Hanging Time

23

At nine o’clock in the morning on the third day of the Maggie Wheeler investigation, Sanchez followed Sergeant Joyce out of the Captain’s office. His expression was grim. Captain Higgins was new to the precinct, and it was common knowledge that Higgins had been recently promoted from Organized Crime Control in order to open up his former post for someone else. The Captain had almost no experience in administration and knew next to nothing about running a precinct. His arrival in June had been heralded with little enthusiasm. Since taking over the command, he had done nothing to raise anybody’s hopes about strong leadership in the future.

A taut, wiry man of middling height with gray skin, graying hair, and a nervous twitch in both brown eyes, Higgins looked like a hyperactive mole in expensive shirts. He was used to being on the move without a thousand eyes evaluating his every gesture. Commanding his own precinct seemed to have stamped him very quickly with the bewildered, unresigned expression of an innocent man sentenced unfairly to life inside The Big House.

Higgins’s response to his own confusion was to dress better and call unit heads frequently into his office, question them closely about their jobs, and then tell them some other method of doing them. In this way he gave the appearance of being on top of everything while keeping everyone else off balance.

Ethnic diversity had kicked Higgins upstairs. After the election of the first African American mayor of New York, racial diversity became an imperative. Everybody had to speak Spanish, and suddenly there were lots of black and Hispanic Commissioners everywhere, in health, education, the school system. In the Police Department there were new black Deputy Commissioners of the Transit Police, Housing Security, and other special commissions.

Higgins’s old job, in which he had been happy and for which he was well suited, had gone to a black Lieutenant who knew next to nothing about organized crime. That was how the system worked. When a person moved up, he usually moved away from what he had been trained for and knew best.

Sergeant Joyce stumped down the hall, muttering. Captain Higgins was of the old school and reminded her of her former husband, a cop who believed there were certain places women didn’t belong, and the NYPD was one of them. Joyce liked to say that her former husband’s attitude was one of the reasons her ex was still Police Officer Joyce, a foot patrolman in the Bronx. But Higgins’s rise to the top clearly disproved this theory.

Captain Higgins had called Joyce into his office and told her with no preliminaries that he was getting pressure from downtown. The Deputy Commissioner had even hinted to him a few minutes before on the phone that if they didn’t get a break in the boutique killing soon, he was going to put a Lieutenant from the Bureau on over Sergeant Joyce to supervise the case, and add some new blood from outside. “I don’t want that to happen, do you?” the Captain asked.

“No, sir,” Sergeant Joyce replied. “We can handle it.”

“Sure you can handle it. You’re the hotshot who solved the tattooer case.” Higgins ignored Sergeant Joyce and jabbed a well-chewed pencil at Sanchez.

Joyce scowled at the slight.

“I had some help,” Sanchez said modestly.

“Well, I’m counting on you to come up with something on this one. You caught it. You solve it.” That would look good. Sanchez was Hispanic, on the way up.

Though asked to sit down, Joyce had remained standing, gritting her teeth as if she had stomach cramps. It was clear as they flanked the Captain’s heavy old desk that had probably been in use since the turn of the century that Higgins had called Sanchez into his office not because he had solved the tattooer case, which he hadn’t exactly. No, Higgins had Sanchez in there with his Detective Squad Supervisor because the squad supervisor was a woman, and Higgins preferred talking to a man.

And this was no isolated occasion. Every time Higgins called her in—and he called her in a lot because he had never once set foot in the squad room—he had Sanchez come with her. Joyce fumed.

“We’re a good squad, sir,” she said now. “We have an excellent clearance rate.”

“I’m sure you do, Sergeant.” Higgins’s eyelids twitched as he kept his focus on Sergeant Sanchez, not Sergeant Joyce. “And I expect quick results on this one, because if I don’t get them, you know what will happen. You’ll have detectives from downtown swarming all over the place, doing everything all over again and making you look like assholes, especially if they come up with something you missed, like the perp.”

“I have every hope we’ll find him, sir,” Joyce said quickly, then added, “But we don’t have a hell of a lot to go on. He didn’t exactly leave his calling card.” A touch of sarcasm crept into her voice.

“How do you know, Sergeant Joyce? You don’t even have the autopsy report.” Higgins finally turned his twitching eyes on her.

She blinked helplessly back. Did he think the calling card was in the body? It was a strangling case. Some psycho thing. They were checking out the crazy angle, looking for psycho cases like it, recently released mental patients, paroled nutcases put away for the short term. Hell, they’d even called Interpol and the FBI to see if there was anything else out there like it. They weren’t exactly letting the thing slide.

“We’re working every angle, sir.”

And then his phone rang and he asked them to report back later.

“Yes, sir,” Joyce said politely, then cursed softly as soon as the door was closed. “Report what? He doesn’t know a damn thing about investigations.”

Sanchez kept his mouth shut.

They turned left and headed for the stairs.

“Shit, we don’t need any new blood. We got perfectly good blood already.”

At least she and the Captain agreed on one thing. They were both trying to hang on to the case. This was the Captain’s first big case since taking command. He needed his people to solve it not to seem a helpless fool himself. Joyce needed it for the grade pay. She muttered some more. And Higgins couldn’t even command the attention of the M.E.’s office.

“What’s your take on why the autopsy report didn’t come in yesterday as promised?” She plunged down the middle of the staircase, ignoring the traffic around them. “What’s the hang-up here?”

She stopped suddenly as if challenging Sanchez to bump into her. “You think it’s gone somewhere else?”

Sanchez gripped the handrail to stop himself from charging into his boss. He shook his head. “Nah. If it had, they’d have asked for the file. May just be bureaucratic shit. Why don’t I go down there and goose them on it?”

“I get the feeling the Captain doesn’t have a fix on what’s going on,” Joyce muttered. “They could still ask for the file.”

They turned into the squad room. With all the phones in use, the noise level was very high. Still frowning, Sergeant Joyce stopped at April’s desk. “What’s new?” she shot out.

April looked up from her notes. It was the first time she had seen Sergeant Joyce that day. The Sergeant was all dressed up in a lime-green shirtwaist dress and black linen blazer with gold buttons. Apparently for good luck she had put on her gold four-leaf-clover earrings, which were thin discs the size of small pancakes. Her thin, pink-frosted lips were pinched together as she glowered at April, passing along the distrust of women, from boss to underling.

April glanced at Sanchez as if he had betrayed her for the thirty-fourth time, then turned to Sergeant Joyce. “We have a confession,” she said.

“No shit. Who is it?”

April referred to her notes. “A bookkeeper, and get this. It’s the guy who does the accounts for the store across the street.”

“Where is he?”

“I’ve got him downstairs in a questioning room. I thought you’d like to hear what he has to say.”

Joyce nodded. She motioned at Sanchez. “Let’s go.”

April raised an eyebrow at the guy who kept saying he wanted to be her best friend and kept edging her out every time he got the chance.

Sanchez shook his head. She just never got it. Women.

“So what happened up there?” April asked, her voice neutral as they trooped to the stairs. It was hot out in the hall. The heady smell of precinct sweat filled the corrider.

“Asses on the line.” Sergeant Joyce gave her a hard look. “It would be nice if this were the guy.”

In the questioning room, Albert Block sat in a metal chair, chewing on his nails. A chubby blue uniform the size of a fullback guarded the door.

“Howya doin’, Herne?” Sanchez said.

Hernando Silvera nodded. “He’s a live one all right.”

Sanchez looked in through the wired window at eye level and snorted, then opened the door for Sergeant Joyce.

“That was my initial reaction,” April said softly.

They filed into the green room, with its ancient peeling paint, one lone table, four chairs, and smudge marks on the wall. Albert Block jumped to his feet. He was all of five five and weighed in at no more than a hundred twenty-five. His scraggly brown hair was gathered into a short ponytail that just brushed the collar of his bright red-and-blue checkered shirt, which was tightly buttoned at the wrists and open at the neck. Black jeans, black motorcycle belt with silver studs. On his feet were a pair of expensive green lizard cowboy boots. In contradiction to the boots, the ponytail, the motorcycle belt, and the strongly colored shirt, his face was shuttered down and timorous in the extreme. Block had watery blue eyes, thin chapped lips, and a receding chin. He was small and pale. His hands were tiny and freckled, the size of a child’s. He looked a lot like Woody Allen after the fall.

April put the tape recorder she had brought down on the table. “Mr. Block,” she said politely, “this is Sergeant Joyce and Sergeant Sanchez. You can sit down.”

He nodded and plunked himself back in the chair, eagerly regarding the tape recorder. “Thank you,” he said.

Sanchez and Joyce looked at each other. What the hell was this? This guy couldn’t lift a five-pound sack of flour, much less press a hundred-and-five-pound corpse a foot and a half over his head and hang it up on a chandelier. What’d he do it with, a winch? Sanchez coughed into his hand.

April ignored him.

“Mr. Block, why don’t you tell the sergeants here what you told me about Saturday night.”

Albert Block nodded again, stuck his thumb in his mouth, and looked from one cop to the other, checking out their faces, three, four times, as if testing their patience. No one moved. He had them in thrall.

Finally he removed the thumb from his mouth and started to talk.