In the BMW, a bunch of empty Coke cans, a couple of Steamship Authority ferry schedules—one for winter and the latest, spring/summer, just out this week. Also used ticket stubs for Tuesday, May eleventh. After Tovah's killing and before Prudence's. Killers were dumb. Nearly always. They never thought their tracks could be followed. Why hadn't they followed this track sooner? They guessed that the gun used to shoot Tovah was back on Martha's Vineyard and possibly a different gun had been used to kill Prudence. Why? People who loved guns—people who shot them regularly—usually had more than one. Some had dozens; collectors had hundreds. They were betting that Weridy, of the tomato red BMW and many pairs of candlesticks and stemware with the stickers still on them, had many guns.
The Vineyard Haven sheriff said he'd meet them at the airport in the A.M. Barring fog at either end, they'd be there before ten. They'd already placed their bets on what they'd find in her house. Mike wanted his sweetheart home with him.
'Hmmm?' She didn't look up.
'You want to eat?'
'The pizza was fine.' Still writing.
'You didn't touch it.'
'I ate the crust.'
Cheese, she still wouldn't eat cheese. He blew out more air, remembering his perpetual warning to himself:
These Chinese girls were tough. Ching had warned him that he'd better be prepared for a long battle if he wanted to win.
April put the notebook down and looked up. 'Tired?' she asked.
'No, I'm cool.' They were now in the shiny Crown Vic headed down Second Avenue to Twenty-third Street, where his battered Camaro was parked. April's car was in the garage at One PP, all the way downtown. He'd have to take her down there to get her car; then they'd both head home in different cars on the BQE. Toughness was tough on logistics. He knew he was going to pick her up in the morning for the drive to La Guardia, but he didn't want to be separated from her for what remained of the night.
'I wish they'd held on to Wendy. I don't want to get yanked out of bed when she takes off in an hour.' April yawned.
'Exactly what I was thinking,' Mike said.
They'd held on to her for nearly ten hours. Some of that time she'd cooled her heels all alone in an interview room. They had her on video, chewing her nails, tapping her feet, twisting around in her chair, taking insignificant bites of three sandwiches then discarding them, and drinking more than a dozen Cokes. There was a saying in the cops that if you put three suspects in a cell for the night only the guilty one would sleep. The innocent ones would be scared shitless; the guilty one could relax because he knew who did it. Wendy was worried and pretty much hopping out of her skin. Without her guns connected to the homicides, though, they didn't have enough to arrest her. They needed the guns to connect the dots.
Mike left the Crown Vic at Twenty-third Street, and they both got in the Camaro. 'You want to leave your car and come home with me tonight?' he asked. So much for toughness.
Forty-five
S
kinny Dragon was waiting for April when she drove up at one-thirty-three A.M. April could see her fried- seaweed hair framed in the light of the living room window. Before April had even switched the headlights off, Skinny was out the front door in her pajamas, screaming as if there were no such thing as sleeping neighbors.
'Where you been,
she cried. 'So late. Thoughtless, thoughtless.' Loud. Something April didn't catch, softer in Chinese. About a party she was supposed to go to, didn't get to. It wasn't clear which one of them Skinny meant.
April grabbed her purse and Ching's custom dress in its see-through plastic, then jumped wearily out of the car. 'Hi, Ma. Sorry. I didn't know it would take so long.'
'No good. Worry all day. Sorry not good enough,' she scolded in Chinese.
Of course not. What could be good enough to appease a suffering mother? A hundred years of apology would not be enough.
'Where you been?' Skinny asked softer now, clearly relieved her only child was not dead, as she had feared. 'What's that? You go shopping?'
As soon as Skinny struck a more normal furious tone, April didn't feel the need to run anymore. Her exhausted body crawled up the walk, acting like the worm her mother thought she was. She wished she could hide the dress. No such luck.
'How much you spend for that?' Skinny demanded.
'Nothing, it was free,' April said.
'Free? What kind of dress is free?' Skinny moved closer for a better look. 'You do monkey business for that dress,
She peered at the dress, giving her daughter a poke in the ribs.
'Maaa!' April dodged her, dove through the front door.
But she didn't make it to the stairs leading to her apartment.
Skinny hurried in right behind her, now screaming with a worse idea. 'You get that dress from ghost?' she demanded, poking the air with her finger, appalled that April could even consider taking an article of clothing from a dead person. But where else would such a thing come free? The Dragon was not a sophisticated thinker.
'Ma, relax. It was a gift,' April assured her.
'Ha.' That meant monkey business for sure. Skinny drew close to her daughter to sniff out the truth. She grabbed April's arm and held her in the old iron grip.
It was late and April longed to permanently wrench herself away from her difficult mother with the one-track mind. The problem was, Skinny had a nose worthy of one of those fake doctors in Chinatown who smelled their patients for symptoms. In fact, if Skinny had become a fake doctor, she'd have made a fortune and wouldn't need a daughter to torture and take care of her.
But April was too tired to wrench right now, and there Skinny went. Sniff, sniff, sniff at April's neck, her hair, the palms of her hands, sniffing for sex and murder. And April happened to have been exposed to both that day, the sex most recently. Where and how she would never tell. Mike had been hot; she had been hot. The long week without was more than either could take a second longer. Okay, they'd done it in a car. Okay, in both cars.
April tried to disengage so her mother wouldn't know, but it was too late.
'Aiyeeei,' Skinny screamed.
'Ma, come on, I'll make you some tea. We'll talk,' she said. 'Look at my dress. Here, isn't it beautiful?'
Skinny staggered into the kitchen, too traumatized to think about the origins of a dress. Sex made her absolutely nuts. She was nuts for ten minutes; then the kitchen restored her to what passed in her for sanity. Like a windup toy she went directly to the refrigerator and started taking out the food, which was a good thing because April was really, really hungiy.
Skinny's angry muttering while she cooked, however, soon drove April upstairs, where she threw her offending clothes on the floor, showered, and changed into a clean T-shirt and a pair of NYPD shorts. When she returned to the kitchen to mollify the Dragon with stories of Ching's kindness, the ham-and-scrambled-egg fried rice, pickled baby bok choy, and red-cook chicken was on the table. Relieved, April collapsed in one of three battered kitchen chairs and reached for her chopsticks.
'Eat,' Skinny demanded, as if she weren't about
to.
'Thanks, Ma. I'm starved.' April snagged a bite of succulent wing meat, perfectly simmered in gingered soy and saki and still warm. Her favorite.
'Bad luck,' Skinny said.
