At a quarter to nine, Jason's mood changed from impatience to alarm. It happened like the audible click in many of his clocks when the second hand advanced to the half hour, just a beat before the peal of the chime. He experienced a cold shiver and felt something was wrong. Maslow was compulsive about time. He was always five minutes early. Jason knew how many minutes Maslow was early because he could hear the hinges on the door squeal each time someone came or went from his waiting room.
He frowned at the phone. As he did so, he realized that the two skeleton clocks on his desk, always four minutes apart, had both stopped at the same time. Spooky. Jason didn't like spooky. He wondered if Maslow could possibly have gone out to dinner and forgotten the appointment. He picked up the phone and dialed Maslow's number. It rang six times before the answering machine picked up. Jason hung up without leaving a message and sighed again. He reached for the knot in his tie, pulled it loose, and stuffed it in his pocket. Uneasy, he wound and reset the two clocks on his desk. Then he dialed Maslow's number again, and this time he left a message. When a very compulsive person like Maslow wasn't where he was supposed to be and didn't call, something was wrong.
Jason had worked with the police often enough now to know how they thought about this kind of thing, how they acted when something turned up funny. Cops didn't wait overnight to see how a suspicious circumstance sorted itself out. They acted on the first shiver. Jason realized that in this particular situation he was thinking like a cop and fearing the worst. But he reminded himself that he wasn't a cop, so he left a note for Maslow on his office door and went home to Emma for dinner. The next morning the note was still there.
Four
On Wednesday morning April got up before dawn and dressed for a quick run. She put on a tank top and thin black sweat pants. Summer wasn't officially over for another week, but already the air offered its first taste of fall. When she trotted down the stairs of her second-floor apartment and opened the front door of the house she had been tricked into buying for her parents, she felt the first autumn chill bite into her cheeks, her bare arms and shoulders. All grogginess passed. She was fully awake now, reminded of her name on the thirty-year mortgage for a house in which she no longer wanted to live and could not escape without the benefit of riches she did not possess. Having agreed many years ago to support and live with her parents, April now felt she was in an unlucky and undesirable position for marriage. Without her salary to put in the wedding pot, she could not marry. The loss of face of having such a debt was so disgraceful to her that she could not even tell her lover her problem. It was a secret.
She sighed and started off on her favorite route in the Astoria, Queens, neighborhood where the Woos lived. It followed Hoyt Avenue under the approach to the Triborough Bridge. At five to six that morning, dense fog blurred the mammoth structure and paled the resolution of the lights necklaced above. At street level the house lights had a yellow cast. After nearly a decade as a cop, April had come to love the intimacy of night. Even more, she liked early morning, after the bad guys had gone to ground and before the commuters were out.
Now that she was spending nearly all of her precious off-duty hours with Mike, April's few solitary dawns had taken on almost a mythic importance to her. Just before the sun lightened the sky had been the time she used to jog every single day. When daylight arrived, she would return home, work with free weights, and finish her leg lifts. Hard exercise had always been part of her ritual. As a small-boned woman cop, she had to be extra tough both mentally and physically so no one could make the allegation stick that she wasn't up to the job.
Shivering slightly, April stepped out onto the street to scan the houses and cars of her neighbors. Always the cop, she carried her gun with her everywhere and looked for signs of trouble. At this hour the workers on graveyard shifts were not yet home, and workers on day shifts were just getting up. Astoria was no yuppie area. Around here people worked hard for a living, and not many jogged for exercise. Only once had a tough guy tried to bother her. He changed his mind when he saw the gun. Today nothing was out of the ordinary.
April's feet took off down the pavement. Until Mike had come into her life, she'd always been alone at dawn. She'd swallowed hot water with lemon, and eaten whatever her mother put in her refrigerator-cold rice, or sesame noodles, slices of drunken chicken, roast duck, or twice-cooked pork. Dry-fried beef with orange peel. Softshell crab, in season. Pickled vegetables. Things her father brought home at the end of the evening from the upscale midtown restaurant where he was a chef.
More yang than yin by her mother's calculation, April had lived thirty years in a strange isolation-her thoughts focused on getting ahead and her body prepped for the cop's job. But now, her life had changed. She was in love, and the deadly yin had moved in to weaken her resolve. Night and day she dreamed of her lover's anatomy-his legs and lips. His eyes and arms. The curve of his back and butt. His chest. His soul and manhood-duke, suave, siempre duro. She loved him and she was afraid of loving him because of the many complications.
For starters, the prospect of a Mexican-Chinese union sent her old-style Chinese mother into a frenzy. An annoyance before Mike had come along, her mother was a nightmare now. Skinny Dragon hated everyone who wasn't Chinese. She absolutely despised all foreigner ghosts with complete democracy. Independent of her mother's bias, of course, April wasn't entirely open-minded on the subject of cultural mythologies herself.
For example, Mike had many girlfriends before he met her. Most of them had been just a few dates; but some had lasted longer and of those, several kept calling him to check if he was still off the market. Occasionally April would hear him on the phone, being nice, talking longer than a truly committed man should talk. Skinny Dragon liked to tell her that all Spanish ghosts were cheaters, and this one was sure to break her heart in the end. How could she not worry constantly about that? This morning, though, the endorphins kicked in and April's spirits soared into the stratosphere, all financial and fidelity concerns forgotten.
Forty-five minutes later, just as she was getting out of the shower, the phone rang. She grabbed a towel and ran into the bedroom to pick up. "Sergeant Woo."
"Hey, April. It's Jason. Sorry to bother you at home."
"Jason, my friend. How's that gorgeous baby of yours?" April toweled herself dry and grabbed some underwear from the top drawer of the dresser. Her bedroom was about the size of a postage stamp. From where she stood, she had a good view of the chaos in her closet-summer clothes and winter clothes, mostly slacks, jackets, and calf-length skirts-were all stuffed together in such bulging disarray that the door hadn't closed for years. She contemplated her huge wardrobe with dismay, thinking she didn't have a single thing to wear.
"She's a doll," Jason was saying.
"I'd love to see her. What is she, six months now?" April combed the tangles out of her wet hair with her fingers.
"Five and a half. Why don't you come over? Emma would love to see you. She's not shooting her new film until the beginning of November."
"Wow. Where does this one take place?" April couldn't help being impressed that she personally knew a movie star.
"Oh, here in New York, of course. Emma doesn't want to leave our daughter till she's twenty. I didn't wake you, did I?"
"No, Jason. You didn't wake me. What's up?" The alarm button had gone off at the sound of his voice. Jason was an important doctor, a busy man, who wouldn't call her just to make small talk.
"A psychoanalytic candidate I'm supervising, a young psychiatrist, didn't turn up for a meeting last night. He didn't answer his phone this morning, and he didn't call in. I'm concerned."