A Killing Gift (27 page)

A
pril took the house key out of its zippered pocket in her purse and did not look back. She walked slowly to the front door of the brick house. By then it was nearly three, but the Dragon was still not waiting for her in the window. April turned the key in the lock and pushed the door open. From the kitchen came no sound of Chinese TV. All was quiet until she closed the door and the dog came alive, barking its head off as it ran out to meet her.

"Shi wo,"
she called. It's me.

"Wa wa wa wa!" the dog yapped excitedly. April dropped her purse on one of the uncomfortable carved wooden Chinese throne chairs and squatted down to pick up the dog.

"Hey, baby, where is everybody?" She put her nose in the apricot coat that was still puppy-soft, and the dog went nuts, wiggling in her arms, licking her face. Then abruptly she wanted to get down again. April put the dog down and headed into the kitchen. "Ma!"

"Shhh." Skinny Dragon came out, waving a dish towel like a matador with a red cape. She looked like a Chinese version of those overdone Hollywood stars on the
People
magazine worst-dressed list, a crazy lady in plaid trousers-brown and yellow and black-with a psychedelic twinset with a design of red, purple, and pink flowers on it.
Whoa.
With the furious expression and the inch-too-long, ink-dyed, freeze-dried hair sticking out of her scalp like a fright wig and new oversize purple glasses, Skinny was quite a sight.

"
Ni
hao,
Ma," April said.

"Bu hao,"
Skinny replied angrily.

"Oh, yeah, what's wrong?"

"Dad has upset stomach. Not up yet," Skinny scolded in Chinese. The dog jumped up on those awful pants. Skinny picked her up and patted her furiously. The dog didn't seem to mind the rough treatment. Like April, she was used to it.

"Oh, the usual," April said. A hangover. In that case she didn't have to go in and say hello.

Skinny rattled on cantankerously in Chinese. Lots of things were wrong in her world that she had to report. "People calling for you all day. Don't they have your number?" she complained.

April felt a chill. All day? "Who called?"

"People from work, wanted to know where you were."

Uh-oh. People from work knew where to reach her. April moved to the side of the front window and cautiously looked out. Nobody in front. The house was attached. Nobody could be in the backyard without going straight through the house, or over a lot of fences. Reassured, she moved away from the window. "What did you tell them, Ma?"

"Said you were coming at three. And now those gas people are here." Skinny didn't look too happy about that.

What? April's stomach did a somersault as she crossed the room to protect her foolish mother. "What gas people?"

"There might be a gas leak. The whole block could go-"

April's heart thundered in her throat. "How many?" she asked softly.

"Two. Something wrong?"

Yeah, no Con Edison truck was parked out front.

"Is Gao here, or his friend?" April asked.

Skinny shook her head.

Okay, just the three of them. Two old people and her. But she had a gun. She swallowed a thousand questions because she already knew the answers. "Where are they?" she said.

Skinny looked confused. "In the basement, of course."

The basement door was outside in the backyard. The gas line came up through the kitchen. It would be easy to rig the house. Just start a fire and it might go up. Nothing fancy. She'd seen it happen before. Just thinking about it made her hand tremble.

"Is the back door locked?"

"No. What are you doing,
ni!"
Skinny's eyes widened as April unholstered her big gun and started hustling her toward the bedroom, using her body as a shield.

"Go get Dad, Ma. Get out of the house, quickly. Call nine-one-one," she whispered. She handed her mother the cell phone from her pocket and pushed her toward the door.

"Jiu yi yi? Weishenme?"
Nine-one-one, why? Skinny grabbed her daughter's arm, freaking out. "What's the matter?"

April tried to shake her off. "Just get Dad and get out of the house. When you're outside call nine-one-one. Say there's an officer down and give the address."

"Why? What are you doing, ni?" Skinny was a real management problem. She didn't want to do it.

April had her back to the wall that separated the living room from the kitchen. She was in the ready position with the gun, covering the door so her parents could get out of there.

"They're not from Con Edison," she said hissing.

"No?" Skinny was having a problem with this. "Why not?"

"Listen to me. Get out of here now before the house blows up." All this in Chinese.

Then Skinny's expression changed from confusion to rage. "My house? My house?" She started screaming, "Dad, get up. Get up. The house is going." All
this
in Chinese.

April's ears popped with the noise and she took her eyes off the target for just a second. That was when Al Frayme leaped through the door with one of those Japanese fight yells intended to terrify an opponent. It terrified her, all right, and it roused her father.

Shouting himself at all the noise, Ja Fa Woo chose this moment to stagger out of his bedroom in his underwear.

To April's right were her precious parents, to her left the enemy who'd killed Bernardino. She swung left and fired. The gun discharged as he knocked it up and out of her hands. Swearing, she sprang away from him as he moved forward to attack her vulnerable middle.

"Get out," she screamed to her parents.

Now she remembered what had happened that terrible night! Frayme had come up from below with his shoulder, aiming for her
tan tien
-the psychic center of the body right below the navel that protects balance and produces the reservoir of force needed to fight. In one blow she'd lost her breath and her sea of
chi,
and spun like a top, kicking at him again and again until he caught her. Instead she should have let her mind turn to water. She should have spun away and away each time he came after her.

Now there was no hope for a more powerful weapon. Her Glock was on the floor in the corner. Her Chief's Special was in her purse. Her mother and father were screaming at each other in Chinese.
Do something. Do something.
Useless.

A second man followed the first through the kitchen door. And then there were two martial-arts maniacs circling around her with no soft mat to spar on and a new mission in their eyes: Kill her for fingering them. All she had were calm thoughts and labyrinth arts. Karate versus
mi tsung i.
Not very much.

But she did it. She let her mind turn to water and fake-danced on the walls of her childhood living room, making so much motion with her body and the heavy Chinese chairs that the two men were trapped with their fist weapons striking air. Monkey child danced up the wall, spun, and struck and spun away. Enraged, Frayme grabbed a chair and smashed it against the wall, missing her by inches. Leaky grabbed one leg as she came down but caught an unexpected fist in his mouth before he could drop her. His head snapped back, and pain ripped through her arm as her knuckles connected with breaking teeth.

Skinny screamed as Frayme sprang at April from the other side. Mind like water, April spun again, moving toward the front door. Her plan was to get them out of the house.

H
is assignment completed, Woody Baum cruised slowly to the end of the block. He was free now, and there were a lot of things he could do. He had the unmarked vehicle and was working on the chart. He'd copied the photo of Rick Leaky and his dog. One thing he could do was take that drive out to the Hamptons and get a positive ID from the lawyer, Paul Hammermill. Save the task force some time. It might be what April would do if she were still on the case. He wanted to do what she would have done.

He slowed the car down to a crawl, thinking about other things his boss might have done in the remaining hours of the day. And he also considered things his boss never did. One thing she never, ever did was strand herself without a car. This thought pulled him to a complete stop. He knew his sergeant's Le Baron was in Forest Hills. Why hadn't she wanted a ride there to pick it up? Maybe she hadn't asked because she felt bad. Lieutenant Sanchez must have knocked the starch out of her, and Woody knew that scenario too well from his own career. He worried about her.

A car behind him honked, and he realized he was blocking an intersection. He shot the driver the finger and remembered that he hadn't fulfilled his assignment. Sanchez had told him not just to drive April home, but to see her all the way into the house and make certain it was secure before leaving. It was just a routine precaution, but he hadn't done that. The car behind him honked again. Woody made a U turn in the intersection and headed back.

A
pril did not make it out the front door. Chaos reigned over the calm lake of her fighting spirit. She could not lure both attackers out the door. Blood poured from Leaky's bleeding mouth and a cut on his forehead. Skinny Dragon was shrieking with pure terror as he tried to get a killing hold on her slippery daughter. April's father had disappeared into the kitchen and was now trapped inside.

In a second of clarity, Skinny reached for a soap-stone smiling Buddha from the dining room shrine, stepped across the room, and whacked Leaky on the back.

"Arrgggh." Bellowing like a bull, he turned and in one fluid motion grabbed the old woman by her scrawny neck.

The game was over. April's heart almost stopped when she saw the Dragon she'd thought all-powerful transform into an old woman in a giant's choke hold.

That was it. She lunged for the gun in the corner of the room, kicking away the table that blocked the kitchen door. Frayme flew to block her. She rolled away from him, and the gun skittered under the sofa. As she dove after it, the kitchen door swung open and her father came out with a butcher knife in each hand. Stunned, Ja Fa Woo saw his wife of forty years caught in a killing hold.

"No!" April screamed. Her father had bleary eyes behind his thick black frames. He was a cook, and not entirely a sober one. His watery eyes seemed puzzled as he tried to choose in a nanosecond which knife to throw at the bloody-faced man holding his wife.

"Ma," April screamed. She did not have a chance to say "duck." She was distracted. In that second Frayme grabbed her and twisted hard. She felt searing pain as her shoulder dislocated. Then her mind cleared, and she came up with her head, bashing him under the chin. His body jerked up. As he straightened and became a clear target, Ja Fa Woo moved like a ninja in his underwear. One hand, one knife. The biggest one, his hacking knife, he wielded like a hatchet, striking Frayme between the shoulder blades.

April dodged the falling body as Frayme crashed on the sofa. Then Ja Fa turned to a stunned Leaky.

"Aieyeee," he yelled, and launched his second knife. This one had a very thin razor-sharp blade and was his favorite. It was the one he used for boning duck and chicken.

Leaky screamed as the knife sliced into his chest only an inch from the top of Skinny's head. He reached to pull it out and her knees gave way.

At that moment, Woody Baum charged into the house with his gun drawn yelling, "Police-freeze!" at the bloody scene.

A
pril had a headache that wouldn't let up. Long after her shoulder and other bruises had healed, important Department people were still dragging her through every move she'd made in the weeks since Albert Frayme had first tried to take her down in Washington Square. She felt terrible. The terrible feeling was constantly reinforced by everyone.

The questions IA investigators asked over and over sounded to her as if they actually believed it was her fault for not immediately linking Al Frayme with karate after his name came up as a caller on both Bernardino's and Devereaux's phones. No, she had not been holding out on them. No, she could not have acted sooner to identify Frayme as Bernardino's killer and save Birdie Bassett. It was an insulting idea. Still, she felt bad. The killer had been an expert at locating disappearing graduates. He had known exactly who she was and where she lived (or used to live) as soon as her name appeared in the press following Bernardino's murder-long before he decided he had to kill her and her parents in their home. She hated to think about missing that.

She told herself that it was not her fault that Frayme had known ways to escape from his office, and had done so many times when people assumed he was there. Before the unfortunate incident in her home, she had told Mike everything she knew about Al Frayme. It had not been on her watch when he took a subway to Queens to meet Leaky after she and Woody had fingered him as an accessory in the case. Nor was it her fault that they set out to convince her parents into thinking they were Con Edison workers so they could get into the house to rig an accident. But she felt that it was her fault. They all could have died. All the Woos.

IA's job, of course, was to deconstruct any and all failings occurring in the system. Why had the case ended in a spectacular mess in an officer's private home? How could they prevent such a disaster from happening again? It wasn't a hard one: Keep cop victims away from their own cases. That was their conclusion. Even though she had solved the case, she hung her head.

Like Harry Weinstein and his story about the quarter mil from Bernardino's lottery money, April had her story about what had happened in the Woo house. She stuck to it. The knives got into the perpetrators' bodies… she had no idea how. The dead couldn't speak, and Ja Fa Woo could speak, but only in Chinese. She didn't want him under any kind of scrutiny, so she took the Department hit for a thousand mistakes. It was her filial duty.

So many faults gave her a bad headache, but there were a few compensations. Mike couldn't apologize enough, couldn't do enough to atone for sending her almost to her death with only the useless Woody Baum to protect her. He'd do anything to win back her love and trust, and April had quite a list of tasks toward that end. Paint the interior of her parents' house, buy new furniture for the living room. Renovate the awful avocado bathroom. Promise never, ever to thwart her again in any way.
Ha.
That was the big one, and he was taking it pretty well. After all, it was his fault that Frayme had gotten away. They should never have released him in the first place. There were lots of should-haves and should-not-haves in the case, but who was counting?

In the middle of her interview ordeal, when April was holding back one of several hundred little details about the case that she didn't want known, she had a surprising insight that was so obvious she couldn't imagine why no one had thought of it before. On her first day of freedom she called Kathy Bernardino.

"Thank God you're still there," she said when Kathy answered. "I was afraid you'd left already."

"Soon. But April! I'm so glad you called. I hear you're getting it bad," Kathy replied.

"There's never any mercy for the innocent, but I'm okay," April told her. "When are you leaving? I want to talk with you before you go."

"That can be arranged. Bill and I want to thank you properly for what you've done for us."

"Your father was good to me. I owed you," April said. But she had more to do.

Bill was wearing a crumpled gray work suit and was in his usual hurry to get back to court when they met in Chinatown for lunch. April had the day off, and Mike had been promoted to captain but not yet reassigned. Kathy was returning to Seattle in less than a week. She'd had her hair done and looked good in a lucky red suit, April's second-favorite color after blue.

April ordered the lunch in Chinese. Dumplings, Ants Climbing Tree, Peking Duck, Noodles for Long Life, Golden Coin with Broccoli. Too much, but so what?

Everybody was in a good mood. Bill slapped Mike on the back a few times, and the two talked about how his messy Tiger Liniment had almost put him on trial for murder.

April poured the Chinese tea for health and began.

"Mike and I were talking. Loose ends were bothering us," she said, "so we have a few details to clear up."

"Oh, yeah?" Bill laughed uneasily. "With you guys it's never over, is it?"

Mike shook his head. "This is just between us."

"Okay, what?" Kathy looked a little nervous, too.

"What's your mother's date of birth?" April asked.

"Four, four, forty-four. She was younger than Dad. Weird, right?"

April knew that because she'd checked it out. "Anything strike you about that number?" She glanced at Mike and smiled.

"Of course, Bill and I talked about it a lot. It's the amount of missing cash. And, you know, those numbers came up on her winning lottery ticket. She used them every time." Kathy shook her head.

"Kathy, I'm sure you looked into your dad's files and found the receipts that showed he had your mom cremated."

She locked eyes with her brother. "I did look after you brought it up," she admitted. "Mom would never have wanted that. Why did he do it?"

April took a deep breath, then let the air out slowly. She glanced at Mike again, and he nodded for her to take the lead. Figuring it out hadn't been hard once she'd had time to give the mystery some thought. For Kathy and Bill, she took it one step at a time.

"You know, the Chinese burn fake money at funerals to help their loved ones in the afterlife."

"Interesting." Bill glanced at his watch.

"And the Egyptians filled the tombs of their pharaohs with everything they'd need in the afterlife, including their wives and servants. In many cultures people send loved ones off with the things they valued most."

"Oh, shit!" Bill said, getting it. "You're not suggesting Dad buried money with Mom!"

"Oh, my God. I don't believe it." Kathy put her hand to her forehead. She did believe it. All of a sudden it made sense.

"What got me thinking, Kathy, was when you insisted you saw your mother buried in a coffin. Why would she be buried in a coffin if she'd been cremated? The cemetery accepts cremated remains, so he didn't need to fool them with a coffin. The only people he needed to fool were you two."

"Jesus, Joseph, and Mary!" Kathy was so agitated that she broke a chopstick. "I understand. Dad wanted Mom to take it with her. I guess he thought four million was her share." She shook her head. "Unbelievable."

"What troubled us," Mike said, "was that no one believed you didn't know where it was. Anyway, one of you did. Harry did." The dumplings arrived and he tucked in, delighted by the reaction they were getting.

Kathy and Bill looked at the food blankly.

"Dad didn't tell me because I wouldn't have let him," Bill said.

"But this is just the kind of thing Harry would enjoy doing. What a hoax, and two cops could pull it off easily. They put the cash in the coffin. Dad gave Harry his piece and knew that as long as he was alive the money was safe in the grave. Jesus, I'll bet Harry was just waiting for Dad to leave for Florida to go and get it," Kathy said.

"Eat," April ordered.

Kathy laughed nervously. "How can I eat when we don't know he hasn't already taken it?"

"I gave him a little warning," Mike told her. "When I told him we knew everything, he confirmed. Eat; we have all the time in the world."

Kathy's face turned the color of her jacket with the excitement of revelation. "Look, with Bill as my witness, I'm going to make you two a promise. If that money turns up where you say it is, I'm going to give you Dad's house for a dollar and see you married there." She sounded so positive about it that April had to laugh.

"What if I don't want to marry him?" she said, rolling up a Peking Duck pancake and handing it over to him.

"You will," Kathy said.

Bill lifted a shoulder, then started to eat. "It's only fair," he said. "The whole thing could have gone a lot worse."

Bernardino's lovely house in Westchester, for April and Mike and maybe a couple of kids? The two of them were enjoying the food and the occasion. The promise made them look at each other and just laugh. A reward for doing their job? That would be the day. But it sure felt good.