Hanging Time awm-2 Read online

  “Braun. Like the coffeemaker.”

  “Maggie had a botched abortion, right?” McLellan looked angry.

  “Unh-unh. Someone strung her up on the chandelier in the boutique where she worked.”

  “Oh, God. My baby,” Roger McLellan cried. “She killed my baby.” He shook his head back and forth, horrified. “How could she do it?”

  “Who’s she?”

  “Maggie. You said she hung herself. Oh, God, that stupid bitch—”

  “No, Mr. McLellan. She didn’t kill herself. Somebody killed her.”

  McLellan slammed his hand on the table. “That’s not possible.”

  “Okay, Roger.” Braun dropped the “mister.” “Why don’t you tell us about your relationship with Maggie and why she might want to kill herself?”

  The young man shook his head, as if he didn’t want to, then started hesitantly. “We were friends. I don’t know why she’d want to kill herself.… Well, she got pregnant. I don’t know how it happened.”

  “You don’t know how it happened.” Braun jerked his head at April to underline that particular remark in her notebook. The man had the mental and emotional awareness of a tree. He didn’t know how it happened. “Got that?”

  April, the secretary, nodded, repeating, “He doesn’t know how it happened.”

  The door opened. Sanchez handed a folder to Braun. Braun opened it, looked inside briefly, then passed it to April. Sanchez took a chair and made a silent drumbeat on the edge of it with his fingers while April looked over Roger McLellan’s priors. Guy had over two dozen arrests for obstructing entrances to abortion clinics, harassing clients of abortion clinics, various types of vandalism to abortion clinics, demonstrations. One B and E.

  “She wanted to kill my baby, and it looks like she did.”

  April finished reading and looked up. McLellan had hidden his face in his hands. His shoulders were shaking with some emotion or other. It wasn’t clear exactly what his regrets were. He seemed more upset about the baby than Maggie. Langworth put his hand on Roger’s arm to comfort—or restrain—him. It struck April that neither of them cared what had happened to Maggie Wheeler.

  “Come on, Roger, I’ll take you home.”

  “Not so fast. We’re not finished here,” Braun broke in.

  “Look at him. He’s in no shape to answer any more questions. In any case, he was out of town when Maggie, uh, died. You can see he doesn’t know anything about it. When he feels better—if he feels better—you may come interview him in my office, but only subject to a specific written request.”

  “You want a subpoena, fine. We’ll get a subpoena.”

  “Do that, but don’t forget: If you try to harass a prominent leader of the right-to-life movement, we’ll have the press all over you.” Langworth stood up. So did his client.

  The demure Asian lowered her eyes to hide her reaction of total disgust. Way to go, Braun. Well handled. Tactful. Now the possible suspect will walk out of the precinct, get his lawyer pal to rip his shirt and mess his hair, then call the press and scream police brutality. She shook her head, not daring to look at Mike. The two of them would have done a lot better.

  38

  Jason stood on the patio, watching the fog dissipate from the trees below, listening to the nine new messages on his machine since the previous day. He checked his watch. Eight Sunday morning made it eleven on the East Coast. Odd. Three calls from Milicia.

  “What is it?” Emma came out of the glass doors holding a glass of orange juice.

  He frowned, shaking his head. “Nothing.”

  “That’s what you always say.” She turned around and headed back into the house. “It’s always something, and you always say it’s nothing.”

  “Hey, don’t go away mad.”

  “I know. Just go away.”

  “I didn’t mean that.” He followed her through the doors, still holding the phone. A Dr. Wilbur Munchin from Austria was speaking to him on tape, asking about having some meaningful correspondence about his latest paper on listening. Herr Docktor Munchin was in New York and wanted to meet. Then Charles was telling him he was in Manhattan on his own for the weekend and wondered if Jason was free for dinner. Then the fourth call from Milicia, breathless, saying she was desperately worried about her sister. It seemed that she was always desperately worried about her sister. Maybe worrying about her sister was her thing. Milicia rang off, and his patient Douglas started telling him he was having a panic attack over flying to Chicago to his father’s funeral. “Do I really have to go?” came the plaintive cry. Jason pushed the button to save the calls.

  “Was that for me?” he asked, watching Emma drink the orange juice he’d watched her squeeze only moments before.

  “No.”

  “You know I have to call in.”

  “You have only two speeds, Jason. On and on.”

  “I’m off now. Look.” He put the phone back in its cradle. But he felt bad about Douglas, torn between the funeral and his terror of the skies. Go, he said silently. Go for it, Douglas.

  “I guess I’d feel better if I knew who they were,” Emma murmured. “All these unseen rivals for your love and attention.”

  “The whole point is that no one knows who they are,” he replied mildly. It was better not to get defensive with Emma over old grievances. He refrained from adding no one was supposed to know who she was either. And her film career had changed all that.

  Emma swallowed the last of the orange juice without offering him a single sip. She would never have done that in the past. He sighed. “I miss you,” he said.

  She went back into the kitchen without answering. After a minute or two he looked up Milicia’s number in his telephone book and dialed it. In spite of Milicia’s desperate eagerness to talk to him, she wasn’t waiting for his call. He got her answering machine and spoke to her on tape. Same with Douglas.

  He heard the sound of the juicer and perked up. He and Emma still had a whole day and night.

  Sometime between five and five-thirty on Monday morning, Jason watched the dawn slowly suffuse Emma’s room with a soft gray light from the skylight over the bed. A thick blanket of fog did not descend low enough to hide the branches of the eucalyptus tree that towered over the house on the side of the back patio.

  In the Bronx, where he came from, very few trees dotted the sidewalks; every building was the same squat configuration of brick and concrete. Even in comparison to Riverside Drive, with its attractive park along the Hudson River, the town of Canyon Beach was beautiful. Still it seemed a pretty fragile setup.

  The first night he slept there he could see the shape of the tree, far blacker than the sky, framed in the skylight, and had to resist thoughts of it crashing through the roof of the house in a light wind. He was afraid of an earthquake, a natural disaster that would end in total destruction of the entire West Coast and most particularly this tiny portion of it. The foundation of Emma’s charming house seemed unbearably flimsy, the angle of the street going down to the beach way too steep.

  And he knew his anxiety about the durability of the setting was a mask to cover his grief about the fragility of his marriage, indeed the whole structure of his life. Emma told him she hated his lifestyle, his philosophy of work and being, his rigid personality. And then she let him hold her, make love to her. Indeed, kept him up half the night with the other half of her ambivalence.

  Jason lay still, listening to the quiet. He was used to sirens screaming all night long, used to hostile encounters on the street. Used to the pace and the dirt and the difficulty of getting around in New York. He lived in the psyches of people who couldn’t fall in love, couldn’t work, couldn’t face their death or their life. He worked all the time without thinking much about where he lived or what he ate, how much his back hurt from sitting so still all day. His physical comfort was not a high priority to him.

  He figured that was what Emma meant about his rigidity. Even in his sleep he did not escape the tortured world of his patients.
He worried about them all the time. After a peaceful dinner three thousand miles away from her he felt compelled to call Milicia again. Just in case.

  “Where are you?” she had demanded angrily.

  His patients were often angry when he went away. They seemed to expect him to have no life but theirs to think about. Some of them punished him by hurting themselves. Women got pregnant. Men had accidents. Emma didn’t bother to ask him what made him call, or what made him shake his head when he hung up.

  The next morning, watching the sun rise, he wondered if the calls from Milicia were just another attempt to get his attention and control him. He wasn’t particularly worried about it. He returned to his anxiety about an earthquake and all the things Emma had said in the past three days.

  “It isn’t worth the effort” was the last thing she said before falling asleep. “We’re too different.”

  He knew it was stupid to tell Emma he would change. Nobody could really change very much. The best they could do was feel better about who they were.

  “Nothing worthwhile comes without effort” was his wimpy reply.

  “That’s just shrink talk,” she grumbled.

  She didn’t want to admit there was anything worthwhile about him. Still, he got the picture it was no picnic being a single woman in California.

  “It’s no different from high school,” she had remarked the first day.

  “Are you surprised?” he asked. They were walking on the beach, waiting for the sun to set. Emma glanced around at the crowd gathering at the water’s edge.

  “I was surprised none of these pretty people has anything to say. There’s no one to talk to.”

  So. He was still good for something. It was his first soaring indication that he would not have to sleep in the loft.

  Now, as the sun rose higher on the last day, he had to prepare himself for the separation. Emma was still asleep, her body pressing his. Once again they had been up much of the night. She’d fallen asleep with her head on his chest and her shoulder somewhat painfully crushing his arm.

  He hadn’t wanted to disturb her by moving. Now his arm and shoulder were numb, and he still didn’t want to disturb her.

  “I could go for this,” he murmured.

  He liked walking on the beach, liked the feeling of the place, the perfume of the sea and the foliage. The brilliance of the sun. He looked up at the eucalyptus tree, wondering how long it had been there.

  “What?” she said sleepily.

  “The whole thing. I like the whole thing, Emma. It’s all great. I love you. If this is what you want, you should have it.”

  He was surprised when she answered. “So?”

  Now he could see that she was awake, had been feigning sleep all along.

  “So we could try to work it out. I could visit. You could visit. We don’t have to make any decisions now.”

  She sat up suddenly, brushing her hair away from her face, fully awake, totally feminine and confusing, with a logic all her own.

  “I don’t know what to do. You’ve ruined me, Jason,” she wailed. “I can’t trust anybody but you anymore.”

  He was silent for a long time. It wasn’t the most romantic thing he had ever heard. In fact, she made him feel like an old shoe. Still, he wouldn’t forget the way she had loved him in the dark. And trust was more than just a place to start. It was central to everything.

  “Yeah,” he told her finally. “Me, too.”

  39

  The owner of European Imports, an Israeli who owned a number of small boutiques around Manhattan, discovered the body of Rachel Stark at nine o’clock on Tuesday morning. Ari Vittleman made the rounds of his stores every weekday, never varying his routine. He always started at European Imports and worked his way downtown to the garment district, then to the Lower East Side in the shabby yellow van with the slogan ARI ENTERPRISES on the side. His travels took him back and forth across town in a zigzag pattern that always led to a hole-in-the-wall deli on Hester Street that had been in the same family and in the same location for over seventy-five years.

  Though none of it was relevant to the case, Ari explained all this to the two officers from the 17th Precinct who responded to the call at nine-seventeen. Bald as an egg, with nearly forty extra pounds on his five-foot-seven-inch frame, Ari wore a shiny silver-gray suit, a heavy gold watch, and a large diamond ring on his right pinky finger. Right from the start he wanted it known that he was a conscientious, hardworking person whose appetite and ability to sleep would be affected for some time to come and whose confidence in New York and all things American was badly shaken.

  He told the officers he had served in the Israeli Army during the Yom Kippur War and had seen a few things in his time. But nothing he had ever seen shocked him as much as the sight of his former employee hanging from an exposed pipe in his bathroom.

  Over the weekend Rachel’s head and neck had turned a greenish red under the makeup. After twelve hours, maggots had already emerged from the fly larvae laid in her eyes and nose within ten minutes of her death. By Monday afternoon beetles could be seen working at the dry skin of her arms and shoulders not hidden by the expensive size-fourteen evening gown she was wearing.

  The smell of rotting meat had drawn Ari to the bathroom. Her body, blocking access to the toilet, forced him outside to the street, where he vomited loudly in the gutter next to his van before pulling himself together enough to call the police.

  It took only twenty minutes for the commanding officer at the 17th Precinct to connect this homicide with the boutique murder at the Two-O. There are twenty-two thousand law enforcement agencies and no centralized homicide reporting in the United States. If the second case had been in Staten Island or New Jersey, or Long Island, or indeed nearly anyplace else, the authorities might not have put them together. Since the first was just across town, Lieutenant Braun, the officer in charge, was located within minutes and called in his troops.

  April worked the eight-to-four shift on Monday. She had spent most of those hours interviewing a dozen reasonable-sounding, wholesome-looking right-to-lifers who claimed Roger McLellan was in Albany the weekend Maggie died. Several of them had sheets a mile long for cutting phone and power lines, spray-painting and stink-bombing abortion clinics, threatening doctors and clients. Even though no demonstration had occurred at the State House, or anywhere else in Albany, during the crucial time in question, April had not been able to shake their story that McLellan had been there.

  On Tuesday her hours were four in the afternoon to twelve at night. She’d started studying for her Sergeant’s exam at five A.M., her hundreds of pages of notes and exercises laid out all over the bed and floor. The phone rang at two minutes to ten.

  “April?”

  “Yeah?” she confirmed without enthusiasm.

  “Mike. There’s been another one.”

  The adrenaline kicked in like a shot, instantly filling her with energy. With just those words she knew what he meant. “Where?”

  “Little boutique on Second Avenue. Fifty-fifth Street.”

  “I’m on my way.” The location rang a bell. It was where the other friend of Maggie’s lived, the one who didn’t get out of bed.

  40

  By the time April got there, over fifteen vehicles and thirty cops jammed the area that was already roped off with sticky crime-scene tape. The two beat officers from the 17th Precinct who got there first and were responsible for securing the scene were still fighting a losing battle trying to keep interested colleagues out of European Imports. At least a dozen people had marched into the store to have a look. All had come out in a hurry, green as the corpse.

  The ABC news van that April had seen the week before outside the bagel store on Fifty-sixth Street must have picked up the police call while they were getting breakfast. They were already setting up for a special broadcast.

  “Get them out of here!” Lieutenant Braun barked at the beat officers, pointing to the news team.

  Two other officers from the 1
7th were trying to direct the traffic. The street was a mess. Vehicles, including half a dozen blue-and-whites from each precinct, the news van, an EMS ambulance, and a crime-scene station wagon were all triple-parked on Second Avenue, slowing the traffic to a frustrated trickle.

  April had double-parked her white Le Baron a block down and walked back. She heard Braun barking orders before she could see him. The first person she saw was Igor unloading his equipment—the cameras, evidence boxes, kits, and the vacuum. Good, they called for the same team that worked the other case. She waved.

  Lieutenant Braun and Sergeant Sanchez were deep in conversation on the sidewalk in front of the store.

  “Ah so, Detective Woo, thanks for joining us,” Braun said without turning his head in her direction.

  April nodded at him, brushing off the sarcasm with a smile. She figured him for a heart attack in the not too distant future and comforted herself with the thought that someday she’d be the Lieutenant and he’d be dead.

  “Morning, sir,” she murmured. From downcast eyes she noted that Braun’s stringy hair was thinning fast. He was wearing the same powder-blue jacket he’d worn the week before. It still looked clean. Maybe he had more than one.

  “How ya doing, Mike?”

  He looked at his watch, then at her. “You made good time.”

  “Yeah, I took the tunnel.”

  She didn’t have to ask why they were hanging around on the street. The air conditioner was on, and the unmistakable odor of a not-so-recent death pumped out to the sidewalk like the frying garlic from Chinese restaurants.

  “Nobody reported this all weekend?” she asked, wrinkling her nose.

  “Nope. Apparently the owner turned on the air conditioner when he got here. He said he wanted to air out the store, didn’t want to lose his merchandise,” Mike told her.

  “Oh.” They’d all been contaminated often enough to know how persistently this odor lingered in the nostrils, on the skin, in whatever clothes they were wearing. It would cling to the walls and carpets of the store itself, like smoke after a fire.