"Two thousand dollars is what she wants," Milton told him. "If you need the money, I have it. I could even bring it in now." He looked at his wife, who was still torturing the napkin.
"Don't worry about the money. This is nothing. I'll walk over to the place with Joey, you remember Joey Malconi? We'll have a little talk with the lady, get this thing straightened out. You'll have your cousin by noon. How about that for efficiency?"
They had Frankie on the speaker phone so they both could talk to him. Nanci had listened to Milton explain the situation without comment. And she had heard Frankie's enthusiasm as he picked up the challenge to intimidate an extortionist and save a female in distress. He responded too eagerly, which made Nanci stay awake half the night worrying about whether Frankie was up to taking care of much of anything. Nanci knew some of Frankie's friends were rough. She knew she and Milton ought to be calling the police, but, once again, she just couldn't do it.
CHAPTER 34
It was almost one o'clock on Friday morning when April parked in her usual spot in front of the brick house in Astoria, Queens, that no longer felt like her home. Sharply etched in the sky just above the house was a crescent moon. As she glanced up and down the block, checking the lights in the neighbors' houses, the night air felt like warm breath on her face. She could almost feel the flowers in their neat little plots reaching up through the softening earth. All looked quiet and safe. But April knew this sense of peace was false. She touched the flip-down cell phone Mike had given her. It was small enough to live in her pocket. For the first time in her life she felt loved. She dawdled under the stars, taking her time getting into the house that had been big trouble for her from the very beginning.
Soon after she'd settled into her first precinct, in Bed-Stuy, her father had picked out this house without breathing a word. He was a great reader of Chinese newpapers but not much of a talker. After much silent consultation with himself, he decided that he'd been living in a Chinatown walk-up for twenty-five years, saving every spare penny. Now he was ready to move up. Also, he'd been waiting for his girl child, Siyue
Woo, to marry a rich man and or get a good job. The job had materialized before the rich man.
April had been summoned to the National Bank of New York without any idea what for. Judy Chen, one of her oldest friends, was there with her father, Ronald Chen of Chen Realty, along with April's parents, both in their best clothes. The four of them made a nice family picture around April when the mortgage agent from the bank handed her the papers to sign. They jabbered at her for a while in Chinese, and that was the first she heard of their expectation that she would hand over her life savings (from working since before she was fourteen, washing hair in a beauty shop, selling groceries in Ma Fat's supermarket, and teaching English to people who were too shy to go to real classes) for the down payment. Ronald Chen argued that April's old father might not be able to work much longer and needed his own life savings in case of war, famine, or possible retirement. On the other hand, anybody could see that April was young, not ugly, and had many chances to get ahead, with her whole life in front of her. Old Father, all of fifty-one, had nodded his agreement to all this. Old Mother had noddded, too.
The mortgage was another shocker. Ronald Chen spoke for the Woo parents. If the mortgage was in April's name, then the venerable old parents wouldn't ever have to worry about their future. This little meeting more than six years ago had doomed April to endless worry about getting ahead in the department and securing enough overtime to cover her expenses.
It wasn't until some weeks later, at the closing, that April found out the house wasn't in her name. For her parents, this, too, had made perfect sense. This way, if April were a bad daughter or disgraced them in any way, they could have their cake and eat it, too:
They could throw her out of their house and still have her pay off the mortgage.
With the facts of her life well in mind, April opened the front door and was immediately assaulted by a strange odor, hot and intense, as if something rotten were baking in the oven. The smell enveloped the house like a deep fog from which there was no escape. When April closed the door with a sharp clap, there was no response from her mother's poodle, Dim Sum. This worried her. She wrinkled her nose, fearing what Skinny Dragon was up to.
The living room was dark. Beyond it, the kitchen door was open. Flickering light in there suggested that Skinny Dragon had the TV on with the sound off. If April had felt like hiding, she would have been grateful for the chance to run upstairs unnoticed, but tonight she wasn't hiding.
"Hi, Ma," she called softly. "What's up?"
April found Skinny sitting at the kitchen table, an old linoleum number like the ones in the restaurant where she'd worked for so many years. She did not raise her eyes from the gruesome scene on the TV screen in front of her. April's mother was watching a body covered with green sheets. The chest cavity was open and something really terrible was going on. It appeared that Skinny was passing the time waiting for her daughter to come home by avidly watching a heart transplant. The combination of the smell of the steam rising from a pot on the front burner of the stove and the green tent over ribs cracked apart with several people huddled around the cutting away of a defective heart chilled April as much as anything she'd ever seen on the street.
She attempted a little smile. "What's going on Ma?"
Skinny Dragon refused to look away from the TV.
When April was little she used to amuse herself by counting the different meanings of her mother's silences. She'd calculated a hundred different kinds of silence, including Skinny's crowing satisfaction when she shoved something truly disgusting—that April
really
didn't want to chew up and swallow—into April's mouth when she was little and defenseless. The silence now was number 23 silence. Number 23 contained the message:
You've been gone too long, you've been up to no good, and whatever you tell me will be a big lie.
Although most silences were no-win silences, silence number 23 was particularly no-win.
"Where have you been? I must have called a dozen times in the last few days," April began.
"Where I, where you?" Sai demanded. Her first words were a battle cry already rising to a shriek. "I here."
April shook her head. "No, you weren't. Ma."
Sai's jaws clamped together as she remembered that she was supposed to be silent. Her eyes traveled to the steam rising from the roiling pot. April's eyes traveled there, too. The contents seemed to be some kind of thin stew, but the liquid was black and smelly beyond belief. She didn't know how her mother could sit in the same room with it. Skinny must be really angry. April had the disconcerting thought that her mother might have killed a rat, or a raccoon, or even Dim Sum because the dog had been April's gift to her. The thought of her mother killing the adorable puppy made her feel even sicker.
"I was worried about you," she said. "It's not like you to take off without telling me. Where's Dim Sum?"
Silence.
"Ma, where's the puppy?" April looked around the kitchen. No dog under the table. No dog in her father's chair.
Silence.
"Ma, what's in the pot?"
"Save your life, that's what." Now Skinny's eyes were sharp as she avidly studied her subject.
April had thought she looked pretty good when she left for work the morning before. But Thursday had started in Mike's bed, ended there, too, and April knew by her mother's expression that the poison in the pot was for her. She coughed and tasted bile, wishing she'd delayed her return another few days. With the cough. Skinny came alive.