Hanging Time

11

Well, What did you do for a whole week without me?” Mike said as soon as they were in the car. It was hot, maybe eighty-five degrees. They took the unmarked red Chevy Sergeant Joyce had used earlier even though the air conditioner was broken. They didn’t like to use their own cars while they were on duty, and taking a blue-and-white was beneath Sanchez’s dignity.

“Pined away,” April answered lightly, busy with her seat belt.

It had taken him all day to get personal. It always happened when they were in a car together.

“No kidding.” He pulled out of the police lot. “Where to?”

“Prince Street.”

“Hah. Your old neighborhood.”

Hah. Now he was making the same sounds she did.

“Hah, yes indeed. My old neighborhood. I’ll try not to hyperventilate when we get there.”

He turned at the corner and headed down Columbus. Yellow crime-scene tapes still sealed The Last Mango. April knew she and Sanchez were both having the same thought. That someone should die so young and so grotesquely not even a block from the precinct was an offense that was hard to take.

Sobbing off what was left of her mascara, Elsbeth Manganaro had said that of all her stores, she felt safest in this one. “Because of the police next door. And what good was that?” she added for the fourteenth time.

“How many stores do you have?” April had asked to make the question go away.

“Four, but two of them are on the Island.”

“Long Island?”

“Where else?” Elsbeth demanded.

April lifted a shoulder. There were other islands.

Now she was silent. The beginning of each case was like walking into a fog so dense you couldn’t see to the corner, couldn’t even see your own feet on the ground. Everything was unknown. You didn’t know what kind of awful thing you might find when you put your hand out. What piece you might miss if you didn’t ask the right question. Or look in the right corner when the light was just right. Sometimes the fog didn’t lift to reveal the puzzle pieces for a long time. Sometimes it never did. Anxiety about finding some pieces in the murk caused April’s thoughts to jump around like a bird hopping from limb to limb.

Who would kill a girl with police cars parked all over the place just outside? Sometime on Saturday, probably just after seven when the store closed, but maybe later. The girl could have waited for someone who was picking her up. Maybe there were no police cars out there. Maybe they were all on call. What else happened on Saturday night?

“So where were you on Saturday night?” Once again Mike’s thoughts echoed her own.

“Not on duty. I don’t know what was going on here.”

“I know. I checked.”

“Checked what?”

“I checked to see if you were on duty.”

It was really hot in the car, even with the windows open and the wind blowing through. It was almost theater hour. Columbus Avenue was jammed.

April bristled. “What did you do that for?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you were here and saw something.”

“I wasn’t,” she said flatly.

There was an opening in the traffic. Mike speeded up.

“So where were you?” he asked after a minute.

“I was off duty, like you.” She frowned. “Why?”

“I’ve been away for a week. I just want to know what mi querida’s been up to.” He turned to look at her and smiled.

Very engaging. Very Spanish, just what she needed.

“I could ask you the same thing,” she snapped.

“Go ahead, you want to know what I did? I’ll tell you everything.”

“Some other time. Right now we have a dead woman to think about.”

“She’s not exactly going anywhere. You could take a second to ask me if I had a good time and tell me you missed me.”

April looked out the window. Lincoln Center was lit up like a Christmas tree. She had walked around it with forty other eleven-year-olds on a class trip once, but had never been inside. Mike sped past it.

“I had a wonderful time, thanks for asking,” he said.

She had never been to Mexico either. There were a lot of things she didn’t know. “How’s Diego?” she said to prove she was up on something.

“Diego? Diego, who?”

“Diego Rivera. That painter you told me about.”

“Wow. What a memory. Diego’s dead, but the paintings are fine.” Mike accelerated through a yellow light. Months before he had told her about the art and literature of Mexico to let her know he wasn’t just some Latino from an island with a short history and not much art. His culture was as old as hers.

“Guess I should have sent you a postcard,” he said.

She shrugged as their progress stalled again around Forty-second Street. He held out his hand, wiggling his fingers. Without having to ask, April knew he wanted the turret light. It was on the floor by her foot. She handed it to him. He reached out his window, stuck it on the roof, then hit the hammer halfheartedly a few times. Cars ahead of them moved over slowly at the sound of the siren.

“So?” he asked after a few minutes of silence.

“So what?”

“So, where were you on Saturday night?”

“What’s the damn difference?” April fumed for a second, then relented. “Okay, I was at a wedding.” She finally blurted out the hateful fact. “Not mine, are you happy now?”

A gust of hot air ruffled her hair as she turned her face back to the window.

“Oh, querida. I had no idea you wanted to get married.” Mike was silent about his part in her breakup with Jimmy Wong.

Last spring he had checked Jimmy out, maybe found something, maybe not. Anyway, he had raised April’s suspicions enough about Jimmy’s activities on the night team in Brooklyn for her to end the three-year relationship.

“I don’t,” she said quickly. She didn’t want Mike to think she was indecisive, had any regrets. She didn’t have any regrets, just a lot of things to wonder about. One of them was that the person “closely supervising” her had a lot of sex appeal. She didn’t know how to feel about that.

Skinny Dragon Mother said men and women shouldn’t be partners. She made an explosive spitting sound when April assured her she and Sanchez weren’t partners. “Detectives don’t work as partners, Ma. You know that. He’s my supervisor.”

“Can’t be superwhatever, can’t be friends either,” Sai Woo insisted. “You got big trouble.”

And Skinny Dragon Mother wasn’t the only one who said it. The whole thing made her uneasy.

As they neared her old neighborhood, April’s stomach rumbled with the hunger of remembered childhood happiness. No, better not think that, she told herself. Just rumbled from plain hunger. With all the excitement, there hadn’t been time for lunch.

“Here we are,” she said suddenly.

FUCKING LESBO, SUCK MY DICK was the exhortation on the door of the formerly brown sandstone building where lucky Olga Yerger had emigrated.

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.