Leslie Glass: Tracking Time

"A psychoanalytic candidate I'm supervising, a young psychiatrist, didn't turn up for a meeting last night. He didn't answer his phone this morning, and he didn't call in. I'm concerned."

"Any particular reason?"

"He's just very conscientious, very obsessive. If he had a medical emergency, he wouldn't forget to call and cancel."

"Hold on." April padded into the other room for her notebook, took it out of her shoulder bag, and came back. "Okay, give me the info."

Jason gave her the pertinent information. Maslow Atkins was the man's name. His address was in her old precinct, the Two-O. The right thing to do would be to call one of the detectives from her old squad to take care of it. She told Jason she'd let him know who'd be looking into it.

"Thanks," he said. But he sounded disappointed that she wasn't taking care of it herself.

The suite of small, windowless, detective squad rooms on the second floor of Midtown North was just waking up at eight o'clock when April came in to work. No one was in the holding cell, and Lieutenant Iriarte was holding court in his office. Like every unit commander, he had his favorites. In his case they were the unlikely trio of Creaker, Skye, and Hagedorn. Skye was tall and brawny, of Irish-Native American extraction, so he said. He had a broken nose, blue marbles for eyes, and a number of scary-looking scars on his shaved head. Creaker was a short bodybuilder with a boxer's blunt face and arms so thick no jacket sleeves were wide enough to hide the muscles. Hagedorn, the computer expert and Iriarte's absolute favorite, was big and soft, and had a pale pudding of a face, and limp, discouraged-looking, mouse-brown hair. These two yangs and a yin, by April's estimation, were among the least evolved humans on earth. But they were not as bad as the detectives she'd worked with in the Two-O-always watching the surgery channel on TV. And she had to admit that Hagedorn was a first-rate hacker who'd helped her out with background checks on the computer more than once.

Iriarte was a small, good-looking Puerto Rican, a really snappy dresser with a matchstick mustache suspended exactly midway between his nose and upper lip, and strong family values. At the moment he was wearing a gray suit with a slight lavender tinge, a yellow shirt, and a black tie. He gestured through the glass wall of his office for April to join them. She did.

"Hey, Woo, what's up?" he asked, acting real nice.

"Not much. Some little stuff. It was pretty quiet last night. What about your rape victim?"

"She's still in the hospital, guy beat her up pretty bad.

Turns out she's a hooker. Her pimp thought she was dealing on the side, followed her on board, locked up her customer in the stateroom, then raped her and knocked her around. The suspect says the three of them were friends, were partying, and the other guy got out of hand. The DA's not even considering rape charges, and the customer doesn't want his wife to know, so the scum may get lucky and walk away." Iriarte shook his head. His three ugly henchmen shook theirs in unison. Disgusting what went down.

He finished his narrative and glanced down at the short stack of sixty-ones, the complaints that had come in during the night. Down to business, he called in the other five detectives on duty, went over pending cases and assigned the new ones. When he was finished with that, April returned to her office and dialed the number of Maslow Atkins, Jason's young shrink. She didn't expect him to answer, but it was worth a try.

She listened to the voice on his answering machine, soft and regretful that he wasn't available to take the call. Something about his tone struck a chord in April. She was a cop who worked on instinct, always assumed the worst. The bottom line was Jason Frank was a fancy doctor, but he was also her friend. They'd worked on many cases together, and he always helped her when she asked him.

The correct procedure was for Jason, or some relative, to fill out a missing person complaint in the precinct where the person lived. April always went by the book, but today she swerved off the straight and narrow. All she did was decide to check out this missing person herself. As a boss herself now, she often acted on the saying "Better to rumble like rocks than tinkle like jade." But no independent action in policing goes unpunished.

The girl who called herself Allegra Caldera did not kill herself Tuesday night after the terrible incident with Maslow Atkins. She thought about killing herself. She wanted to kill herself. She longed to throw herself on the subway tracks in front of an oncoming train. The pressure to end her miserable life was tremendous. When her train rolled in, she didn't throw herself in front of it. But when she got home at midnight, the urge to cut herself became unbearable.

She considered filling the tub with hot water, then cutting her wrists and watching her blood pulse out in the bath. If she drank a bottle of vodka, she'd be high and wouldn't even know she'd died. The problem was it wasn't so easy to kill herself. Especially since her mother and father were home. They went to bed early at night and didn't hear her come in, but they would definitely wake up if she turned on the water. Also she had a paper on Hawthorne due in American Lit.

Like a lush on the wagon, she brooded and longed for the knife, but in the end she kept away from that, too. She promised herself she wouldn't even look at it. She holed up in her room and took a Dex to write the paper. The paper was about people who hurt other people, who did bad things because they couldn't help it. It centered around the selfishness of men in all ages and how women were destroyed by them. She knew a lot about that and enjoyed writing it.

In the early Wednesday morning hours, she was wired and overtired. And like many, many early mornings in the last six years, she had the powerful desire to cross the hall and stick a kitchen knife into her parents' chests a dozen, maybe two dozen times. She wanted to stab them, hack away at them. She thought a lot about Lizzie Borden, what Lizzie might have been feeling a hundred years ago on that hot day in Fall River, Massachusetts, after a heavy lunch, with no air conditioning in the sweltering upstairs rooms, and the smell of garbage wafting everywhere through the house. She imagined everyone sweating in their beds, snoring-maybe as loudly as her father with the deviated septum did.

Allegra wished she had the guts to explode on the scene, like Lizzie Borden, and destroy the people who hurt her. She wished she could splatter their guts everywhere. She lusted for their blood and feared her rage. After she finished writing her scathing paper she took a few Valiums to calm down and sleep. Then in the morning she couldn't even get out of bed.

She decided not to go to her American Lit class at Hunter College in Manhattan to hand it in, after all. The novel they were studying was one of her least favorites- The Scarlet Letter. She hated that smug novel about adultery among the Puritans, and she loathed the grad student teaching assistant who taught it and whose comments about her work were so stupid and vicious. She already knew what the TA would say about her paper on The Scarlet Letter. Allegra was always in trouble with the TA, an arrogant little twit who'd graduated from Harvard and thought he was so smart.

But she was in trouble in general. Her father and mother wanted her to be a professional like them so she would always have a way of supporting herself. She knew that meant they didn't want to take care of her. They wanted her to graduate so they could be done with her, and she didn't know what the hell to do with her life. She was hopeless; she knew she could never do what they did. She didn't know what kind of job she could do.