Hanging Time

by Glass, Leslie

  Horrified, Braun looked at the woman with her head bobbing up and down.

  “Okay, that’s it.” He gestured to Roberts to turn off the tape. He got up, his hands rubbing the skin around his eyes and above his cheekbones, turned his back on the table where Camille sat like an insect, a big insect, with hair sticking out from her head like crimped red filament wire. Cold. Weird.

  “Get Woo in here.”

  “Yes, sir.” Instinctively Roberts reached for the tape recorder and took it with him.

  Braun followed him quickly to the door. “Stay here,” he told Camille. “We’ll be right back.”

  But she wasn’t listening to him. She was thinking about Puppy and how frightened Puppy must be.

  Camille didn’t know how long she was there before a different person, a woman, came in. The woman took a look at her and said, “Stop that” very sharply.

  Camille growled and continued biting at her arm.

  “You can’t do that.” April approached her matter-of-factly and pried the arm out of Camille’s mouth. A little blood oozed out of the places where she had chewed some holes in it. The bitten arm looked raw, as if it should be hurting quite a bit.

  “There’s no need for that,” April said.

  Camille gnashed her teeth, snapping at the air now.

  “I guess you’re having some trouble, huh?”

  “Rrrrrr.”

  “I’m April Woo. You’re acting like a dog. I’d guess you’re worried about your dog.” April stood there with one hand on her hip. She was used to crazy. It happened all the time. The police department could do it to anybody.

  “Would you feel better with your dog in here?”

  Camille stopped growling and fell silent.

  “Will you talk to me if I bring you the dog? What do you say?”

  “Yes,” Camille whispered. “I’m better with Puppy.”

  What was so hard about that? April leaned out the door and talked to the officer who was standing outside. He hadn’t been doing his job. The woman should not have been allowed to mutilate herself while in police custody.

  50

  I want to talk to you.” Sergeant Joyce crooked her finger at April and made some wiggling motions with it. “In here.”

  It was after nine that evening. April followed her into her office.

  “Close the door.”

  April closed the door.

  Sergeant Joyce returned to her desk. When she was settled in the same kind of old-fashioned wooden, rolling, tilting chair April had in the squad room, she turned to April. April could see that the order to stay behind in the precinct had not exactly been easy for her supervisor to take. April felt a little sorry for her.

  Out in the squad room someone began screaming obscenities. “Fucking pig hit me. Asshole fucking cop. I’m gonna file a complaint. I’m gonna have your fucking ass.”

  The screaming stopped as suddenly as it started.

  A breeze drifted in through the open window. It was cooling off and beginning to smell like fall. In the second of silence April noticed there was water in the saucers under the two plants on the windowsill. Sergeant Joyce must have been really desperate for something to do. The plants looked happier now. Sergeant Joyce didn’t.

  Only two hours before, Sergeant Joyce had had the pleasure of being chewed out with her two best detectives in front of the captain of the precinct by a Lieutenant from downtown. For once April knew more about what was going on than she did. Sergeant Joyce didn’t like not knowing what was going on. Her desk was a mess. It looked to April as if she’d spent the time since the skirmish messing up the number-coded forms and eating her fingernails.

  Right now her face was screwed up into a big question mark.

  “Where’s Mike?” she demanded.

  “Down at the district attorney’s office, trying to get a search warrant.”

  Joyce frowned. “Any particular reason?”

  “Whole thing looks suspicious.”

  “What about the boyfriend, wouldn’t he let you in?”

  “He wasn’t home.”

  Sergeant Joyce raised an eyebrow. “So what’s going on here?”

  April told her how Braun and Roberts had pulled Camille off the street while she was walking her dog, brought her in for questioning and gotten nowhere, then called April in from the stakeout to see if she could do any better.

  “Nice of them to inform me. Jesus, what fuck-ups. Where are they now?”

  “Braun and Roberts went back to the building in question to wait for the boyfriend. They seem to think the boyfriend might be involved.”

  “Oh, yeah. What makes them think so?”

  “The woman is—wacko. When I went in there she was chewing on her arm. And I’m not kidding. Bite wounds all over.”

  April stood in front of the desk, her face impassive, reporting like a soldier.

  Sergeant Joyce cocked her head, nodding for her to take a seat. Reluctantly, April sat down. She could see Joyce, thinking through her nerve endings, trying to figure this one out.

  Ducci had said the fibers in Maggie Wheeler’s ring were dog hairs. Camille Honiger-Stanton was found walking her dog.

  “Where’s the dog?”

  “Braun took the dog away from her. When she got the dog back, she responded better. It’s still with her.”

  “What kind of dog?” Sergeant Joyce jumped on the question.

  “Poodle. Apricot-colored. They’re downstairs.”

  “She fit Ducci’s description?”

  “Kind of.” April fell silent, uneasy.

  “Well, what did she tell you?” Joyce demanded impatiently.

  “Uh.” April pulled out her notebook. It had been necessary to take some notes. What Camille had said was all on tape. But what she had done during the interview had to be written down on paper. The woman was really weird.

  “She said her sister was a witch,” April began.

  “Millie?”

  “Milicia. Said she made her—Camille—sick. She rolled her eyes back in her head. Then she told me I was going to die of cancer.” April looked up.

  “Oh, why is that?”

  “She said there was a big cancer-growing agent in the precinct. Anyone who’s in here could catch it.”

  Sergeant Joyce frowned. “That’s not so crazy. I’d agree with her on that. What else?”

  “Eyes roll back in head. Growling noise. That meant she was thinking about the dog. She said she was worried about the dog catching it, then said the dog couldn’t get precinct cancer as long as she was holding it.”

  “Great.” Sergeant Joyce impatiently tapped the desk with a pencil.

  “She said the sister had been projecting radiation rays at her. She wanted to report it, but didn’t think the police would do anything about it. She said the sister tried to kill her in other ways, too. I asked her what ways. She said poison, through radio waves. She has a whole list.”

  “Uh-huh, so why does the sister want to kill her?”

  April continued reading from her notes. “She said Milicia was always trying to kill her. Said she’d be dead now if she didn’t have Bouck to protect her.”

  “So what is this? Some kind of sibling-rivalry thing?”

  “Yeah, Camille said Milicia was jealous because their parents loved Camille more. She said Milicia killed her parents and she—Camille—was the only one who knew. So now Milicia has to kill her, too.”

  “Okaaaay.” Sergeant Joyce tapped the desk with the pencil. Two sisters and two boutique salesgirls in a dance of death with a poodle.

  “Anything in that?” she asked about the murder of the parents.

  April shook her head. “Milicia told me their parents died in some kind of car accident about two years ago. Greenwich, Connecticut. I have someone checking it out.”

  Sergeant Joyce sighed. “What about the boyfriend?”

  “Name’s Nathan Bouck. I’m going to run a check on him. Camille says he owns the whole building and the chandelier shop downs
tairs. She says he’s God. He can do anything he wants.”

  “Must be nice,” Joyce murmured.

  “Yeah, even Milicia the witch is scared of him.”

  “So, ah, what do you think?”

  April closed her notebook. Her neighbors next door in Chinatown when she was growing up had a cousin. Name of Lee Hao Chung. Fat boy, stupid-looking. His movements were jerky just like Camille’s. Lee Hao did a lot of naughty things, stole the best food, tortured the other kids. Got away with everything because he was kind of crazy upstairs. April remembered Skinny Dragon Mother telling her again and again, “Lee Hao not crazy, smart. Do anything he want, never have to work in life. Family always make excuse. Pah.”

  Could be like that with Camille. Maybe crazy, maybe not. Maybe parents made excuses. Maybe sister not so tolerant. April could see how Milicia would not like being troubled with a sibling who covered her face with her hair whenever she got upset and talked about cancer traveling in radio waves—not that such a thing was completely impossible. April had read somewhere that power lines near farms out west had killed whole herds of cattle. And lots of people in New Jersey were getting leukemia. Could be radio waves. Why not?

  “So, is she a murderer?”

  April shook her head. “I have no idea. The crime scenes were very—organized. Crazy, but organized, know what I mean?”

  “Yeaaah,” Joyce said doubtfully.

  “So the homicides look like the work of a crazy person, doesn’t mean they are.” April leaned forward, trying to gather her thoughts into a coherent whole. “Camille acts crazy. Lieutenant Braun was completely freaked. Maybe she’s too crazy to do anything. Braun thinks so.”

  “What do you think?” Joyce pressed some more.

  “I don’t know, Sergeant. I wish I did.”

  “Let’s go have a look at her.”

  “Sure.” April stood. Last she saw Camille, the curtain of red hair was covering her face. Sergeant Joyce was going to love this.

  51

  Jason picked up the phone on the first ring. “Dr. Frank.”

  “It’s Milicia.”

  Jason waited.

  “Am I calling at a bad time?” she asked after a beat.

  “No, I’m between patients. I have a few minutes.”

  “Jason, I’m so worried.”

  Jason cringed just a little. The situation slipped into the background as he worried about a patient calling him by his first name. No matter what Milicia thought, they were in a clinical setting and had a clinical relationship. He didn’t allow anybody to use his first name in a clinical setting. His first name was reserved for colleagues and family members.

  For a second he considered changing the footing by insisting they use last names. Then he elected to let it pass.

  “Jason, what’s wrong?”

  What was wrong was he let the temperature drop when she put him off. Now he let it drop some more.

  “What’s going on?” he said finally.

  “I’ve been so nervous since you opened this whole thing with the police. I can’t contain myself.”

  Her voice took on a baby-talk quality. Childish was not a style that appealed to him. Jason had to remind himself that this was how Milicia acted with all men. It had nothing to do with him. She had learned to appear vulnerable because most men could be relied on to respond well to cute and cuddly. But Jason knew this girl had a steel blade for a heart.

  “But you’ve been to the police.”

  “I know, but it really weirded me out.”

  Jason didn’t say anything. He could see how it would.

  “I need to see you. I need to compare notes with you. We need to be together on this.”

  “Why?” Jason looked at the bull clock on the shelf. He had thirty seconds before he saw his last patient. Then he was going to go out into the evening and get something to eat.

  She’d already seen him that day. Why did Milicia need to see him again? He told himself that this was how she was with men. But at the same time, in the sleeping part of his mind, he thought maybe this wasn’t the way Milicia acted with all men. Maybe this was how she chose to be with him.

  “Remember when you were a kid, and sometimes you had to go to a scary place that seemed to have monsters in the shadows? Well, I want you to tell me there are no monsters in the shadows. I want you to tell me my fears are silly. Jason, I need to feel protected, and you’re not protecting me.”

  Jason shifted in his chair, genuinely irritated now. He was really put off when grown women talked baby talk to him. He struggled to shake off his annoyance. This was an open clinical situation. The idea of murder—homicide—was disconcerting. It was a horrible thing. He didn’t have patients who came to him worried their siblings were killers.

  Milicia had held that piece of information back until the second murder. Horrible.

  He felt manipulated.

  “When I was there,” he said suddenly, “they gave me a tuna fish sandwich. I was surprised how homey it was.”

  “You were at the precinct today?” Milicia jumped on the revelation. “What did you say?”

  “Not today,” Jason told her. “I was there for something else.”

  “Well, what did you tell them today? Tell me exactly what you said.”

  “You were here. You heard what I said.”

  There was a brief pause. “Are you sure?”

  What did she mean? Jason couldn’t let it go by. What was she really asking?

  “Do you think there’s something wrong with my memory?” he persisted.

  “No, no.”

  “Do you think I’m not telling the truth?”

  “No, silly. Sometimes little things slip away, that’s all.”

  The door closed in the waiting room. His next patient was there. It was time to go. Jason did not reassure Milicia there were no monsters in the shadows.

  52

  By nine-thirty Jason was exhausted and overstimulated. He had returned from California only the night before, had seen ten patients that day, one of whom ended up at the police station accusing her sister of murder. All through his session with his last patient, the conversation with Milicia played over and over in Jason’s mind. He didn’t want to think about it. He had other things to think about.

  When he returned home, he lingered in the kitchen debating whether to ratchet down with a beer or a martini with three olives. He’d have a drink, think about Emma and California. Later, he’d read a book.

  He decided on the martini, built it, threw a frozen pizza in the toaster oven, and took his first burning swallow. Yes. Alcohol helped. He grabbed three more olives from the jar and savored the salty taste. Glass in hand, he wandered into the living room, thinking about making love to his wife. He concentrated on that, didn’t want to crash with the weight of being alone again.

  Sipping the martini slowly, he told himself this was okay. He didn’t have to have a wife with him every second. They could live together sometimes. He tried to walk around a little with that conviction.

  But underneath it all the Milicia tape played on and on. Her voice calling him silly, talking baby talk about monsters in the shadows, clicked on without his bidding.

  What did you tell them? Tell me exactly what you said.

  He turned on the television and listened to the weather report, couldn’t pay attention, and turned it off. He was trained to look at time sequences for branch points without making judgments or conclusions.

  At every fork in the tree he asked himself what was going on. Why did she say “We have to be together on this”?

  Why was she worried about what he told the police? Why did she pretend not to know what he’d said?

  He wandered around the living room, picking up one book after another, trying to unwind. He wanted to stay with Emma, think about her. Read a book. But the more he tried to escape, the harder it was to get away from Milicia and Camille.

  Against his will Jason had been drawn deep into their story. That bothered him. He
was a quick study. He could put together any number of disparate elements of personality and character almost from the very start. It wasn’t like him not to be able to come to a conclusion right away.

  It occurred to him that maybe the reason he couldn’t get it this time was that Milicia was lying about something. He reviewed how she had started with him. Bits and pieces about the day in the Hamptons, the ride home in her car. How she had asked to see him. Her calls when he was in California. It was all unusual, ambiguous. Nothing in this life was truly random.

  He turned away from the books, looking for another diversionary tactic. He had to calm down or he wouldn’t get to sleep that night. He didn’t want murder hanging over his dreams.

  The martini was almost gone. He decided to have another. The phone on the table rang. He picked up on the first ring, hoping it was Emma.

  “Hello, Jason?”

  He sighed. It was April the detective. Now she was calling him Jason. Earlier that day she’d called him Dr. Frank. He couldn’t help smiling. He knew if she was calling him by his first name, she wanted something.

  “Hello, April.”

  “It’s nine-thirty. Am I getting you in the middle of dinner?”

  Jason jerked his head toward the kitchen, suddenly remembering the pizza in the toaster oven. Shit. “No, I haven’t had it yet.”

  “Ah. Then you’re probably sitting there with a gin martini. May or may not have olives in it.”

  “Yes, gin martini, and yes, it has olives.” He looked down at the glass. Had olives. It was empty now.

  “You’re unwinding after a long day of patients. Am I right?”

  “Yes, again.” He wouldn’t mind a few more martinis so he could unwind further. He had a strong suspicion by the way she was talking to him that he wasn’t going to get them.

  “It’s really nice to chat with you, April. But I have this really uneasy feeling you’re not calling to chat. And I don’t really feel like chatting right now anyway. Am I right?”