Hanging Time

by Glass, Leslie

  Now April shrugged. “Was she afraid of lying down?”

  “What are you saying? What are you getting at?”

  “I’m just wondering. Your sister just seems more like a victim than a murderer to me.” April said it mildly, but she knew she was pushing it. Instantly, Milicia flared up.

  “Are you accusing me of something?” She took a step toward April, suddenly revealing a powerful undercurrent of rage.

  For the first time, April realized what a big woman she was. The skimpy camisole revealed how wide her shoulders were, how deep her rib cage, well fleshed, with round pendulous breasts. Her bare arms had the definition of someone who worked out with weights. The full skirt of crinkled purple silk, billowing out from her waist, only expanded her impressive bulk.

  “Why the questions?” Milicia demanded. “What are you getting at? Don’t you believe me?”

  “Any problem with my asking?” April asked calmly. Still, she eased away from her, toward the door. She felt threatened by the woman, increasingly uneasy about being alone with her in the empty house. April was supposed to be somewhere else; she could almost hear the seconds ticking by as she lingered. Why didn’t she just go? She glanced toward the door, willing herself to leave.

  “I answered all your questions. I told you what happened. I told you everything.”

  April edged another step toward the door. Time was passing. She must go.

  “Don’t back away from me,” Milicia cried. “Why are you backing away from me? Why do you all do that?” A muscle in her cheek twitched.

  Why do you all do that? Who was Milicia talking about? Who else had backed away from her? April felt the weight of her off-duty handgun. The gun was in her purse. Her purse hung by a strap on her shoulder, touching her hip. There was no unobtrusive way to get her hand into it. She was alone, off-duty, on her way to her Sergeant’s test, couldn’t get to her gun without alerting Milicia, couldn’t seem to get out of the house.

  Milicia towered over her. “Don’t back away from me,” she said hoarsely.

  April stopped. “I’m not backing away from you. I have to go, that’s all. You want to sign a release for the dog?” As if to get the release, she reached for her bag.

  Now April could hear the dog pattering down the stairs. It hadn’t found its mistress, was coming back.

  “I didn’t touch her. She backed away from me for no reason. No reason,” Milicia said fiercely.

  “Backed away? How did Camille back away?” April asked.

  “Attack. I said attack. Can’t you hear?” Milicia took a step closer to April.

  Now she was near enough for April to feel her heat and smell the deep heavy perfume she wore. Milicia reeked of hot musk and fury. As April recoiled from the smell, her foot caught on the ornately carved ball foot of a table and she almost lost her balance.

  “Hey, watch that,” April said sharply. “Don’t touch me, I’m a police officer.”

  Milicia made a sound like a branch snapping. Her long arm snaked out and grabbed April before she could maneuver around the cumbersome table.

  “Let go!” April tried to recover her balance. “I don’t want to hurt you. I said let go.”

  Milicia’s grip was unexpectedly painful. April’s breath caught in her throat. She could feel her terror mounting. Milicia had begun to shake her, like a dog with a sock. Her sharp fingernails bit into April’s shoulders, right through her jacket. Her head snapped back as Milicia picked her up easily, and her feet left the ground. In the huge mirror April could see herself suspended, like a little Chinese doll.

  The grotesque mirrored image of herself struggling in Milicia’s powerful arms brought the last moments of the two dead girls into hideous focus. Also the ancient memory of an academy instructor, six feet four and built like a linebacker, holding her off the ground with one hand, laughing his head off at the sight of her helpless, flailing arms.

  You want to be a cop, little girl? Then don’t struggle. Use your pussy little brain and kick the shit out of me.

  I said, KICK ME, Officer.

  Yessir, whatever you say, sir. As she had done more than once in her life, April relaxed into a dead weight, then slammed her knee into the softest place of an opponent’s body. In Milicia’s case it was the stomach.

  The vicious blow caught Milicia by surprise. She doubled over, gasping for air. Released, April stumbled backward, hitting her head against the crown of a column with a marble bust on it. Still propelled backward, she hit the hard brass corner of the bulky table with the ball feet. The table prevented her from crashing to the floor. She held on to it, fumbling in her purse for her gun.

  “You’re crazy. You kicked me,” Milicia screamed as soon as she could find her voice. She hugged her stomach. “You hurt me.” Her face was contorted with surprise and rage.

  “You can’t hurt me.” Milicia started toward April as the tiny dog charged into the room. Finally free after twenty-four hours in the small kennel, perplexed by her missing mistress, and excited by the angry voices, the puppy started dashing around and around Milicia in a dizzying circle, barking wildly.

  “Stop that,” Milicia screamed.

  The puppy continued to bark shrilly. Her sharp baby nails pawed frantically at Milicia’s calf, giving April precious seconds to recover her balance and reach for her gun.

  The dog wouldn’t stop. It scratched at Milicia’s panty hose, at the hem of her skirt until the panty hose ripped and the puppy caught a nail in the tear.

  “Shit!”

  Milicia jerked away, back toward the center of the room, where she stood reflected in the mirror under the enormous crystal chandelier, lashing out savagely at the dog attached to her leg by a thread. The dog finally tumbled away, but Milicia went after it. The second time her kick missed the yipping ball of fur, her foot slammed into the library stairs that supported the antique mirror.

  “Noooo—” In the middle of a long piercing scream, Milicia could see the little dog turn and leap into the Chinese policewoman’s arms. She could see that the policewoman had a gun pointed at her. She saw the huge mirror jolt, then teeter. The horror on the policewoman’s face.

  The mirror pitched forward, setting the sparkling crystals on the chandelier above it into a gentle swaying dance. And in the last shimmering, light-filled split-second before the full weight of five hundred pounds of wood and glass came crashing down on her, crushing her skull, Milicia understood it wasn’t the policewoman who ended her life. It was the dog.

  EPILOGUE

  April walked slowly out of the precinct, sucking in the crisp fall air with the relief of someone who’d been in prison for a long time and hadn’t thought she’d ever be released. She looked up. The sky was a brilliant afternoon blue, scattered with the thinnest patches of pure white. She knew each kind of cloud cover had its own name, but until the names applied to some case she was working, she’d probably never learn what they were. Free. She was finally free to leave. Sanchez was somewhere behind her. She stopped on the sidewalk to wait for him.

  At three-thirty in the afternoon the entire block of Eighty-second Street from Columbus to Amsterdam was double-parked with police vehicles, marked and unmarked. Many, many years ago the police union had bargained for the right of officers to drive their cars from wherever they lived and park them around the precincts where they worked, instead of having to travel on public transportation. From time to time, the lack of police on the subways and buses during rush hours and the glut of illegal parking around precincts engendered a swell of bad feeling, followed by some token action. None was in force today.

  In addition to the solid line of double-parked cars, uniforms swarmed all over the sidewalk. Several nodded to April and called out to her. News traveled fast. She’d upset a prominent case that had been cleared only the day before. “Police Detective Involved in Death of Former Suspect” wouldn’t look good in the headlines or on the evening news. The department had to get the story straight.

  Since the ambulance door
s had closed on the body of Milicia Honiger-Stanton, April had been questioned for many hours—despite a pounding headache and severe bruises—about the events that had occurred in the building on Second Avenue. For over two hours she had been isolated from Mike and Sergeant Joyce while each was questioned separately.

  A mean-eyed Lieutenant she’d never seen before had a long list of doubts about her story. He kept asking why she had returned to the building today. His repetition of the question implied disbelief that she was following orders to take the dog there. How could that be the case? It was a day she wasn’t even on duty. She had been scheduled to take her Sergeant’s exam. What about that?

  “I missed it, sir,” April told him.

  The Lieutenant continued to scowl at her. Not for the first time she had been uncomfortably aware of how the stale air always hung heavy in questioning rooms. Sometimes innocent people panicked in the closed spaces, looking guilty under the pressure of having to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Over and over until they got it right. She was also reminded how hungry-making this kind of stress could be. Sometimes the questioners fed people to encourage disclosure. Sometimes they did not. They had not fed her.

  “We know you missed the test, Detective.”

  “I was working off the chart, but I was on police business. Will I have another chance to take the exam?”

  He laughed sourly. “Maybe in five years—if you’re telling the truth.”

  April flushed. Five years might be the next time the test would be offered. That would be too late. By then, she’d already have Lieutenant’s pay, and it would be a demotion no one in their right mind would dream of taking. What a system. You could be promoted to detective, but had to pass a test to be a Sergeant or Lieutenant. Once you became a Captain, you could be promoted to any rank above. But with each promotion came a reassignment. For her it would mean she could no longer be a detective. She’d be reassigned to some other department. She might get to be a Sergeant in the detective bureau sometime in the future, but then again she might not.

  A lot of people in her position would not risk taking the test. She had the pay and the job. Getting the rank meant they could put her in uniform and send her out to supervise foot patrol officers in the Bronx. They could stick her with a desk job anywhere at all.

  Maybe it was a power thing. Maybe it was a gender thing. Maybe it was an ethnic thing. All she was absolutely sure of was she wanted respect. She wanted the rank. She waited for the color to fade from her cheeks.

  “I am telling the truth, and I’d like an opportunity to reschedule the exam now, sir.”

  The Lieutenant’s fingers did a little dance on his knee as he thought it over. He personally might have nothing to do with it, but he scared her all the same because you never knew who had the juice to do what.

  “We’ll see what can be arranged,” he said finally.

  That’s what made her think she’d be out of there by dinner time. It occurred to her then that the only way to make it in this world was not by being honey for the bees, as her mother advised, but by fighting for her rights every step of the way.

  Mike came up behind her, took her arm as if he had ownership, and steered her out of the crowd. “You did good work, querida. You’re a first-rate detective.”

  April forgot about the uniforms watching them from all sides. She squeezed his arm against her side. “Thanks for standing up for me in there.”

  Sanchez grinned. “What’s a rabbi for?”

  Oh, so now he was a rabbi again. “I don’t know what a rabbi’s good for. I’ve never been to church.” April laughed. “How about food? Are you good for food? That son of a bitch gave me a little water but not a thing to eat. Must have thought I deliberately set out this morning to murder a woman twice my size.”

  “Fine. I’m good for food.” They strolled to Columbus and stopped on the corner. “What do you feel like eating?”

  It was a loaded question. April hesitated. In five hours she would be meeting with Jason Frank to have dinner and Start working on the procedure to get Camille out of Bellevue, as well as appointing a guardian to see that she got the treatment she needed. April had promised Jason Chinese and was determined to pay for it.

  The light turned green, turned red, turned green again while she thought about it. Finally she realized that what she wanted was to sit down with Mike and have a long, long talk about a whole lot of things: his dying wife, Maria, and his mother in the Bronx, what his hopes for the future were, and why he hadn’t taken the Lieutenant’s test a few months ago when Sergeant Joyce did. She wanted to breathe in his powerful spicy aftershave and … eat a burrito.

  She glanced at him, a tiny smile teasing the corners of her rosebud mouth. Without a word, he nodded and steered her left for Mexican.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Leslie Glass is the author of BURNING TIME, LOVING TIME, TO DO NO HARM, TRACKING TIME, JUDGING TIME, and STEALING TIME. She divides her time between New York and Sarasota.

  Turn the page for an exciting preview of Leslie Glass’s suspense novel starring N.Y.P.D. detective April Woo and psychoanalyst Jason Frank!

  LOVING TIME

  Look for LOVING TIME by Leslie Glass at your favorite bookstore.

  Raymond Cowles died of love on the evening of his thirty-eighth birthday. It happened on Sunday, October 31, after a long battle for his soul. As with many bitter conflicts, the end was abrupt and unexpected. In the same way as love had come on him unexpectedly and caught him by surprise after a lifetime of loneliness and despair, death crept up on Ray from behind without his even knowing that his release from ecstasy and anguish was at hand.

  Since his twenties, Ray had flipped past the passages about love in the books he read. The movie versions of passion and lust seemed stupid and unbelievable to him. Love was supposed to happen to men like him when scantily dressed, big-breasted women flashed the look that said “I’ll do anything. Anything at all.”

  Lorna had looked at him with those eyes; other women had, too. Many other women. Sometimes Raymond had even thought he’d seen it in the eyes of Dr. Treadwell. He never got it. Love to him was like a foreign language for which he had all the clues but couldn’t figure out the meaning. And he had learned to live without it as his own personal cross to bear, like a dyslexic who could never really read, or a patient with a terminal illness that wouldn’t go all the way and end his misery for a long, long time.

  Until six months ago, Raymond Cowles thought he had all his problems solved. He had made work the focus of his life, tried to find the same satisfactions in his personal life other people experienced in theirs. He wanted to feel what other people felt, and when he couldn’t, he acted as if he did.

  Then, six months ago, Ray Cowles finally understood what life was all about. He fell in love. The paradox was that real love, the kind that smacked into one so hard it turned a person all the way around, didn’t always happen as it should. The great passion of Raymond Cowles’s life came too late and was spiritually messy. Even though he was a man experienced at battling demons, Ray’s new demon was the worst he’d encountered.

  With Dr. Treadwell’s help he’d conquered all the others. First the demons that told him he was a bad child. Then the ones that told him he was stupid, not up to his studies. The big ones that said he was incompetent at his jobs. And always in the background there were those demons that told him he could never attract a girl, never satisfy a woman. These particular demons continued to torture him after he met Lorna, the endlessly sweet and understanding girl he married.

  The killer demon told him he was a failure at everything, even the years of psychoanalysis to which he had resorted half a lifetime ago for a cure. This was the demon that whispered to him in his sleep that his sudden and overwhelming passion at age thirty-seven was beyond disgusting and immoral. Love, for Raymond Cowles, was a fall from grace into the deepest pit of depravity from which abyss he was bound to fall even further into the very fires of Hell.
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  In the months prior to his death, as Raymond fell deeper from grace into lust and corruption, he wanted nothing more than to surrender at last to the first real feeling of contentment and joy he had ever experienced. But he wanted to fall and be saved with his love absolved. Surely everyone had the right to surrender to passion and be released from the excruciating anguish of sin. He had that right, didn’t he?

  But absolution didn’t come, and once again Raymond Cowles’s dreams were full of far-off women—high on cliffs when he was on the ground, or on shore when he was way out at sea. In dream after dream, these women waved their arms at him and told him, “Watch out, watch out.” And each time he awoke in a panic because he didn’t know what to watch out for.

  Then on October 31, at the very start of his new life, Raymond’s world collapsed. He felt he had no warning. He was cornered. For a few moments he was alone. And then he wasn’t alone. He was trapped with a person who wanted to kill him.

  “Save me, save me.” He tried to scream into the phone, into the hall, into the lobby of the building, out on the noisy street. Save me!

  He longed to reach for a life preserver, but there wasn’t one. Where was one? Where was a lifeboat? Where was safety?

  Help!

  At the end he was mute. He couldn’t cry out for help or make the move to save himself. In his last moments of panic, when Raymond Cowles was too frantic and distraught to make a sound, the very thing he had never been able to watch out for slipped out of the noisy Halloween night of dress-up and reveling on Columbus Avenue and took his breath away.

  At midnight on Halloween, two hours after Raymond Cowles died, Bobbie Boudreau slouched into the French Quarter. His mood matched the atmosphere of the seedy bar perfectly. To a Cajun from Louisiana, this was as far from the real French Quarter as a place could get. The old jukebox was a poor stand-in for even the worst live band and there was no compensation for the lack of a weary stripper migrating slowly back and forth across the bar. Charlie McGeoghan liked to tell Bobbie he’d named his dump the French Quarter because he’d heard New Orleans was a wild place, and even the word French sounded pretty wild to Charlie.