Judging Time Page 9

  Jokingly, Merrill used to tell him that dazed and puzzled were the two reactions actors had when stinking reviews came in. He and she had received some pretty stinking reviews when they got married, but the hate was never murderous, never struck at the heart.

  Snide remarks on either side of the color line were like graffiti on city walls. It was everywhere. They saw it, they didn't like it, but it wasn't going away. So they'd had to get used to it.

  They had told each other having to defend their reasons for being together made them stronger. What had made them vulnerable was the inability to have children, for which no doctor could find a medical reason. That flaw in their life was what had kept them from feeling normal, from feeling right as a couple. Rick had believed it was his fault; Merrill had believed it was hers. Now they would never see their love mirrored in other faces. Al Merrill's battles were over. Rick thought about that as his partners stared at him with disbelief.

  "Don't you know what's going on? Haven't you seen the news?" Mel echoed incredulously.

  Rick shook his head. Two cops had given him the news at four in the morning. He didn't need to hear the uninformed versions.

  Chris Richardson, a man who had his suits and everything else including his underwear made at Sulka and who trained in a gym for three hours every day after the market closed, was still slim enough to bend at the waist. He leaned forward and put a hand on Rick's knee. "This is going to get ugly," he said ominously. "Really ugly."

  Dan Rothhaus was a small wiry man with intense blue eyes, curly white hair, and a long thin nose the nostrils of which he constantly teased with a pinkie. Rothhaus radiated anxiety. Rick shot him an inquiring look, then stared at his other two partners as if he had never seen them before. Both were wealthy, well-fed men whose only adversities were having to endure spoiled first and second wives, spoiled and aimless children, and frequent turbulence in national and world markets.

  Now the three men were galvanized with what they seemed to see as a real problem, were catching each other's eyes and isolating him with their concern. Rick took a few moments to get a grip on himself. It was going to get ugly? It was already ugly.

  He drifted back into his own thoughts. Earlier in the day, Patrice had given him the feeling Merrill's murder hadn't been a random act. Now he was distracted by the word "ugly," and other, familiar irritations like the way his partners made a point of waiting for the restaurant staff to leave before saying anything of importance. All four men in the room had a stake in Liberty's Restaurant—all had a part ownership. But the other three considered it Rick's thing. They considered some of the patrons, and all of the staff, aliens, from another planet. Rick had the feeling that secretly they believed blacks were Martians. He had to stop thinking about that.

  He thought about Merrill's face when he'd gone to identify her body. It seemed to rebuke him with its emptiness. Her eyes and mouth were permanently closed, had no comment about what was going on, couldn't tell anyone what happened to her. Now, hours after he had left her there, he found himself trying to remember something else about Merrill other than her color.

  For the first time, her color seemed an unbearable offense. She had been frighteningly white at the medical examiner's office, as were the walls of the closed viewing room that he hadn't been allowed to enter. Rick had seen his dead wife through a window and was shaken by how white and alone she was. When he touched the window, that, too, was cold.

  "I want to go in," he'd said. He didn't want to leave her there with no crowd of mourners, to be dissected alone. It was so cold, so very cold. He was shaking all over.

  "Is that your wife?"

  He didn't look to see whose voice was asking, could not have said afterward which cop it was. He just knew the white corpse on the table wasn't his wife. No. his jaw and fists clenched. He looked at her for a long time. No, it was not his wife. Not Merrill. Then, finally he nodded.

  He did not encounter Daphne Petersen, was not shown Tor's body to identify. He felt as if the two were set apart somehow. He wanted to see Tor but was afraid to ask. No police person told him what really happened last night. Rick wondered if they would ever tell him. It hit him at that moment that he would not be able to rest until he knew exactly what happened. And then he was hustled out. They wouldn't let him go in and say good-bye to Merrill. Someone said something about everybody's having to suit up before getting anywhere near the dead these days, wear masks with respirators, as if all corpses carried the AIDS virus or TB, or something even worse. Or were they afraid death itself was catching?

  And everything had been white. A white sheet was tucked up around Merrill's ears so he couldn't see any more of her than her face, white under the harsh lights, unmarked in any way, frozen in an expression he'd never seen. It almost felt as if she'd been killed by whiteness itself, bled of her spirit, bleached into nothingness. He noticed that the large diamond studs she always wore were not in her ears. He had heard that the police stole jewelry, watches, and money of victims, also the property of people who were arrested. But Rick didn't think to ask about Merrill's diamonds.

  He was too shaken, for white had never been the color of death to him. He'd seen the dead, many dead in his childhood. His mother, grandmother, sister, and he used to visit all the families of the dead in their congregation. They'd prayed over the dead in church and sung them into heaven. The women probably still did. The dead went to heaven in golden chariots, sung there by the choir. They crossed the river to the other side. They were sung all the way on their journey to Jesus, who'd always loved and cherished them no matter who they had been or what they'd done with their lives. The lives may not have been very precious, but the souls were golden treasures to Jesus. That was what they believed. And the treasures were always black. Rick had never seen a dead white person until he saw his wife on—he couldn't even tell what she was lying on. She was covered with a sheet, and there was another sheet under her, draped to the floor.

  He admitted the body was hers, but nothing about the thing he saw through the window was like the Merrill he had known. And what was there was not going to heaven in a golden chariot. Merrill was going to be cut up with saws and scalpels and her tissues examined under a microscope. Sitting now with his partners in the borne he had shared with Merrill, Rick's body was tense, but his eyes hid his fury. It was already very very ugly.

  "Listen to me, Rick," Chris said earnestly. "You have to focus. Do you know what they're saying on TV? Do you know what's going on downstairs? Downstairs there are half a dozen of those vans with star wars on top. Two of those crews almost knocked me down, fighting to get a microphone in front of my face."

  It's never too late for salvation. Sing for Jesus, sisters and brothers. Rick had no congregation now, no one anywhere near to sing for Merrill. "Lord save us," he muttered.

  Merrill's family was waiting for her body so they could have a funeral. They wanted the funeral in Massachusetts where she'd grown up, and he'd agreed that was best. His family was on the way. After her body had been cut up and examined, they would take her back to the New England town she came from and bury her there. He sucked his breath in, trying to keep control.

  "What?" Mel said, cupping his ear.

  Rick shook his head, not replying.

  "Rick, I know you don't want to think about this right now, but you never know which way these things are going to jump. It's a madhouse out there."

  "What do you mean 'jump'?"

  Christopher looked apologetic. "You know how Tor was. Who knows what sort of garbage these fucks will come up with?"

  "What do you mean jump?"

  Chris jerked his chin, irritated. "Don't make me spell it out for you, Rick."

  "I'm slow," Rick said evenly. "Spell it out for me."

  "You're a celebrity."

  "So?" He knew what they were getting at and still he couldn't help pushing.

  "So, you've lived with publicity. You have to manage the situation all the time, present your own image. They see what
you tell them to see. You have to do that now big-time, you know that. You're an expert." Chris scowled at Dan, prompting him to pitch in.

  "Yeah." Dan finally opened his mouth. "You've always been great at managing them."

  "So what does managing the press have to do with getting a lawyer?"

  Mel shifted his stomach. "You know how we feel about you. We want you protected in every way. We don't want you getting hurt."

  Rick stared at the three men, his partners. He was already hurt. "Are you worried about the firm?" he asked softly. "Are you scared I'll taint the firm?"

  "No, no," Dan shot back angrily. "You don't get it, do you? The vultures are going to tear at your life, pick at your bones—schadenfreude. You know what that means?"

  Rick shook his head, but he got the picture.

  "It means taking pleasure from other people's troubles. Joy and pleasure from eating you alive," Dan persisted. "This is going to happen. It's guaranteed to happen, and we want to control it."

  Mel threw his two cents in. "We don't want to see it get out of control here, you know what I mean?' '

  Rick clenched his jaw. "They won't find anything to pin on me, if that's what you mean."

  Dan shook his head. "Don't be a stupid fuck, Rick. They always find something. You—"

  Abruptly he stopped as Patrice pushed open the door and bore down on them with a tray of rich pastries and a sullen expression. Rick turned to him, frowning, and their eyes locked.

  12

  What you doing?" Sai Woo screamed at her daughter.

  April stopped so short she almost felt as if she'd been halted by a bullet. What she'd been doing was trying to sneak up the stairs to her part of the house without an encounter with her mother. Mike told her she always worried about the wrong things, like her mother's feelings and not her own. Almost thirty years old, and she was still so worried about what her mother had to say that every little verbal foray felt like the beginning of another battle in a long and bloody war that April could never win. Hearing her mother scream now, April held in a deep sigh.

  The snow and sleet had stopped that morning. The temperature had held at around freezing all through the day, but started dropping again in the early evening. The streets were so icy that the mayor had gone on the radio warning people to keep their cars off the streets and particularly to stay out of Manhattan. April had heard his voice give the same command repeatedly on her hazardous trip home in the white Chrysler Le Baron that she sometimes felt she would still be paying for at the turn of the century. The last thing she wanted was the confrontation her mother had clearly been waiting for all day.

  "Where you shreep rast night? Where you been aww day?" Sai Woo demanded.

  Reluctantly, April turned around and made eye contact with Skinny Dragon Mother whose eyes had narrowed into slits of war.

  "At work, where do you think, Ma?"

  Long ago Sai Woo told April about the meaning of dragons and April knew her mother was one. Dragons had demon eyes, the ears of a cow, the neck of a snake, the belly of a clam. On its camel head is a lump, a "gas bag" that allows the dragon to fly through the air swooping in from the sky to bring rain and snow and all manner of storms to undeserving human worms, exactly like April. Of its 117 scales, 81 are good-influence scales (yang) and 36 are bad-influence scales (yin). Sai said there were several hundred different kinds of dragons, but they all had the same kind of power and ruthless personality. When one of them swooped down out of a golden cloud, it was anybody's guess whether the good-influence or the bad-influence scales were going to be dominant.

  Tonight, as usual, this particular dragon was in disguise as her mother, now beautifully dressed in black peasant pants and a thick silk padded jacket, turquoise, sprigged with cherry blossoms. The dragon lump on her head was hidden under two inches of freeze-dried seaweed that looked like, but was not, in fact, a wig.

  April stared at the jacket, wondering where it had come from. "Nice jacket, Ma. Is it new?"

  Sai shook her head and the hair didn't move. "Owd," she announced. "Velly owd." She stroked the sleeve, stroked the tiny French poodle that was sitting on her lap. The dog, Dim Sum, did not lift her head at April, though her apricot fuzzball of a tail made a feeble attempt at a wag. "Where you shreep, no rie. I can terr."

  "I worked all night," April said, glad that it was true.

  "No bereave."

  "Well, it's true." And she had worked through the day, too, except for a few minutes at lunchtime when, exhausted, she'd broken her own rule by sacking out on a bunk in the detective dorm. With Mike camped out across the hall in the office marked SPECIAL CASES, and everybody on edge because of the unusual aggressiveness of the press, it had been a strange day.

  "What can I tell you, Ma?" April could not break the force field that insisted on contact with the demon eyes of her mother.

  And there was no way to avoid it. The house was set up so that April had to come through the front door to get to the stairway leading to her apartment. There was an arch in the wall dividing the hall from the living room. Skinny Dragon Mother was in her command post in the living room, framed by the arch and looking like the photo of the all-powerful nineteenth-century dowager empress she wished she could be in Queens, New York.

  Skinny Dragon Mother sat on one of the carved hardwood Chinese chairs that was a copy of the kind noble families had in old China. There were two of these black chairs in the living room, one for her father and one for her mother. They had no cushions on them and were the symbol of the classless society of America to which Ja Fa Woo and Sai Yuan Woo had fled half their lifetime ago. They had come to a place where anybody could become rich, buy a brick house in Astoria, Queens, and sit in a throne with a thousand-dollar French poodle on her lap that no hungry neighbor would ever be able to get his hands on and eat.

  Despite the paper label under the seat that said MADE IN TAIWAN, Sai should have been a happy woman. She had almost everything she wanted. She believed that the chair in her living room had once belonged to a great silk merchant with many wives. And this illustrious, best-quality chair that she now called her own had been the seat of power of the first and most important of his wives, which was now her.

  The truth was Sai was the descendant of peasants so poor they routinely abandoned their female infants to the elements, or sold young daughters as slaves and concubines to those who could better afford to feed them. This fate had nearly been hers. But instead, she had some other unspeakably terrible experiences before coming to America. These she referred to frequently (without actually revealing what they were) to shame her daughter into some semblance of obedience.

  Sai was not the happy woman she could be because her daughter refused to come up in the world in the same proportion she had. Her shame was that April had not turned out to be the kind of daughter a Chinese mother would want. April was a policeman, stayed out all night chasing the worst kind of human scum, occasionally going so far as to wrestle with them in the street. Sometimes she came home smelling of death. The rest of the time she spent with men of questionable character—oh yes, she knew all about corruption in the police department from TV and stories in the Chinese newspaper.

  She thought April had no shame and had no honor, for if worm daughter had either, she would quit her terrible job, marry a Chinese doctor, and produce many children for her to brag about and properly discipline. This was a grievance she addressed every day and intended to correct in time. She stroked her baby the dog, frowning at her daughter.

  "Boo Hao, ni. You rook bad."

  "I'm tired," April admitted, standing in the arch. After her nap, she had gone into the women's locker room and showered when none of the officers was around. She'd felt bad having to do this, but it was better than using the bathroom for the public. She'd changed into the rumpled jacket and pants she kept in her locker for those occasions when close contact with a malodorous corpse clung to her relentlessly, refusing to go away lest she forget to do her duty. Not that changing her jac
ket and sweater could purge the smell of death from her hair follicles or her sinuses.

  Sai's face softened. "You change crows. Notha muda?"

  April nodded. Yes, there was another murder; and even though the bodies had been outdoors in winter for a very short period of time and contaminated her not at all, she had changed her clothes. Skinny Dragon was right on both counts.

  "Know awleddy," Sai said with satisfaction.

  "I'm sorry I didn't call. I didn't have time for anything. It was a bad day."

  Sai nodded. "Know awleddy. You boss. Priece no can do nothing. Oney top boss Apra Woo can do."

  April smiled in spite of herself. "Thanks, Ma. I appreciate your good opinion."

  "No good pinyun. Oney say tooth." Sai spat out the shell from a pumpkin seed into her hand for emphasis, then put it in a dish on the table in front of her. Her mood changed abruptly.

  "I velly sad, ni. Rike Elicka velly much. Velly solly brack man kirr. You allest?"

  April moved through the arch into her parents' space without actually meaning to. "What are you talking about?"

  "Tawking about Elicka Frinree," Sai said angrily, as if April were playing dumb with her on purpose. "Know awleddy you woking Elicka Frinree case. Happen rast night. Leason you no come home. You good girr, ni. You catch kirra."

  Baffled, April stared at her mother. "Who's Elicka Frinree?"

  "Big sta. Watch elly day."

  Oh, now they were talking TV. This happened frequently. Skinny Dragon couldn't keep the lines clear between reality and outer space where the dragons and ghosts lived. April dealt with crazies like her every day. What one had to do was kind of social-work them into silence. Only then would they let you go to bed.

  "Someone you watch on TV," April prompted.