"No good. Worry all day. Sorry not good enough," she scolded in Chinese.
Of course not. What could be good enough to appease a suffering mother? A hundred years of apology would not be enough.
"Where you been?" Skinny asked softer now, clearly relieved her only child was not dead, as she had feared. "What's that? You go shopping?"
As soon as Skinny struck a more normal furious tone, April didn't feel the need to run anymore. Her exhausted body crawled up the walk, acting like the worm her mother thought she was. She wished she could hide the dress. No such luck.
"How much you spend for that?" Skinny demanded.
"Nothing, it was free," April said.
"Free? What kind of dress is free?" Skinny moved closer for a better look. "You do monkey business for that dress,
nil"
She peered at the dress, giving her daughter a poke in the ribs.
"Maaa!" April dodged her, dove through the front door.
Home sweet home.
But she didn't make it to the stairs leading to her apartment.
Skinny hurried in right behind her, now screaming with a worse idea. "You get that dress from ghost?" she demanded, poking the air with her finger, appalled that April could even consider taking an article of clothing from a dead person. But where else would such a thing come free? The Dragon was not a sophisticated thinker.
"Ma, relax. It was a gift," April assured her.
"Ha." That meant monkey business for sure. Skinny drew close to her daughter to sniff out the truth. She grabbed April's arm and held her in the old iron grip.
It was late and April longed to permanently wrench herself away from her difficult mother with the one-track mind. The problem was, Skinny had a nose worthy of one of those fake doctors in Chinatown who smelled their patients for symptoms. In fact, if Skinny had become a fake doctor, she'd have made a fortune and wouldn't need a daughter to torture and take care of her.
But April was too tired to wrench right now, and there Skinny went. Sniff, sniff, sniff at April's neck, her hair, the palms of her hands, sniffing for sex and murder. And April happened to have been exposed to both that day, the sex most recently. Where and how she would never tell. Mike had been hot; she had been hot. The long week without was more than either could take a second longer. Okay, they'd done it in a car. Okay, in both cars.
April tried to disengage so her mother wouldn't know, but it was too late.
"Aiyeeei," Skinny screamed.
"Ma, come on, I'll make you some tea. We'll talk," she said. "Look at my dress. Here, isn't it beautiful?"
Skinny staggered into the kitchen, too traumatized to think about the origins of a dress. Sex made her absolutely nuts. She was nuts for ten minutes; then the kitchen restored her to what passed in her for sanity. Like a windup toy she went directly to the refrigerator and started taking out the food, which was a good thing because April was really, really hungiy.
Skinny's angry muttering while she cooked, however, soon drove April upstairs, where she threw her offending clothes on the floor, showered, and changed into a clean T-shirt and a pair of NYPD shorts. When she returned to the kitchen to mollify the Dragon with stories of Ching's kindness, the ham-and-scrambled-egg fried rice, pickled baby bok choy, and red-cook chicken was on the table. Relieved, April collapsed in one of three battered kitchen chairs and reached for her chopsticks.
"Eat," Skinny demanded, as if she weren't about
to.
"Thanks, Ma. I'm starved." April snagged a bite of succulent wing meat, perfectly simmered in gingered soy and saki and still warm. Her favorite.
"Bad luck," Skinny said.
"Yum." April savored that first bite, then attacked the mound of hacked chicken on the plate. For a few seconds Prudence's murder pushed back just a few inches and her mother's comfort food made life as poignantly sweet as it had been in April's youngest years. Her body tingled with the afterglow of Mike's love and the excitement of leaving the city for her first on-the-job flight out of town.
"Bad luck," Skinny announced again, pouring tea.
April stopped gobbling long enough to swallow some. Delicious. She didn't want to ask what in particular was bad luck, since practically anything from the Dragon's point of view could be. She tried distraction.
"The dress came from Ching, Ma. Isn't it beautiful?"
"She gave it to you, why?" Skinny looked suspicious.
"She wants me to give a speech at her wedding."
"Why!" Skinny was flabbergasted.
April lifted a shoulder. A little break with tradition. Skinny didn't wait for an answer.
"Ching called five times," she announced. "Bad luck."
"Okay, Ma, what's the bad luck?"
"Tang Ling on TV. Big interview. You see?"
No, April did not have time to watch TV today, or any other day "Is that what Ching called about?"
"Tang made Ching's dress."
"I know."
Skinny leaned over the table and took a bite off April's plate. "They're friends. She was invited to the wedding. You didn't know?"
"I know." April flashed to her garish Chinatown cheongsam. Too bad she didn't get a Tang Ling dress.
"Ching can't wear bad-luck dress! Tang very mad. Call her now," Skinny commanded.
April checked the kitchen clock. "It's almost two in the morning, Ma. I can't call her now."
"Tang very famous,
ni."
"I know." April put her chopsticks down, her shortlived feeling of well-being totally gone. Had Prudence been wearing a Tang dress? That was something she hadn't asked.
Five minutes with her mother and the fog was back. She remembered that she could have stayed at Mike's place and avoided this complication. She should have stayed at Mike's. But her makeup case was here. Her clean clothes were here, and she hadn't wanted to leave town even for a few hours unequipped. Tang Ling wanted to talk to her, or maybe it was Ching who wanted Tang to talk to her. That meant Prudence's dress was a Tang. Another thread to follow.
"You solve case?"
"I hope so, Ma," April said wearily.
"Good girl. You solve," Skinny said, nodding with approval for the first time April could remember.
Forty-six
T
oo soon it was morning. Birds called outside April's window. She heard them before the click of her alarm, almost as soon as the sun had dragged itself out of the ocean and made its presence known in Queens. The chirping and chattering heightened as light slowly suffused her little room. She'd had a deep and dreamless night, thanks to the feeding philosophy of Skinny. Fill the belly to cease all functioning of the brain.
It worked for only a little while, though. The new day always kicked April's thinking back into gear. Yesterday, storms and catastrophe. Today, birdsong and optimism. Two young women were dead, and nature didn't give a shit. Groaning, she punched the pillow to find a cooler place for her face. That kept her calm for exactly fifteen seconds. After that, all possibility of sleep was gone. She rolled over to stretch her spine and muscles. She hadn't run yesterday or the day before. No martial arts for weeks. Last night, love in a hurry, hardly the sustained hard exercise her legs and spirit required. Today she didn't have time to give it to them, either.
Exactly a week ago Tovah Schoenfeld died. Yesterday Prudence Hay followed her into an uncertain afterlife. But peaceful afterlife wasn't her business. Fully alert now, she jumped out of bed and into the shower. No dme for food or further thinking.
A few minutes before seven Mike pulled up in the Camaro. The second she heard the car begin to cough its way into her block, she charged down the stairs and out the door before her mother could ask her where she was going so early on a Sunday morning. The fact that she still had the habit of sneaking in and out at thirty-one years old would have filled her with her usual disgust if Mike hadn't been out of his car, standing by the passenger door. With his ample mustache, dark sunglasses, open-collared amber shirt, buff jacket, and cowboy boots he looked like a drug lord from Miami or