The Hanging

by Wendy Hornsby

  In the quiet they left in their wake, I said, “Two’s company, three’s a nightmare.”

  “You want to go over everything you did and everything you saw for me?”

  “You gonna grill me, Officer, sir?”

  He chuckled. “No, I just want to hear your story.”

  There wasn’t much to tell, but I ran through it. I entered, the building seemed empty, I saw Holloway in the stairwell, and I called 911. The 911 tape should have captured everything except the first sixty seconds.

  “You came here to film the empty stairwell?” he asked.

  “I did.”

  “Where’s your camera?”

  I pulled it out of my bag where I dumped it when I went to open the big front doors for the paramedics. I hadn’t turned it off so, although inside my bag there were no images to shoot, the camera had continued to record sound.

  He pushed his chin toward the stairs. “You think you can go up there and take some pictures?”

  “If you need them.”

  “Not a bad idea,” he said. “In two more hours he’ll be in full rigor and all his blood will have settled into his feet and lower legs. Let’s film a complete record of him pretty much as you found him.”

  My lack of enthusiasm must have been apparent. Roger put a big hand around the back of my neck and brought his face down close.

  “I’d do it myself, Mags,” he said. “But that’s a pretty fancy camera. Kate’s the picture-taker in our family, out of necessity. And, anyway, I should wait down here in case anyone shows up.”

  He smiled his broad, white-toothed smile at me.

  Roger was a big man, graying at the temples, softening in the middle, maybe a year from his sixtieth birthday, and though he wore old jeans and holey baseball sleeves—he had come straight from his fifteen-year-old daughter Marisol’s softball practice—he was still too handsome for his own good.

  Before he took the job heading Anacapa’s little police department, Roger had put in his twenty-five at a big-city police department down the coast. For fifteen of those years he had been, like my husband Mike, a homicide detective. He had accepted promotion to commander for the last couple of years so he could pad his retirement as a matter of pride, in case it ever became necessary for his family to rely on his income.

  Kate, his wife, was a true egghead who never concerned herself about money because, unlike Roger, she never had to. When Kate was sixteen her father died, leaving her, according to Forbes, the fifth richest teenager in California. Not that she cared one whit.

  I looked up at Holloway, cringed, and stalled every way I could think of; I was in no hurry to get up close and personal with his remains. With luck, the coroner would show up right now and take his own damn pictures. I changed the battery pack on the camera, checked the available space on the photo disk. Next I tried diversionary conversation.

  “So, Roger,” I said, “how does it feel to be working a homicide again?”

  “Are you stalling?” he asked, grinning at me. “I know you’ve taken crime scene pictures before.”

  “Sure. And no, I’m not stalling.” A little fib. “I’m just asking.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, rightfully skeptical.

  “So, back in the saddle again, huh, Roger?”

  “The thing of it is,” he said, “my department can’t handle a homicide. My guys don’t have the experience and we don’t have the resources. Mostly what we do here is write traffic tickets and haul in drunken college students on weekends. So, no, I’m not back in that saddle.

  “I put out a call to the LA County Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau, and they’re dispatching a team of detectives who’ll take over as soon as they can get here.”

  “Too bad,” I said. I turned on the camera and, feeling resigned, headed up the stairs. “This one could be interesting.”

  “Maggie,” Roger called behind me.

  “I know, don’t touch anything.”

  While I filmed Holloway, Roger kept up a conversational stream, friendly chatter as counterpoint to the grim images I was seeing through my lens. I was grateful to him.

  “So,” he said as I started with the soles of Holloway’s shoes. “Kate tells me you finally got the okay to talk with Sly’s mother.”

  “Finally, yes.” I zoomed in on a dark blob of something stuck on the outside of the heel of his left shoe. “Tomorrow morning, crack of dawn, I’m headed to Frontera State Prison for Women.”

  “Traffic out to Corona shouldn’t be a problem that early.”

  “It’s coming back I’m worried about.”

  Dark blue trousers with a narrow gray pinstripe, creases from sitting and a little shine on the ass from wear. I could see a bulge in his right rear pocket that might have been a wallet, and the edge of a linen handkerchief showed at the top of his left pocket. Black leather belt, silver-gray dress shirt creased in the back, probably from leaning back in a chair, and a Mont Blanc pen clipped in the breast pocket.

  “I have afternoon plans tomorrow,” I said, glancing down at Roger. He grinned at me.

  “Right, Mom meets the boyfriend.”

  “I’m over forty, Roger. Boyfriend doesn’t sound right.”

  “He’s French, yeah?” he said. “How about petit ami?”

  “That’s better.”

  There was a narrow stripe of darkening blood that ran from a gash on Holloway’s forehead, down his face, along the edge of his yellow silk tie, and into the top of his trousers. Something had connected with the back of his head with enough force to crush the bone, leaving a fist-sized indentation that was now crusted over with black and sticky blood.

  “Someone hit him, Roger,” I said.

  “I saw that. Clocked him a good one.”

  I couldn’t see whatever it was that had been used to garrote or hang Holloway because it was imbedded in the bloated flesh of his neck. About his face I will only say that hanging victims don’t often get open coffins.

  “What are you hoping to get from Sly’s mother?”

  “A handle on who his father was,” I said, turning off the camera. “There is no father named on Sly’s birth certificate.”

  “Is this for the film you’re making about Sly?”

  “In part. Most of all, it’s for Sly. Not knowing gnaws on him.”

  “You want to take some shots of the area up there?” Roger said. “Railings, floor—you know the drill.”

  Dutifully, I turned the camera back on and started shooting the area around Holloway, continued, focused on the floor, as I walked back downstairs.

  “It’s important to know where you came from,” I said.

  “You would know that better than most of us,” he said, referring to my own recent discovery of family I had grown up knowing nothing about.

  When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I asked, “Will that do it?”

  “One more thing,” he said, gesturing me closer.

  He took the camera from me and scanned me with it, front and back, hands and feet in close-up.

  “Insurance for you,” he said, handing the camera back, “in case some idiot detective gets notional about you.”

  I turned the camera off and started to take out the photo disk to give him. But he stopped me.

  “Any way you can make a copy of what you got before we hand it over?”

  “Sure.” Like hell he wasn’t back in the saddle. I dug a memory storage stick out of my bag, plugged it into the camera’s USB port, and made a copy of the photo file. Then I made a second copy. One I dropped back into my bag, the other I handed to him, along with the camera’s image card.

  “That do it?” I asked.

  “Just one more thing,” he said. “Any idea where we can find a coffeepot around here? It’s going to be a long night.”

  Chapter 7

  “You knew the guy?”

  Kevin Thornbury, the more senior of the two detectives sent out from the LA County Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau, looked down his nose at me, accusation, skepticism in h
is tone—pure cop.

  He was a man about my age, early forties, average height, average weight, average looks. Mostly, he looked tired, the sort of tired that a good night’s sleep won’t fix. But then, it was Friday night, and hours past the end of his regular work week. We knew from the deputy coroner, who had arrived a full hour earlier, that traffic leaving central LA had been brutal. Of the three groups who eventually showed up, the detectives, coming out of City of Commerce, had the furthest to travel and several more gnarly interchanges to navigate than the others.

  Long before they arrived, Roger had unlocked the staff lounge and put on a pot of coffee. Thornbury and I, seated at a table in the lounge, both had steaming mugs beside us, but neither of us was drinking from them. Thornbury’s partner, a rookie detective named Fred Weber, was out in the lobby overseeing the crime scene. Roger was overseeing Weber, though he had no official role in the investigation other than local liaison. So except for technicians from the coroner’s office or Scientific Services Bureau coming in occasionally in search of coffee, Thornbury and I were alone in the lounge.

  Thornbury waited for my answer, tapping the table between us with the end of his ballpoint pen.

  “I didn’t know Holloway well,” I said.

  “You know him well enough, though, to make the identification.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Park Holloway was the college president. I work here.”

  He looked at something in his notebook and then up at me.

  “You said, ‘Park Holloway’?”

  “Yes.”

  “That Park Holloway?”

  “He’s the only one I know.”

  “Huh.” He studied the page again, crossed something out and wrote something down. Had he not recognized Holloway’s name until now? Genuine surprise on his face, or theatrics? I couldn’t get a handle on him. Was he playing me?

  “You work here?” he asked, that skeptical scowl back in place.

  “Temporarily,” I said. I had earlier spelled my name for him, and it had apparently rung no more bells than Holloway’s had initially.

  “You’re a temp, huh? What, like a secretary?”

  “I’m teaching in the film department this semester, part-time, filling in for someone who’s on sick leave.”

  “Oh yeah?” A dismissive quality in the question. “What, you have the kids watch movies in class?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “I teach film production; the kids are making movies.”

  He flicked his chin toward the door that led to the lobby. “Any idea what happened out there?”

  “None,” I said. “He was hanging from the ceiling when I came in.”

  “Anyone else in the building when you arrived?”

  “I didn’t see or hear anyone.” I shrugged. “People generally leave early on Fridays.”

  “Yeah?” he said. “Except you. Mind telling me what you were doing here?”

  “You saw that apparatus Holloway is hanging from?” When he nodded, I said, “It was installed to hang a sculpture.”

  “I wondered what that was.”

  “I came here to shoot it.”

  “Shoot it?” He tensed as his hand reflexively dropped to the butt of the gun holstered on his belt.

  “With a camera,” I said. “I wanted to shoot some footage of the empty space before the sculpture is hung there next week. I’m making a short film about the artist and his work and I wanted a ‘before’ shot.”

  Cradling his mug between his hands, Thornbury took a long look around the bright and airy room and out at the enclosed garden beyond tall glass doors. With a scowl he said, “This place looks more like a fancy hotel than a college administration building.”

  “You know what the kids call it? The Taj Ma’Holloway.”

  He chuckled. “So the president, this Holloway, wasn’t so popular, huh?”

  “Not very, no.”

  “You have any run-ins with him?”

  “We had a little kerfuffle shortly after I was hired. He asked me to make a film about the campus for him to show at his state-of-the-college address. I told him I would have it done as a class project, but he wanted me to do it myself. I turned him down.”

  “So he didn’t get his movie?”

  “He did. His media staff put together a very nice production—that’s what they’re paid for. I was more worried about stepping on their toes than about making Holloway unhappy; sometimes I need to borrow Media’s facilities for my classes.”

  “You said that at the end of the semester you’ll be out of a job. Your, what’d you call it, kerfuffle, with the college prez have anything to do with that?”

  “No. I only contracted to work this semester.”

  “Where’d you work before?”

  “In television. My series was canceled.”

  “So, what, Holloway wanted a little Hollywood glitz for his film?”

  I shrugged again, noncommittal, but he was correct.

  “How’d you end up here, from TV?” he asked, smug, patronizing in the way he said here, as if there was something deficient about the place. Or colleges in general; I’m a filmmaker, not a shrink, but if I had to guess, I’d say that academics were never Thornbury’s strong suit.

  I told him, “When my series was cancelled a friend told me about this gig. I thought, why not? Something different to do until the next thing comes along.”

  “Next thing? You a Hollywood gypsy, going from gig to gig?”

  “I suppose.” Not exactly correct, but why get into it? I knew he was grilling me under the guise of small talk, and doing a decent job of it though he apparently found Hollywood to be as deficient as teaching. At the moment I was the only warm body available to put on a suspects list, so I knew it was in my best interests to keep things superficial; you never know when a bad impression or a wrong sort of answer might set complications in motion. I did not explain that I’d had my own network television series, “Maggie MacGowen Investigates,” for a long time, until a recent corporate reorganization.

  My show was fairly cheap to produce and the audience numbers were respectable, so the chances of getting picked up elsewhere were fairly good. I’d been through this shuffle before. If something didn’t turn up, there was always independent production to fall back on. In the meantime, I was enjoying the break from the pressures of TV Land and I was having a great time working with young people who were excited about what they were doing. Teaching turned out to be demanding work, but I found it to be more rewarding than, for instance, reporting from the jungles of Guatemala about militant separatists, or dodging gangbanger bullets in any of LA’s benighted housing projects.

  He said, “You seem pretty collected, I mean, walking in and finding the guy the way you did. Not many women would have handled the situation as well as you are.”

  “I don’t feel collected.” Should I have dissolved into hysterics?

  Thornbury’s partner, Fred Weber, came into the lounge and helped himself from the coffeepot on the counter.

  “How’s it going in here?” Weber asked, looking past me at his colleague. He had rolled his shirtsleeves up to show his well-muscled forearms. From the bulk of him, I guessed he was a body builder.

  “We’re doing okay,” Thornbury said. “What’s Opie up to?”

  Weber shrugged. “Asking the techs a lot of questions. Probably the biggest case he’s ever been involved with.”

  Opie? Did he mean Roger? I had to lower my face to hide my reaction. This pair had no clue who Roger was or what he had done before he showed up in Anacapa. My husband, who was a homicide detective for twenty years, thought that Roger Tejeda was one of the smartest detectives he had ever worked a case with. Though they worked for different police departments, they collaborated on several investigations and became good friends. Learning, early in our relationship, that both of us knew and valued Roger had been a happy discovery.

  I looked from one detective to the other. They seemed to have forgotten I was there as they discussed wha
t was happening in the lobby.

  “May I leave?” I said. “It’s late. I’ve told you everything I know. Twice.”

  Weber pulled out a chair next to Thornbury, turned it around and straddled it, leaning his big-gun arms across the chair back. The way he studied me, he reminded me of Sister Dolores of Eternal Sorrows, the counselor at my high school, preparing to launch into a pontification of information and correction.

  Roger came into the room just then. He leaned against the service counter, arms folded over his baseball shirt, and listened as Weber went into his pitch.

  “Ma’am, there are certain procedures and protocols that we in law enforcement follow that might seem puzzling or even intimidating to a civilian like you, but know that they are necessary. It’s natural for you to be a little scared of authority figures like policemen, but all we’re trying to do is find out what happened.”

  “Thanks for telling me,” I said. Patronizing putz, I thought, but stayed quiet, didn’t tell him I had been through the drill before. Didn’t tell him that Holloway was not the first dead man I had seen. Didn’t give him anything he might spend half the night asking questions about, and that had nothing to do with the man in the lobby who was lying on the coroner’s gurney under a sheet.

  “I hope you’ll be patient with us,” Weber said. “We may ask you the same questions six different ways until you begin to think we aren’t half as smart as we look—which I admit isn’t all that sharp—but this is the way things are done by the experts, so just hang in there with us.”

  “Good to know,” I said. “But it’s been a long night, and I would like to go home.”

  “All in good time.”

  I dared to look over at Roger. He had a tooth-sucking grin on his face when I caught his eye. He lifted the corner of his cheek in a little wink, and I knew Weber was in trouble.

  Weber said, “You probably told my partner already, but I’d like you to tell me something about your relationship with Peter Holloway.”

  “Park,” Thornbury corrected. “Park Holloway.”

  Weber nodded acknowledgement of the correction, but the name didn’t seem to ring any bells for him, yet.