'So he had a chance to kill somebody else. And still Wendy didn't say anything.' He was furious.
'It was her gun,' April said slowly. 'She's a thief. She can't restrain herself. It's a sickness. That first day I questioned her I hit her with her weakness. She didn't want to get branded as a thief so she drove up to the Vineyard to get some of the stuff out of her apartment. But she also wanted to check out her guns. She wasn't absolutely certain one of her crew hadn't taken one. Remember when I asked her how many guns she had? She said she didn't know. She said they'd been stolen years ago. But after Prudence was killed, she knew she couldn't wiggle out. She just hit the bottle. Whether or not she wanted to die only she can say.'
Traffic slowed almost to a stop on the bridge, and Mike hit the siren to open it up. 'Bleeding to death like that is a hell of a way to die,' he muttered.
'Maybe she didn't know what was happening.' April didn't want to think about Wendy's lethal binge while they were on Martha's Vineyard.
'Yeah, Prudence Hay went that way, too. Wendy had that on her conscience.' April's thoughts shifted to another member of the team, Louis the Sun King, not exactly an expert in pain management. He'd been Kim's first friend—after Kim had married Clio for citizenship. Maybe he was the man Clio was talking about, still Kim's special friend. Someone should check.
Mike hit the siren again, more insistently this time, and a little frantic maneuvering of the cars around them got them moving toward the off-ramp.
April punched some numbers in her phone. Mike glanced over at her.
'Who are you calling?'
'Tang. I'm worried about Ching.'
'Why?'
'Mike. This thing has just been bothering me all day. Why is Kim doing this? How does he choose the girls? And then I realized Louis and Wendy have nothing to do with it. It's about the girls and their dresses. He's turning the girls into angels, dressing them in their white dresses, and marrying them to God so they don't have to marry men.'
Mike whistled. 'But what does Ching have to do with it?'
'Ching told me Saturday that Tang put an angel on her gown. But she must have been mistaken. My guess is that Kim did it on his own.'
Sixty
A
fter leaving the bar, Kim went back to the Dumpster on Fiftieth Street. Seeing Tang on TV offering so much money for the chance to punish him made him feel terrible. He was wandering around, dazed and wounded. When he got back to the Dumpster, there were policemen around it, and he left right away.
He didn't know what to do. Tang was his closest friend. He'd been so proud to have a friend, a boss, who was so famous and so rich. He told everybody about her house. He went out of his way to pass the fine brownstone just so he could show off and tell his friends, 'This is where my boss lives.'
Even when Tang wasn't home, Kim took every opportunity to deliver things and help out there. He knew how the alarm system worked and what her housekeeper looked like, much prettier and younger than Tang. He knew a lot of things about Tang. He knew that she did not get up early because she was out late every night. He knew that she did not like lunch or exercise, but at the end of every day she enjoyed an hour of relaxation in her beautiful pool. The maid told him Tang's pool had lavender oil in it and was kept very hot for her, almost as hot as a bathtub.
The pool was in a glass room on the roof. The room was full of plants and palm trees, and the pool was so heavy the ceiling of the floor above had to be reinforced with steel beams to support it. He'd seen the room on the top floor himself, that's how close to her he was.
Because Tang liked him, Kim thought of himself as a protector of hers. He'd pass her street in the evening before he went cruising just to see if she was home, to look through the windows into her rooms. He didn't want her as an enemy.
Kim felt sick and lonely and needed a friend to help him. Wendy wasn't answering her phone, so he went to see the old man, Bill, who bailed him out whenever he got in trouble. Bill was at home in his penthouse apartment, but he was busy and didn't want to be bothered. Bill Krauterman was his name. Bill buzzed Kim up, but as soon as he opened the door, he told Kim to go away.
'I don't have time for trouble now,' he said with an angry face.
Kim started crying out in the hall. 'Clio hit me.'
'Well, I'm sorry she hit you. I told you not to stay with her.'
'She hits me too much. I can't go back there.'
'Okay, so leave her.' Bill was big, very big. Over six feet tall, and he weighed too much. He had trouble getting in and out of bed, and sometimes he got very mad at Kim for nothing at all.
'I did leave.' Kim was desperate and cried some more, letting his tears run down his face so Bill would feel sorry for him. He should have been an actor. 'Tang fired me.' He was pleading while the fat old man was trying to make up his mind.
'Kim, did anybody ever tell you you're too much trouble?'
'But you like me, Billy We're friends, right? I need one thousand five hundred dollars for a new place. Then I won't bother you.' Kim said the words quickly, working hard to get the order right in English.
Bill's angry face looked back inside his apartment as if someone were in there waiting for him. He wasn't letting Kim in.
'I'll pay it right back,' Kim promised.
Bill snorted and pulled on his gray ponytail. 'How are you going to pay it back if you've lost your job? Oh, never mind. Take it and get lost.' He reached into his pocket, fanned out a fat roll of hundreds and gave Kim fifteen, then closed the door without saying anything more.
Kim's heart felt full. It made him so happy to get such easy money and be loved by a rich friend. Right away he went shopping. He wandered from store to store on Lexington and Third, looking for new clothes to look good for his friend. He spent all his shopping time thinking about the rest of the money in the old man's pocket and how he would get it later.
He was surprised when all his money was gone. He was wearing a green silk shirt and a fine suede jacket, new white pants, and Italian slip-on shoes. But he had nowhere to go, no plan. He felt poor and lonely again, and his memory flashed back to long ago. He thought of the village good-time girl who was so horribly burned when angry wives held her down and threw acid on her face for stealing their husbands. He could still hear the girl's screams in his head and see clearly the way she looked afterward.
Her body was sdll alive but she was dead. She called herself a living dead person.
Living dead person. Kim's sister, too. Kim thought of his sister, who was an angel now. He thought of Tang and the acid-throwing wives. Tang Ling was very vain; she liked to have her picture taken and see herself in the magazines. If acid spoiled her face, she would be ugly. She could never go on TV or hurt him again.
Kim was walking around Lexington Avenue, thinking about throwing acid on Tang for hurdng him so much. He walked around for a long time, down to Forty-second Street and Grand Central Station. He was thinking how easy it would be to make Tang a living dead person. She would scream and roll around on the ground. Her husband wouldn't want her anymore. No more late nights in restaurants. Kim knew where acid was, but not here in Manhattan. He had to go back to Queens to get it. That would take a long time. Anyway, even if he was mad at Tang, he would never hurt her.
Kim thought of another dead person. A girl, only thirteen. He didn't know her when she was alive. But when the men pulled her naked body out of the river, his mother turned to him.
'Maybe someone raped her and she struggled too hard,' she told him.
He was little then and didn't know what she meant. But he remembered later not to struggle too much when people hurt him. The girl in the river made him think of Tang drowning in her pool. A strong person could hold her under the water until she stopped struggling like the girl so long ago. Kim started walking to Tang's house. His feet in the handsome shoes were taking the familiar route back uptown. He wasn't thinking of taking the gun out and shooting Tang. That was the furthest thing from his thoughts. Wendy told him you couldn't shoot a gun without fixing the bang first because people were so afraid of guns. They got upset when they heard the noise and called the police. He hated the police, who always made trouble for him and tried to lock him up.
He had no plan to shoot anybody right then. The gun with the muffler on it was buried in the garbage.
