The Silent Bride (3 page)

April Woo might be an ABC—American-born Chinese—but she'd grown up in Chinatown and worked there in the Fifth Precinct on Elizabeth Street as a beat cop, then a detective for five years. She knew what was what. She listened to Gao's tall tale— as she did to all the others she heard in the course of her work—without letting any intelligence leak out of her eyes. She'd learned young to hide all emotion, to do her thinking behind the blank wall of a quiet, stupid-looking face. She let the man talk and talk, making the wheel go around. As they said in the Department, what goes around comes around. The way of Tao in the new world also happened to be the way of the NYPD. Eventually she'd learn why Ching had insisted on the meeting.

At nearly four-thirty she dropped her wrist under the table and glanced at her watch. Her
chico,
Lieutenant Mike Sanchez, commander of the Homicide Task Force, was working today, supervising a double homicide and suicide. This morning he'd told her he might not be free until late tonight, so she eyed the food on the table to give him later.

Gao Wan had cooked an impossibly big spread for her. It was late in the afternoon, and the feast was way too much even for a regularly scheduled meal. As her host, Gao wasn't eating a thing and, as honored guest, April could hardly pig out, either. Therefore, the fragrant steamed pork buns; wok-fried garlic tops; crisp scallion cakes; translucent Shanghai noodles, wide as a man's hand and swimming in spicy peanut sauce; clams with oyster sauce; mussels with fermented black beans; eggplant with garlic; shrimp balls;
shui mai;
and sweet/sour fish sat there cooling on their plates as April waited for Gao to say what he wanted from her.

Gao caught April's sidelong glance at the potential leftovers.

"Eat, eat, please," he urged for the fourteenth time. "You don't like?"

"Oh, I ate so much," April said politely. "I'm stuffed." She changed the subject. "How did you meet Matthew, by the way?" They were speaking in Cantonese.

She'd wondered about this because Matthew Tan, Gao's supposed "friend," was an ABC computer expert from California who'd met Ching Ma Dong at a convention in Tucson. Matthew's Chinese did not extend much beyond
kuai he!, xie xie,
and
cha. Drink up, thank you,
and
tea.
She'd be truly surprised if they'd ever met. April was spared having to wonder about it further by the ringing cell phone in her pocket. Caller ID said
private,
so she said, "Sergeant Woo."

"Querida,
where are you?" Mike's voice sounded tense.

"Flushing, what's up?"

"We've got a synagogue shooting up in Riverdale; looks bad...." His voice broke up.

"Mike?" April turned her body slightly away from Gao. "Riverdale where?"

"Burk ... aou."

"Give me an address."

"Independence Ave. Exit Nineteen on the HH Parkway. Copy?"

"Yeah, I copy."

She wanted to know how many people were hit. Was anybody dead? But his siren was wailing, the radio in his car was squawking, and he'd hung up anyway.

The cop's life. April looked regretfully at Gao and the leftovers she wasn't going to get. "Sorry," she murmured. "Something's come up. I have to go."

Three

B
y the time April reached the restaurant door less than five feet away, she'd already forgotten Gao Wan. Crime always suspended real life. Didn't matter if it was her day off, or if she was in the middle of some important family occasion, a funeral or a wedding. When a call came, she hit the road.

Outside the restaurant, a riot of Asia greeted her on the busy Sunday afternoon. Colorful dual-alphabet and language signs for everything from acupuncture and ice cream to hair cutting and gourmet tea all screamed for attention on storefronts and in upstairs windows. Dresses, East and West style, hung outside store windows and in doorways. Merchandise— gewgaws of every kind imported from dozens of countries—jammed small storefronts. On the sidewalk, street vendors hawked a kaleidoscope of familiar products for homesick arrivals: plastic sandals, embroidered silk shoes, toys from China, incense, paper money, herbal cures.

Almost dizzying was the abundance of stalls featuring seductive, dewy-looking vegetables, long beans, cabbage, bok choy, radish, bean sprouts, bitter melon, oranges, Asian apples and pears. Nestled in their ice beds were cockles and clams, whole fish, shrimps, squid, baskets of clawing crabs still very much alive.

The sidewalk was jammed with mothers and children and whole families taking the day to eat and buy food. Everything Asian. Asian faces and products everywhere mixed with the overriding aroma of sizzling garlic and ginger. It all created the impression of a metropolis anywhere but Main Street, USA.

It was only a short block to the parking garage, but one that was clogged by hordes of people who were not in a hurry. April broke into sweat, dampening the armholes of the lime green shell under her lemon suit jacket. She stepped off the curb and dodged into the street, her shoulder bag slamming her hip as she ran. A bicycle messenger swerved to miss her when she dashed through a changing light.

"Fuck you!" he yelled at her in the only words she knew in Korean.

And then she was in her aging white Le Baron and on the road. For the next fifteen minutes she raced northwest, not even trying to rouse Mike on his cell. Beat officers on patrol had radios to communicate with dispatchers and bosses. Some detective units had cell phones or beepers as well so they could call each other directly. April's private car had no radio, and Mike was busy. She'd have to wait.

In less than half an hour, she found the local street in Riverdale off the Henry Hudson Parkway. Two uniforms, both female, were standing in the intersection, directing traffic beside their angle-parked blue-and-white. April resisted the urge to query them about the incident. She showed her ID and the uniforms waved her through.

Down the street half a dozen blue-and-whites were double-parked in a line, some with their doors still open, as if their drivers had charged out. Four unmarked black sedans with shields in the windows indicated that brass had arrived. Two empty ambulances with their back doors closed stood like sentries. And all around was the pandemonium of deflated celebrants—all dressed up, bunched in groups outside their house of worship, stunned and angry, not yet released.

No matter how many times April walked out of everyday life into somebody's death chamber, into somebody's nightmare of grief, into a standoff of innocence against evil, it was always the same. It was a bungee jump into the hell where ghosts and devils lived. Right now there wasn't the frenzy and chaos of people in imminent danger, no hostages to save, no tense SWAT team taking positions against a sniper. No hovering choppers in the sky.

It looked as if a very big, expensive party had been interrupted. Maybe fifty or sixty elegantly dressed women, many of them stout and wearing flashy jewelry, their weight embraced by sparkly, bright-colored evening gowns. The same number of men in tuxedos with gold and red and bright blue cummerbunds and matching embroidered skullcaps. And there were children everywhere, dozens of them trying in vain to get some attention. Like the two sexes everywhere, the men and women had gathered in separate groups. The people were jittery and upset, but their attitude was marked by the kind of lassitude that comes when a tragedy has already taken place, when there's nothing left to do but go home. Whatever had occurred was over.

She parked the car, anxious to get there and do something.

"No more, no more, no more!" was the first thing she heard when she got out.

A woman was ranting, "Where were the police? This is not supposed to happen again."

Sweating heavily in her too-cheerful outfit, April felt her usual beginning-of-a-case sick feeling hit her hard. Headache, slight nausea. Hazard of the job. She was entering the fog of yin when everything was soft, hazy, unformed, and she had to keep her ears and eyes wide open to the sounds and sights around her. She could feel the presence of the immortals, the ghosts and demons churning in the air. It always made her a little queasy because she was an American and not supposed to believe in them. She shook them off and mapped the scene in her mind.

The synagogue was a two-story, rust-colored building flanked by blazing red azalea bushes over five feet tall and wide. It was adorned with only a Jewish star carved in stone over two sets of wide dark-wood doors. Down a short slope to the left, a parking lot was filled with enough prime product to make a used-car dealer a rich man. The street side of the lot was fronted by a four-foot evergreen fence, possibly to afford some shelter to the fortune sitting there. Behind the hedge, a number of valets in red jackets were smoking in a clump, not fetching cars for the women and children waiting for them.

April broke into a run when she heard snippets of angry conversation from the other side of the hedge. "Terrorists." "Israel." "Poor girl." The name "Tovah" and "car bomb."

Then she saw Mike. He was on the sidewalk in a crowd far left of the building. His head was bent toward a precinct commander April had seen around but whose name she didn't know, two other high-ranking uniformed brass whose faces she also recognized, half a dozen stout men in tuxedos, and a small man in a black clerical gown with a blood-besmirched shawl around his shoulders. Her sunny suit caught Mike's eye, and he waved her over.

"Sergeant Woo, this is Rabbi Levi, Mr. Schoenfeld, the bride's grandfather, Mr. Schoenfeld, the bride's uncle. Mr. Ribikoff, the groom's father."

April nodded and murmured "Sir" after each of their names. Her face was neutral, but her head pounded with the shock of personal bad luck. To have a wedding case just when her ahnost-sister Ching was getting married was not good, not good at all. An irrational, uncoplike fear clutched her.

The rabbi's voice chilled her further. "I want every car on the street checked for explosives. Get your dogs, your Geiger counters, I don't care what. And the cars in the lot. Every one. I don't want a single one of my people getting into a car that hasn't been tested for a bomb."

My people! Oh, here zve go.
Already the lines were being drawn. That always ruffled feathers.

Mike took April's arm and led her toward the building before Chief Avise, the stern-looking chief of detectives, had a chance to respond.
"Querida,
you made good time."

"The traffic wasn't too bad."

"You okay?" Mike's almond eyes, not so very different from April's own, caught everything. Now he struck at her anxiety with the love look that had changed her life.

When they'd first sat at adjoining desks in the Two-oh, he'd seemed a bully out for the trophy of getting her in bed when no one else she worked with could. Each time he'd brought her in on a case or horned in on one of hers, she'd thought he was trying to control her, mess with her career. She'd taken a strong position against a cop couple working together, but he'd wanted her front and center, both in his professional and private life. And Mike always got what he wanted. Despite her mother's dire predictions about ethnic incompatibility, he turned out to be her rock.

"I'm okay." She tilted her head to one side. He looked out of place there with his mustache, leather jacket, and cowboy boots, but good to her.

"Enlighten me," she said softly.

His expression didn't change, even though he knew it would affect her. "Somebody shot the bride."

"Oh." April felt the kick of the catastrophe fill her own body. To be a bride, charged with all the hope and excitement for a happy life. Every cliche April both longed for and feared herself. She didn't ask if the girl was dead. She gathered the girl was dead. What bad luck! Bad, bad luck for every spring bride in New York. She shivered for Ching and all the families who would be spooked, even though it had nothing to do with them.

"The groom?" she murmured, scanning the tearful crowd of wedding guests.

"No, he didn't do it. He was standing at the altar waiting for her."

"I meant shot." April tried breathing again.

"No, no. Two other people got hit. A twelve-year-old lost an ear. Another one took a bullet in the shoulder, both males. Looks like the shooter was only after the bride. Chief Avise told me the parents went nuts when the paramedics cut her dress open."