"I want to go in," he'd said. He didn't want to leave her there with no crowd of mourners, to be dissected alone. It was so cold, so very cold. He was shaking all over.
"Is that your wife?"
He didn't look to see whose voice was asking, could not have said afterward which cop it was. He just knew the white corpse on the table wasn't his wife. No. his jaw and fists clenched. He looked at her for a long time. No, it was not his wife. Not Merrill. Then, finally he nodded.
He did not encounter Daphne Petersen, was not shown Tor's body to identify. He felt as if the two were set apart somehow. He wanted to see Tor but was afraid to ask. No police person told him what really happened last night. Rick wondered if they would ever tell him. It hit him at that moment that he would not be able to rest until he knew exactly what happened. And then he was hustled out. They wouldn't let him go in and say good-bye to Merrill. Someone said something about everybody's having to suit up before getting anywhere near the dead these days, wear masks with respirators, as if all corpses carried the AIDS virus or TB, or something even worse. Or were they afraid death itself was catching?
And everything had been white. A white sheet was tucked up around Merrill's ears so he couldn't see any more of her than her face, white under the harsh lights, unmarked in any way, frozen in an expression he'd never seen. It almost felt as if she'd been killed by whiteness itself, bled of her spirit, bleached into nothingness. He noticed that the large diamond studs she always wore were not in her ears. He had heard that the police stole jewelry, watches, and money of victims, also the property of people who were arrested. But Rick didn't think to ask about Merrill's diamonds.
He was too shaken, for white had never been the color of death to him. He'd seen the dead, many dead in his childhood. His mother, grandmother, sister, and he used to visit all the families of the dead in their congregation. They'd prayed over the dead in church and sung them into heaven. The women probably still did. The dead went to heaven in golden chariots, sung there by the choir. They crossed the river to the other side. They were sung all the way on their journey to Jesus, who'd always loved and cherished them no matter who they had been or what they'd done with their lives. The lives may not have been very precious, but the souls were golden treasures to Jesus. That was what they believed. And the treasures were always black. Rick had never seen a dead white person until he saw his wife on—he couldn't even tell what she was lying on. She was covered with a sheet, and there was another sheet under her, draped to the floor.
He admitted the body was hers, but nothing about the thing he saw through the window was like the Merrill he had known. And what was there was not going to heaven in a golden chariot. Merrill was going to be cut up with saws and scalpels and her tissues examined under a microscope. Sitting now with his partners in the borne he had shared with Merrill, Rick's body was tense, but his eyes hid his fury. It was already very very ugly.
"Listen to me, Rick," Chris said earnestly. "You have to focus. Do you know what they're saying on TV? Do you know what's going on downstairs? Downstairs there are half a dozen of those vans with star wars on top. Two of those crews almost knocked me down, fighting to get a microphone in front of my face."
It's never too late for salvation. Sing for Jesus, sisters and brothers. Rick had no congregation now, no one anywhere near to sing for Merrill. "Lord save us," he muttered.
Merrill's family was waiting for her body so they could have a funeral. They wanted the funeral in Massachusetts where she'd grown up, and he'd agreed that was best. His family was on the way. After her body had been cut up and examined, they would take her back to the New England town she came from and bury her there. He sucked his breath in, trying to keep control.
"What?" Mel said, cupping his ear.
Rick shook his head, not replying.
"Rick, I know you don't want to think about this right now, but you never know which way these things are going to jump. It's a madhouse out there."
"What do you mean 'jump'?"
Christopher looked apologetic. "You know how Tor was. Who knows what sort of garbage these fucks will come up with?"
"What do you mean jump?"
Chris jerked his chin, irritated. "Don't make me spell it out for you, Rick."
"I'm slow," Rick said evenly. "Spell it out for me."
"You're a celebrity."
"So?" He knew what they were getting at and still he couldn't help pushing.
"So, you've lived with publicity. You have to manage the situation all the time, present your own image. They see what you tell them to see. You have to do that now big-time, you know that. You're an expert." Chris scowled at Dan, prompting him to pitch in.
"Yeah." Dan finally opened his mouth. "You've always been great at managing them."
"So what does managing the press have to do with getting a lawyer?"
Mel shifted his stomach. "You know how we feel about you. We want you protected in every way. We don't want you getting hurt."
Rick stared at the three men, his partners. He was already hurt. "Are you worried about the firm?" he asked softly. "Are you scared I'll taint the firm?"
"No, no," Dan shot back angrily. "You don't get it, do you? The vultures are going to tear at your life, pick at your bones—schadenfreude. You know what that means?"
Rick shook his head, but he got the picture.
"It means taking pleasure from other people's troubles. Joy and pleasure from eating you alive," Dan persisted. "This is going to happen. It's guaranteed to happen, and we want to control it."
Mel threw his two cents in. "We don't want to see it get out of control here, you know what I mean?' '
Rick clenched his jaw. "They won't find anything to pin on me, if that's what you mean."
Dan shook his head. "Don't be a stupid fuck, Rick. They always find something. You—"
Abruptly he stopped as Patrice pushed open the door and bore down on them with a tray of rich pastries and a sullen expression. Rick turned to him, frowning, and their eyes locked.
12
What you doing?" Sai Woo screamed at her daughter.
April stopped so short she almost felt as if she'd been halted by a bullet. What she'd been doing was trying to sneak up the stairs to her part of the house without an encounter with her mother. Mike told her she always worried about the wrong things, like her mother's feelings and not her own. Almost thirty years old, and she was still so worried about what her mother had to say that every little verbal foray felt like the beginning of another battle in a long and bloody war that April could never win. Hearing her mother scream now, April held in a deep sigh.
The snow and sleet had stopped that morning. The temperature had held at around freezing all through the day, but started dropping again in the early evening. The streets were so icy that the mayor had gone on the radio warning people to keep their cars off the streets and particularly to stay out of Manhattan. April had heard his voice give the same command repeatedly on her hazardous trip home in the white Chrysler Le Baron that she sometimes felt she would still be paying for at the turn of the century. The last thing she wanted was the confrontation her mother had clearly been waiting for all day.
"Where you shreep rast night? Where you been aww day?" Sai Woo demanded.
Reluctantly, April turned around and made eye contact with Skinny Dragon Mother whose eyes had narrowed into slits of war.
"At work, where do you think, Ma?"
Long ago Sai Woo told April about the meaning of dragons and April knew her mother was one. Dragons had demon eyes, the ears of a cow, the neck of a snake, the belly of a clam. On its camel head is a lump, a "gas bag" that allows the dragon to fly through the air swooping in from the sky to bring rain and snow and all manner of storms to undeserving human worms, exactly like April. Of its 117 scales, 81 are good-influence scales (yang) and 36 are bad-influence scales (yin). Sai said there were several hundred different kinds of dragons, but they all had the same kind of power and ruthless personality. When one of them swooped down out of a golden cloud, it was anybody's guess whether the good-influence or the bad-influence scales were going to be dominant.