rather die than drink cream.
'Would I give you cream? I wouldn't give you cream. It's milk. You need it for your bones. I love you so much, sweetheart. Tell me about your date. How old is he? What's he do? Is he cute?'
'He's very cute.' And he hates me, she didn't say. 'Go to work, Mom.'
'Not until I know who you had a date with. I never hear anything about your life anymore,' she complained. 'How do I know what you're up to?'
Allegra stared at the coffee and said nothing.
'You missed dinner last night. What date could be worth hurting your father?'
'What?'
'We both missed you last night, but he was really hurt.'
Allegra made a disgusted noise. 'He's always hurt.'
'There was no date, was there? You just stayed out to avoid your father.' Her pretty little mother shook her head sadly.
Allegra felt bad for her misguided mother. 'You're wrong. I had a date,' she said.
'Who was it?'
'None of your business.'
