Hanging Time

by Glass, Leslie

  Mike parked the car in front of a hydrant, and they got out. Prince Street was both run-down and fixed up in the extreme. The street was narrow, crowded, and dirty. The loft buildings all around were crumbling. Not more than three or four stories high, many of them had been old sweatshops and warehouses. Now expensive façades on restaurants, art galleries, and clothing stores winked at the shabby street. Upstairs there still could be anything.

  April nodded at a gallery window featuring small wire sculptures of body parts. “This is it.” The door to the building had recently been painted a color April knew as Chinese red. She opened it.

  Inside, a metal cage door blocked access to the stairs. Even from the door April could see the treads dipping and sagging just the way they did in the building where she grew up. Also like home, the light was poor and the walls were coming down. Only here there wasn’t the pervasive smell of cooking food, garlic and ginger and scallions frying in peanut oil, duck roasting in honey and hoisin sauce. No sounds of squabbling families.

  Mike pushed the button beside the label that said YERGER. Instantly the metal door clicked open.

  “Third floor.” The voice on the intercom had no accent and invited them in without asking who was there.

  Mike and April exchanged glances. Even when expecting company, not many people did that in New York. They passed through the metal door, letting it clang shut behind them, then trudged up the three extraordinarily narrow flights of stairs. On the third floor there was no bell for the only door. Mike knocked on it.

  The dark-haired girl who opened it looked surprised to see them. She was wearing very short cut-off jeans and a halter that pushed her small breasts up. Her red lips puckered into a startled “Oh. What—?”

  “Detective Woo. I called a little while ago.” April showed her badge and cocked her head at Mike. “Sergeant Sanchez.”

  “She’s not here,” the girl said.

  “Who?”

  “You said you wanted Olga, didn’t you? Well, she’s not here.”

  “Do you mind if we come in and wait for her?” Mike smiled engagingly.

  The girl looked him over. “Actually, yes. It’s not a convenient time. I’m expecting company. I thought you were—”

  “We need to talk to Olga.”

  “Why? She hasn’t done anything.”

  “Then she won’t mind talking to us, will she?” Mike crowded her a little, moving forward so that she had to retreat.

  She backed into the apartment, protesting. “Hey, I said you can’t come in.”

  They came in. So did a huge Viking of a woman. She was over six feet tall and slender, with blue eyes and a mane of fine, pale hair almost down to her waist, which was a long way. Her choreographed entrance had her clicking through a beaded curtain. The first glimpses of her through colorful plastic that tried but did not succeed in looking like glass gave the impression that she was nude. But in fact she wore a short black leather skirt and matching leather bra.

  She, too, let out a surprised little “oh,” at her mistake, dropped her pose, and turned anxiously to her friend for help. The friend shook her head. The blond woman was a massive Scandinavian with a very little brain.

  In one take, on the girls and the place filled with soft sectional sofas and beaded curtains, April knew they were hookers. The cast-iron tub and shower was a featured item, right in the middle of the room with a standing mirror in front of it. The large TV screen and VCR were no doubt for dirty movies.

  “Olga?”

  The Viking nodded. “Ja.”

  “This is Sergeant Sanchez, and I’m Detective Woo of the New York Police.” Once again April displayed her badge. Before she had a chance to say anything more, tears began gushing out of Olga’s Delft-blue eyes.

  “Please,” she sobbed. “Don’t turn me in. I only yust started. Yust started.”

  “Shut up,” the other girl snapped. “They’re not here about that.”

  The waterworks stopped abruptly. Olga smiled tentatively.

  April glanced at Mike. He was choking on a cough.

  April said, “Tell me about Saturday.”

  “Saturday?” Olga darted an anxious look at her mentor. “You said—”

  The girl rolled her eyes.

  “We want to know about the shop The Last Mango. Who came in. Who bought things. We want to know about Maggie, okay?”

  Olga frowned. “Maggie?”

  “Maggie Wheeler, the girl who works in The Last Mango with you.”

  A look of pure amazement crossed Olga’s otherwise vacant face. “Is she whooking, too?”

  “No, she’s not whooking. She’s dead. Someone killed her on Saturday evening in the store.”

  This was clearly news to Olga. She collapsed onto several sections of sofa. “Wow.”

  “So we need to know everything that happened in the store that day.”

  “I don’t know that.”

  “What don’t you know?”

  “I don’t know what happened in Lost Mango. I didn’t go Saturday.” Glance at mentor.

  “She had a cold,” mentor explained. “She stayed in bed all day.”

  “I’ll bet,” Mike said.

  “Ja, ja. Sneeze, sneeze all day.”

  “Looks like you recovered enough to get back to work today.” Sanchez was getting impatient.

  “Don’t go Moonday. Moonday day off.”

  “I meant your other work,” Mike said pointedly.

  “Huh?” Olga gaped at them.

  April shook her head. This wasn’t getting them anywhere. “Why don’t you tell us everything you know about The Last Mango and Maggie Wheeler.”

  Olga turned to her friend for guidance one last time and nodded okay when none was forthcoming. April took out her notebook and wrote the date, the time, the place, and Olga Yerger’s name. The buzzer sounded from downstairs. Ah, their customer had arrived. The mentor with the brain hurried out the door to head him off.

  12

  The outer door clicked shut as Milicia departed. Jason returned to his desk and checked the skeleton clock. It was six o’clock and still running. He had a fifteen-minute break. A patient was due at six-fifteen and another at seven. His stomach rumbled. He had eaten the last English muffin for breakfast, and as far as he knew, his kitchen had nothing else in the way of food. After his last patient, he’d have to go over to Broadway or Amsterdam to get something to eat. He dreaded the prospect of sitting in a restaurant alone.

  Evenings were the worst for Jason. The worst was going out the door of his office, turning right to the door of his apartment, twisting the key in the lock, and finding the lights off, the air still. No sounds of activity reached out to him from the kitchen or bedroom. No discernible human odors hung around to comfort him. At nine-thirty, when he finally went home, his patient hours over and his many procrastinations all used up, the soothing aroma of that morning’s coffee had dissipated some fourteen hours before. With the air conditioner off, the temperature rose to the eighties by noon, baking the dust and emptiness into a stuffy animal’s den that his return didn’t seem to diffuse.

  Every day without Emma was a new shock. He had always felt a couple could negotiate for anything—lifestyle, time, attention, love. He had been wrong. There was more to a good relationship than tough bargaining for the satisfaction of needs. Some things had to be given gratis, with no expectation of return. Jason felt a little dizzy, even nauseated, as he remembered how resentful he used to feel at the banalities of domesticity. Now what he faced every night in the different rhythms of his many ticking antique clocks, and smelled in the nighttime gloom of his airless apartment, was despair.

  He was comforted by the thought that he didn’t have to worry about going home for several hours. His work wasn’t over. He sat down at his desk and reached for the black notebook he had started for Milicia Honiger-Stanton.

  There was the little look of triumph that came over her face when she asked him not to take notes and he slapped the notebook shut. He
r expression did not escape him. He knew what body language and the order of words meant. He knew what to watch out for and what to ask. He did not need to take notes to remember what Milicia said, or the order in which she said it. He took information in and swallowed it whole, processing and saving it like a computer. He had fourteen minutes now to re-create what Milicia had told him about her family. He got to work, writing quickly.

  Milicia and Camille Honiger-Stanton grew up in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where, as she put it, “nobody was poor.” They lived in a big house on the road to the public beach. Milicia described their mother as German in origin, slavish, and depressed. Their father was an alcoholic. The father’s family was English. In Connecticut such things mattered. The Stantons were the ones with the culture and the money. Hilda Honiger, Milicia told Jason, probably started her career in America as a maid. She never conquered her accent. Milicia said she didn’t know when, or why, her parents’ names were joined by a hyphen. She thought it must have amused her father to annoy his family. He liked turmoil, she added.

  “Did your mother or father ever get treatment for their problems?” Jason had asked.

  Milicia laughed. “Are you kidding? They didn’t think they had problems. Camille had problems.”

  “Camille is older or younger?”

  “Than me? Two years younger. She’s twenty-eight now.”

  “When did her problems start?”

  “Eighth grade.” Milicia said it firmly.

  Well, Jason had asked himself: if Camille had problems dating back to eighth grade, why the urgency now, more than a dozen years later?

  “So what were Camille’s problems?” he asked.

  “Oh, God. What weren’t?” Milicia pursed her lips. “She had screaming tantrums. Uses foul language. She’s sexually promiscuous, does kinky things with black men.”

  Jason mentally noted the change in tense.

  “She was accident prone, always hurting herself. She’s tried suicide. She drinks a lot. Takes drugs, too. What else?” Milicia shook her head. “I told you about the tantrums. Um, she screams at people and throws things, hits people. Of course, you wouldn’t know it if you looked at her. She looks beautiful, vulnerable. That’s her thing. But she’s really vicious. She thinks she’s ugly and starves herself. She’s been bulimic. I don’t know what else.”

  “Does she hear voices, see things?”

  “I don’t know. Uh, I don’t think so.”

  “Does she feel anyone is out to get her? Strangers, or people she sees on the street?”

  “Yes, yes. That’s probably so.”

  “Who does she think is after her?”

  Milicia thought about it. “Oh, you know, she gets really frustrated and hurt when a man dumps her. Resentful. She starts to look at men funny, really crazy. She says men are out to get her, hurt her.”

  That didn’t sound so crazy to him. “You seem very convinced there’s something terribly wrong with your sister. What exactly is your concern?”

  “She can be dangerous. There’s nobody to look out for her but me. What if she hurts someone? I wouldn’t want to be responsible.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “They’re dead.” Milicia had said it flatly, tapping her foot with impatience at him.

  Why impatient, he wondered. Maybe it was her own perception that her sister was crazy. Maybe she was the one in need of help. “Both of them?”

  “Yes, they died in a car accident about a year and a half ago.”

  “That’s rough.”

  Milicia chewed on her lips and nodded. He felt sorry for her then. She described having to sell the house she had grown up in and most of its contents. She told him about her fury at the IRS for expecting so much money. What was left would be split between her and Camille, but that was a ways off.

  “You don’t get the money until the estate is audited. The IRS has three years after the death to do it. Anyway, the money is in trust. Camille can’t do anything crazy with it,” Milicia said.

  Jason asked her if she was worried about that. Maybe her concern here was really money.

  “No, no,” Milicia assured him. It wasn’t the money that bothered her. She was afraid of Camille herself, afraid of what she might do.

  It was then that she told him how she’d seen Camille kill an animal. “We were baby-sitting together—I used to go with her sometimes. She didn’t have a lot of tolerance for little kids, so I’d go to keep a lid on.” She shrugged.

  “This time one of them—it was a girl, about five—got to her while they were playing with a pet rabbit—Camille’s anger seems to be focused on girls. Well, she grabbed the rabbit and threw it at the wall so hard, it didn’t get up. Then she put it back in the cage and told the girl’s parents it died in its sleep. So, you see, I’m concerned.”

  Jason did not have time to ask Milicia what her part was in that baby-sitting experience when her younger sister lied to the parents of her charge about the death of her pet. The forty-five minutes were over. He did try to get her to pinpoint her reason for coming to a professional, for choosing him in fact—apparently out of the blue—when their parents had died nearly two years ago, and Camille’s problems, if indeed they existed, were many years old. At this point he had no reason to either believe or disbelieve what Milicia told him. He was just listening, trying to figure out what it was all about.

  Milicia was impatient at him for not getting it. He asked her if she would like to come back and talk about it some more.

  “Well, I have to, don’t I? There’s this thing that’s happening, and you haven’t told me what to do yet.”

  “I can give you the name of a good psychiatrist for Camille,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I need to talk to you. There’s more to it than that.”

  “My fee is a hundred and seventy-five dollars an hour for consultations.”

  “I told you I don’t care about money. I care only about my sister. She’s all I have left.”

  Jason remembered all of this and a great deal more. What he wrote was: Woman, middle thirties. Concerned about behavior of sister. Informant does not present herself as a patient in need of help for herself. Eloquent, expressive, sexually seductive. Too much perfume—Opium. Story about sister is difficult to conceptualize symptomatically. Informant says sister’s paranoid, possibly dangerous. No delusions or history of assaultive behavior or OMS. Impression deferred.

  He heard the outer door close and looked at the clock. It was six-thirteen. He placed a call to Charles to ask him about Milicia. Charles’s answering machine was on. Jason left a message, then checked the skeleton clock again. Six-fifteen exactly. He got up to open the door. He had two more patients and a number of phone calls to deal with before he had to face looking for food and going home. He had heard many stories like Milicia’s. They were always puzzles; their true meaning came together slowly over a long period of time. Milicia could very well be a hysteric looking for attention for herself. It was way too soon to tell. He dropped Milicia’s notebook in the filing cabinet under his desk and closed the drawer. By the time he opened the door for his favorite patient, Daisy—a twenty-five-year-old affective schizophrenic he’d been seeing for many years—he was no longer thinking about Milicia.

  13

  It was still light at eight o’clock. Downstairs, three reporters hung around, hoping to get more details on the case before their deadline for the morning papers. At two, the NYPD spokesman from downtown had read from a statement about what the reporters were now calling “the boutique slaying.” The information had come too late for that day’s papers and left a whole lot of questions unanswered, including the victim’s identity. By five that information was released so Maggie Wheeler’s name could appear on the six o’clock news along with the clip of her corpse bag being loaded into an ambulance.

  April and Mike didn’t have to see the news to know what was in it. As they came in, the desk sergeant was busy with a huge woman in a black silk dress. A thi
ck coating of a white powder covered the woman’s face like a mask. She was claiming that a calico cat in the neighborhood was Christ.

  “What would you like me to do about it?” the Desk Sergeant asked politely.

  They headed for the stairs, passing the reporters camped out in Reception without being stopped. That was one advantage of not being in charge.

  Upstairs in the squad room, the noise level was high, and the air conditioner wasn’t up to its job. The accused mugger who had been so disruptive earlier was no longer in the pen. Two other detectives, both older men with their stomachs sprung and their hair going, were sitting at the desks April and Sanchez had used on the day shift. They didn’t look up from their typewriters as April and Sanchez headed straight for the squad supervisor’s office without stopping first to check for messages.

  Sergeant Joyce was still there, the phone receiver plugged into her ear. She looked as if she’d been in a dogfight, short hair on end, eyes bloodshot and pouchy, blouse a mess. She hadn’t given up her office to the night supervisor, probably had to kill him for it, April thought.

  Hah, considering her boss’s concentration right then, Sergeant Joyce was probably talking to the Mayor himself. April had to revise that speculation when Joyce banged the receiver down at the sight of them. “Well?”

  “Scratch Olga,” Mike said, taking a chair. “She didn’t go in that day and says she doesn’t know a thing.”

  “Didn’t work at all Saturday?”

  “Oh, she worked, just not at the store.”

  April took her usual place on the windowsill so that Sergeant Joyce had to turn her head to address her.

  “What the fuck does that mean, Sanchez?” Joyce didn’t have a lot of patience. This was the kind of case that drove everybody nuts. Columbus Avenue, just around the corner from the precinct, was an upscale neighborhood. Lot of wealthy people lived and shopped there. Reporters in bush jackets no less were hanging around downstairs, cluttering up the place and making everyone nervous with their expectation of a break in the case at any moment. The press was like having a bunch of the other team’s cheerleaders jeering “Do something, do something. When are you going to do something?” all day long while the detectives on the case tried to ignore them and get their work done.