Jason’s whole body stiffened defensively. He didn’t like her intimate tone, her body language, her insinuations. The assault of sexuality was like Teddy’s aromas from the kitchen, irresistibly tantalizing. Like a computer, he scanned his database for his true feelings. Was he attracted to Milicia, Charles’s architect, who had come to his office looking for—what?
“How’s your sister?” he asked stiffly.
“Horrible.” The eagerness faded from her eyes. “Really horrible. I have the feeling—” She stopped.
“What?”
Suddenly tense, apprehensive, Milicia shook her head. “I—can’t talk about it here.”
They had stopped in front of a restaurant, an Italian restaurant, not very fancy. Milicia gazed through the window wistfully, as if she were as hungry as Jason was.
“Have you eaten? I could tell you in there.”
Jason glanced at the busy restaurant with its red and green flag-of-Italy façade. The pungent fragrance of garlic and tomato sauce blew out of the air-conditioner exhaust above his head. He was tempted to go for it. Charles had suggested he go for it. He had already eaten a meal with Milicia. Hey, what did it matter? Emma had left him; he was free to go for anything. He was tempted and didn’t dare look at her, didn’t want her to know. She had come to him professionally. He could not do it. Probably couldn’t have done it anyway.
“I’m looking forward to talking to you,” he said, trying to keep the ice from forming on his words. “On Friday.”
He didn’t give a reason, and didn’t allow himself to worry at the way her face collapsed at the rebuff. He’d already told her social and professional couldn’t mix. He stood there, inhaling the garlic until she was out of sight, then he grabbed a hamburger and french fries in the Greek coffee shop. His encounter with Milicia brought him way down.
He had been on his way to eat fancy food, but guilt made him instantly slide back to the old habits of before Emma—fast food gulped on the run, pizza, hamburgers, steak. French fries with everything. He ate the takeout hamburger and fries in his kitchen, dripping over the sink. Well, Teddy was right, but he didn’t exactly have a gourmet background. Jewish boy from the Bronx, not so far from the peasant past. What did anyone expect? His parents favored heavy Jewish food, the heaviest. Boiled beef, knockwurst and sauerkraut. Potato pancakes with apple sauce, and gobs of sour cream piled on top. Pastrami and chopped chicken liver sandwiches four inches thick. Matzo-ball soup and chicken in the pot, thick with noodles and chicken fat. Everything made with chicken fat. The men in his family often dropped dead before they reached sixty.
Jason finished up the fries and threw the wrappings in the garbage. Fuck his arteries. He got the bottle of Tan-queray and poured himself a healthy drink, then sat in the large pale green armchair that Emma had chosen, shuddering at the gin’s fiery path down his throat. Gin had always been his drink, bitter and medicinal. It went straight to the heart of the trouble, kicking in with a jolt like nothing else.
Ebony branches stood out against a sky of midnight blue, slowly fading to gray, then black. He felt like shit, then began to feel a little better. He thought about the twilight sky. The first time he’d seen a Magritte painting of this kind of sky he’d thought the image came from the imagination of the painter. All his life he’d been too busy studying books and the insides of people to see the way light changed colors as time passed and the earth moved around the sun. Now light and colors were preoccupations of his, along with his passion for time. In a few days, he thought, he’d be thirty-nine.
The sound of the mantel clock striking nine was as deep and resonant as Big Ben. The clock kept perfect time exactly seven and a half minutes late. Every forty-eight hours Jason wound the clock and set it to the correct time. Three or four hours later it would be seven and a half minutes late again. There was no explanation for it. Clocks were not alive. They were just mechanical things that measured precise units through a series of spur gears.
Some considerable part of every day, Jason studied the way time was measured. He couldn’t help being awed by what a breakthrough the clock was, the brilliance that conceived the whole idea. The falling weight, or an unwinding spring, that powered the driving wheel through a pinion geared to rotate once an hour. The driving wheel turned the two hands around the face of the clock, ensuring that the minute hand moved exactly twelve times around the dial for every revolution of the hour hand. The pinion drives the minute hand directly. The hour hand is driven through two sets of spur gears that together reduce its speed to one-twelfth that of the minute hand. Another set of gears sets the speed at which the driving wheel rotates by connecting it to the escapement, the heart of the timekeeping mechanism. The escapement was the thing that went back and forth. The tick-tock.
On the eighth strike of the tenth hour, Emma called.
27
If he didn’t do it, how did he know she was hanging from the chandelier? Huh, tell me that?” That was the question Captain Higgins had shouted at Sergeant Joyce when she suggested they let Block go.
“ ‘Let him go. Are you fucking crazy? He had to be at the scene. If he didn’t do her, who did?’ You should have seen her face,” Mike told April. “She was fucking furious. I’ve never seen her so mad, and she couldn’t show a thing. I thought she was going to explode. What kind of food do you want?”
April checked her watch. It was after eight and she hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast. There wasn’t any time after the autopsy report came in and everybody went kind of crazy because the report said Maggie Wheeler just happened to be pregnant. That kind of changed things. And they had let their prime suspect go.
Block was being watched around the clock though. He wouldn’t get very far if he changed his mind and tried to run. April and Sanchez stood on Columbus, getting a breather from the noise and chaos in the squad room. A lot of people hung out on New York’s streets in summer. Already there had been two muggings and a rape reported that evening, and it wasn’t even eight-thirty.
April couldn’t help noticing that suddenly Mike was talking to her as though she were one of the guys. A few months earlier he held his tongue on the four-letter words like motherfucker and asshole. She ignored his question about food. She was still mad about being excluded from the meetings in the Captain’s office. She was clearly not one of the guys in the ways that mattered.
“Yes,” she said sharply. “I should have seen her face. We caught the case together. I should have been there.”
“So we caught it together. A technicality.” Mike stopped on the curb for a red light, forcing her to stop with him.
“A technicality? Is that what you call it?”
“Look, the Captain’s not crazy about women. That’s not my fault. So he calls me in with Joyce. I know one precinct chief that likes the whole bureau in every meeting. I know another likes to work with only one, two guys—” He looked at her quickly. “Women. You know what I mean.”
“I know exactly what you mean.”
“Don’t get political on me, April. Each commander does it a different way. They call the shots. So this is how Higgins does it. It’s not a political thing.”
April shook her head. But it was a political thing. Everything was a political thing, and Mike knew it.
“Hah. Easy for you to say,” she muttered, then checked his face quickly to make sure he wasn’t getting too mad at her. She didn’t want to cross the line with him.
Lots of lines she didn’t want to cross. Didn’t want to get too close, didn’t want to be too far away. It was so complicated, the whole thing was dizzy-making. Or maybe she was dizzy from lack of food. Anyway, Sanchez was watching the traffic light, waiting for it to turn green, and wasn’t looking at her.