Burning Time

Burning Time Read Free Page B

Book: Burning Time Read Free
Author: Leslie Glass
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hearing aid was on the night table. He was a tiny guy with a dapper mustache, sitting there perfectly balanced, his red-and-white striped pajama bottoms around his ankles and his eyes wide open in shock as if he had been caught in the act.
    About midday, when April was still looking around theapartment for numbers of relatives to notify, and waiting for the ambulance to take the old man away, a request came in just for her. Up here on the Upper West Side, on Columbus Avenue only one block from Central Park West, where there was a lot of money around and very little need for a Chinatown expert, it didn’t happen a lot.
    It was a case in the Westminster, one of the famous buildings on Central Park West. They sent her out to interview a Chinese maid, and she relished every second of it. Turned out the woman, Ling Ling Jee, had been assaulted when she discovered two robbers in the apartment busy pocketing her mistress’s jewelry. Ling Ling was a broad-faced woman of middle age and stoical peasant stock who couldn’t speak English. She was terrified by the two men, and even more frightened of being blamed for their entry into the apartment. Worse, her employers were out of town on a skiing trip. Ling Ling didn’t know where they were, nor was she absolutely sure what skiing was.
    The Haitian maid across the hall had called the police for her. Two police officers arrived on the scene, but couldn’t get enough of a story to fill out a report. Eventually April got there and sorted everything out. She calmed the woman down, got her story, tried to ascertain what was missing, explained to her what skiing was, and found the Barstollers up in Vermont. Tomorrow Ling Ling was coming in to look at mug shots.
    Sorting things out for confused and terrified newcomers was what April felt she had been born to do. And for five years she had been a happy detective down in Chinatown. She knew all too well the terrors of people who didn’t know what to do or who to believe about what the rules really were.
    Almost nobody in Chinatown had come into the country legally. So when they got there, they lived in constantanxiety about being discovered and sent back. This and the fact that they couldn’t speak the language made them perfect victims—for each other, for the authorities, and for the people who employed them.
    Sometimes the people who sold them fake papers for thousands of dollars then sold their arrival dates to associates in New York, who kidnapped them at the airport and ransomed them to the desperate relatives who were waiting for them. In her years in the 5th, April had had many cases that made her happy. Not so many up here, where she felt like a fish out of water.
    Sergeant Joyce came in and brusquely motioned for April to come into her office. It was three-forty. April knew by the Irish set of her supervisor’s jaw that she wasn’t getting out of there in twenty minutes. Something had come up.
    Two minutes later she came out of the office with the Missing Persons form that had only been partially filled out at the desk downstairs. She approached the anxious couple on the bench.
    “Mr. and Mrs. Roane,” April said. “Come with me.”

3
     
    Three blocks from home Jason looked out the taxi window and was startled by a movie marquee that hadn’t been there when he left town.
Serpent’s Teeth
. What in the—?
    “Stop,” he said suddenly.
    The taxi skidded to a halt at Broadway and Eighty-third Street. Jason paid the fare and dragged his things out into the cold. It was a foggy March afternoon, still dead of winter in New York. His flight from Canada had taken less than two hours. He hesitated outside the theater, studying the poster. There were just two faces on it, with all the names at the bottom too small to read. One face he knew well. He shivered as the cold mist turned to rain, intensified, and began pelting down. Jesus. Jason bought a ticket to get out of the deluge and ducked into the moldy old theater.
    Inside it

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