Hanging Time

24

What’s that for?” Albert pointed at the tape recorder.

“So we can remember what you said.”

“I’m confessing.” Albert frowned at the tape recorder. “Where’s the D.A.? If I confess, I know the D.A. is supposed to be here. I don’t want to talk to that. I want to talk to him.”

“We have to do everything properly, Mr. Block,” April said pleasantly. “Right now we’re talking. We’re establishing what, if anything, you know.”

“I told you I did it.” He became belligerent. “What else do you want?”

Sanchez and Joyce glanced at each other.

“Why don’t you just tell the two sergeants here what you told me about Maggie,” April prompted, “and we’ll worry about the D.A. later.”

“Who are they?” Block crossed one black-jeaned knee over the other and jiggled a green lizard cowboy boot nervously.

“I told you. This is Sergeant Joyce, Supervisor of the Detective Squad in this—”

“Did you read him his rights, Detective?” Sergeant Joyce interrupted.

“Yes,” April said, “I did. Twice.”

“Do it again, Detective. For the record.”

Albert kneaded his freckled hands.

April read his Mirandas for the tape. “You have the right to remain silent, you have the right to be represented by a lawyer. If you cannot afford one, one will be provided for you. Anything you say can and will be used against you. Do you have any questions, Mr. Block?”

“No,” he said faintly.

“Would you like a lawyer?” Sergeant Joyce asked gently.

“Who’s doing this, you or her?” Block flared up, his moment of weakness gone in a flash.

“Who would you like to do it?” Sergeant Joyce asked.

Sanchez coughed.

“Shut up!” Albert slammed his hand on the table.

Okay. The guy was a nut with a temper.

April took a deep breath. “Why don’t you just tell us about Maggie, Mr. Block. You knew Maggie.”

“Maggie?”

“Yes, tell us how you met Maggie.”

Block sniffed. “Will you get the D.A. in?”

“No promises. Just tell us the story.” April kept her eyes on him. He was weird. Earlier the words had just come tumbling out. Now he was acting like a hardcase. She should have taped him then.

“Okay.” He lapsed into silence, staring off into the far distance, where the green wall had a long crack down the side that resembled the California coastline. “Fuck you” was scrawled over Mexico. There was no window in the room except the wired window at eye level in the door. It was getting stuffy and tense.

“I met Maggie last winter.”

Silence.

April licked her lips. They waited.

“Uh-huh. Could you give us the time frame on that?”

“Huh?” Block shifted his gaze.

“When you met Maggie.”

“Oh, in February. Right after she moved here. I decided to go out on my own.”

Silence.

“What do you mean, Mr. Block? Did Maggie convince you to go out on your own?”

“I was working for a firm. You know the kind of tight-assed kind of place.” He looked at them expectantly. They didn’t.

“I’m an accountant. Harry encouraged me to go out on my own. Harry’s the owner of All Dressed Up. That’s the store on Columbus next to the bookstore.” He waved a tiny hand in the direction he thought it was.

Sergeant Joyce nodded. They knew where it was.

“I had his account. He told me to go up and down to all the stores and restaurants on Columbus and ask if they were happy with their accounting. Nobody’s ever happy with their accountant, you know.” He challenged them to disparage accountants.

Sanchez and Joyce kept their faces neutral. It was the last thing they would do. They didn’t know a lot about accountants. Their taxes were easy. One source of income, no bookkeeper necessary. Joyce glanced at April. April had the feeling she’d be toast if this guy kept Sergeant Joyce there for hours and gave them nothing. She shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Don’t rabbit on me now, Block, she prayed silently.

“Harry said to tell everybody I could do it faster and cheaper and he’d back me up. Then I should go to Amsterdam and Broadway, you know.”

“So you went to The Last Mango, looking for work,” April said softly, “and there you met Maggie.”

He shook his head. “No, first I quit my job. Got some new clothes. You know, for my confidence.”

“Then you went to The Last Mango, looking for work.”

“Yeah.”

He relapsed into silence.

“Jesus,” Sanchez muttered.

“Hey, you want me to tell the story or not?” Albert turned on him furiously. “I don’t like this guy. I want the D.A.”

April took a deep breath. “The D.A.’s office is very busy. We can’t just get somebody to come over every time someone comes in to talk to us. Please, Mr. Block, just tell the sergeants here what you told me about Maggie.”

“And then you’ll get the D.A.?”

What was his thing about the D.A.?

“Look, I watch TV. I know you don’t indict without the D.A.”

He wanted an indictment. The guy had no priors, no sheet of any kind. He hadn’t ever caught so much as a speeding or a parking ticket in his whole life, and he wanted to be indicted for the murder of Maggie Wheeler.

Sergeant Joyce checked her watch and made a move to get up. “Why don’t you give me a call later,” she said.

Block twitched. “Okay, okay. You don’t give a guy a break, do you?”

“Yeah, you have our full attention,” Sergeant Joyce told him, leaning back in her chair. “I’m here if you want to talk. I’m gone if you don’t.”

He looked at the wall again, rubbing his palms together. Now April could see he was sweating into his plaid shirt.

“Like I said, I went into The Last Mango, looking for the owner. Maggie had just come to work there, maybe a week before. She wasn’t the manager yet.”

“Did she become the manager?” Elsbeth Manganaro never said she was the manager.

“Oh, yeah, Maggie did almost everything in the store. Except she couldn’t fire that stupid bitch.”

Sanchez raised an eyebrow at April. Well, that part was true. Olga Yerger was no rocket scientist.

“Who would that be?” April asked for the tape.

“Olga, the helper. It’s her fault Maggie’s dead.”

“How is that?”

“I don’t know.” He looked down at his hands. “We used to have lunch together—oh, every couple of weeks. It was kind of a regular thing. I stopped in on Saturday. Last Saturday, the day she—uh, died.”

April nodded.

“See, she liked to eat late—but Saturday she wouldn’t go out. That bitch hadn’t turned up again.” He shook his head as if he still couldn’t believe it. The ponytail bobbed from side to side, and his face flushed with rage at Olga. “I told Maggie to just close the store for an hour, what’s the big deal? But she wouldn’t do it. She was scared Elsbeth might come by, see the store closed in the middle of the afternoon, and fire her. I don’t know. Elsbeth would do anything for Olga, but Maggie—I don’t know, she took advantage of Maggie. It happens to short people. It made me—” His little hand curled into a fist.

“So why didn’t you order in?” April had noticed there were no food containers in the wastebasket in the store.

“She was working. She didn’t want me around,” he said bitterly.

“So you left.”

“Yeah, I left.”

“When was that?”

“Around one-thirty.”

Again Sergeant Joyce shifted in her seat. Her stomach growled.

“But I came back,” Block added quickly.

April nodded. Okay, now they were getting to it.

“I was really upset. I, you know. I liked her. She was—different.” He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “She was from Massachusetts. Anybody in the world ever heard of Seekonk, Massachusetts?” He shrugged. Nobody.

“We had a fight, kind of. We’d go out to lunch like I said. We’d talk. We had to talk. I was going to do the accounting, at least I think I was. Maggie introduced me to Elsbeth, and you know. Elsbeth was going to try me out.”

“So what happened?”

“So I felt bad. I kind of ripped into Maggie about Olga. I told her if she wasn’t going to tell Elsbeth about Olga, I was. And then we got into this fight. So I came back later to make up.”

Nobody moved. The room had become hot and still. He liked the girl. There was the ring of absolute truth about that.

“I, uh, wanted to take her out to dinner. I knew she was hungry, she didn’t have lunch. So I—asked her.” He flushed, trying to swallow down the humiliation. “She said she already told me she wasn’t going out with me. I guess I lost it. I went crazy … I killed her.”

He was flushed all over, face purple, nose running unchecked. Hands shaking. He had confessed, and he was finished.

“Now can I see the D.A.?”

“How did you kill her?” April asked.

“What do you mean?”

“How did you kill Maggie?”

He looked at her as though she were stupid, pulled a red handkerchief out of his pocket, and blew his nose twice. “I, uh, strangled her.”

He could have read that in the newspapers. It was not good enough. April shook her head.

“How did it happen? When you got mad. What exactly did you do? What did Maggie do?”

“I told you—she didn’t want to be with me—you know, that way. So I lost it. I strangled her. What else do you want?”

Information that did more than put him on the scene. Something more than a slender motive. Something that connected him physically, directly with the crime. Something he could tell them that no one but the killer could know.

“Details,” April said quietly. “We want details.”

“You mean about the dress?”

“What dress?” Sanchez blurted out.

“The printed dress, size fourteen, she was wearing when I hung her on the chandelier.” A look of pure triumph galloped across Block’s homely, pinched little face at their electrified reaction. Got ’em. “Can I have a sandwich? I’m starved.”

Again he looked from one to the other.

April jumped up and went to the door with the window in it so she could place a lunch order with Officer Silvera. “Of course. What would you like?”

Neither Sergeant Joyce nor Sergeant Sanchez moved. Suddenly they had all day.