Hanging Time (40 page)

April looked at her watch. Twenty-five minutes had passed. Time to go. Had he clarified anything? Maybe he had. She told Albert Block she’d be back.

M
ilicia got out of the taxi a few yards north of Bouck’s building. Nothing could calm her down and cool the rage she felt. Not the hours of talking to Charles and Brenda, not the Valium Charles had given her. Not the sleepless hours she spent tossing around on her bed. What if going to the police had not been the right thing to do? They never would have found Camille, never would have put together what happened. And even now they were all mixed up. First they took Camille away, and now they brought her back. What was going on?

The police car parked in front of Bouck’s door puzzled Milicia. She didn’t like the police. She felt a sharp pain in her mind’s eye from the bad memories of police cars. They were on reels that played over and over. The worst ones showed the policemen making her father stagger along the yellow line on the side of the road all those times he had trouble driving at night.

“Let’s go for an ice cream cone, girls,” he used to say. Then, as soon as they were in the car, he suddenly remembered he had to meet somebody in a bar. He always said he’d be gone for just a minute. The girls were not allowed to leave the car. When he came out two, three hours later, he was always mad. He’d forgotten they were there.

Milicia approached the building cautiously, remembering everything, as if it were yesterday—she and Camille huddling under the old gray beach blanket that, year after year, no one ever took out of the car. The things they said—the whispering, wheedling, and whining. Crayon drawings all over the window. Cigarettes and matches in the glove
compartment. Smoking. She wouldn’t ever forget the burn marks on the car seat, on Camille’s arm. Nobody ever figured out what the wounds were, even after they got infected and Camille had to go to the doctor.

Oh, yes. She remembered the police stopping them on the road. “You’re going to kill yourself one of these nights, Mr. Stanton.”

The bastard couldn’t even stand up. That was the reason he never locked the front door. Once he passed out before he got it open. She and Camille found him sleeping on the lawn the next morning when they left for school. And there was the time a policeman brought them home in the middle of the night, and then had to take them away again. He rang the doorbell over and over, but their mother was lying asleep in the living room, her makeup messed all over her face, with a puddle of vomit beside her. They saw her through the picture window. Then they were taken away to spend the night in a shelter.

It took a long time for the policeman’s predictions to be fulfilled. She and Camille were all grown-up. Daddy had to take Mother with him in the brand-new Mercedes the night of his crash. A few years earlier it could have been them. Milicia shuddered. And if Camille hadn’t run away from her to Bouck, none of this would be happening now. Camille just wouldn’t grow up. She was still a little girl dressing up in fancy clothes, doing destructive things. Only now they were worse things than drawing on car windows and mutilating herself.

Milicia could see that the front windows of the police car were open. Inside, a uniformed cop was eating a danish. For a few seconds she had the wild hope that maybe he had just stopped there outside Bouck’s building to eat. But even as she thought it, she knew it wasn’t true. If Bouck was really in the hospital, the policeman must be there to keep Camille from getting away.

Her mind raced. Her body vibrated with tension and fury. What happened in there? Did Camille find one of Bouck’s guns, shoot him, and tell the police he’d done it himself? Milicia didn’t know how she was going to manage this cleaning job. She was supposed to be at her office, supposed
to be living a life. Instead, she was a wreck. Her face was bruised and puffy. She was having an anxiety attack. No, she was like an overheated car trying to dig its way out of a muddy bog. Every part of her was racing, and she wasn’t getting anywhere.

She moved toward the entrance of Bouck’s building without turning her head to acknowledge the strips of crime-scene tapes still stuck to the tree and the doorframe of European Imports across the street. She didn’t look that way, but she knew from the night before that the store was still sealed up.

Last night, after she had left the police station, she walked around the West Side for hours, all the way down Columbus Avenue and back, debating what to do. She considered running away. She didn’t want to think about the police going to Camille’s house and ringing the bell a hundred times, trying to get in. She knew Camille would be in some upstairs room, cringing at the sound of the buzzer. And the puppy would jump around, yelping. She hated Camille more than anything in the world. And somehow she found herself walking there, back to Second Avenue, hoping to be in time to watch them take her sister away.

And then when she got there, it was too late. No one would tell her anything except that neither Bouck nor Camille was inside. Her head hurt worse. A huge generator was heating things up inside so her blood boiled, and she could hardly breathe. Milicia stood on the corner across the street for a long time, watching the police bring things out of the house in paper bags. Finally, she turned to the phone, called Charles and Brenda.

She reviewed all this in her mind as she tried to put her anxiety in another place. Her sister was a maniac who could kill salesgirls and get away with it. She had no choice but to walk up to the door of the house and deal with the situation.

Before she could insert her key in the lock, however, the policeman was out of the car, telling her it was a crime scene and she couldn’t go inside.

A
pril left Block’s apartment and stopped at a pay phone on the street to try Milicia Honiger-Stanton’s number again. At least the woman had gone home at some point. Her answering machine was back on. The voice on the machine told April this call was important to Milicia: “Please leave the day, date, time, and purpose of your call, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.”

It did not sound promising, but she left a message anyway.

The woman who answered the phone at Milicia’s office told April Ms. Honiger-Stanton wasn’t coming in. She had called in sick that morning. April figured Milicia was home and just not picking up. Her apartment was not far away. April decided it was worth going over there to find out.

The building was right near John Jay College, behind Lincoln Center. It was big and plush, with marble floors and carpeted hallways. The surly-looking man behind the desk said Miss Stanton wasn’t there. The name on his uniform was Harold.

“Do you know when she went out?”

“Are you a friend?”

April flashed her shield.

Harold examined it skeptically.

“Cop?”

“That’s what it says.” April smiled. “So, about what time did she leave?”

“Uh, she walked the dog at about eight o’clock. Then maybe half an hour later she went out.”

“She has a dog?” April started to sweat again.

“Yeah, cute little thing. Poodle, I think it is. What’s this all about? She not picking up its poop, or something?”

“Yeah, something like that.” April paused for a new thought. “Does she ever wear big loose blouses, long skirts, and big floppy hats?”

“Nah, not her. She’s got it, she flaunts it. Never seen her in pants neither.”

“Thanks.” April turned to go.

“You wanna leave a message?”

“No, I’ll come back later.” She looked at her watch and wondered if Mike was back from his hospital visit.

A
pril had one of the older cars. It needed to go in for repairs. She could feel a vibration in the drive shaft. She tried not to think about that as she raced up Tenth, then cut over to Amsterdam.

“Sergeant Joyce’s not at her desk right now,” Gina had told her when she had stopped to call in.

“What about Sanchez?”

“He came in a few minutes ago, but he’s not here right now. You want to leave a message?”

“Yeah, tell them to keep the Honiger-Stanton sisters separated until we’ve had a chance to question them. It’s very important, Gina. I’m on Sixty-third Street. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Then, at a red light on Seventy-ninth Street, she considered turning left to Riverside Drive and stopping by Jason’s building. That would be her third tangent of the morning. She was supposed to be getting the damn dog. But everything had gotten more complicated. She needed Jason to come and question Camille right away.

The light changed; April wavered. The problem with Jason was she couldn’t just go over there and knock on his door. He wasn’t the kind of doctor who’d drop everything and let her in. She’d have to leave a message on his machine and wait for him to call her back. She stepped on the gas, wishing she had a phone in the car, turned right on Eighty-second Street, and started looking for a place to park. Finally, she left the car double-parked in front of the precinct, the third in a line of three.

Upstairs, it was quiet in the squad room. Half the squad was working the case, canvassing the neighborhood with photos of Bouck and Camille, asking questions, looking for witnesses who saw either one of them on the Saturday night Maggie Wheeler was strangled.

They were deep into the second week of the case and already way backed up on their other cases. People called in, left messages, got mad. There were about a dozen messages on April’s desk, in addition to the ones she hadn’t been able to return the day before. The stack of pink slips next to the files of unresolved cases she hadn’t had time to work on was the kind of thing that gave her a headache. She hadn’t been able to study for her exam either.

Her whole body pulsed with anxiety. Even though she’d told the assistant D.A. she’d bring Camille and the dog back in, she’d put them on hold on the off chance Albert Block could identify the killer.

She didn’t want to mess up on this one. She’d checked in with the surveillance team at Bouck’s building three times to make sure Camille and the dog had stayed put and were all right. And still she worried. Penelope Dunham hadn’t seen Camille. She didn’t know how hard it would be to make a case against her. Right now they didn’t have enough physical evidence to make a case stick against anybody.

Gina pointed in the direction of Sergeant Joyce’s office.

“They’re in there.”

“Thanks.” April smelled pizza or something coming from the locker room. She realized that even after a large meal of crab and ginger dumplings late last night to celebrate the continued interest of George Dong, she was hungry. She had to go to the bathroom, too, wanted to splash water on her face and calm down. She didn’t have time to think about romance or anything else. She put her physical needs out of her mind as she headed toward Sergeant Joyce’s office.

The door was closed, but from the other side she could hear an angry voice. “I want to see my sister. You can’t stop
me. This isn’t some Latin-American dictatorship. You can’t keep people under house arrest here.…”

April knocked on the door.

“Yeah, come in.” Sergeant Joyce’s voice.

April pushed the door open. Joyce nodded at her. Her face was a model of reason and grace under fire. Sanchez was in his usual place, leaning against the back wall. He smiled.

Milicia Honiger-Stanton sat in one of the visitors’ chairs. She was wearing a severe gray suit, not unlike the A.D.A.’s but with a much shorter skirt. Her pose revealed the considerable length of her legs and most of her thighs. She didn’t seem to be aware of her thighs at the moment though. Her face was redder than her hair, and her tirade continued on uninterrupted as the door opened.

“It’s my sister, and I demand to know what’s going on.”

Sergeant Joyce raised her eyebrow at April. April cocked her head at the hall.

“Excuse us for a moment.” Joyce crooked her finger at Sanchez, and the two of them followed April into the locker room. No one was in there, but a pizza box sat on the table. April touched it. It was still warm.

“So?” Joyce demanded.

“I went to see Albert Block. He says he was waiting for Maggie in the bookstore, watching from the window.”

“No shit.” Mike’s nostrils twitched at the enticing smell of pizza.

“Albert says he saw a woman come out of The Last Mango. He waited for Maggie to close up and come out—or for her boyfriend to show up. He knew about the boyfriend. When she didn’t come out, he went in looking for her.”

“Huh? How’d he get in?”

“He’d taken the key from the counter earlier in the day.”

Joyce sniffed at the pizza box, scowled, and turned her back on it. “He used the key, and he went in, and he found Maggie dead, is that it?”

“That’s what he said.”

“He saw the murderer, and he didn’t call us?” Mike was incredulous.

April shook her head. “He saw a woman come out. He didn’t think homicide. He thought Maggie committed suicide.”