"Okay. She was young, a teenager, a seamstress from the looks of the calluses on her thumbs, index, and pinkie fingers. She was undernourished, dehydrated, and had some real bad pelvic infection. The doc said she also had herpes and pneumonia. She was not a healthy lady."
April's spirits sank. "Anything else?"
"Yeah, she'd had a baby."
"Uh-huh."
Alfie scowled at her, tapping his foot impatiently. "What?"
April held up a finger to silence him.
"Might be the mother you're looking for."
"Uh-huh."
"What
?" Alfie punched her arm. She ignored him.
"What was the COD?" April asked.
"Someone bashed her skull in."
"Oh, God." More green spots drifted across April's field of vision. She had a brief vision of Anton's angry face and wondered if he was the killer. Maybe he'd retrieved the baby already and had hidden it somewhere. April wanted to tell Mike that she was sick, that people around her were sniffing her as if she smelled of death. She knew that sick smell and was scared of it. She'd been so out of it when she left home that morning she hadn't known the putrid odor was clinging to her. She didn't know how to tell him any of those things on the phone.
"You don't sound good. Is something wrong?"
"Yeah. What's your involvement in the case?" she asked weakly.
"I'm in. Where are you?"
"Allen Street. Maybe there is a God," she murmured, surprised she was so relieved.
"What?"
Alfie demanded again.
April handed the phone to him. "It's Sergeant Sanchez of Homicide. He seems to know all about it. Talk to him yourself."
The two conferred while April swayed on her feet. I'm dying, she thought. Then, Better find the baby first.
Alfie hung up and handed her the phone without turning it off. It took her a few seconds to hit Power, flip it up, and put it away.
"What's the plan?" she asked.
Bernardino turned to a detective smoking a cigarette at his side. "Annie Lee?"
"Okay." April wondered where Mike was and when he planned to join her.
Now she was irritated as well as faint. Baum hadn't come back from uptown yet. Mike had hung up before she could tell him she was seriously sick. She didn't remember his cell number so she couldn't call him back. She might have beeped him if she'd thought of it, but she didn't think of it. Instead she gazed bale-fully at Alfie, who was being high-handed just like the old days. Only one person knew how long her legs would hold up; her mother. She wasn't going to call Skinny Dragon.
Alfie approached her, stepping over some soiled rags to get there. He put a solicitous hand on her shoulder. "You're not looking too good, April. Come on, I'll take you back."
Back where? April heard thunder, but the sun was out, shooting blinding white light into the Ming-blue sky. She looked up at the blacked-out windows in the Popescu building, her brain scuttling like a rat in a maze. They were going to talk to Annie Lee, but why weren't they going up there to examine the rooms behind the windows first? Her vision clouded and her brain shut down before she had a chance to ask.
CHAPTER 36
H
eather Rose was discharged from the hospital early Friday morning. The doctors had given her the green light and there was no excuse to keep her any longer. The day before, when she'd finally awakened from her protective sleep and been fully aware of what was going on, she had at least three guards around her at all times. There was a policeman outside her door. And finally, unimpeded by the opposing will of her husband, her parents had come from San Francisco to be alone with her for the very first time since she was married nearly six years ago. These two hardworking, gray-haired people, who had labored eighteen hours a day in a dry-cleaning store so she could fulfill their dreams and attend the number one university in America, climb the ladder of success, be rich, and live in splendor the rest of her life, were there to see her shame. They sat by her bed, solemn-faced, talking quietly in Chinese and eating the food they brought in from a Chinese take-out place across the street that was not first-rate. They did not leave her room unless the nurses or the doctors or the police came and told them to go out into the hall. They left the hospital only one at a time, and only to get food and return to their post.
If Heather Rose could have hung her head, her forehead would have been knocking the ground. She knew that they, and everyone else, could see she was a walking piece of human shit. And no longer even walking. Just a lump of human shit in a hospital bed. She knew that she did not deserve to be alive. Better to have been drowned in the bathtub, better to have been pushed under a subway car. Better to have died of poisoning. Anything would have been better than the eye swollen and purple like a bursting plum, her lips deformed, her scalp split and her ribs aching so that she could hardly think straight, and the burn marks on her arms and inner thighs—all revealed for her parents and the police and the doctors and nurses to see.
Luckily for her, her parents were the only ones who did not ask what had happened to her. And she knew that as long as they lived, they would never ask her. They might see her every day, feed her and scold her and advise her to do any number of things, push her this way or that way. But they would not ask what had happened after she married Anton and went to live the rich life with him in New York City. To ask, and to receive the answers, would mean they would have to swallow her pain and be destroyed by it, and they would never do that.
When she was little, Heather's mother used to tell her that in China people would eat anything. They would eat lice and maggots and rats, scummy things from ponds and seas, crusty things from trees and fields, even stones and earth and bones. They would dry and pound into powder whatever was dreadful, frightful, or dangerous to them. They would ingest it, and in this way they would both consume their fear and acquire its power. They believed that horrors could be eaten; but sadness could not be so easily conquered and exterminated. The many sad parts of life had to be the most deeply held secrets, unvoiced and rigidly contained in an iron box of a soul. To give sadness a name was to make it unendurable for others, so the highest form of love was to say nothing. And so Heather Rose's parents prepared for her release from the hospital, bought her a ticket to return with them to San Francisco, and asked her no questions.
She was sitting up when the psychiatrist Jason Frank came to see her, very early, at a quarter past seven. Her parents quietly left the room. As soon as they were gone he said, "You're looking a lot better."
She blew air through her nose. "Today is Friday; Clinton is still President, but maybe not for long. My name is Heather Rose Kwan Popescu, I don't hear voices from outer space, and I don't think the devil lives in the television set."
The doctor laughed. "Well, that clears a lot of things up. I gather they've been asking you those questions to see if you're disoriented, or hear things that may not be there for anyone else."
"Dr. Frank, the psychiatrist, right?"
"And you have an excellent memory. Yes, I'm one psychiatrist. Have there been others to see you?"
"I'm told this is a coming attraction for me. I'll miss it, though."
"Oh, how will you manage that?"
"I'm going home in a few minutes."
"Really, are you feeling that much better?"
"Yes. They gave me brain scans and everything. I guess I'm lucky—just a concussion." She gave him a look. "I'm not a suspect. I'm the victim. If I don't know who assaulted me, I can't help the police. They, in turn, can't keep me here. Anton wants me to come home. My parents want me to go back to San Francisco."
"What do you want?"
She rubbed her arm. "Do you think I'm crazy?"