W
endy Lotte didn't answer her door when April and Mike rang her bell at one-twenty. The officers in charge of surveilling her maintained that she had not left the building since she'd arrived home early Sunday morning, but April was badly shaken after losing Kim Simone and didn't trust anybody's certainty about anything. There wasn't an elevator to a garage in this building, but maybe there were other ways out.
Sdll, Wendy had to have been exhausted. She could just be sleeping it off. April was wound tight as they stood there in the hallway waiting for her to rouse herself and come to the door. Five minutes passed. Mike tried her phone. Only voice mail answered. A gentle
ding-dong
sounded over and over. April felt the stillness inside the apartment as she kept her finger on the bell.
When a person was at home and the place was this quiet, something could be wrong. She glanced at Mike. The deep furrow between his eyes meant his thoughts were running on the same track. Saturday night, the last time they'd seen Wendy, she'd been feisty as hell, strangely unconcerned about her print on the spent cartridge that killed Tovah Schoenfeld.
Neither Mike nor April had pegged her for a suicide risk at that time. She could have crashed and done something stupid when she got home, or she could be a heavy sleeper.
Let it be that,
April prayed. Drunks were hard to rouse.
Let it be that.
"Shit," Mike muttered.
"You want me to get the super?" she asked.
He nodded tensely. He could have tried his hand at the locks, but there were two of them, one a Medeco. It would take him a while. April was the one who'd lost Kim, so he gave her something useful to do.
A few minutes later, she returned with a worried young man who didn't speak much English but knew enough to unlock the door and get out of the way. The smell alone was chilling. It was clear that Wendy had been doing some pretty heavy drinking in the last thirty-eight hours. The lights were on, and even from the front door several empty large bottles of Gordon's vodka could be seen in the living room. One was upended on the sofa; one sat on the cocktail table.
A third bottle lay on its side on the rug. Quite a bit must have spilled out when it went over, because the room smelled as if a lit match would send it up. A loop in an electrical cord beside the sofa suggested that someone might have tripped over it. The lamp attached was shattered. Other things had been destroyed, too. Shards from many pieces of broken china made a blue and white abstract on the kitchen floor. The whole apartment was torn apart.
"Jesus." The super moved farther from the door.
April went in first, stepping over a broken teacup whose pattern she'd recognized a week ago as the famous Chinese Willow. Mike followed in her footsteps. The quiet after what must have been quite a storm was eerie and sad. It was the kind of scene where one expected to find the worst and found it. There was blood in Wendy's office. It was smeared on the walls and stained the carpet. There was blood on her pink quilt and on her pillow. A lot of blood on the floor of her closet, along with piles of her clothes, as if she had tried to get dressed before she died. They found her lying on the floor of her bathroom awash in a pool of vile-smelling vomit and clotting blood. They immediately called 911.
Three hours later they were sitting with Inspector Bellaqua at a table for four in the back of the Metropolitan, across the street from the puzzle palace. At five P.M. the day tour was over and the place was filling up with off-duty cops. Bellaqua was nursing a diet Coke, her eyes punchy with dismay at all the things that had gone wrong in a single day and the fact that two of her detectives had played a part in the worst of it.
"He did what?" she said of Mike Fray, who hadn't been able to tell the difference between a boy's back and fanny and a girl's.
"Kim's small. He's good-looking," April murmured.
Bellaqua studied the wedding photo. "Fray said he walks with a wiggle. Jesus. What about that silencer book you found, Mike?"
"It has Wendy's name in it," he said, noncommittal. They were all noncommittal as hell.
"How about Wendy?"
"She's lost a lot of blood. The place looked like a slaughterhouse. Ever seen an alcoholic hemorrhage? It's not a pretty sight. In her case everything went at the same time: esophagus, stomach lining. Just burned out by the booze. She had blood pouring out from everywhere. And she was so out of it she probably didn't even know how sick she was. She could have died if we hadn't come along," Mike said.
"Is she talking?"
"Uh-uh." April felt bad. They'd stayed in the ER at Lenox Hill Hospital for several hours waiting for word to come in. None had come. Finally they'd had to leave before finding out if she'd been stabilized. A uniform was posted at the hospital now, watching out for her.
Bellaqua sighed at the day gone bad. Then she picked up the wedding photo of Kim and Clio.
"I'll get this made up and we'll get Kim's face out there, all over TV. We'll get him."
"Good." Mike slapped the table and got up. He and April were heading out to Queens in case Kim had gone home.
Fifty-seven
S
oon after Kim left Tang's shop, he put on his blue Hawaiian shirt in the men's room of a coffee shop near the Lexington Avenue subway. He put on his baseball hat and his sunglasses. He felt bad and needed to make a new friend. The empty place inside of him filled up when he made friends. He wanted to tell someone how Tang Ling had mistreated and misunderstood him, how she'd thrown him out like a stupid salesgirl.
Around Hunter College he looked over the students. Nobody gave him a second glance. The empty place inside him hurt as he got on the subway and traveled one stop south to Fifty-ninth Street. He had a handgun, but it made a lot of noise and wasn't one he could use for anything. The one he liked was in the Dumpster a block over on Fiftieth Street. He approached the street with high hopes because he could see that the Dumpster was still there. The only problem was that now it was piled much higher with rubble from a renovation going on there. A construction crew was dumping more stuff in it, raising a cloud of dust from crumbling chunks of old plaster. He couldn't get anywhere near where he'd dropped the black garbage bag on Saturday. He walked back and forth a few times but didn't get any attention from the men on the crew. He was hoping someone would talk to him, help him recover that garbage bag, but gave up after a little while when no one did.
With his glasses on and his shirt dapping around his hips, he started walking downtown on Lexington. The bar where he danced somedmes and picked up men was on Broadway in the Forties. He didn't get that far. At Fifty-sixth Street through the window of the Shamrock Inn, he saw Tang Ling on a big TV screen over the bar.
Immediately he knew that Tang had gone on TV as a way to speak to him. He knew her temper, knew that she was sorry about the way she had treated him. Kim was sure Tang Ling had a special feeling for him and was not really mad. He did not think he'd done anything bad. What happened happened, like the rain falling, like the water rising, like bad feeling and killing everywhere. People were killed all the time. Six thousand people at once. Bodies were everywhere. Two, three, four little angels were nothing.
Excited to see Tang on TV, Kim went into the bar and sat down on an empty stool to look at her and to hear what she had to say. Tang was not a beautiful woman, not like Clio. But she was so famous. She could be on TV whenever she wanted. On TV she was wearing the gray suit and her magnificent pearls she'd been wearing when she hit him. He studied her hair. It was no longer black like it used to be. It was getting redder every month. Now it was almost the color of red wine. On TV Tang had her glasses on. She looked serious, reading from a piece of paper.