"Hey, don't play with me!" she said sharply. "I have the party list going back years. You've had your problems in the past. We know about that, too. So cut the cha-cha. You do a lot of business with Wendy."
"Okay, a lot. So what?" Louis's face went through a number of expressions: pissed, nervous, impatient.
'You did a wedding together on Martha's Vineyard a month ago?"
"Yes ... ?" Now he was wary.
"How did you get there?"
"We took the van." Very surprised.
"Your van?"
"Of course my van."
"Who went?" April asked.
Louis pursed his hps. "Uto and me." He raised his shoulders.
"What about Wendy?"
"Wendy went in her own car."
"Did anybody go with Wendy?"
"I don't know, why?" "Did you know Wendy was a marksman?"
"Of course."
"Did she brag about it?"
"Brag, no. It was a fact of life, like being left-handed."
"Is she left-handed?"
"No."
"What did her being a shooter mean to you?"
Up went that shoulder. "I don't know, nothing. Wendy's good at her job. That's all I think about."
"You're a smart man, Louis. Don't give me that. Did she ever talk about taking somebody out?" April kept pushing.
"Never."
"What about Tito?"
"I told you he's a bedbug, afraid of his own shadow."
"Like Ubu?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Did you shoot the guns, Louis?" April demanded.
"Me, are you crazy?" His eyes bulged out.
"Oh, come on, it's fun. You know it's fun. Why not?" she prodded. "Everybody likes to shoot."
"I still don't know what you're talking about." He looked pained.
"I'm talking about the guns on the Vineyard. Wendy told me all about it. She said you all shot the guns."
Up went the shoulder.
'You remember it now?"
He shook his head. "I'm not sure. I don't remember. Maybe some of the others did." His face was draining now.
"Did you all stay at the house while you were there?" "Wendy's house?"
April nodded, holding her breath.
"Yeah, we stayed at Wendy's house."
"Ubu, too?"
"Yeah."
April exhaled, and so did Mike. "You may go away for the rest of your life for not telling us about the guns sooner, Louis. You certainly could have saved Prudence. I don't know. Maybe you didn't want to save Prudence. I don't know, Mike, does this look like a conspiracy to you?"
"Could be. We'll have to see how the DA takes it."
"I never touched those guns."
"How many guns, Louis? One, two? An arsenal?"
"I don't know, a few," he said vaguely. "I don't like guns. I wasn't paying attention."
"Maybe you didn't touch them, but transported them."
He shook his head. "They never left the island. I'm sure of it."
"How can you be sure of it if you weren't paying attention?"
Silence.
"You took a big chance, Louis, and you're going to pay for it."
"The bigger chance was talking to you," he muttered.
"We're going to take a look around, that okay with you? If it isn't okay with you, we'll get a warrant. Which do you prefer?"
He shook his head. "You have my permission. Look away," he said.
Forty-four
M
ike blew air out of his mouth. In big puffs like someone practicing Lamaze. He was tired and wanted April to come home with him. "You okay?"
"Oh, yeah, just thinking." April was writing quickly in her notebook. Her to-do list. Go to Martha's Vineyard Island. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.
He could see her thoughts churning. In a few hours they'd covered a lot of bases. This time they'd gone through Wendy's place themselves, and not looking just for guns. They were after an address and found one in a file with tax and electric and phone and water bills for a house located at Chappaquon-sett, Vineyard Haven, Mass. Bingo.
They also found the garage bill and located her car in a garage on Third Avenue. It was a tomato BMW 538i. In the BMW, a bunch of empty Coke cans, a couple of Steamship Authority ferry schedules—one for winter and the latest, spring/summer, just out this week. Also used ticket stubs for Tuesday, May eleventh. After Tovah's killing and before Prudence's. Killers were dumb. Nearly always. They never thought their tracks could be followed. Why hadn't they followed this track sooner? They guessed that the gun used to shoot Tovah was back on Martha's Vineyard and possibly a different gun had been used to kill Prudence. Why? People who loved guns—people who shot them regularly—usually had more than one. Some had dozens; collectors had hundreds. They were betting that Weridy, of the tomato red BMW and many pairs of candlesticks and stemware with the stickers still on them, had many guns.
The Vineyard Haven sheriff said he'd meet them at the airport in the A.M. Barring fog at either end, they'd be there before ten. They'd already placed their bets on what they'd find in her house. Mike wanted his sweetheart home with him.
"Querida?"
"Hmmm?" She didn't look up.
"You want to eat?"
"The pizza was fine." Still writing.
"You didn't touch it."
"I ate the crust."
Cheese, she still wouldn't eat cheese. He blew out more air, remembering his perpetual warning to himself:
Women. You risk your life if you fall in love with one.
These Chinese girls were tough. Ching had warned him that he'd better be prepared for a long battle if he wanted to win.
April put the notebook down and looked up. "Tired?" she asked.
"No, I'm cool." They were now in the shiny Crown Vic headed down Second Avenue to Twenty-third Street, where his battered Camaro was parked. April's car was in the garage at One PP, all the way downtown. He'd have to take her down there to get her car; then they'd both head home in different cars on the BQE. Toughness was tough on logistics. He knew he was going to pick her up in the morning for the drive to La Guardia, but he didn't want to be separated from her for what remained of the night.
"I wish they'd held on to Wendy. I don't want to get yanked out of bed when she takes off in an hour." April yawned.
"Exactly what I was thinking," Mike said.
They'd held on to her for nearly ten hours. Some of that time she'd cooled her heels all alone in an interview room. They had her on video, chewing her nails, tapping her feet, twisting around in her chair, taking insignificant bites of three sandwiches then discarding them, and drinking more than a dozen Cokes. There was a saying in the cops that if you put three suspects in a cell for the night only the guilty one would sleep. The innocent ones would be scared shitless; the guilty one could relax because he knew who did it. Wendy was worried and pretty much hopping out of her skin. Without her guns connected to the homicides, though, they didn't have enough to arrest her. They needed the guns to connect the dots.
Mike left the Crown Vic at Twenty-third Street, and they both got in the Camaro. "You want to leave your car and come home with me tonight?" he asked. So much for toughness.
Forty-five
S
kinny Dragon was waiting for April when she drove up at one-thirty-three A.M. April could see her fried-seaweed hair framed in the light of the living room window. Before April had even switched the headlights off, Skinny was out the front door in her pajamas, screaming as if there were no such thing as sleeping neighbors.
"Where you been,
nil"
she cried. "So late. Thoughtless, thoughtless." Loud. Something April didn't catch, softer in Chinese. About a party she was supposed to go to, didn't get to. It wasn't clear which one of them Skinny meant.
April grabbed her purse and Ching's custom dress in its see-through plastic, then jumped wearily out of the car. "Hi, Ma. Sorry. I didn't know it would take so long."