He’d have done no such thing! And you know it!
‘Well, I wasn’t sure. The other thing was… Lorraine’s my very best friend on earth. We sit together in every class in school, spend all our free time together, do things together, talk about things together, secret things… we’re like sisters, you know? It was like forget the petty bullshit, Ape, what’s a little bottle of nail polish between friends to the end?’
Teddy said nothing about her language.
Or that someone was calling her daughter Ape.
‘It was really difficult, Mom,’ April said. ‘Really.’
I want you to promise me something, Teddy signed.
‘Mom, please don’t ask me to stop seeing Lorraine.’
No, I won’t do that. But if anything like this ever happens again…
‘I promise,’ April said.
You’ll tell your father or me right away.
‘Yes, I promise,’ April said.
* * * *
The word was out. No question about it. If the reaction at Plum Blossom was merely a harbinger, the responses at Pear Blossom and then Apricot Blossom were clear indications that nobody was about to tell them anything much about Alicia Hendricks.
This wasn’t quite the ‘Nobody Knows Nothing’ stonewalling you got in the Eight-Seven hood, or even in Washington, D.C, for that matter; the managers of the Blossom shops couldn’t very well deny the existence of a woman who visited them regularly to promote and sell Beauty Plus’s line of nail-care products. Instead, they all nodded and bowed and smiled in the Oriental manner, oh yes, we know Alicia, oh yes, she very nice girl, come here alia time, we buy many nail polish from her, oh, she dead? So sorry to hear. Nice girl.
But mention dope…
Fortified by the La Paglia drug bust yesterday, they were still pursuing the drug-related angle…
… and immediately the faces went blank.
Dope was news to all of them.
Except to Jenny Cho, of course, who had admitted that Alicia did ‘Some li’l pot, you know?’
But that was earlier today, and this was now, and the word had gone out, and the party line had changed.
Drug use?
Alicia?
No, no. Smiling. Bowing. Ladies all over the place looking up when the detectives mentioned drugs. This couldn’t be too good for business, all these nice city-slick ladies with their smooth sleek legs and their skirts pulled up over their thighs, hearing the word ‘drugs’ bandied about as if this was some street corner near a playground someplace instead of a civilized establishment where you could even get a bikini wax. What was the world coming to?
The world was coming to a dead end.
Until they visited a place called Cherry Blossom Nails.
* * * *
They knew the minute they stepped through the doorway that they weren’t supposed to be here to witness whatever was going down. There was that silent electric buzz that indicated something illegal was happening here. Eyes flashing. People caught in the act, though all that seemed to be happening was innocent manicures and pedicures. They flashed tin simultaneously, and marched straight to the back of the shop, the manager rushing along behind them, waving her hands in the air, yelling that a waxing was in progress, and then turning abruptly and running for the front of the shop when she saw they were about to open one of two closed doors in a narrow passageway.
Genero ran after her.
Parker threw open the door.
A small Asian man was sitting behind a small table upon which rested what appeared to be a one-kilo brick of cocaine.
The detectives had just stepped in shit, as the saying goes.
* * * *
On the drive back to the city, he told her what the options for this evening were.
‘I have an errand to run,’ he said. ‘We can either have dinner before or after, take your choice.’
‘What kind of errand?’
‘Someone I have to see.’
‘I’m not hungry yet, are you?’
‘No.’
‘So why don’t we make it a late dinner?’
‘Good. You can wait for me at the hotel.’
‘What time will you be leaving?’
‘Around seven.’
‘I’ll take a little nap.’
‘Okay,’ he said.
‘What time will you be back?’
‘Eight, eight thirty.’
‘Will we be going out?’
‘Absolutely. Celebrate.’
‘Oh? What?’
‘Us,’ he said.
* * * *
Jenny Cho told them Alicia was nothing but a mew.
They didn’t know what she meant at first.
She was trying to say that no one would have killed her for her minor role in what amounted to a penny-ante drug operation.
‘She on’y a mew,’ Jenny insisted.
They finally realized she was telling them Alicia was ‘only a mule.’ No, not a so-called swallower, who ingested drugs packed into latex gloves in order to transport the contraband through customs, not that kind of mule. Nor even a so-called stuffer, who inserted similarly packed drugs into vagina or anus with the same end in mind, you should pardon the pun. Just your everyday, garden-variety mule, a mere delivery boy, or girl in this case, woman actually, because she’d been fifty-five years old, even though Jenny Cho called her a delivery boy, a mew, a mule.
Jenny would not tell them the source of the cocaine Alicia delivered to her Blossom salons on her regularly scheduled visits. Jenny knew that in the business of drug trafficking or distribution, there were worse things than arrest and imprisonment. A garrulous person could oftimes meet with a sudden and untimely demise. But she did not think Alicia’s death had anything to do with her activities as a courier. She was ‘ony smaw potatoes,’ she said. ‘A deli’ry boy. A mew.’
The bust itself was small potatoes.
This wasn’t the French Connection, or even the Pizza Connection. This wasn’t billions of dollars of heroin or cocaine being smuggled into the United States with the illegal proceeds being laundered via many different methods and through many different countries. This was merely a Korean immigrant, a self-made woman in a land of opportunity, an enterprising woman who’d seen a way to earn a few extra bucks by funneling dope through her shops, which was safer and more convenient, after all, than having to buy it ‘all over the street, anyplace.’
Her arrest put an end to her success story.
But it left open the question of who had murdered Alicia Hendricks and Max Sobolov.
* * * *
The campus lights were spaced some twenty feet apart. This meant that there were pools of illumination under each lamppost, and then stretches of utter darkness, and then another splash of light as the path meandered its way between buildings and benches toward the sidewalk and the nighttime city beyond.
Christine Langston had packed the papers for the spot test she’d administered during her three o’clock class on the Romantic Poets, and was heading off campus, matching her stride to the areas of darkness and light, making a game of it, bulging briefcase swinging in her right hand. She was a woman in her late sixties, but spry as a goat, as she was fond of saying, and alert to every nuance of campus sound. This was the middle of June, and the cicadas were at it hot and heavy, as were the students, she suspected, mating behind and on top of every errant blade of grass.
In the far distance, she could see the beckoning street lamps on Hall Avenue. She would catch an express bus there, and be whisked downtown to her apartment in sixteen minutes flat. Mortimer would be waiting there for her, mixed drink ready, dinner heating in the kitchen. She would report to him on her day, and listen to his publishing-industry atrocity stories, and then they would have their dinner and perhaps go down for a stroll later on, walking hand in hand in the quiet streets outside the apartment they shared. And yet later, they would…