Burning Time (10 page)

“Uh, no,” the kid said nervously. “You just seem kinda—I don’t know.” He paused. “Ah, is it hot?” he asked finally.

Troland reached in his pocket for the registration and the receipt from the bike shop in San Diego where he had bought it. Two and a half hours later he was on a bus, heading back to Pacific Beach with the kid’s check in his wallet. Now he had plenty of money. All the way home, and deep into the night, Willy’s voice told him he did good.

“Yes, New York is still waiting,” April said as patiently as she could.

In San Diego they couldn’t say Woo. When April said, “This is Detective Woo from New York,” they said “Who?” She refused to play games.

“Never mind. Just tell Sergeant Coconut Grove it’s the detective from NYPD.”

Next to her Sergeant Sanchez laughed.

April lowered her eyes. Now he was not only staring at her, he was listening to her conversations, too.

Sanchez sat at the desk in front of hers. To stare at her properly, he had to sit sideways with his back to the window. If she sat facing the front of her desk and looked up just a tiny bit, she looked right at the middle section of his body. If she tilted her head just a tiny bit to the right she saw the upper part of him, his chest and shoulders and head.

His phone, like hers, was often plugged into his ear, but he sat leaning back in his chair, with his feet on one of the open drawers, looking at her. This was very disturbing for
many reasons. One was that everybody knew it. And when people in a precinct knew things, they teased.

“Where’s your boyfriend?” people said when Sanchez was out in the field, and someone was looking for him.

It drove her crazy.

Just now the room was full of people. There was a black guy carrying on in the pen. They’d just brought him in. There wasn’t a mark on him; his shirt was tucked in. No one was even near him, and already he was complaining loudly about police brutality. Must be twenty-five people in the room, and no one was paying any attention to him. They always said that.

It was hard to concentrate with so many things going on. She was trying to talk to San Diego, and something had happened in Central Park so the room was filling up. She hadn’t been called in on it, so she didn’t even know what it was. And right in the middle of it, while she was waiting for her contact in the San Diego Police Department to get on the phone, Sanchez was looking at her so that anybody looking at him would know exactly what he was thinking.

She wished she could handle these things the way Sergeant Joyce did. Sergeant Joyce had already passed her test for Lieutenant and was waiting for her number to come up to get the promotion. She was only thirty-six, Irish, with wanna-be yellow hair cut like April’s. But she was tougher and had a sharp tongue. She could swing her hips and not look stupid, make a joke back when someone flirted with her. She was decisive and powerful. Sergeant Joyce would never get stuck lowering her eyes like some caricature of the demure Oriental.

April tapped her finger on the desk and switched her thoughts to Jimmy Wong, with whom she had worked on a case once, and got to know when she was in the 5th.
That was two years ago. Jimmy Wong would never let anybody know he was interested in her. Never in a million years, not for a ten-million-dollar lottery. He just wouldn’t. He was on Night Watch in Brooklyn now, which meant he went out on whatever calls came in from the whole borough from eleven o’clock at night on.

April worked some days, some nights, but in the precincts the night shift of the detective squad ended at eleven. Jimmy Wong said he was waiting for a promotion to ask her to marry him, but she doubted he would ask her if she was transferred back to the 5th and got hers first. It would not stop her, though. Sergeant Joyce’s police officer husband divorced her, and left her with two small children, when she went into the Academy. April wanted to be like her. Sergeant Woo, BA, MA. Some day. She wasn’t sure she wanted to marry Jimmy Wong anyway.

“Yes, I’m holding,” she told San Diego, looking down so she would not have to make eye contact with Sanchez.

April had a list of things she knew and did not know about Sanchez. She also had a list of things she didn’t like about him. First and foremost she did not like being aware of him. And she could not help being aware of him. He draped his body in front of her and used some kind of after-shave that was very powerful. He didn’t just wear it on special occasions, either. It was there every day.

Once when she was in a Cosmetics Plus store, she smelled all the men’s cologne trying to find which one it was. She wasn’t much of a detective; she couldn’t find it. But maybe she wasn’t a bad detective. Maybe the chemistry of his body changed the smell so she couldn’t identify it once it was on him. She didn’t like thinking about the chemistry of his body. But she couldn’t help that, either. It was in front of her all the time.

She had given some thought to the fact that different
kinds of men had different smells. This was the sort of thing no one would say, and she probably shouldn’t even think, but she thought about it anyway, and wondered what effect things like hair and smell had on a long-term relationship like marriage.

Caucasian men had a sour smell. When she was little, she had been told this was because they ate cheese. Asians don’t eat cheese. When she walked in a crowd in Chinatown, she could smell garlic coming out of the pores of Asians the way sour sweat did in other kinds of people.

Sanchez smelled so sweet she couldn’t tell what his true smell was like. The worst thing was that she had gotten used to it, so she knew when he was in the room without having to see him. The sweetness was kind of comforting, and she missed it when it wasn’t there.

Her thoughts shifted to the after-shave she had given Jimmy for Christmas. It was called Devin, was very expensive, and had a citrusy aroma. Jimmy made a face when he opened it and said it smelled like urine. He said he’d never use it. But after he had broken the cellophane on the box, she couldn’t take it back. It gave her a bad feeling about him. He was wiry and not much taller than she was. She thought if he wasn’t grateful or generous-minded before he asked her to marry him, she’d have plenty of trouble pleasing him after.

April gazed at Sanchez’s arms as she waited for Sergeant Grove to come on the line. The heat was too high in the building again, and Sanchez had rolled up his sleeves. She could not help noticing the fine black hairs he had right down to the backs of his hands. This led April to speculate he probably had hair on his chest, too; somehow she did not find this as unattractive and barbarian in a man as her mother and aunts did.

Sanchez also had a mustache, which tried but did not
succeed in making him look fierce. The mustache was irritating because, well, she wasn’t sure why. Another thing was he smiled often, letting people know when he was friendly and in a good mood. The Chinese laughed or frowned, but rarely smiled. Everybody knew a smiling Chinese was a troublemaker, probably a cheat and a liar. Sanchez’s smiles were confusing.

Two other items on the list were his physical type and his eyes. April was disapproving of both Chinese body types—chubby with undefined musculature, and thin with undefined musculature. She disliked her own flatness so much she exercised with free weights every night to encourage her shoulders and buttocks to become more rounded. Nothing short of surgery could change her eyes, though.

Sanchez had well-formed eyes and a well-proportioned body large enough to carry someone much bigger than herself from a burning building, if the need ever arose. There had been more than one burning building in April’s childhood, so it was the sort of thing she thought about.

She did not like being attracted to Sanchez. And the thing she disliked about him the most was the fact that he was a fish
in
water. He belonged where he was. He spoke Spanish on the phone. He spoke Spanish to people on the street. He had cases that involved his people. His eyes danced with his happiness at being where he was. April wanted her fins back in her own water. She did not want to have to study him with interest. He was Hispanic, she was Chinese. They were structurally different, and not bilingual in the same languages.

Her thoughts about Sanchez were cut off by the San Diego P.D. They had finally managed to locate Sergeant Grove.

“Missing Persons, Sergeant Grove,” he said.

“Yes, Sergeant Grove, thank you for coming to the phone. This is Detective Woo in New York. I’m calling about the Ellen Roane case. Have you found anything?”

“How are you doing, Detective? Nope. I told you, we’ve got eight Jane Does here. Had five of them around before your girl disappeared. And none of them is a match. Three Mexican, two black. We have three Caucasians, but they’re all older women.”

“Is there any chance you could take her picture around in the neighborhood where she put the charges on the credit card, and see if you can locate her?” April wasn’t exactly looking for the girl’s body, and had counted on Grove’s not coming up with it. Ellen Roane would probably be back in her dorm room in two days, mad at her parents for making such a fuss. April had seen it a hundred times before. Still …

“Hey, I can check out the hospitals and the ME’s office. I’ve already done that, but you know as well as I do that our job is to match names with bodies. We want to get the dead ones buried. We can’t go looking for every kid that takes off on a lark.”

“Is there anybody who can go out in the field for a few hours?” April said patiently.

There was a short pause. “Look, I only tried the city. Do you want me to try the surrounding jurisdictions?”

“Yes, might as well,” April said, discouraged.

“Detective?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“How’s the weather in New York?”

“It’s forty-six degrees and raining.”

“It’s seventy-eight and real sunny here.”

“Thank you for sharing that with me, Sergeant.”

They said their good-byes and hung up.

“He hit on you?” Sanchez asked.

April shook her head. “I don’t have a good feeling about this.”

It was Friday, more than a week since Ellen had left for San Diego and used her MasterCard to buy food and clothes. There had been no new charges on the credit card in three days. Where was she eating? Where was she staying? April had checked with American Airlines on Ellen’s return ticket, and found out that Ellen did not show up for the flight she was booked on. College had started up again, and she was not back. Something was wrong.

And what was wrong with the system was that the San Diego P.D. would not send someone out with her picture to find out what happened to her unless they had good reason to believe a crime involving her had been committed. Ellen had to commit a crime herself, or be abducted with a number of witnesses looking on. That was on the SDPD side. NYPD would not send someone out there to look for her under any circumstances.

It was not easy to tell parents that the network of police departments and the FBI did not actually investigate missing persons. What they did was try to match descriptions with unidentified bodies. It was terrible, but if the Roanes wanted to find their daughter, they would probably have to hire a private detective to look for her. April reached for the phone to tell them if she wasn’t able to come up with something soon, a private detective was their best option.

Troland took the girl to the crummy house he grew up in. Back then, the streets around it had been quiet. When he and his brothers drove by, their bikes blaring a continual fart, people used to come out on their porches to see what was going on. Not anymore. The houses had gone down. Some of the porches were about falling off, and whole families were living on them, lying out there in hammocks with the Latino music blasting. Laughing, smoking, arguing in loud voices. Everywhere there was the smell of beans and frying foods. Broken-down cars were parked on the street, in the short weedy drives. Shit. His mother died seven years ago, and his aunt Lela had been living there ever since. He’d given her a trip to Disneyland to get rid of her for a few days, and offered to look after her house for her. She’d handed over the keys and taken off.

Troland unlocked the door and the girl followed him in.

“This your place, Willy?” she asked.

He was a foot or two away from her. Suddenly his hand whipped out, caught her arm, and wheeled her around to look at him.

“Hey, that hurts. What’s the matter?” Tears sprouted in her eyes.

“Don’t call me Willy,” he snapped. Willy’s voice thundered in his ear.
Only Willy is the real Willy
.

“I thought that was your name.” She sniffed, trying to hold back a sob.

“Don’t cry. I don’t like crying.”

“What’s the
matter?”
She gulped a little, pulling on her arm to get him to release her.

“Nothing. Just do it right.” He looked at her so intensely, she turned her head away from his eyes.

“You’re not going to be weird, are you?” she said faintly. “Weird scares me.”

Troland snorted. “What’s weird?”

“Uh, I don’t know.” Her eyes were on the coke.

He had pulled some cellophane packages out of his pocket. He put one package down on the table and went to check the doors. Front door locked. Back door locked. Windows locked. He made some patterns with his foot around each entrance, to seal it from the outside. He went around the house three times, first to check the doors and windows, then to pull down the discolored old blinds. Finally he came back to the table and laid out a large piece of paper to put the lines of powder on.

“Hey, what’s that?”

“What does it look like?”

She shivered. The paper was almost completely covered by a drawing, very vivid with strong reds and blues.

“I don’t know.” She leaned closer.

Her blond hair fell over her face, and she didn’t brush it back as she tried to figure it out.

“Uh, two snakes with wings?” she guessed. “No, an eagle with two snakes in his mouth. Ugh, it has teeth, and it looks like the whole thing’s burning up around the edges.”