Nine more clocks finished their roll call, but the ringing persisted. Shit. He opened his eyes. The vertical blinds were open enough for him to see that outside, the sky was just beginning to lighten with the dawn. Emma’s alarm clock with the Day-Glo face showed that it was six thirty-two. That made it three thirty-two in California, too early to be a wake-up call from Emma. The loud, unruly sound was the bell of his oldest telephone, the kind that most people had replaced a long time ago with the kind of phone that burbled like a mourning dove. Jason didn’t want to answer it. It was a half hour too early to get his brain in gear, and there wasn’t a soul in the world other than Emma he wanted to talk to.
Shit. He reached for the phone. “Hello.”
“Happy birthday. What is it—thirty-nine or forty?”
Jason groaned again. It was his birthday. “Same as you, Charles.”
“What’s the matter? Did I wake you up?” There was an edge to Charles’s voice.
Jason sat up, rubbing his eyes. “No, I’ve been up celebrating for hours.”
“Good, I wouldn’t want to wake you up. Did you get my message?”
“No, I got in so late last night I didn’t pick up the messages.” He paused. “You didn’t call at six-thirty to say happy birthday. What’s going on?”
“Maybe you should tell me. Actually, I’m surprised you didn’t call me in on this before.” The edge sharpened.
Oh, it was about Milicia. Jason waited for Charles to explode. He did.
“I don’t get it, Jason. Milicia is a friend of ours, a colleague. You met her in our home. The least you could do is keep me informed of a situation like this.” Charles’s voice was tight with anger.
“She came to me professionally, Charles. You know I couldn’t talk to you about that.”
“Milicia called me last night. She was so upset by the way you’ve handled things, she spent half the night with us.” He fell silent, then added, “Brenda told her she could stay over, but Milicia said she couldn’t.”
A heavy accusation hung in the air. Jason didn’t respond.
“Jason, is this true? Are you responsible for having Milicia’s sister arrested for murder?”
“No, she has not been arrested. But she is a very sick woman. And she was brought in for questioning. I was at the police station for hours last night. They wanted a preliminary evaluation of her and didn’t want to send her to Bellevue.”
“I’m just astounded by all this. Milicia is devastated. She’s afraid her sister will go to prison. She blames you for dragging the police into it.”
“Charles, Milicia came to me because she was fearful that Camille was dangerous. Since then two young women have died. Milicia told me she believed Camille was responsible for their murders. What was I supposed to do? I had no choice. Absolutely no choice. Milicia had to go to the police with the information she had. Look, do you have a half hour sometime today? I’ll fill you in.”
“Jesus, Jason, I can’t believe you didn’t call me. Shit. What is this—Wednesday? I have a cancellation at one forty-five. We could talk then.”
“Fine. I’ll meet you halfway. How’s Madison and Seventy-ninth?”
“That’s more than halfway for you, thanks. Ah, Jason, where is she now?”
“Camille? She’s at her home. Oh, and Charles—the suspect is her boyfriend. He had a gun, and apparently there was some kind of shootout.” The words sounded strange in Jason’s mouth. He didn’t know the kind of people who were in shootouts.
“God! Was anybody hurt?” Charles sounded shocked.
“Yes, the suspect and a policeman, as I understand it. I don’t know the nature of their injuries, but Camille has lost her caregiver. She’s going to need a lot of supervision.”
“Should she be hospitalized?”
“We’ll talk about it later.” Emma’s alarm clock started ringing. “I’ve got to get going.”
Jason hung up and stretched. He didn’t like the way the bed looked, only a small slice of it mussed, and the rest still made up, the pillows untouched. Twice a week Marta, the cleaning lady he’d had for a dozen years, made the bed for him. The rest of the time he messed it up and left it that way. He kicked the bedcovers off his naked body and pushed them around with his feet. The sun was now pushing in through the blinds, clearly revealing a thick layer of dust on the slats. His body looked slack and soft to him. He was damp with sweat, and his bladder was full. He got up to urinate for the first time in his fortieth year.
63
It was supposed to be better at night. It was always better at night. Depression moved in on Camille in the mornings, rumbling into the city by the bridges and tunnels in a caravan of eighteen-wheelers that pitted and dented the streets so badly, no one was safe negotiating the potholes.
Starting at four or five on bad days, she could feel it coming. She could see in inches, how the blackness of night began to break up into little pieces. And like the night fading away, she disintegrated, too, as unrecognizable bits of herself plunged into the Bermuda Triangle of another dawning day.
Camille was constantly, perpetually afraid. The knot in her stomach pushed up from below, crushing her chest and heart. It was painful to breathe. An animal stuck in her throat, chewed away at her from the inside. Sometimes she saw it as a tapeworm, thick and gray, sometimes as a cloud of poison gas. Today when she shut her eyes, she saw a formless thing, all mouth, eating her heart out. There was nothing in her, no human organs, nothing. Her body was an empty package with a bomb inside. She could hear it ticking away.
Bouck was in the hospital. The doctor told her that, but she didn’t cry. The policewoman at the police station said she couldn’t locate Milicia to take care of her, and they couldn’t keep her there, so they had to let her come home. Still she didn’t cry. She was numb.
The doctor said he would talk to her again so they could figure out what happened.
“When?” she wanted to know.
“Sometime tomorrow,” he told her.
No, she meant, “What happened when? What happened now or what happened a long time ago?”
He didn’t say.
Camille and Puppy came home in a police car. Her heart pounded all the way. A policewoman, big as a house, guarded her in the back seat, then let her out. She opened the doors of Bouck’s building with Camille’s key, then walked behind Camille and Puppy up the stairs.
The pounding in her chest intensified when she saw blood all over the hall floor. There was blood on the walls, too, and sticky tape marking off the places where no one was supposed to go. No one had cleaned the blood up. It left a sick smell in the moldy place.
The bomb inside Camille exploded. She tripped and pitched forward. The policewoman behind her reached out to stop her from crumpling on the floor.
At her touch, Camille started shrieking.
She grabbed the banister, smearing the blood, a shrill sound of pure terror pulsing from her throat. “Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me.”
The wall of blue recoiled. “Honey, I’m not going to hurt you—”
Not a second later the other one lunged through the door. “What’s going on?”
It was the one who drove the car, a man. He looked nervous.
Camille screamed, a cop on either side of her. “No, no!”
The power that kept her safe was gone. Bouck wasn’t there to protect her. “Get away from me!” she cried.
Her heart started pounding again. There was blood on her hands. “Where’s Bouck?” she whimpered.
She didn’t know what happened to Bouck. Puppy yelped, trying to jump out of her arms. The wall of blue moved closer.
Camille froze. Bouck must have killed a policeman with one of his guns and left all that blood behind. Or a policeman had killed him. She stared, bug-eyed, at the two cops.
For a moment no one moved. Then the woman said, “It’s okay, honey. No one will touch you.” She cocked her head at the cop by the door and moved away from Camille to show they wouldn’t touch her. T
hen she looked around the warehouse of the second floor in amazement, but didn’t get any closer to Camille, or say anything about the place.
Camille was too upset to tell her they were redecorating.
It took a long time before she could ask what happened.
The policewoman said she didn’t know. Camille didn’t believe her, didn’t know what to do. She wouldn’t go upstairs to the room where she slept, wouldn’t stay on the second floor with all the blood. Finally she went to Bouck’s room, to sit in the bergère she had chosen for him, the new one that he liked.
The policewoman sat by the door in a hard wooden chair she had brought from downstairs, and watched Camille all night. Her eyes didn’t droop. Camille could feel them, wide open, gaping at her. All night she could hear another bomb inside her ticking away.
It was bad, very bad, by morning when the telephone rang. Camille listened to it for a while, not wanting to pick up. By the tenth ring she knew she had to pick up. It might be Bouck calling from the hospital. She reached for the receiver.
Milicia’s voice came out of it like a snake out of a charmer’s basket. “Bouck, what’s happened to Camille?” Her voice was harsh and wild. “I’m so worried about her.”
Camille didn’t say anything.
“Talk to me. I know you’re there.”
Still Camille didn’t say anything.
“You son of a bitch. You’re responsible for this. If Camille is sent to prison, I don’t know what I’ll do. Poor Camille, you did this to her.” Milicia was sobbing.
Milicia was crying for her. Camille didn’t want Milicia to cry.
“Bouck, just tell me where she is. I want to see her.” Milicia’s voice was pitiful.
“I’m here,” Camille said in her little-girl voice.
“What?” The crying stopped abruptly.
“I’m right here,” Camille said.
“I thought—I came by, looking for you last night. There were police all over the place. They said you weren’t there.”
“Well, now I’m here,” Camille said, watching the big policewoman by the door.
“Didn’t they arrest you?”
“I didn’t shoot. I think Bouck did.”
“What? Are you crazy? They were hung, not shot. Don’t play dumb. You know they were hung.” Milicia sounded annoyed.
“They were shot, Milicia. There’s blood all over the place.”
Milicia thought about that for a second.
“Camille, let me talk to Bouck,” she said finally.
“He’s in the hospital.” Camille started to cry.
“Which one?”
“They didn’t tell me.”
“Shit, are you alone there?”
“No. They’re watching me.” Puppy stirred at her feet, stretched, then squatted on the rug.
“Who’s watching you?” Milicia demanded.
“Police,” Camille whispered.
“Look, I’ll be right over.”
Camille shook her head. No, Milicia, don’t come over. Don’t. But Milicia had hung up. She was already gone. The policewoman started talking into the radio she carried on her belt. Camille couldn’t hear what she said. She glanced at the puddle Puppy had left on the floor, then picked Puppy up and hugged her.
64
Okay, what do we have here?”
The A.D.A. surveyed the room full of people, half of them with containers of coffee as well as their notebooks in front of them. They were all talking at once.
“Come on, let’s see if we have a case here.” Penelope Dunham was a no-nonsense kind of woman somewhere in her middle forties who looked as if she ate only on rare occasions, saving up her appetite the rest of the time for her opponents in court. Tall and excruciatingly thin, she had a sharp nose with half glasses perched on the bridge, short curly brown hair, intense brown eyes, and a perpetual furrow between strong, untweezed eyebrows. She wore a gray suit with a pearl-gray blouse buttoned all the way up to the neck, low-heeled gray pumps, no jewelry or makeup. Two heavy black bags sat at her feet.
“For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Penny Dunham, the assistant district attorney on this case. Before we’re through, you’re going to know me better than you want to.” After having been up half the night and giving herself no cosmetic help, she looked every minute of her age.
She finished shuffling her papers and turned her unflinching gaze on Sergeant Joyce. Joyce had had even less sleep and the additional job of getting two unwilling kids off to their second day of school. Still, she’d taken the time to put some rouge on her cheeks in approximately the right places, some lipstick on her mouth, and the drops she used in her eyes “to take the red out.”
April had seen her struggling to pull herself together only moments before. April’s own eyes, hidden in their Mongolian folds, looked as fresh and bright as always. She was lucky that way, and knew if she could keep enough fat on her body, and not wither away like her mother, she’d age better than anybody. Joyce, Woo, and Dunham were the only women in the room.
Penelope nodded at Ducci, who had made his second rare emergence from the police labs, and Dr. Baruch from the M.E.’s office. Penelope, with her Daughter of the American Revolution background, was an anomaly in a D.A.’s office, where most of the prosecutors were on their way somewhere else, were ethnically diverse with distinct New York neighborhood accents and a wide range of coloring.
April had never worked with her before, but Mike called her “lock-’em-up Penny” because he once heard her dismiss the testimony of a hostile witness by demanding, “Don’t you think our police officers have better things to do than go around arresting innocent people?”
It was nine o’clock in the morning, the earliest they could get together. Dunham had requested that the detectives on the case go downtown to the D.A.’s office because it would be easier on her team—her second in the case, Mario Santorelli, and her investigator from the D.A.’s office, retired Lieutenant Bill Scott of NYPD, now just Bill Scott. Because of the delicacy of the situation and the number of people involved, however, it hadn’t turned out that way.
Sergeant Roberts was off the case, being investigated himself for having shot the suspect. Bouck had taken a .38 slug in his right lung, which had made such a mess, he only just survived the surgery. He was as yet unable to speak, and his condition was listed as guarded. Lieutenant Braun was in the hospital, on a different floor, not feeling too good with a couple of mashed bones in his right foot.
But still there were a lot of people. In addition to the three from the D.A.’s office, there were six people from the Two-O, Ducci, and Dr. Baruch. There weren’t enough chairs. Sanchez and two other detectives leaned against the wall.
Ducci scowled as if already he wasn’t happy with the way things were going. “I got the stuff from the Stark case only yesterday. Haven’t touched the bag of clothes from the suspect’s house. Haven’t got anything else from the house,” he grumbled. He didn’t mind people telling him what to look for, but hated being told what he had. He already told them he wasn’t finished.
“—yesterday evening. What do you think I am, a magician?” Baruch’s words rose to the surface, then he looked around and was silent.
“Supposed to be. Want to share the autopsy report with us or keep us in suspense?” Scott threw his two cents in.
“What do you want—the whole thing, or just the pertinent parts?” Baruch opened the report.
“What do you think?”
“Fine, the pertinent parts. Rachel Stark died by strangulation, same as Wheeler. Can’t tell you the exact time. Sometime Saturday night, probably. Interesting thing. Recently she’d had surgery, had only one kidney. Had some pretty bad keloid scarring around her—”
“Anything else relevant to the case?” Penny interrupted. “We have a lot to go through.”
“Bruises around the neck and shoulders. Makeup on her face like the other case”—he looked up—”traces, I mean. Three deep scratches on the right arm. Some dirt u
nder her fingernails, nothing else. Looks like she was overpowered and died without too much of a struggle. Just like the Wheeler case.”
“What about the blood on the floor?”
“She had her period. Must have bled right through her Tampax just prior to, or at the time of her death.”
Ducci coughed. “What about the pattern marks on her right ankle?”
Baruch nodded and passed around some photos of Rachel Stark, naked on the autopsy table. Two blowups showed a small black curve with four tiny black dots on one side of it. “Looks like a bite mark. I’ve called a dentist to take a look.”
Penelope studied one of the photos, then tossed it to her assistant, frowning. “What kind?”
“What bites on the ankle?” Ducci said sarcastically.
“What? Rats, mice? What?” Santorelli stared glumly at the picture.
Little animals gnawed holes. None of the detectives said anything.
“Woof woof. Here comes the mailman.” Ducci rolled his eyes.
“Oh, God, the dog.” Penny slapped her forehead and looked around for Mike, who had been the one to brief her for the warrant the night before. The dog hairs had been part of the case. Dog hairs in the first victim’s nose.
“You still got the dog, Mike?”
“The dog is not in custody at the moment,” Mike said, glancing at April, who got very busy making a note. She had acquired hair samples from the puppy, but had let Camille take the dog home with her.
“Better get that animal in here before it disappears,” Penny said sharply.
“It isn’t going to disappear.” April spoke for the first time, though she wasn’t as confident as she sounded. Pretty stupid to send the dog home with the suspect’s girlfriend.
“What makes you so sure?”
“It helps with its owner’s sanity.”
“It could still disappear if somebody finds out it’s material evidence in a homicide.”
Hanging Time Page 30