“Very profound,” April muttered. So chubby Annie, who still had a number of zits on her face, married a postal worker from Brooklyn. What was so lucky about that?
Her mother poked her in the ribs with the toothpick she was still using to clean spare-rib gristle out of her teeth.
“Nice boy, good steady job, that’s what’s so rucky. But not so good food.” She frowned at the spare-rib gristle clinging to the toothpick before depositing it on her plate.
April agreed. All that luck, and the food still wasn’t good.
Maggie Wheeler had a worse Saturday. She was murdered and hung up in the storeroom sometime on Saturday. Now it was Monday morning. April looked out at the street.
Columbus Avenue was two parking and three traffic lanes across. The shops were so far apart, you couldn’t really see what was happening in them. How well did people in these shops know each other? Out in Astoria, where April lived, everyone in the neighborhood knew everyone. Same in parts of Chinatown. But it was a different story up here. Affluent. Indifferent.
Mike walked out of the back room with Sergeant Joyce, supervisor of their detective squad. April had a feeling Sergeant Joyce didn’t like her and would rather not have her around. Sergeant Joyce was thirty-eight years old, the mother of two young children, and had already passed her test for lieutenant. She was waiting for a big enough group to accumulate to warrant the ceremony. She was already commander of a squad but was not yet getting commander’s pay. Sergeant Joyce was frowning now, probably worrying about how not solving this case, if they didn’t solve it, would affect her salary. Getting the raise was a political and production thing. And April knew Sergeant Joyce needed the money. April also knew how ambitious she was. Sergeant Joyce wanted to rise in the department, maybe to captain and command a precinct of her own.
Sergeant Joyce was a big deal now. She had been on television, taking the credit for solving April’s last case while April and Sanchez were in the hospital getting their burns treated. Still, Sergeant Joyce was kind of a hero to April. Joyce had been married to an Irish cop who threatened to divorce her if she became a cop. He’d proved as good as his word. She’d been in Sex Crimes before she became a supervisor. Where she’d go next was anybody’s guess. Taking credit for other people’s work was sly, but good manipulation of the system. April could not fault her for it.
Sergeant Joyce was shorter and plumper than April. She had a round face, thin lips, a pug nose, blue eyes, and a special affinity for plaids with green in them. April knew men found the sergeant cute and sexy. Today she was wearing a green and pink plaid suit that was both too short and too tight around the butt. A deep frown creased her forehead and the corners of her mouth. She dragged her fingers through her badly cut, badly bleached hair and cocked her head at April.
“Ready?” she demanded.
April nodded. “You think it’s some kind of sex crime?”
“How the fuck should I know? Let’s get out of here.”
April stole a glance at Mike, wondering if he found Sergeant Joyce cute and sexy. But he raised an eyebrow only when the three of them left the store as the body was being bagged.
7
At the precinct the press invasion had already begun. Cars and vans with NYPD plates and the names of news agencies painted on their sides, as well as a great deal of rubbernecking from civilian cars, had created near gridlock on a street already crammed with police vehicles. Half a dozen blue uniforms were trying to clear the street.
Swearing, Sanchez finally pulled the unmarked red Chevy Sergeant Joyce had brought to the scene back into the NYPD lot next to the precinct. Sergeant Joyce got out of the front seat. “Should have walked,” she muttered.
Yes, she should have, April agreed, getting out of the back.
As they headed inside, April could see a number of reporters clamoring at the desk for information about the homicide around the corner. As if there were a whole lot to give at this point.
Across the street at The Last Mango, the video-cam crews were probably just now finishing taping removal of the corpse in its earth-colored body bag to an ambulance from Roosevelt Hospital, which would take it to the M.E. to await autopsy.
Before they reached the door, Joyce turned around abruptly. “Better go over her place. See what you can turn up, and get a name to notify.” She cocked her head at the reporters, clumped around Chummley, the large and balding Desk Sergeant who looked a lot like a bulldog. It was clear she wanted to handle them herself.
April stared after her. It wasn’t a hard one to figure. Once again she and Sanchez were being sent out of the press’s way, just as they had been after they had solved their last big case. Oh, well, for five minutes Sergeant Joyce would have the scene. Then, after that, a spokesman for the case would be assigned by the department. It would be a Lieutenant from downtown. That cheered April up.
Mike looked at her and smiled. “You really care, don’t you?”
April shook her head, figuring a headshake wasn’t a lie. Thing was, as long as she had worked in Chinatown, she had mostly been interested in being a good cop. It was the principle of the thing. Now that she was on the Upper West Side and knew better how the system worked, she wanted to be a good cop with a high rank. Rank had something to do with being a good cop. It was still the principle of the thing, but she didn’t think Mike would see it that way.
If she had been willing to talk about it, she would have said, See, up here it wasn’t always so much a question of the case, but the public relations aspect of the case. How visible it was, how prominent the victim, how great the threat appeared to the public. Meaning important public, not little-people public. But she wasn’t willing to talk about it, so she shook her head.
“Then let it go,” Mike advised. “You’ll live longer, have a better digestion.”
April made one of her sounds, “hah,” thinking of Sanchez and the kind of digestion he must have, considering the heavy Mexican food smothered with chilis and cheese he liked to eat. Asians didn’t eat cheese. Even ABAs like herself, who could handle pizza, didn’t go for melted or grated cheese all over things. She didn’t say it, but she was glad Mike was back for this one.
She stood at the door, watching Sergeant Joyce talk to reporters who had their notebooks out and were hanging on her every word.
Mike touched her arm to get her attention.
Yeah, he was right. The clamor was only beginning. It would heat up all day and continue heating up, until they had some facts. Right now they couldn’t even release the victim’s name until her family had been notified, and they couldn’t notify the family till the family could be located. First things first.
“You want to go down and get the warrant or find the landlord and say we’re going in?”
April gave him a brief smile. “It’s your first day. I’ll give you a present. I’ll go down and get the search warrant.”
It was one of those unavoidable waste-of-time things. If they didn’t go to the courts downtown and get a search warrant to go into the girl’s apartment and find her telephone book, a lot of really uncomfortable things could happen, including their being charged with theft if anything was missing later. They went upstairs so April could type up the warrant request.
Maggie Wheeler had lived in a brownstone, a walkup. There were six apartments in the building. An hour and a half later, April and Sanchez stood in the airless vestibule, studying the list of names on the intercom. There was only one name by 3. Wheeler.
Sanchez tried the buzzer just in case Mrs. Manganaro had been wrong about Maggie’s living alone, or someone had turned up since they tried the phone number.