Hanging Time awm-2

by Leslie Glass

  “I was in the neighborhood,” April said. “I thought I’d drop by to say hello.”

  “I don’t think I believe that.” Block was dressed in another plaid shirt and string tie, jeans, and his lizard cowboy boots. His face was bloodless, as if he’d been deprived of oxygen for the last day or so. He looked nervous and scared, and sorry he’d pushed the buzzer downstairs to let her in.

  April glanced around the living room. It looked as if he had decorated it very recently from Ikea. The black-and-white area rug on the floor was so new, a piece of its price tag was still wired to the end. The white nubbly sofa against one wall had a white pillow at each arm and a squat blond wood coffee table in front of it. On the coffee table were two twisted candlesticks with unused candles in them, and a brass pot filled with what looked like a sheaf of wheat. A matching blond wood table with two chairs floated in the middle of the floor by the closed folding doors of the tiny kitchen. There was not much in the way of clutter. Everything was very clean, neat. April wondered if Maggie Wheeler had ever been entertained there. She guessed not.

  Block followed her eyes. “You’ve already searched the place. What do you want?”

  “I just wanted to talk to you. Do you mind?”

  He shrugged. “Yeah, sort of.” But he closed the door behind her anyway.

  “Why’s that?”

  He shrugged again, put his mug down on the single mat that indicated his place at the table. The mat was some kind of black woven plastic. There was nothing else on it.

  “I don’t have anything else to tell you.” He said this like a man who’d been thinking things over and decided for sure he didn’t want to be a murderer after all.

  “I think you do.”

  He shook his head. “I saw the papers.”

  April looked around again. She didn’t see any newspapers. “So?”

  “So, I know, uh—there’s been another one. I didn’t have anything to do with it. I didn’t know her. Nothing.” He waved his hand at the sofa. “You want to sit down?”

  “Sure.” But she didn’t want to sit on his sofa. She pulled out the closest chair at the dining room table and retrieved her notebook from her bag, checked her watch. She had only a few minutes for this. She wrote the day and date, the location and Block’s name.

  “I’m not here about the other one. I’m here about Maggie,” she said.

  He played with the empty cup. He didn’t want to talk about Maggie anymore.

  “You and Maggie were friends, right?”

  “I already told you that,” he muttered. “I didn’t kill her.”

  “No, I never thought you did.”

  “How did you know?” He seemed as surprised now as he had been before when they let him go.

  “You’re too short. The bruises on Maggie’s body indicate her killer was a taller person.” April played with her pencil, giving him a moment to calm down.

  “You can tell that?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what do you want from me?”

  She cocked her head to one side, like an inquisitive bird. “You don’t look like a happy man, Mr. Block.”

  “I told you. Maggie was my friend. I liked her.”

  “You told me you were in the store, and you saw her.”

  “Maybe I was—kind of imagining things.”

  “You imagined some parts of the scene pretty well. So we believe that you were there.”

  “She was already dead,” he said quickly.

  “How do you know?”

  “She was hanging there. Her eyes were open. Her face was all …” Sweat broke out on his forehead. His fingers trembled as he reached up to wipe it off.

  “Albert, do you know that doctors can do amazing things these days? Revive people who’ve drowned, transplant hearts. There was a mother who saved her kid. He’d been struck by a van and hadn’t been breathing for six minutes. She administered CPR while a police officer drove them to the hospital. Only a few blocks away from here. Remember that?”

  Albert Block looked doubtful. “She looked dead to me.”

  “Have you ever seen a dead person before?”

  “No. But she was hanging there.” His eyelid twitched, and he made a face to get control of it.

  “Didn’t it occur to you to try to help her?”

  “You’re not supposed to touch—you know—” Block looked away.

  “She was your friend.”

  “I didn’t think there was anything I could do!” he cried.

  “There was a phone right there. You could have called nine one one. Why didn’t you?”

  He looked defeated. “I don’t know. I keep asking myself that.”

  “Mr. Block, you left your friend hanging for three days without calling the police.”

  “I know. It was stupid.”

  “It was more than stupid. What kind of friend is that?”

  Block hung his head. “I said it was stupid. What do you want from me?”

  “For Maggie’s sake, I want you to tell me the truth. How did you get into the store?”

  “I had her keys. I took them off the counter when I asked her to have lunch with me and she said no. I fixed it so she couldn’t go out for lunch without me.”

  “So you used the keys you’d stolen to get back in.” April made a note.

  “I rang first, but she didn’t answer. So I used the keys.”

  “Where are the keys now?” They had searched his apartment and hadn’t found any keys.

  “I threw them away.”

  He threw them away. “Okay, let’s go back to before you went to the store. What were you doing before that?”

  “I told you—I was hanging around in the bookstore.”

  “The Endicott.”

  “There isn’t another.”

  April nodded. “Were you looking at books, or were you looking out the window, watching for Maggie?”

  “Both. I told you that, too.”

  “I know.” But things were different now. “So you could see who was coming and going from the store.”

  Block shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “So who did you see?”

  Block shook his head. “I didn’t see anybody.”

  April found that she was holding her breath. “Nobody?”

  “I wasn’t watching every second.”

  “So what were you waiting for? How did you know Maggie was still there?”

  “She always left at exactly seven o’clock. She was afraid of the old lady. She wouldn’t dare close up before then. I got there about six forty-five.” He was perspiring heavily.

  April could smell his fear. “And?” She had stood by the window of the Endicott Bookstore and knew exactly what he could see from there. The man at the register knew Block and confirmed that he had been there that evening. She didn’t let her breath out.

  “And I hung around. I spend a lot of time there.”

  “You were in love with Maggie. Did you know she had a boyfriend and that she was pregnant? Were you standing there in the bookstore watching for her boyfriend?”

  Block angrily shook the pain out of his eyes. “He was one of those hypocritical Christians.” He spat the word. “He didn’t want to use anything, and then when she got pregnant, he didn’t want her to have an abortion. She was just so upset—” He crumpled. His tears splashed on the tabletop.

  April went on quietly. “When you went into the storeroom, did you think he had done it?”

  “No, I thought she did,” Block sobbed.

  “She? You mean the woman who was in there with her?”

  “No, after she left …”

  April let her breath out. There it was. “What she, Mr. Block?”

  “Maggie! I thought Maggie did it because of him.”

  What? He confessed to murdering her when he thought she was a suicide? That didn’t make sense. Don’t try to work it out, April warned herself. Just let it pass. She went on.

  “You saw somebody go in The Last Mango and then come o
ut. Who did you see?”

  “I don’t know. Some woman.”

  “Come on, Albert. What did she look like?”

  “I don’t know. She was wearing a long skirt. She had red hair. Lots of red hair. That’s all I remember.” He shook his head. His nose was running.

  “Mr. Block, do you know what a transvestite is?”

  “It wasn’t a man,” he said sharply. “I’d know if it were a man.”

  “Sometimes they can be very convincing,” April murmured.

  “It wasn’t a man.”

  “How do you know, Albert?”

  “She was wearing flats.”

  April waited. Now she was the one sweating. So, the woman was wearing flats. So what?

  Block looked at her. “Men dressed up as women always wear high heels. It’s part of the thing. The falsies, the lipstick, the wig, the tight short skirt, and the high heels.” He said it triumphantly. “This woman was wearing a long loose skirt, a loose top, and flat shoes. It was a woman.”

  “Did it ever occur to you the woman you saw leaving the shop murdered Maggie?”

  “No. It didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. It just—didn’t.”

  Okay. “Would you recognize this woman if you saw her again?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. She was wearing a hat with a floppy brim. I didn’t really see her face.”

  Oh, now she was wearing a hat, great.

  “Then how did you know she had all that red hair?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I saw it.”

  “Well, would you recognize the hat? The shirt, the shoes, the blouse?”

  Block shrugged again. He was a big shrugger. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  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.

  66

  Milicia 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.

  67

  April 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.

  68

  April 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.