Hanging Time

27

If he didn’t do it, how did he know she was hanging from the chandelier? Huh, tell me that?” That was the question Captain Higgins had shouted at Sergeant Joyce when she suggested they let Block go.

“ ‘Let him go. Are you fucking crazy? He had to be at the scene. If he didn’t do her, who did?’ You should have seen her face,” Mike told April. “She was fucking furious. I’ve never seen her so mad, and she couldn’t show a thing. I thought she was going to explode. What kind of food do you want?”

April checked her watch. It was after eight and she hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast. There wasn’t any time after the autopsy report came in and everybody went kind of crazy because the report said Maggie Wheeler just happened to be pregnant. That kind of changed things. And they had let their prime suspect go.

Block was being watched around the clock though. He wouldn’t get very far if he changed his mind and tried to run. April and Sanchez stood on Columbus, getting a breather from the noise and chaos in the squad room. A lot of people hung out on New York’s streets in summer. Already there had been two muggings and a rape reported that evening, and it wasn’t even eight-thirty.

April couldn’t help noticing that suddenly Mike was talking to her as though she were one of the guys. A few months earlier he held his tongue on the four-letter words like motherfucker and asshole. She ignored his question about food. She was still mad about being excluded from the meetings in the Captain’s office. She was clearly not one of the guys in the ways that mattered.

“Yes,” she said sharply. “I should have seen her face. We caught the case together. I should have been there.”

“So we caught it together. A technicality.” Mike stopped on the curb for a red light, forcing her to stop with him.

“A technicality? Is that what you call it?”

“Look, the Captain’s not crazy about women. That’s not my fault. So he calls me in with Joyce. I know one precinct chief that likes the whole bureau in every meeting. I know another likes to work with only one, two guys—” He looked at her quickly. “Women. You know what I mean.”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

“Don’t get political on me, April. Each commander does it a different way. They call the shots. So this is how Higgins does it. It’s not a political thing.”

April shook her head. But it was a political thing. Everything was a political thing, and Mike knew it.

“Hah. Easy for you to say,” she muttered, then checked his face quickly to make sure he wasn’t getting too mad at her. She didn’t want to cross the line with him.

Lots of lines she didn’t want to cross. Didn’t want to get too close, didn’t want to be too far away. It was so complicated, the whole thing was dizzy-making. Or maybe she was dizzy from lack of food. Anyway, Sanchez was watching the traffic light, waiting for it to turn green, and wasn’t looking at her.

She took the opportunity to examine him. She did this from time to time when he wasn’t watching. He wasn’t so sensitive. He stared at her quite openly whenever he felt like it. Now she looked at him like a cop, sizing him at five nine or ten, pretty tall for a Mexican. Medium to stocky build. She got the impression he worked out, had some discipline about what he ate and drank. His stomach hadn’t fallen out yet. Lot of detectives in the bureau got soft and let themselves go. Didn’t have the time or opportunity to eat right or exercise. Too much tension on the job, too much rushing around. Had to keep irregular hours. Mike liked gray and black, but today his jacket had a kind of greenish cast. Gray tie, drab green shirt.

Black hair cut pretty short. Distinguishing marks: angry red patches on one ear, hands, arms, neck. Eyebrows scarred and uneven. Maybe the burns had killed the hair follicles or something. She thought of them as just distinguishing marks though. Not really disfiguring. He was still good-looking to her, with his intense dark eyes and nice mouth that was always smiling. He wouldn’t talk about the burns, still smiled a lot.

Sometimes she thought about his mouth, with his bushy mustache hiding the top of it, and wondered what kissing him would feel like. He was different from the Chinese she was used to. Chinese didn’t smile so much. In China a smiling person probably just ate your dog. Or had a devious plan to separate you from your money. Mike looked like a bandido and smelled like a perfume counter. April’s mother and aunts thought people like that—so big and smiling, with lots of hair on their bodies and smelling like women—were barbarians.

The light changed. Mike turned to her, noted her scrutiny, and smiled. She shook her head, couldn’t believe she had been talking to him like that. What had happened to her? Only a few months before, a quiet little Asian from Manhattan South—way south, all the way in Chinatown—too nervous to say boo. And now she was furious because the new Captain of the Precinct was overlooking her in her own case. And thinking about kissing a superior in her squad, who happened to be Mexican. Was she crazy?

Without exactly planning to, they had crossed the street and wandered down the block to The Last Mango. They stopped in front of the window. The crime-scene tapes were gone, but the brightly colored shirts were still on the clothesline in the display window. The track lights in the ceiling were on.

Around the time Maggie died, it would still have been light outside. But not much of the inside of the store could be seen anyway. A backdrop behind the display in the window hid most of the store’s interior.

“So what did she tell him?” April asked.

“Who?” He was gazing into the store, speculating.

“Sergeant Joyce. What did she tell Higgins?”

“She told him we questioned the guy for almost four hours and he couldn’t come up with a single piece of solid evidence that would hold up in court.

“ ‘But he knew about the chandelier. He knew about the dress. He knew about the fucking size of the dress. Explain that for me,’ Higgins screamed at her.”

“That’s what I say,” April agreed. “So what did she say to that?”

“She said, ‘Maybe Block came in after she was dead, sir.’ So Higgins goes, ‘And maybe he came in before she was dead and did her just like he said.’ ”

“Anyway, if it was after, how did he get in? You think the killer left the door wide open?” April asked. Elsbeth Manganaro had given April a set of keys to the shop, but they already knew it had the kind of door that locked automatically when it closed.

“Maybe he had a key.”

“Where would he get one?”

They looked at each other. Maggie might have given him one.

“Maybe we better get him back and ask a few more questions. The time frames don’t work for me. When he came back after she didn’t go to lunch with him. When he had this so-called fight with her. How he killed her, and the time he left. If she was alive when he came in, then she might have let him in as he said. But if she was already dead, then how did he get in?” Mike asked.

“Maybe he was there with someone else, and someone else did it. None of it plays except the jealousy, does it?”

“Well, if he went in and out several times that day, somebody must have seen him. He’s known in the neighborhood. Got to start all over again, talk to the other store owners, look for a witness who saw him.”

“It sure puts a different cast on the thing.”

“You mean the little fact that Maggie was seven weeks pregnant? Yeah. It does. Either everything Block told us was a crock, or else he didn’t know. Maybe she wouldn’t date him because she was involved with someone else.”

“Yeah,” April agreed. “If he was just someone she knew, why would she tell him she was pregnant?”

“Maybe she finally told him about the other guy and he had a fucking fit.”

“Yeah, but maybe he’s the father, but someone else still did her. At least that’s a piece of physical evidence we can check. If he doesn’t want a blood test, we can get a court order.”

“Did the mother know who the boyfriend was?” Mike changed the subject.

“She said Maggie was kind of backward that way, wasn’t really interested in boyfriends yet. I gather she didn’t know her daughter that well.”

“Right.”

“You still think Block didn’t do it?” April wasn’t sure about anything anymore.

Finally Mike turned away from the store window. “We’ll nail him if he did.”

“I just don’t want to nail him if he didn’t,” April murmured. That happened too. “Are you up for Chinese?”

Mike smiled. “Always.”

The nearest takeout place was uptown. They walked north slowly. April knew “always” didn’t have anything to do with Mike’s taste in food. In the food department the only way to get along with Sanchez was to make her choice Mexican.

The streets smelled fresher now. The air was finally cooling off after the long, hot day. April stretched her cramped muscles as she strolled along. Just being outside for a few minutes helped ease the tension. The M.E.’s report said Maggie had been strangled. It was up to the science people to tell them by what. A few fibers had been taken from the wounds in her neck. Maybe the fibers would tell them something. The report also said Maggie’s arms and hands were bruised and scratched. She probably tried to fight off her attacker. Her fingernails were very short though, and there were no scrapings under them. Oh, and that little thing about Maggie’s having been about six or seven weeks pregnant at time of death.

April forgot about food again. She was back to business, worrying about who killed Maggie, and if it was someone they didn’t even know about, like the person behind the voice on her answering machine. Poor Maggie didn’t have much luck. Olga said something was bugging her before she died. It must have been the pregnancy. April wondered how the pregnancy fit into their case.