Burning Time (26 page)

“Uh, ah—”

“Not a sound,” he said. “It’s gonna to be fine. It’s gonna be great. Don’t worry about a thing.”

He moved her into the car as if she were a sack of laundry, then hit her on the head with the butt of the gun, hit her maybe a little harder than he meant to. The thunk was quite loud and startled him. She slumped over in the front seat.

He checked her pulse to make sure she was still alive, then covered her with a pale blue blanket, tucking it in
carefully so it wouldn’t fall off. Then he looked around quickly, closed the door, and walked around to the driver’s seat.

“Say good-bye, Emma,” he murmured, patting the blue blanket as he drove off.

Sometimes April was so busy she didn’t have time to think about Sanchez, and sometimes, like right now, she found herself listening to his voice. He was on the phone having some kind of conversation with his mother. He was speaking in his fish-in-water language, and said her name.

“Sí
, Mama.”

Sanchez had a special tone of voice when he talked to his mother. April had mixed feelings about it. Sanchez told April that when she talked to her mother, it always sounded like they were arguing, no matter what they were talking about. When he talked to his mother, it sounded like she was center of the earth to him.

Spanish people were not so different from Chinese, April thought. Both spoil their sons rotten, give them everything, and never get mad at them. Fix it so when they marry, their wives sound like scolding nags and can never make them as happy.

“Sí
, Mama,” he said again.

And then something something else about
la casa
and something something else she didn’t get at all. They were
on the four-to-eleven shift that day. Maybe he was telling her when he was getting home.

By now April was beginning to pick up a few of the words. It wasn’t a hard language like Chinese, which had a lot of different dialects and words that changed their meaning just by the register and tone in which they were spoken. She had a lot of paperwork to do and tried not to listen. Soon she was thinking about it again.

It was a good thing that Sanchez had respect for his mama, but a bad thing that he hung on her every word. Pretty soon she was speculating about how Spanish women were lower than Chinese. Chinese kept their pride in their face. Men and women, same thing. Both had pride, both had face. All Chinese spent time on saving face, protecting face, building face. It was kind of like face was money in the bank, and you could accrue interest on it, or lose it all, if you didn’t watch and protect it every day, and invest it just right. Jimmy lost face when his girl dumped him and he had to go home on the subway.

Spanish had their pride in a different body part. They didn’t care about face. Spanish had their pride in their penises. So only men could have it. You could see by the way they walked and talked that was where the pride was. Women were lower, had no pride. They walked around with their clothes too tight and their big behinds bouncing up and down to get men’s attention. Lipstick too bright, eyes too dark. All so they could attract a man and get some pride from him. Pah. And
then
when they got one, if he was a true Spanish man, he’d have the red-eye disease, be crazy jealous over her big, jiggling bottom, afraid every minute some
other
man would take it away.

Still, Sanchez went home to take care of his mama after his marriage broke up and his father died. And he was not ashamed of it. That was like Chinese, but not like Caucasians,
who ran away from their parents in a big stampede as soon as their hormones changed. Other people just did their sex business and went home, didn’t have to make a big deal about it.

April couldn’t help wondering about Sanchez. Why did his marriage break up? Why were all the women he knew named Maria? It was hard to tell if they were sisters, or aunts, or cousins, or girlfriends, or what. Even Sanchez’s ex-wife was called Maria. That was another difference between the two cultures. Each Chinese had his own name, not like anybody else’s name. Parents put together whatever words they wanted. Happy Face. Free of Sorrow. Jade Luck. Tomorrow’s Chance. Chinese named their children like round-eyes named racehorses.

April’s Chinese name was Happy Thinking, as a kind of counteractive against the way she wrinkled her nose just after birth, as if she came into the world with a bad smell in her nose and was thus fated to spend her whole life questioning everything. Her mother liked to tell how she called her daughter Happy Thinking to trick the Gods into changing April’s fate.

“Didn’t work,” Sai lamented. Her unlucky daughter was still sniffing out the worst in everybody. She also liked to say she was afraid her only child had too much un-tempered
yin
to get married, which April believed was a contradiction in terms.

“You can’t be too much woman to be woman,” April told her.

“Not woman like person,” Sai argued. “Woman like down thinking. Settle for less when you could have husband, babies. Not gun in hangbag.”

“Handbag.”

April’s phone rang just when she was wondering which
Maria Sanchez was now having his sex business with before he went home to his mother.

“Detective Woo?”

“Yes, speaking,” April said. It was a voice she knew, but couldn’t place.

“This is Jason Frank.”

“Oh.” The doctor who didn’t call himself a doctor.

“I’m calling from San Diego.”

San Diego again? “What are you doing there?” she asked with surprise. It was nine o’clock at night. What made him think she’d be on duty?

“I’m doing your job, Detective. Do you have anything new?” The edge to his voice made her bristle. Curiosity wrestled with insult as she struggled for an appropriate reply.

“I can’t do a job that I’m not authorized to do, Dr. Frank,” she said more sharply than she meant to. What did the man think he was doing in San Diego? He must be crazy.

“I’m sorry,” he amended hastily. “I meant the police, not you.”

“Okay.” She accepted his apology. “Then the answer is no. I tried to call both you and your wife, and neither of you has returned my calls.”

“You called my wife?” Now he was surprised.

“Was that a wrong thing to do, Doctor? I thought it might help to get
her
opinion of who might be sending her these letters.”

“Well, I think I might have something.…”

“Oh? What do you have?” Crazier and crazier. How could he have something?

“I have a name, but I can’t locate the guy. He doesn’t seem to be around. Do you have any suggestions?”

“What do you think you’re doing?” April demanded.

“I thought I’d pay him a visit, but he doesn’t seem to be around.”

Pay him a visit? Was he crazy? April’s heart constricted with anxiety. This was her case. Sergeant Joyce had given it to her and told her to be diplomatic. She had failed, and now the doctor was out there looking for some letter-writing lunatic on his own. What if he found him and got his head bashed in?

“You can’t do that,” April said loudly. “Come home, get a lawyer. Get an injunction against him. Dr. Frank, please listen to me. You can’t help your wife this way.”

“There may be more to it.”

“What do you mean?”

“He may have done some … other things.”

April took a deep breath. “What kind of things, Doctor?”

“I talked with his aunt. He has a psychological profile that definitely indicates he was a troubled boy. He set fires. He threatened other children. He may have been institutionalized somewhere. Maybe nobody’s been paying any official attention to him for a while. Maybe they have.”

“Okay,” April said, quickly pulling herself together and making up her mind. She didn’t like the urgency in the doctor’s voice. When civilians got involved in police business, things always went wrong. “The thing to do is call Sergeant Bob Grove of the San Diego Police Department. I’ve been in contact with him. Ask Grove to check if this guy has a sheet, a criminal record.… But, Dr. Frank, even if this man doesn’t have a sheet,
don’t
go to talk to him. Get a lawyer, get the court to deal with this. You can’t just charge around taking things into your own hands. There could be legal consequences. You could get hurt.”

“Uh-huh. Sergeant Grove? What’s that number?” Dr. Frank asked.

April looked up her notes on the Ellen Roane case and read the number to him. “Uh, Dr. Frank. What’s the man’s name? The man you think is writing the letters. I’ll try to work on it from here, see what I can find.”

He told her the name. She wrote it down on a fresh sheet of paper. Troland Grebs. She hung up and looked at it. What kind of name was that?

Sanchez had long since finished his conversation with his mother. He leaned over April’s desk. “What’s going on?”

“Can you believe this? That crazy doctor went out to San Diego,” she said, her nose wrinkling up with deep suspicion and concern. “And unless the wife doesn’t like the police or doesn’t return her calls, I bet she’s gone somewhere, too.” It was all very difficult and out of control.

A few minutes later a call came in about a robbery on Central Park West, and Sergeant Joyce sent them out on it.

Jason broke the connection, then dialed the number Detective Woo had given him. Her advice not to look for Grebs came too late. He had already gone to the address the aunt gave him. He had driven all the way up the coast to Queen Palm Way, off Crown Avenue. It wasn’t easy to find. He had to cross the small bridge over a dry gully twice before he located Queen Palm Way, so well was it hidden behind a short street of slightly dowdy stores and restaurants, not too far from the beach. When he got to Grebs’s apartment building, the manager told Jason he hadn’t seen Grebs for nearly a week. There were no lights in the place, no sounds of running water. No Harley-Davidson.

Jason was in his room at the Meridien, puzzled now. He had called Emma a dozen times all afternoon, and she still wasn’t home. It wasn’t like her. Six hours had gone by since she left a message for him to call her right away.

He had his notes spread out on the desk. In the mirror he could see out the window behind him to the bay and the docks on the other side of the water. Funny city. The
skyline was dominated by the view of navy shipyards and warships of various sizes. He had no idea which were which.

The fact that he didn’t know which ship was which suddenly pierced him with sadness for Emma. He felt a lot of sadness out here. Emma had spent her childhood watching these ships, drawing pictures of them when she was little, counting the days she was allowed to visit on them as the most exciting of her life. All she ever wanted was to be the one to get on a ship and sail away from those faraway places she didn’t choose to be. He reached for the phone.

“Missing Persons, Sergeant Beasly.”

“Uh, I think I’ve got the wrong department. I’m calling for Sergeant Grove,” Jason said.

“Who’s calling?”

“It’s Dr. Jason Frank from New York.” He added, “Detective April Woo of the New York Police gave me his name.”

“I’ll see if Grove’s here.”

Missing Persons. Why did she give him the name of someone from Missing Persons? Jason tapped his pen against the table nervously. Where was Emma? Emma waited for him. That was what she did when she wasn’t working. She waited for him to come home, or call. Occasionally she went to the theater with a friend, but she didn’t go out alone at night.

He wanted to kick himself. He always assumed Emma was all right because she never complained and whined the way Nancy had. Acid roiled around in his empty stomach. The corn muffin was long gone, replaced with burning guilt for neglecting his wife and insisting all was well in their world because all was well in his.

What if Grove wasn’t there? What if he was wrong and
it wasn’t this Grebs person? What if it was somebody else and he was wasting his time? What the hell did he think he was doing? Was he altogether crazy to be out here?

He shook his head, ran his hand through his hair. Had to be this guy. But where was he?

“Grebs takes off for days sometimes,” the manager at Grebs’s apartment building had told him. It wasn’t at all unusual.

“Takes off? Where does he go?”

“I think he likes to go down to Mexico.” The manager was a small freckled person with a red nose and thinning red hair.

“Why?” Jason asked.

“Who knows?” The man looked off into the middle distance. “I just get that feeling. Strange fella.”

“Strange in what way?” Jason’s anxiety escalated, but he kept his features neutral.

“You know, those eyes, like marbles. See right through you. Pays on time, though. And he’s a terrific mechanic, always out there working on that bike. Hell of a bike, ain’t it?”

Yeah. Jason nodded. He’d heard it was a hell of a bike. He wondered where it was. And where was Grebs, with the eyes like marbles.

“Sergeant Grove speaking.”

“Hi, this is Jason Frank. April Woo told me to get in touch with you. I have a name of someone who needs to be checked out.”

“You want to fill out a Missing Person report?”

Great. Another frosty, unresponsive voice.

“Uh, no, not exactly. I need somebody checked out for a criminal record. Arrests, convictions.” Jason’s tongue felt thick with the words he wasn’t used to saying.

“We’re not an information service. We don’t do that.”

It was a definite, cold dismissal.

In hospitals people did whatever the doctors told them to. “I have a reason,” Jason said, getting very frustrated now.

“I’m sure you do, but this is Missing Persons. You want to make a complaint about somebody, you’ll have to come in and talk to a detective.”

“Are you a detective?”

“Yes, but I’m a detective in Missing Persons. If you have a Missing Person, you come to me. Otherwise, you go to someone else.”

“So, Detective Grove, how do you know April Woo?”

“Detective-Sergeant Grove,” Grove corrected. “April had a Missing Person. We found her.”

“Well, Detective Woo told me to call you about this. She said you could help me.” Jason wondered if Detective Woo was also Sergeant, and if her missing person was found alive.