Hanging Time (45 page)

The Sotheby people said the highly polished silver tea service on the Queen Anne sideboard in the dining area was genuine George III, worth a fortune. By the time Milicia was an adolescent, it had long since been stuffed in the back of a closet, black with tarnish.

Ar, ar, ar
.

“Shut the fuck up, you little bitch.” Milicia’s face stiffened with rage as she looked through the kitchen door.

Hannabelle was standing on her hind legs with her muzzle poked through the wires. Her eyes were bright, black, puzzled. She pawed at the cage door, showing that she wanted to get out. When her mistress didn’t respond, she cocked her head and raised the pitch of her wail. She weighed only three pounds, but she made a lot of noise.

Milicia threw her clothes on the floor, didn’t care if anyone saw her in her bra through the window.

“Bitch.” She stepped into the kitchen and opened the cage.

In a second Hannabelle had charged out and was circling Milicia’s feet, barking happily, jumping up, her tongue out, lapping furiously at whatever she could reach. Milicia watched her for a second with utter disgust. Then, as Hannabelle pawed at Milicia’s ankles, one of her razorlike baby claws snagged Milicia’s panty hose. An ugly run snaked up her leg.

“Shit—” Milicia reached down for the little dog, scooped her up with one hand, and held her out at arm’s length, scolding her furiously. The dog’s woolly body was still, her legs hung down, her eyes were bright with despair and puzzlement.

“Bad dog!” Milicia screamed. “Very bad dog!” She brought Hannabelle to her chest, squeezing her hard so she didn’t have to look at her. The dog was trouble. She didn’t know what to do with her.

She wanted to get rid of her, but it would be suspicious if Hannabelle suddenly disappeared. The puppy clung to her, making pitiful mewing noises like a baby. Milicia smacked it hard, overwhelmed with the impulse to wring its neck. She thought for a long time about killing it, trying to decide if she should do it, while the puppy cried.

I
t was mid-afternoon, just before three o’clock. From inside 1055 Second Avenue came the sounds of running water and a dog barking. Downstairs, the chandelier shop was closed. Its heavy gate was locked with a massive padlock.

Two people had tried to enter 1055 in the last hour. A tall, bulky woman, well dressed in a designer suit, had walked back and forth in front of the building for nearly fifteen minutes, looking up for signs of life. She tried the bell a number of times, stepped back on the sidewalk, and looked up at the windows again. Her pale hair had recently been molded into a complicated style of swoops and swirls that didn’t move when she did. Finally she took a key out of her bag and tried it on the inside door. A second later she was back out on the sidewalk, hailing a taxi.

The other person who came to the door of the brownstone was a black man with dreadlocks. He, too, rang the bell and tried to get into the building with a key that didn’t fit. He, too, went away after a few minutes.

It was hot in the van. From time to time the whine of the dog came piercingly out of the amplifier.

Mike clapped his hands over his ears. “Ow, can’t you fix that, man?”

Ben, the sound expert, adjusted a knob. “That better?”

The barking stopped abruptly. Now they couldn’t hear anything.

“Uh-oh. Can you get it back?”

“I don’t know. I’m not getting anything. Maybe she took the collar off.” Ben played with the knobs.

“Shit.”

“She didn’t take it off,” April said after a minute. “She just picked up the dog. It stops crying when she picks it up.”

Discouraged, Mike sighed and stretched. “I knew this wouldn’t work.”

“We didn’t have a lot of options,” April murmured. They couldn’t exactly put a wire on Camille without her knowing it. They couldn’t bug the whole house. And they couldn’t just let her go back in there alone while they sat outside without any clue what was happening inside.

For a few minutes, nothing emerged from the speakers. Then a kind of humming started—one long, disconnected note, another one higher in the scale. A third one, lower down.

“What’s that?”

“Sounds like she’s singing.”

“Poor woman,” April murmured. “She shouldn’t be in there by herself.” April was usually too busy to think much about what happened to people after their cases were closed. She was supposed to retain the relevant parts for her experience file, the fund of knowledge that made her a better cop with each case, and then let the personal part go. But she had a feeling this crazy lady was going to stay with her for a long time.

“I wonder what she’s doing in there,” Mike muttered.

Now some scratching as well as a humming sound came out of the machine.

“She’s scrubbing something with a brush,” Ben said. A small, wiry man with a shaved head, he was wearing shorts and a Grateful Dead T-shirt, Nike Airs with no socks.

The whole van smelled of his feet.

April shrugged. Camille didn’t wash the dishes or anything else, but maybe this was a special occasion. Maybe she wanted to clean up the place for her lover’s return.

When she left the precinct, Camille had wanted to get Bouck’s sister to go with her to visit him in the hospital. She didn’t seem to know where the sister lived though, and so far there was no lead on any sister. They had located an elderly father in Florida with Alzheimer’s who no longer knew his own name, much less those of his relatives. He
wasn’t going to visit anybody. They had also located an older brother in California. When the brother in California was informed Bouck was in critical condition in the hospital with a gunshot wound, he demanded: “What the hell do you expect me to do about it?”

Maybe Camille meant her own sister would go with her. April stuck her nose out the cracked window on the street side to get some fresh air. A few hours earlier in the precinct Milicia had seemed so eager to be with her sister. They knew she’d show up.

But she was certainly taking her time getting there.

M
ilicia was wearing sunglasses, had pinned her hair into a tight bun and put a silk scarf on her head, tied around the back like Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Kennedy used to do. People turned to look at her. She knew she looked good. She was carrying her leather carryall and the Channel Thirteen bag with Hannabelle inside. She strode along Fifty-seventh Street, moving confidently now. The two Klonopin she took after her shower must have worked.

Usually, she didn’t like taking pills of any kind. But Charles had told her that in really stressful situations, it was okay to get a little help to calm down. He told her the experience she was having now with Camille and the police ranked very high on the stress scale. She should have gone to Charles in the first place. This mess wouldn’t have happened if she had gone to Charles instead of Jason Frank.

She glanced around casually. She wasn’t stupid. She knew someone had to be following her. But who was it? She stopped in front of a restaurant with bottles of Chianti and piles of fresh uncooked spaghetti in the window and carefully studied the street reflected behind her. No one seemed to be watching her. But how was she supposed to know? It didn’t have to be someone in uniform. It could be anybody. The person or persons following her could be Chinese or Hispanic, or black. The cop who had come to her apartment was Chinese, her doorman said. In the station house a lot of the police didn’t look like police.

A feeling of unease drifted over Milicia as she thought of
all those people looking like Haitian taxi drivers, and Indians on messenger bikes, who might really be cops.

She went into the restaurant. She took a table where she could watch the street from the window and ordered some spaghetti with tomato sauce and a glass of red wine. When the spaghetti came, she ate it slowly, thinking things over, sipping the wine and ignoring the unhappy dog scratching at the canvas bag by her feet.

After her meal she felt better. She paid her bill and headed east toward Second Avenue. Things looked normal around her. But still she had an uneasy feeling that anyone and everyone could be a spy.

On Second Avenue, unlike the night before, there were no police cars on the street. She did not know how this could be. They had sent a sick woman home by herself, a woman who was not safe without supervision. How could they do that? Weren’t they responsible if they took her home in a police car, left her there, and something happened to her? She felt a surge of anger at the thought of something happening to Camille.

She scanned the street, looking for someone who appeared to be hanging around. She saw several dozen parked cars and vans: All were empty. None of the passersby paid any attention to her. As she approached the door of the building, it suddenly occurred to her that maybe Camille wasn’t alone. Maybe they had sent a social worker or a cop with her, maybe she was somehow being supervised. Maybe she was under house arrest.

She glanced around one more time, saw nothing to arouse her suspicions, then opened the outside door. Inside, she had no problem using her key. Bouck was in the hospital. She knew that part wasn’t a trick. She had called to make sure. He was in intensive care, couldn’t even speak, the nurse had told her. His guns had been confiscated. She could go into Bouck’s house anytime she wanted: She had no more reason to be afraid.

Milicia climbed to the second floor and opened the door at the top of the stairs. Inside, she stopped short. Camille was on her hands and knees in the middle of a lake of
soap and water, scrubbing the floor, singing a tuneless little song.

At the sight of her sister, Camille stopped singing.

“Hi, baby,” Milicia said, setting the canvas bag down. “I brought you a present.”

H
ow did you get in here?” Camille was so startled to see Milicia come through Bouck’s apartment door, she dropped the brush with a clatter.

“Baby, I can get in anywhere, you know that. I’m an architect. I know how everything works.” Milicia made a face at the puddles of soapy water. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Milicia’s Channel Thirteen bag tilted and fell over. The dog inside tumbled out and shook herself. Puppy, who hadn’t been acting right since the police station, suddenly regained her energy. She leapt out of Camille’s lap, charged through a puddle, and hurled herself at her tiny twin.

“Puppy,” Camille cried sharply. “Come back here!”

Puppy ignored the command.

“Puppy, it’s your mother calling!”

“No.” Milicia laughed. “It’s her sister calling.”

Milicia planted herself on the third stair. She took her scarf and sunglasses off, then peered through the banister bars at Camille, as if one of them were in a cage.

“Sisters are more important than mothers.” She pointed at the dogs. “Look at them.”

The two apricot fluff balls had launched into a frenzy of leaping and jumping and kissing and rolling all over each other with sharp yips of delight.

Camille was confused. Puppy had seemed so sick with precinct cancer, and now she seemed all right. “Oh, no.” Camille smacked her cheek in horror. “Oh, no, oh, no.” She’d taken Puppy’s collar off when she started splashing water everywhere. The collar had been expensive, and she
hadn’t wanted to get it wet. Now Puppy was without her identification. Puppy wasn’t listening to her, and Milicia’s dog wasn’t wearing a collar. What if Puppy forgot who she was?

“What’s her name?” Camille cried frantically. “Call her, call her back—”

“Doesn’t have a name. Look how happy they are to see each other.” Milicia clapped her hands. “Isn’t it cute. That’s how sisters should be.”

“Puppy’s been sick,” Camille said angrily. “I don’t want her upset, you’ll have to go. I’m too busy. I can’t have you here.” She picked up the brush to show how busy she was, spraying soap across the wet floor. “Take your dog and go away.”

“Oh, don’t be so mean, Camille. You’re always so mean.”

“I’m not the one who’s mean.” Milicia’s sneaking in on her made Camille’s head start to pound.

She kept her eyes on the dogs, now chasing each other up and down the hall, sliding in the soapy water and falling on each other. Puppy was staggering around a little, but seemed determined to play.
Go away, Milicia
, she thought but could not say.

Then, as Camille studied them, she could see they weren’t the same at all, just like she and Milicia were not the same. The other dog had a tooth sticking out of its lower jaw that distorted its face just enough to make it look like it was always smiling. Puppy didn’t have that tooth at all. She’d lost the baby canine on that side, and the new one hadn’t sprouted yet. Camille knew this because one day a tooth fell out in her hand.

Camille reminded herself of the tooth so she wouldn’t think about Milicia being nice to her. All those massages, when she rubbed little Cammy’s tummy, moving her hand lower and lower, fingers wiggling between Cammy’s thighs.
Like that, Cammy? Isn’t it great?
Fingers slippery with Vaseline from the medicine cabinet. Back and forth, round and round with the soft, oily fingers until little Cammy was all throbbing and breathless and hot.
Yes, you like it. Yes, I’ll do it again. Whenever you want
.

Yes, yes, comparing the two poodles point by point, Camille noticed Milicia’s was darker around the head and ears, and Puppy’s legs were longer. Puppy was taller. Her head still hurt, but she felt better when she knew which was hers.

“You’re mean to me,” Milicia said in a pouty voice. “I try to take care of you and love you, and whatever I do you hate me. Why do you hate me so much?”

That tone of voice made Camille’s stomach queasy. Milicia’s voice was like a pretty pond with a mud-sucking bottom. All sweet and sad, with an ugly, dangerous edge.
What did she want?

“You better go. Bouck’s coming back in a little while. He won’t like finding you here.” Camille pushed away the sick feeling in her stomach that kept warning her Milicia was there to be her boss again. Carefully, she scrubbed a spot on the wall she’d missed. “Can’t you see I’m cleaning for him?”