Hanging Time

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.