Hanging Time awm-2

by Leslie Glass

  “Did she say why she got out there so late?”

  Charles shrugged. “Something about having to work late. Why?”

  “On Saturday night?”

  “Why?”

  “The first girl was murdered that Saturday night. The police think she died around seven in the evening, just after the boutique closed.”

  “So, what are you telling me?” Charles glanced at the desserts again. He was a hedonist, never able to let an appetite go unsatisfied for long.

  “I’m telling you that Sunday night Milicia drove me home. We talked. I had the feeling she might be interested in a relationship, but I—didn’t pick up on it. After I got out of the car, she said she wanted to see me professionally. I was surprised. I thought if she needed professional advice, it would be more natural for her to go to you.”

  Charles focused on that. “Hmmm,” he said.

  “I thought maybe you were hitting on her—”

  “Jesus, our architect? What do you think I am?” Charles exclaimed.

  Jason chose not to respond to that. “I thought she must need somebody neutral, so I agreed to see her. Charles, the whole thing was odd. She was seductive, clearly trying to manipulate me for some purpose that was unclear to me. I tried to get her to tell me what the crisis was. What event had occurred to cause her to seek help at this particular moment. She felt a great urgency, but refused to say why.”

  “So?”

  “So, we met a number of times and she kept hinting things about her sister. But she gave me no real indicators that would call for any kind of intervention. She became frustrated and hostile. She was very angry at me for being unable to see her every day last week, but I was in Baltimore on Thursday. Friday I went out to L.A. for the weekend.”

  “You went to see Emma. How did that go?”

  Charles changed the subject suddenly, throwing Jason off balance.

  “Well. It went well,” Jason murmured. But his visit with Emma seemed like a long time ago now.

  “That’s good. I like Emma.”

  Jason didn’t say anything. He more than liked Emma. He loved her.

  “Yeah, I know.” Reading his thoughts, Charles looked sad for a moment. “Want some cheesecake?”

  Jason shook his head. He felt old, was thirty-nine today and already he felt he’d crossed the line to forty.

  “Then what?”

  “Milicia called me several times while I was away, again about the sister. Again, nothing specific. We connected on Tuesday. Yesterday. It was then that she told me about the second murder. She said she’d heard about it on the news. You know how unnerving she is. You were the one who told me there was something about her—”

  Charles nodded.

  “Well, what?” Jason demanded.

  “Little things.” Charles gave up the fight. He raised his hand for the waiter.

  The waiter had a huge handlebar mustache that did not come out quite far enough to conceal an ugly black mole on his cheek. The mole reminded Jason of Camille.

  “I’ll have a cheesecake and another cappuccino,” Charles said. “Are you sure you won’t?” he asked Jason.

  “Nothing for me.”

  “Milicia was so upset last night, really wired. She felt she’d come to you in all innocence and you let her down in the end, sent her into the lion’s den alone. And you were over there interviewing her sister the whole time. Unbelievable.”

  Jason took a deep breath and let it out. And Charles believed Milicia. That’s how good she was.

  The cheesecake came. Charles shoved a bite into his mouth. Jason waited until he’d swallowed.

  “Milicia sexually abused her sister for years.”

  Charles dropped the fork.

  “Are you sure?”

  “All the indicators are there. Camille’s illness, her dissociation. Self-mutilation beginning in adolescence … She’s very sick, but she’s not a killer.”

  “Do you think Milicia …?” Charles couldn’t bring himself to frame the question. He shoved his dessert to one side.

  “The police are pretty sure the killer is one of the three of them. It could be the boyfriend dressed up to look like Camille. It appears Camille was set up.”

  Jason picked up his fork and reached across the table to Charles’s plate, tasted the abandoned cheesecake. Then he told Charles about his sessions with Camille and the police, and filled him in on everything he knew about the case, including the ritualistic aspects of the crime scenes and how the careful design of the murders related to the ritualized abuse of years ago.

  Cloudy with doubt for a long time, Charles’s eyes slowly cleared to a hard intensity. From time to time as Jason spoke, Charles stopped him with a question, then nodded at the answer. Finally Jason finished.

  Charles tapped his coffee spoon against the table, shaking his head at the cracked Formica tabletop. For a moment the two friends sat in silence as Charles searched for a response to a situation that was incomprehensible to him. The people Charles knew and treated suffered from a different kind of illness. They didn’t do things like this.

  “I can’t believe it,” he murmured, finally raising his head to look Jason in the eye. But even as Charles spoke in denial, Jason could see that all their years of training, and their long and close relationship, weighed more heavily than any doubts he could have. Charles did believe it.

  Jason reached out to pat his friend’s arm, then raised his hand for the check.

  74

  Hannabelle started barking the second Milicia opened the door. She was pretty good about staying in the cage and not making too much noise when Milicia was out, but the minute Milicia returned, the dog went wild, barking and scratching at the wire sides to get out. Milicia always let her out right away because she couldn’t stand the racket.

  She couldn’t stand it now. “Shut up,” she said sharply.

  Suddenly Hannabelle was a liability. Milicia didn’t know why the police were so interested in the dog. What did they know anyway? Even if they thought one of the dogs had something to do with it, how could they tell which one? Keep calm, she told herself. There was no way to tell which one. It was all a bluff.

  But even so, the sight of Hannabelle made her sick. She couldn’t remember now why the animal was there in her life. She didn’t even like dogs.

  Ar, ar, ar. Hannabelle sobbed like a baby, deep inside her throat.

  “Shut up!”

  Milicia stood in the doorway, studying the living room to see if anything had been moved. The doorman had told her a Chinese cop had been to the building looking for her, but had not asked to go inside the apartment. Milicia didn’t trust the doorman. Maybe he had let the cop in and that’s how the police knew about Hannabelle.

  Damn fucking dog. “Shut up,” she screamed at it.

  Hannabelle barked louder, combining grating yelps with her intolerable whine for maximum effect. She wanted love, had to pee. Why couldn’t she get out?

  Milicia squinted through the slanting afternoon sunlight to see if the thin layer of dust on the antique tables had been disturbed. It didn’t look like it. Then she crossed to the window, impatiently pulling off the jacket and blouse that smelled so offensive to her in the police station. She didn’t see anything unusual on the street.

  Her apartment was on the twenty-second floor. It was decorated with as many of her parents’ antiques from the house in Old Greenwich as would fit in the two-bedroom rental. Milicia was very proud of it. Everything was dark wood, Queen Anne, with graceful curves and carved ball feet. She’d had everything carefully repaired after her parents’ death. The nicks and marks and stains from all those years of abuse were gone now. The settee and wing chairs had new upholstery and no longer sagged in the arms and seats.

  Now it was obvious what kind of people she had come from. This was how it had all looked in her grandfather’s day, when the Stanton family was everything it should be. After her parents’ death, the IRS made her pay tens of thousands of dollars just to keep the
pitiful furniture she had planned to throw away. She hadn’t known how valuable it all was until the lawyers showed her the tax bills the estate would have to pay to own it.

  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.

  75

  It 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.

  76

  Milicia 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.”

  77

  How 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.