Stealing Time (11 page)

Almost no one started out on top in New York. Everybody coming in worked in a restaurant or a factory, or cleaned houses. Nanci herself had come as a child and learned English within a matter of months. She'd never had to make bean curd or dumplings, wait on tables, sell things on the street, clean other people's houses, wash dishes, or sew in a noisy factory. Lin was older and not so lucky. Nanci and Milton wanted to place Lin in a store, but she couldn't read or change American money. She couldn't sell things on the street for the same reason, and she had no experience with flowers or dry cleaning or laundry. She knew nothing but how to sew. Nanci had been frustrated, trying to explain to her that she had to learn to read and speak English to get ahead in America. She had to go to school. But Lin had refused to speak the language of get-ahead ambition. Lin had refused to move in any direction. It turned out that her cousin, whom Nanci had tried so hard to help, did not like her, would not live with her. They had nothing in common, and now she'd entangled Nanci in real trouble. Nanci's stomach knotted with anxiety and fear. All the way into the city she had wondered how she, who had known and helped so many Italian, Latino, and Chinese children, could have been so helpless when it came to her own cousin.

At the address of the factory there was no name on the door. Nanci rang the bell. After a while a scratchy, heavily accented voice asked her through the old intercom what she wanted. She gave her married name, Hua, and asked if she could come up.

The voice switched to Chinese and screamed through the intercom that no one was there.

Nanci replied in Chinese that she was no one official, wasn't there to make trouble, she was just looking for someone. After that there was no more argument. The lock clicked, and she pushed the door open to a very small space with an unmarked door leading to the back of the first floor and a dark stairwell going up to another unmarked door on the second floor. The second-floor door opened just a crack. A pair of keen eyes in a wrinkled face looked down at her.

"Ni hao, zumu, wo shi Lin Tsing Hua,"
she said politely.

"Okeydokey, come upstairs," said the voice behind the eyes.

It was an old building with a steep staircase. The steps sagged so badly they almost seemed to be tipping over on themselves. Nanci wondered how many times her cousin Lin had climbed these stairs and disappeared behind that door. She wondered if Lin was in there now. Nanci was used to climbing stairs. There had been three flights of stairs to her apartment. Still, these stairs were very steep, and she was short of breath when she hit the top. The old woman opened the door just wide enough for her to slip inside.

"Hello, Grandmother," Nanci said again. "I'm sorry to bother you in the middle of your important work."

The woman made a humphing sound that was not hard to interpret even over the roar of many sewing machines. Inside the door was a big room with more than a dozen machines and heads bent over them. Some heads still had the black hair of youth, and some were peppered with gray. Two heads of curly hair were pure white; the skin of those women was the color of butterscotch. And there were no men anywhere. A high chair with a rickety table, a chipped teapot, and a small cup marked the place of this woman, the woman with the sharp eyes.

For a second Nanci took in the cracked beams in the unfinished ceiling, the fat black-and-orange extension cords looping from one makeshift outlet to another high above, slats of some unidentifiable building material on the walls between a few patches of old plaster. By the windows were radiators, but not many. In May the room was already broiling with so many lungs sucking at the stale air and so many machines using electricity and acting as little furnaces.

There was no space for cutting tables here. The stacks of legs waiting to be sewn together suggested it was a pants factory. Some women were sewing the curve of the crotch, some just the zippers, some the waistbands. One older woman covered with thread was just cutting the threads from the finished garments. And in the farthest back corner clouds of steam were belching from the presser. All the activities, the noise, and so little air made Nanci dizzy; so did the dishonorable fact that she was so poorly acquainted with her cousin that she didn't even know what part of the garment Lin worked on. Rust and burgundy were the colors of the wool fabrics the women were putting together now. That meant they must already be sewing for fall.

Nanci felt that empty place of sorrows burn in her gut. It had taken her six years to save enough to bring her little cousin here, and now that Lin was here Nanci still could not reach her. She looked around and did not see her cousin.

"Everybody's here, and everybody's legal," the woman said in Chinese. "So who are you looking for?"

"Thank you for taking the time to talk to me. I am looking for my cousin, Lin Tsing."

The woman's eyes showed nothing as she shook her head quickly.

"What does that mean, Grandmother? I know she works here," Nanci said.

"No work here."

Nanci looked carefully at the bent heads again. "Maybe not now, this minute. But she did work here. If there's something wrong with her, please tell me."

The woman shook her head. "Never work here."

"Maybe she didn't give her right name."

"Know nothing."

"I have only one cousin. No one else. She may not be a good cousin, but she is all I have. She is my father's brother's child. My mother and my father and my uncle are gone. They would want me to take care of her. I need to find her. I have her things. It's very urgent."

"Bad luck," the woman said, but the shrewdness didn't leave her eyes. "What things do you have—in case I hear of her?"

"Maybe you remember her. She's young, pretty, has short hair. She worked here for many months, you don't have so many people you could forget so fast."

"Boo hao
." The woman coughed up some phlegm.

Nanci ignored the disapproval. She guessed what was no good, but Lin had been sulky and secretive ever since her arrival, wouldn't even see Nanci, much less share her troubles with her cousin.

"I'd like to talk to the boss," Nanci said firmly.

"I boss."

"The owner, then."

"No here."

"When will he be back?"

The woman shook her head. Grandmother wasn't saying. Nanci paused at the table with the teapot on it. "If you see my cousin, tell her I have her things. I'm sure she wants them back."

"What things, in case I hear?" the woman asked a second time.

"Would you ask around and call me?" Nanci didn't want to tell her.

The old woman's hard eyes traveled to Nanci's purse. Nanci had never bribed anyone before. The idea of having to do so now made her nervous. She groped around in her purse, trying to count her money without appearing to do so. It would cost her another fifteen dollars, at least, to get back to Long Island. How much could she afford to offer? She gave the woman a ten. Was that enough? Apparently it was. A glimmer of recognition showed in the woman's eye.

"Maybe I'll look around for you," the woman suggested. "Maybe she has important things? Maybe you'll give a reward for her?"

Nanci's mouth went dry. "Yes," she said. "I have a reward."

"My name Annie Lee. How much?" she demanded.

Nanci frowned. How much was enough to get results? Now she was really frightened. Milton would be so angry about all this. She closed her eyes. She asked herself how much she'd pay.

"A thousand dollars," she said finally. "A thousand dollars if you can tell me where my cousin is."

The grandma nodded. "I'll ask around. What's your number?"

Nanci gave her the number. Then she walked back, crossed Bowery, and cut around to Elizabeth. On Elizabeth she walked back and forth in front of the police station a dozen times, asking herself if she should go to the police. What if Lin had done something criminal? What if Nanci were now an accessory to some crime? What should she do? The police were so dangerous. Her old friend, April Woo, the only representative of the police she'd ever liked and respected, wasn't there anymore. Nanci had seen her only twice since April started working uptown—it now seemed like a hundred years ago—and they never spoke on the phone or had lunch anymore. In the end she was too frightened to go into the station house and ask for April's current work telephone number.

CHAPTER 11

L
ieutenant Iriarte had two characteristic expressions when things were not going well: fury at those beneath him for messing up and detached regret for those above him who could remove his head for it. Right now his face displayed the latter. "Nothing," he said flatly.

At quarter past eight on Monday morning Captain Bjork Johnson, the commanding officer of Midtown North, aimed frosty blue eyes at April Woo, the so-called rising star of his detective squad. Johnson was a man who looked as if he ate a cow for dinner every night and hadn't done any form of exercise since the day he stopped walking a beat more than fifteen years ago. The lack of discipline implied by his large, soft midsection, undisguised by his captain's uniform, gave him a somewhat dangerous air. His cold stock-taking of April told her he didn't think any more of her than Iriarte did. She wished that she'd had more than an hour's sleep.

Captain McCarthy, Johnson's second whip in the precinct, sat on the other side of the room, pretending to confer with his computer while waiting for the right moment to enter the conversation. He gave April an encouraging smile that did not actually mean he was on her side. Captain Johnson's eyes, however, made no attempt at nice.
What do you have to say for yourself?
they demanded.

April glanced quickly at her immediate boss. Iriarte was holding himself together with a studied air of comfortable authority. He sat straight-backed but relaxed, with both well-shod feet in their almost-pointy Italian loafers planted on the ground, like the gentleman he knew he was. He wore a carefully pressed Harris tweed suit with a purple silk handkerchief in the breast pocket. Under the jacket was a powder-blue shirt with his monogram on one white cuff. He was Puerto Rican and proud of it. April was trying to develop a similarly confident style. She stood beside him, not too close, and tried to appear professional— neither meek like the classic Oriental woman whom men of all races seemed to think they could push around, nor defiant like the butch American feminists who couldn't ever let go of their grudges. Thus she hung on to her tightrope balancing act, nervous as usual and right on the edge of a headlong crash into abject and groveling.

She was a boss now, but still so twitchy about the responsibility she could hardly stand still. A police department was most on the line in the "B cases"—the ones involving bombs and babies. Things couldn't get more intense or high-profile than this. She knew the department had a very good record with this kind of thing. With snatchings, detectives almost always came up with a scenario and a suspect within thirty-six hours. Same story with abandonment cases—young mothers who left their babies in parks or doorways or Dumpsters, either dead or alive. The babies were discovered quickly, and usually someone came forward with information about the mother. Of course, there were cases where women gave birth in secret and did away with their babies without anyone's finding out because no one, not even their mothers or boyfriends, had known they were pregnant. Those were the real perfect murders, and there were no statistics on how many of
them
happened in a year.

April tried to breathe evenly while three brass challenged her as if she alone, of all the detectives working the case, had failed the mission. No baby had turned up in the night. The papers were full of it.

Finally, Iriarte nodded at her.

"We had over a hundred people out checking garbage cans in the area and searching in the park last night," she said. "We also had officers checking Dumpsters parked outside a construction site two blocks away from where the Popescus live. Came up with two dead cats, that's it."

Iriarte made a face.

"You have a possible scenario for us, Sergeant? You're a woman," Captain Johnson said.

"It's not the victim's biological baby, sir. I think the most likely scenario is he was abducted by a brother, father, even husband of the baby's mother. Even by Popescu himself," April said, ignoring the implicit snickers. "I don't think Heather Rose could have killed him."

She got a cold stare in return. "Why not?"

"First, she was beaten up. That means there had to be at least one other person involved. Second, the baby's stroller is missing."

Captain Johnson chewed the inside of his cheek. He didn't appear to understand the significance of the missing stroller. All he wanted to know was how to allocate the officers for the day. He glanced at McCarthy, then Iriarte.

"We know about the stroller. We didn't come up with anyone who saw it, sir," Iriarte told him.

April jumped out on a limb. "Our guess is that the missing stroller indicates the baby is still alive, and someone has him."