Hanging Time

by Glass, Leslie

  “You want to go down and get the warrant or find the landlord and say we’re going in?”

  April gave him a brief smile. “It’s your first day. I’ll give you a present. I’ll go down and get the search warrant.”

  It was one of those unavoidable waste-of-time things. If they didn’t go to the courts downtown and get a search warrant to go into the girl’s apartment and find her telephone book, a lot of really uncomfortable things could happen, including their being charged with theft if anything was missing later. They went upstairs so April could type up the warrant request.

  Maggie Wheeler had lived in a brownstone, a walkup. There were six apartments in the building. An hour and a half later, April and Sanchez stood in the airless vestibule, studying the list of names on the intercom. There was only one name by 3. Wheeler.

  Sanchez tried the buzzer just in case Mrs. Manganaro had been wrong about Maggie’s living alone, or someone had turned up since they tried the phone number.

  No response.

  The place smelled of mold and wet plaster. There was a wet patch in the ceiling plaster that looked as if it were ready to come down on someone’s head any second. Maggie’s keys, along with the rest of her belongings, had been paper-bagged and tagged. The landlord said he couldn’t get there, but if they had the warrant, it was okay with him if they just went in. They went in.

  Once a really nice brownstone, the building was now all chopped up into small apartments. The doors to apartments 1 and 2 were on the first floor to the right and back of the stairs.

  “Three must be on the second floor,” April murmured.

  They turned to the wide staircase. April ran her finger over the thick, gracious mahogany handrail that capped the sturdy banister, then started up. The tan paint on the walls was smudged, and worn carpeting covered the sagging treads of the stairs. Maggie lived on the second floor in what must have been the brownstone’s former living room. Double doors flanked the entrance. The building was silent. No one was around to see the two detectives enter the apartment.

  Inside, the lights were off; shades covered the bay windows that fronted on the street. April reached for the light switch, and the personality of Maggie Wheeler was revealed.

  Mike whistled. “Wow.”

  The room was no more than sixteen feet square. It had clearly been cut in half in the middle. The back wall rose up to chop off half of an elegant decorative molding in the ceiling that must once have surrounded the centered chandelier. Now a cheap fixture hung there. Along the wall and at least a dozen years old, a tiny stove, refrigerator, and sink had been tacked on. Four small cabinets were centered above them. No dishes, dirty or otherwise, were visible.

  A small, neatly made double bed covered with an old red quilt was pushed against one wall. Three matching pillows had been carefully arranged at the head. There were no clothes on the floor or the one armchair in the room and no decorations. No TV, just a clock-radio. No photographs. No art. No lists of things to do or groceries to buy. The place was empty, really empty, as if Maggie had just arrived or didn’t plan to stay long.

  April quickly went through the cupboards and closet. There were enough plates and cups for four people if they didn’t eat much, a few pots and pans, and a toaster, all very clean. In the closet her clothes were neatly arranged. Nice clothes, colorful dresses, blouses, and skirts. Well, she worked in a clothing store. They had to be attractive. April fingered the belts. There were six of them hanging on a hanger, different styles and materials. April’s clothes were very businesslike. A cop couldn’t accessorize. She checked out the bathroom. Here was a surprise. Maggie used expensive soaps and bubble baths, expensive makeup in pale colors, not like the garish stuff that had been smeared on her face after she died. She’d hung up some wire shelves that were loaded down with cosmetics.

  Mike was going through a letter box covered with decorative paper when April came out of the bathroom.

  “It was under the bed,” he said.

  Her valuables consisted of a Chemical Bank checkbook, canceled checks, pay stubs, paid and unpaid bills, an address book, a calendar with an appointment book, two gold bangle bracelets, a teddy bear pin with amethyst eyes, and a few personal papers. Sanchez opened the address book and found Wheeler in Seekonk, Massachusetts, then turned to the telephone.

  “Look at this,” he said, pointing to the answering machine under the phone. “She didn’t have a TV, but she had an answering machine.”

  April took the address and appointment books and put the box with the rest of the things back under the bed for the time being.

  Mike pushed Play. There were five messages on the machine. Four were from her mother, first asking Maggie why she hadn’t called as she promised, then demanding that she call right away. Sandwiched between her mother’s calls was one from a man who didn’t leave a name. April stood beside Mike as they listened.

  “Hi,” the male voice said. “It’s me. Don’t think you can get away with it. No one is on your side. And no one will ever forget.” Click.

  “What the hell is that?”

  Mike pushed the rewind button and played it again, then popped the cassette out. “Let’s hope his number is in her book.”

  Neither said much on the way back. It was too early to speculate.

  8

  Within a second of Milicia’s entrance the air was charged with her perfume. Jason knew it would still be there in an hour, and his next patient would remark on it. What was it—woody, herbal, spicy? Not his favorite aroma. He made an effort not to sneeze.

  Milicia slowly appraised his office, turning around, showing him her back so he could study her if he wanted to. He didn’t. He had long ago learned to focus on one of the clocks or the window, even his cuticles if absolutely necessary, anything but the bodies of his female patients when they walked around his office.

  Well or sick, a large number of women these days took the position that men looking at them any way whatsoever was a kind of sexual harassment. Jason never let any of them make that an issue with him.

  So he focused on the pendulum of the clock on his desk. But even watching its measured process back and forth across four inches, Jason did not miss any of the many attributes of Ms. Honiger-Stanton. As indeed she did not wish him to.

  In a red blouse open at the neck that in no way disguised her ample breasts, and a short red skirt, she had a statuesque presence. Everything about her signaled a difference from the ordinary, including her level of self-confidence. Her perfume was definitely spicy, not flowery or herbal, Jason decided. Maybe it was Opium. He didn’t like Opium.

  The perfume reminded him of the day he dared to ask his skinny, discontented father for a baseball glove. He got more than no for an answer. His father, already a bitter and defeated old man, shook several tobacco-stained fingers at him, warning if Jason got what he wanted, it wouldn’t make him happy.

  In ominous tones Herman Frank illustrated his point with a story about how Jason’s mother, Belle, had spent a great sum of money, “more than a week’s worth of food, on some gardenia perfume,” Herman said, “to please me on our wedding night.”

  He inhaled his cigarette down to the very end, and fiercely stabbed it out, still angry over that long-ago extravagance.

  “And you know what?” he demanded, blowing smoke into his son’s puzzled face.

  “What?” Jason remembered the smoke choking him.

  “It smelled so bad I couldn’t stand to be near her. Made me vomit.” Herman ended the story in triumph, hacking up a lump of brown phlegm and spitting it into his grimy handkerchief.

  It took Jason a long time to figure out what his father’s vomiting on his wedding night had to do with Jason’s being denied a baseball glove fifteen years later.

  Milicia examined his environment critically, as if it were an architectural disaster in need of complete rehabilitation. Jason felt a stab of insecurity. His office was comfortable, had a bit of a view into himself in it—his clocks, gifts from his pat
ients that included small sculptures, watercolors, needlepoint pillows, paperweights. The paint was beginning to peel in a number of places on the ceiling. It was clear to anyone with an eye for these things that the place had never seen a decorator.

  Her striding into his office, posing for him, demanding attention, and smelling as if she’d doused herself on the way up in the elevator was very far from the usual nervous and highly stressed behavior of a person in need of psychological counseling. His clinician’s sensitive antennae bristled.

  Finally she finished her visual tour of his furniture, which was the usual collection of aged leather, semi-matched pieces, Oriental carpet on the floor, objects on his desk and windowsill. His bookcases were far from adequate for his growing collection of reference material. Books and periodicals of all kinds covered every available surface.

  “I like this building,” she said, finally settling into the Eames chair behind Jason’s analyst’s couch and crossing her legs.

  Jason nodded and took his desk chair opposite her. For many years he had liked this building, too. It was a jewel, a copy of the kind of buildings in Paris and Austria that were built before the turn of the century. It had a sandstone façade in the front and a heavy wrought iron and glass front door. The centerpiece of the ornate lobby was an elaborate staircase that wound around a central space open all the way to the top floor, where there was a stained glass skylight. The elevator was a cage with a folding gate that had never been replaced with anything more modern. Now that Emma was gone, Jason was seriously considering moving, growing a beard. He stroked his chin in a rabbinical sort of way, waiting for Milicia to reveal her reason for being there.

  She swiveled from side to side, showing off her long legs.

  “I feel a little nervous,” she murmured. “It’s an odd situation, particularly since we met socially.… Of course, you must get this all the time.”

  Jason smiled neutrally. So far Milicia had revealed that she was sophisticated. She could appropriately identify the awkwardness of the situation and relate it to the present social context. Saying he got this all the time was meant to flatter him by enhancing his professional identity. His impressions of her were camera clicks.

  She knocked over her handbag with her foot, leaned over to right it, showing off her cleavage and a black lace bra.

  He had an uneasy feeling. Her flaunting was about on the level of a man carrying on a conversation with his hands in his pockets, rattling his change. Guess what I’ve got in here.

  Milicia did a lot of rattling her change. Jason wondered why.

  Her eyes slid around the room again. “Your books are reassuring. I’ve always loved books. If you’ve read them all, you must know what you’re doing.” She laughed briefly.

  “The clutter is nice, too,” she went on. “It means you’re not one of those uptight people without any real feeling. You’re not a plastic person.” She studied him intently, a smile playing on the lower half of her face.

  Jason didn’t respond to this foray either. He was clicking the camera on her. And also on himself as he measured his reactions to her. It wasn’t clear to him what was going on.

  “So. Why don’t you tell me what’s happening with you, and what you think I can do to help,” he said.

  There was a long pause while she gazed at him some more, as if trying to decide if she could trust him.

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” she said finally. “I need some advice, that’s all. I didn’t want to talk to Charles about this. He’s a client. I’m sure you understand about that.” She shrugged. “You impressed me the other day. I figured I could ask you.”

  Jason nodded. “Go ahead.”

  “I’m very worried about my sister.” She crossed her legs the other way, and readjusted the handbag at her feet. Once again the blouse fell open.

  Jason picked up a new black and white notebook from his desk. “What worries you?”

  “Her behavior, her moods. She’s very sick, and I have no one to help me manage her. I’m afraid she’ll hurt herself, or someone else.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Oh, God. She’s out of control. She’s depressed, moody, violent. She’s had a problem with alcohol and drugs for years. When she drinks she’s vicious, screams at people, hits them—why are you taking notes?”

  Jason looked up. “Does it bother you?”

  Milicia frowned. “It gets in the way.”

  Jason closed the notebook. “Is there a special urgency about your sister right now?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I get the impression this has been going on for a long time. Why are you seeking professional help now?”

  Milicia bristled. “What kind of question is that?”

  “Just asking if something special has happened, a crisis?”

  “What if something really awful has happened? What do I do?”

  Jason glanced at his notebook but didn’t open it. He didn’t have to. He was trained to remember everything he saw and everything he heard. He waited for her to go on. In a second she did.

  “Do you know how hard it is on a family when there are two perfect children and then one of them starts going off? It’s like at the Olympics on the balance beam when the first back flip is straight on the mark and the next one a centimeter to the left. After that, a gymnast can’t get it back. She keeps going crooked until she falls off.”

  She was silent for a second.

  “And then the whole system comes crashing down, and nobody is left whole.”

  Jason nodded, touched by the way she said it, by the image of the child gymnast doing it right to a certain point and then faltering, failing to be “normal,” thus destroying the careful façade of the family front.

  “I know what that’s like,” he said gently.

  He looked at her with his inner eye, searching for the real person under the cloud of flaming red hair and dusky perfume, the perfect makeup and bravado. Who was really in there and what piece of music was being played?

  “Tell me,” he said to Milicia, “about falling off the balance beam.”

  9

  Sometimes on very sunny afternoons spikes of light forced their way through the few clean patches in the cracked basement window. Today the light looked to Camille like white grass growing up through a cracked pavement. The floor was crunchy where fallen plaster from the ceiling and walls got walked on for many months before anybody bothered to sweep up. Bare bricks showed through everywhere, discolored and chipped.

  It was very damp down there, even in summer, and the smell of urine was getting worse now that the puppy was older. Bouck said she had to do something about the smell.

  Camille sat on the floor with her back pressed into a corner, waiting for the bright light to fade. She could hear Jamal on the other side of the wall, polishing crystal with the sonar machine. There was kind of a whine, or a hum, that she sometimes thought was human. As long as she could hear it, she felt safe.

  Jamal wasn’t supposed to come on this side of the wall. The best chandeliers were in here, hanging from the low ceiling. On very bad days Camille stayed here, too, unable even to take the puppy out. The hum stopped, and she tensed.

  He wasn’t supposed to come on this side of the wall. Jamal smoked some kind of dope—hash or cocaine or something. And he touched her if he could get away with it. After he found out there were times she couldn’t move, he came in and touched her hair and her breasts. Now he wasn’t ever supposed to come on this side of the door.

  Bouck told Jamal he would kill him. Bouck had three guns. Camille thought he would do it. He would kill for her. No doubt about it. But Jamal didn’t care about the guns. He wanted to touch her fine hair, that pale, pale reddish gold that was so rare. It was a color and texture Jamal had never seen in Haiti, or Trinidad, or Jamaica, or wherever he came from. Camille didn’t like to talk to him. His hair was all matted and he smelled worse than the dog. Some religious thing. He listened to reggae through a Walk
man that Camille knew was the devil singing in his ear.

  The light moved just a little bit, and she turned her head. Upstairs in the shop she could hear the phone ring and someone answer. It wasn’t Bouck. Bouck was at an auction. No, no, somebody died. Bouck was looking at a dead person’s estate. Sometimes he went and took things out of dead people’s apartments before the IRS could get there to tax them. Sometimes he bought the whole estate. Bouck had a lot of money. He gave her money all the time and laughed when she forgot where she put it.

  “Easy come, easy go,” he said.

  A few weeks earlier Bouck shot somebody who was trying to get into the shop. It was Puppy that first heard the noise.

  Then Camille heard it. Nights were sometimes good for her and Bouck let her move around. That night she was free.

  “Bouck.”

  “Huh.” He jerked awake as if lightning had struck him.

  She stood outside his door because she didn’t like to go into his room at night no matter what.

  “Somebody’s downstairs.”

  He was up before the light was on, the .38 already palmed. He was down the two flights of stairs and in the basement within a few seconds, with Camille not far behind.

  It turned out to be a kid trying to jimmy the window in the basement. He didn’t even get inside. Before the window was all the way open, Bouck shot him. The bullet knocked him flat even though it didn’t kill him. Bouck would probably have shot him again, but the guy got up.

  Together Bouck and Camille ran up the stairs and watched out the window of the shop as the thief staggered down Second Avenue, bleeding all over the place. Bouck told her later the kid must have lived. There was nothing about it in the paper. He had Jamal wash down the sidewalk the next day, but no one ever came to ask any questions. Camille thought about the way Bouck had shot the boy. Even with Jamal around, Bouck always made Camille feel safe. Bouck could make war.