Hanging Time (4 page)

“Yeah, but Thursday of what month?” he asked. He made a note on the paper in front of him.

“Oh, now it’s
this
month. Can you give me a date on that? A date. Like Thursday the fourth. Or Thursday the twenty-second.”

At ten o’clock April Woo and Sergeant Sanchez were the first detectives to see Maggie Wheeler.

O
h, God, she’s in there!” the woman cried, pointing to a door at the back. “Oh, God, the poor kid. Who could do that? How could that happen? Oh, God.”

April looked quickly around, saying some comforting words she wasn’t even aware of. The store was only two blocks from the precinct and already blue uniforms were swarming around outside. It was one of the expensive boutiques that April noticed every day and never went into because she couldn’t afford anything there. Right now it had some colorful shirts that probably couldn’t be washed, hanging on a clothesline in the window. Below the clothesline there were some piles of sand on the floor. Like everyone was supposed to be at the beach wearing shirts like this, April supposed.

The woman started screeching at her.

“What kind of city is this that two young women can’t even work in a store without getting killed?”

A terrible city
, April didn’t have time to say.

“And hundreds of cops only a block away. What the hell were you all doing when this happened?”

In a second April had taken in the soft, pouchy skin all blotched with relocated makeup, hair redder than anything nature ever intended, the funny figure with its skinny legs and thick middle, big breasts straining at a lime-green silk shirt tucked into matching shorts with a big twisted rope belt that emphasized the nonexistent waist. April estimated her age at late fifties or early sixties. Understandably hysterical.
The woman said it was her store, and yes it was all right if April took a look around.

“Here, sit down,” April suggested. “I’ll be right back.”

Crime Scene had already been called, but there was no way of knowing how many homicides the sixty-man unit was working just then. There were about six homicides a day in New York City. She and Sanchez could be body-sitting for ten minutes or three hours, depending on when a team was available. April headed where the woman said the body was. Two? Was it two bodies now?

There was only a tiny space at the back, hardly big enough to be a storeroom. The door was open. April hesitated for a second and then pushed it open as far as it would go, careful not to leave a print.

“Oh.” She recoiled involuntarily at the sight of the dead girl.

The corpse’s eyes and mouth were open in a mute scream, lips pulled away from the teeth as if in a huge grimace. The eyelids looked as if they had been propped open with toothpicks. Around the eyes and mouth, deep blue eye shadow and plum-colored lipstick had been crudely applied, the way makeup is on a clown. A long dress hid the girl’s feet; a price tag hung from a ruffled sleeve. April could see the price, which had been written in by hand. Five hundred and twenty dollars. That was a lot of money for a dress that was made of—rayon. The price tag said that, too. Too bad it didn’t say why the girl was wearing a size fourteen when she was probably only a two. This was no suicide. It was the work of a psycho.

April saw everything in an instant, and took it in the way she had been trained. She would never forget it. She would always be able to describe that scene.

The air from the air-conditioning vent blew the hair away from the dead girl’s face and lifted the hem of the dress. Goose bumps covered the skin on her arms and shoulders as if the corpse could still react to cold.

April shivered, pushing away the normal person’s desire to vomit. She was a cop. She wasn’t supposed to be normal. To counter the urge, she reached for her notebook and oddly recorded the price of the dress first, as if that had
anything to do with it. Then she crouched down and lifted the hem of the dress. The girl’s feet were bare.

Mike pushed in behind her.

“Oh, shit,” he muttered.

April switched her attention to the girl’s little hands curled tightly into fists. Tiny red spots dotted her knuckles. Lividity. The third finger of her right hand had a small gold ring in the shape of leaves on it. One pale blue stone was set in the middle of the gold leaves. Caught on the prongs holding the stone was a tuft of some kind of peachy textile. It looked like wool.

April studied the tuft for a second and then looked quickly around for a sweater, for the girl’s handbag, for the makeup that was on her face. She didn’t see an orange sweater. The handbag was on a chair. It didn’t appear to have been opened. April didn’t see her shoes. She didn’t touch anything.

“How do you think she got up there?” Mike asked, ever the prompting supervisor.

April shook her head.

The ceiling was only about seven and a half feet high. The light fixture was wrought iron, had two twisted arms decorated with a pattern of leaves on a vine. April frowned. More leaves. The girl was hung up on the chandelier by a short length of clothesline that looked like the kind in the window. Just kind of hung on it by the chin.

Her feet dangled barely a foot above the ground.

“Oh,” April said again, trying to process what she saw without feeling so sick. She turned to Mike suddenly. “Where’s the other one?”

“The other what?” He frowned.

“She said there were two girls here. Didn’t you hear her?”

“Shit.”

They left the storeroom and went back into the store. The woman was sobbing into a sodden tissue.

“No one’s safe anymore. And with you just across the street. I got to get out of here. Move to Florida or someplace. I checked the register. It wasn’t even money.” She cried some more.

“You said something about another girl.”

“I don’t know where she is. Maybe she got away. Maybe they took her someplace else. I bet she’s dead, too.”

Mike made a face at April and went up the circular staircase. In seconds he came down again, shaking his head. No bodies upstairs.

“Was she raped?” Elsbeth Manganaro cried. “Poor thing. Was she raped?”

“We’ll know that later,” April said, and nodded as the crime-scene unit arrived. She looked at her watch. Twenty minutes. Must be some kind of record.

Mike went out, and April turned to the store owner.

“Mrs. Manganaro? Why don’t you come across the street with me?” she suggested.

“Are you a cop?” the woman demanded, blowing her nose and finally focusing on April.

April nodded. “I’m a detective.”

“You don’t look like a cop.” Elsbeth frowned, examining April’s navy trousers and navy jacket, pale blue and white printed rayon blouse, with its soft bow at the neck.

“I’m a Chinese cop,” April said. Uptown people found that surprising.

“You don’t sound Chinese.”

The woman wouldn’t give up. Was it still so unusual for an Asian to speak English? April was an ABA—American-born Asian. In Chinatown there were clubs of them. They met and networked. Asian networking didn’t work too well in NYPD. In fact, there weren’t enough of them in enough high places for them to network at all.

“I was born here. I could run for president.”

“Oh.” The woman blew her nose again, apparently satisfied for the moment.

Mike had returned and was watching this exchange. His amused grin brought a flush to April’s cheeks. With Crime Scene there, the store had crowded up.

April took the store owner’s arm and helped her up. “How about a cup of coffee?”

“Are you going to question me?” Elsbeth demanded.

“I’m going to ask you some questions.”

“What about my store?” the woman cried.

“Sergeant Sanchez will watch it for you.”

Mike nodded gravely. April introduced them.

“You won’t let them take anything.” Elsbeth frowned suspiciously, now looking Sanchez over. He appeared to be Spanish and his eyebrows weren’t even. The left eyebrow was only half there. There was a scar where the rest of it should be.

“No, ma’am,” Sanchez assured her.

The only things that would be taken away were the corpse, the evidence, and the belongings of the victim. April turned to Mike. “I’ll take her statement and meet you back here.” She glanced at her watch again. “An hour at the most.”

She wanted to get back before they moved the body. Sanchez nodded. “Welcome back,” she murmured. It was the best she could do. She’d been taught to watch her back and save her face, hide her feelings no matter what, so persistently, over such a long period of time, she had a lot of trouble figuring out what her true feelings were.

J
ason watched Brian leave, pleased to note that for the third week in a row, he was taking with him all the possessions he came with. Jason gave himself five minutes between Brian, his ten o’clock patient, and Dennis, his ten-fifty patient.

He closed the door to the waiting room, returned to his desk, and carefully tucked a piece of blotter paper under one leg of his newest skeleton clock. Earlier, with some irritation, he had watched the hammered brass pendulum slow down and finally stop at the same time Brian stalled in the middle of a sentence and stared off into space. In the past, at such moments, Brian’s eyelids used to droop and he actually drifted off for a few minutes. But he was slowly getting better.

Today he turned his head suddenly and said, “The clock stopped.”

“It must be slightly off balance,” Jason replied. “Balance is everything in these old clocks.”

“Is it a new one?” Brian asked.

“Yes,” Jason answered. He’d bought it about three weeks ago.

“Can you get it going again?” The pendulum had a brass sun on the end. Brian frowned at it.

“Yes,” Jason said. Some of his patients knew about his passion for clocks and some didn’t. Brian did because it helped him to know that Jason could make broken things work.

Jason started the pendulum swinging again. It might
stop in five minutes, an hour, five hours, or not until he next left town and wasn’t there to wind it. He watched it swing back and forth. Maybe the tiny adjustment would be enough.

It was Monday, a long time from Friday, when he was scheduled to speak with Emma again. Jason didn’t know whether to look forward to the phone call or not. He turned to another, more reliable clock, trying to shake off the pervasive feeling that too much was wrong with his world. Now the feeling included a vague uneasiness that lingered from the previous day in Southampton.

Something about it was odd, and even way after midnight he hadn’t felt comfortable letting Milicia Honiger-Stanton drive him all the way to his building. He had no reason to ask her to let him off at Columbus Avenue, several long blocks from his apartment on Riverside Drive, but he did. He figured it was some kind of symbolic thing that had to do with Emma. He lived alone now, wanted to walk home alone. Crawl home like an injured animal was more like it.

He had gotten out of the car and was surprised to hear Milicia say, “I’d like to see you again.”

He didn’t reply immediately, and she hesitated, as if she weren’t used to having to say those words to a man herself, much less follow them up.

A faint breeze stirred the air. Somewhere a siren howled.

“Hey, man, got a quarter? I got to get me sumpin’ to eat.”

The plaintive voice of a large black man with long, matted hair rose to a wail as he menaced a young couple halfway down the block. Jason stiffened, ready to move in their direction. Sometimes he had Mace in his pocket, but not today. Not having the Mace didn’t bother him. Even from where he stood Jason could tell the man was unsettling but not dangerous. He didn’t have to rescue the couple though. On the hot summer night there were still a lot of people on the street. A cop emerged from the dark and moved the man along.

Jason returned his attention to Milicia. He was startled by how beautiful she looked in the dark. The glow from the
streetlights backlit her red hair, giving it the appearance of a fiery halo. Her face was as pale as the moon, which at the moment hung low in the sky over Central Park and seemed to hover over her head, very ripe, and just a day or so short of being full.

Her wide-eyed look of sudden shyness and innocence was belied by the display of deeply tanned thighs, visible almost to the crotch, and parted with the business of dealing with a gearshift. Jason noted that her old Mercedes needed a tune-up. It idled high in neutral. The woman’s whole being exuded a powerful sexuality. No thanks, he wasn’t buying.

“Thanks for the ride,” he said coolly.

She caught her bottom lip with her teeth and struggled a little with her breathing. “I need someone to talk to,” she said faintly.

“Oh?” Jason hesitated although he was already long gone, preoccupied by a thousand important matters to avoid thinking about what weighed most heavily on his mind.

Right then he was thinking about his schedule for the next day, the precious hours he had wasted going to Southampton to see Charles and Brenda when he should have been working on the paper he had to present at a conference in Baltimore at the end of the week. He was aware that the black man was now lurching in their direction.

He smiled a bit grimly to himself at one of those gender differences between men and women that kept turning up to complicate the simplest things. Women took a lot longer to say good-bye, often had trouble letting go of the moment. Men liked to walk away without looking back. He wanted to walk away.

He and Milicia had had an uneventful drive back. They talked about the house she designed for Charles and Brenda, architecture, New York City rent-controlled apartments, the firm she worked for. It was pleasant, but by no means one of those luminous, unforgettable events like the first time he met Emma.

Jason had interviewed Emma Chapman for a paper he was writing on adults who had been moved from place to place when they were children. Emma’s father had been an
officer in the navy before he retired. Jason and Emma were instantly drawn together, as if some kind of bond between them had always existed.