Hanging Time (22 page)

“So, what was that all about with Ducci?” April asked.

Mike negotiated the car around a bulldozer. “Jesus, last year Central Park West, this year this. What a mess.”

“Umm. So what was the ‘rest in peace’ all about?” she persisted.

“Ah—nothing. Let it go, April.” Mike stopped at the next red light, scowling. The intersection had a big hole in the middle of it, and the green Pontiac Grand Am ahead of them had pulled into the space beside it, blocking all cars trying to cross the other way.

“Will you look at this asshole.” Mike didn’t bother to ask for a turret light to slap on the roof of the unmarked gray car they’d taken. He just hit the hammer. His siren screamed its little “hello-out-there” warning, and miraculously the traffic slowly opened up.

“So, what was Duke doing, huh? Putting down women?” She didn’t let it go.

“No, he was putting up women. So let it go.”

“He sure got to you.”

“Yeah.”

Mike lapsed into silence. She let it be for a whole block.

At the next light she asked, “What woman?”

Mike heaved a great sigh, punctuated by an irritated “humph” at the end. “Jesus, April, not you. My ex-wife. Okay?”

“Oh.” April looked straight ahead, her cheeks flushed. What a jerk. She just forced her way into Sanchez’s private space. She shook her head at herself, wishing she were in China.

Why was it that the cause of death in a badly decomposed, mutilated corpse was the kind of thing that kept her up at night, but she didn’t want to know about the frailties of the still-beating, physically healthy heart of her partner? Yeah, in a funny kind of way Mike was her partner. She looked out the window, hot all over. What was it about this love thing? She could see it, feel it in the air around her. Books and TV were filled with it. Movies showed how it was supposed to happen. But with her the phenomenon was just a ghost that passed her by.

Skinny Dragon Mother said how it happened was you meet someone with a good character and you get married. It was as simple as that. Everything else so what.

Every time April told her it didn’t work that way in America, you had to fall in love first, Sai Woo would produce the shell of a melon seed she’d been harboring somewhere deep in her mouth. Who knew for how long. Maybe for an hour or so, or ever since she left China. She’d spit it out with the word “love” to demonstrate her disgust for it. “Pah. Rove. What’s that? Just riry brooms one day.”

Sai Woo couldn’t even get the words right. She meant love was a lily that blooms only for one day. A day lily, in fact. Years ago she had planted day lilies in her garden to prove the point. April didn’t get it. All her life she worried that the lost l’s in her mother’s English meant she, as Sai’s daughter, could never find the right emotions she needed to be a true American. Couldn’t fall in love and get married because Chinese didn’t believe in it, and couldn’t even say the word.

One thing April had noted about the lilies in her mother’s garden though. It was true each one did bloom only a day so you couldn’t pick them and bring them in the house. But as each flower died, another grew in its place.
The lilies proliferated. The roots spread under the ground, and the clumps of lilies had multiplied until they were all over the backyard.

So Mike had some trouble with love and marriage, too, and the last thing she could ever do was ask him about it.

“Well,” he said somewhere in the fifties, “I guess you want to know why I went to Mexico.”

“Uh, no. That’s okay—I mean you can tell me if you want to. I—”

“You know I’m married, right?”

“Ah.”

“You didn’t know?”

“Yeah, I knew that.” So what? What did that have to do with her? Except the shit had been coming on to her for months. So much for the heavy breathing. She blinked, her face impassive.

“Yeah, well, she was young, came to New York from Matamoros. Beautiful. Sweet, you know, not like the girls from here. I, uh, really liked her.”

There it was—Sanchez in love. April bit her lip, blushing again.

“So, we got married. And you can guess what happened, right?” He turned to look at her.

April shook her head. She had no idea what happened.

“Well, she couldn’t stand any of it. The noise, the weather, the rough city life. She missed growing things, the sweet perfumed air of Mexico. Couldn’t really speak English and didn’t want to go to school. She was scared all the time, scared of me—you know, my being a cop.… Everything.

“Maybe I wasn’t much of a husband.” He shrugged. “Anyway, after a while she went back to Mexico. And then my father died.” He shrugged again, staring out at the traffic.

“I’m sorry.” She couldn’t think of anything else to say. “So what about her—”

“Maria? She’s dying of leukemia.” He shook his head. “You know, all these years she refused to get a divorce. I thought it meant she planned to come back someday. But
the truth was her priest told her if we were divorced she wouldn’t get to heaven. Isn’t that something?”

“Yeah. It’s something.” Absolutely unbelievable. What kind of woman would leave a man like Sanchez for any reason whatsoever? Without thinking, April put her hand on his arm. Neither said anything the rest of the way back to the precinct.

Thirty minutes later, Gina at the desk in the squad room waved them over.

“Sergeant Joyce wants to see you right away.”

“Thanks.” Mike pointed at his desk. Still littered with the Wrigley’s wrappers, it was uninhabited now. “Gone,” he said, grinning at April. “Who said the odds were ten thousand to one? I think you owe me.”

“Not so fast,” she murmured, pointing to her desk that no longer had the thick Wheeler case file on it.

They headed across the squad room. Aspirante and Healy were out. The flamboyant shoplifter was no longer in the pen. In his place was one of the panhandlers on Broadway who usually launched verbal assaults on passersby, but occasionally chased one with an empty wine cooler bottle. Right now he was singing “Happy Birthday” to himself.

Sergeant Joyce’s door was open. “Yeah, come in,” she said when she saw them. She was sitting at her desk, her blond-streaked hair sticking straight out at the sides as if someone had been pulling at it. Her eyes were pouchy, and her skin was the color of unbaked cookie dough. Her blouse that might have been white when she put it on now looked like coffee had been coughed all over it. Both sleeves were unevenly rolled. Her lips were two thin lines of unhappiness.

April felt sorry for her. Sergeant Joyce was the kind of woman to whom stress was no friend. Everything showed on her: ambition, anger, jealousy, loss of face.

“Where’ve you two been?” Joyce demanded. “I wanted to talk to you.” She looked April up and down, scowling some more.

“At the lab, talking with Duke,” Mike replied. “What’s up?”

“We’ve had a Lieutenant from downtown assigned to the Wheeler case.”

“The guy who was sitting at my desk this morning? Lieutenant Braun?”

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

Mike took a seat. “Nice guy. Neat. Friendly.”

April took her usual seat on the windowsill and stuck her finger in the dirt of one of the ivy plants. The leaves were drooping and the dirt was bone dry.

“How did the Captain take it?”

“Gee, I don’t know, Mike. You weren’t here when it happened and he doesn’t exactly communicate directly with me.” Sergeant Joyce glanced at April. “What’s with you?”

April shook her head. “Nothing. Just thinking about what Duke said, that’s all.”

Sergeant Joyce turned back to Mike. “Captain Higgins called me up and told me.”

“Uh-huh. Did the good Lieutenant bring his own people?” Mike asked with no trace of the resentment Sergeant Joyce was using to electrify the room.

“Unh-unh. Apparently they couldn’t spare anybody else. So you’re going to be working for Braun. He’s got the file. I want you to cooperate with him fully.” Her eyes were doing something funny. April couldn’t tell if their supervisor was having convulsions or giving them a different message.

“Yessir,” Mike said. “Where is he?”

“The Captain put him upstairs, three-o-four.” She smiled grimly. The empty office next to the men’s room had a heady odor no amount of disinfectants seemed to help. It was full of filing cabinets, and used mostly as a storeroom.

“I want you to go up there and introduce yourselves, brief him on what you’ve got so far.” Sergeant Joyce gave Mike a hard look.

This prompted Mike to ask, “Has he done anything yet?”

“Yeah, he pulled surveillance on Block.”

“Well,” Mike assured her, “that was probably all right.”
Then he filled her in on the kind of suspect Ducci had told them they were looking for.

“You got to be kidding. He-shes don’t kill. They
get
killed.”

“So what about the long hairs on her dress?” April asked.

“You know how hairs stick. Shit, they could have been on the dress already.” Sergeant Joyce’s skimpy lips turned up at the corners for the first time since they arrived. She threw her head back and honked out a hearty laugh. “A transvestite boutique killer. With a poodle as the only witness. Ducci is really something. If you’ve got spatters, he’s a spatter man. If you’ve got glass breaks, he’s your glass-break man. Now two red hairs and he tells us to look for a he-she. And I thought I’d heard everything.”

“What if it was a woman with a poodle?” April murmured.

Sergeant Joyce laughed again. “You find that, and I’ll buy you both the best dinner you ever had.”

“Deal,” Mike said. He got up to leave.

April stopped him in the hall. “If that’s what we find, do we have to eat the dinner with her?”

“Cute, real cute.”

They trudged back through the squad room and climbed the stairs to locate the exiled Lieutenant Braun.

“This is some shithole” were the Lieutenant’s first words when they appeared at the door of his assigned “office.” Looking around, they couldn’t disagree.

A
fter the storm passed, the air was clear and fresh. Just before they left for Fairfield, Bouck and Camille surveyed the damage to the canopy over the store. The canvas was torn, and the exposed metal frame was pretty badly bent on one side, but it didn’t look as if it would come down on somebody’s head anytime soon.

Camille breathed deeply, hugging the puppy in her arms. Her own storm was over, too, and for the first time in weeks, her head was clear. The red cloud was gone. She could see, talk, eat.

“Why don’t I design a new one,” she suggested. “Something classy. What do you say?”

“Hey, this isn’t classy?” Bouck demanded, pointing to what could be seen of the gray canvas hanging off the frame. It was years old, cracked, and dirty. The “T” and “Q” from the word “Antiques” were almost completely worn away by the constant drip of the air conditioner above.

Camille was wearing the new straw picture hat she had bought after her lunch with Milicia. It was hand-painted with lavender flowers and had a huge bow at the back. The salesgirl had admired her in it. “Not everyone has the height to carry a hat like that,” she said. Camille had been so angry at Milicia, she had no idea what she looked like. The hat soothed her because it was a cover, big enough to hide her face. She could run away inside of it and not come out until she wanted to.

Now she tipped the hat down low over her face as she
whispered to the puppy. After a brief consultation, she spoke from under the straw. “Puppy says the sign was never classy.”

Bouck threw his head back and laughed like a pirate. He was wearing jeans and Gucci loafers, a lightweight navy Ferragamo blazer over a black T-shirt. Camille thought of him as a pirate. A big man with a round cherub’s face, small pink lips, pale blue eyes, and soft hair that hung down his neck and caught on his jacket collar. She didn’t know how he captured the money. But she knew he was powerful, made things happen. Kept her safe from her sister, who would kill her if she got the chance. She pushed away Milicia’s evil force by hugging Puppy tightly.

At a few minutes after ten on Sunday morning Second Avenue was deserted. Only a few cars and dog walkers cruised the streets. Saturday’s storm had left three feet of water in the subway and a water-main break on Broadway and Ninety-second Street. There were parts of the city where thousands of rats, forced out of the ground by high water, scurried among black plastic garbage bags, foraging for food. Puppy saw one and struggled to get out of Camille’s arms.

Smiling, she murmured, “Oh, all right,” and put the dog down. Puppy took off after the rat, only to be stopped short after a few feet by its retractable leash. The rat disappeared into the wet garbage that clogged the drain over the sewer on the corner.

Once the water had abated on Second Avenue, the devastation seemed to be limited to an assault of sodden newspapers and cardboard boxes that had been left out for a recycling pickup on Saturday that never occurred. Wet paper and loose garbage had blown all over the street.

“Let’s get out of here.” Bouck led the way across the street and halfway up the block to Third Avenue, where the garage was. He had called for the car, and it was waiting for them—a dark green Mercedes large enough to carry home most of the things they liked to buy.

Many antiques dealers were compulsive buyers, collecting at a much faster rate than they sold, and Bouck was no exception. He went to shows and auctions up and down the
East Coast, with Camille beside him in the Mercedes. When she was really bad, he let her hide in the basement and didn’t stay away longer than twelve hours. Today they had a handle on things, were celebrating a new phase.

Camille settled herself into the caramel-colored leather and watched Bouck burn up the Merritt Parkway all the way to Connecticut. Two or three times she felt a tremor of panic, but when she retreated into the hat, she could see Puppy curled up on her lap. As long as Puppy was there, its tiny teeth showing in a smile, the red cloud wouldn’t close in over her. She knew from past experience if nothing bad happened, she would have a few good days.

Today was dazzling. The sky was deep blue, the trees and foliage that lined the highway after Greenwich thick and green. They were headed for the Fairfield Antiques Fair, which was held at a farm that was now a flea market and auction site. The traffic was light and by noon they had already parked and were beginning their meticulous study of the thousands of items offered in seventy-five small booths under three large tents in an open field.