Hanging Time

40

By the time April got there, over fifteen vehicles and thirty cops jammed the area that was already roped off with sticky crime-scene tape. The two beat officers from the 17th Precinct who got there first and were responsible for securing the scene were still fighting a losing battle trying to keep interested colleagues out of European Imports. At least a dozen people had marched into the store to have a look. All had come out in a hurry, green as the corpse.

The ABC news van that April had seen the week before outside the bagel store on Fifty-sixth Street must have picked up the police call while they were getting breakfast. They were already setting up for a special broadcast.

“Get them out of here!” Lieutenant Braun barked at the beat officers, pointing to the news team.

Two other officers from the 17th were trying to direct the traffic. The street was a mess. Vehicles, including half a dozen blue-and-whites from each precinct, the news van, an EMS ambulance, and a crime-scene station wagon were all triple-parked on Second Avenue, slowing the traffic to a frustrated trickle.

April had double-parked her white Le Baron a block down and walked back. She heard Braun barking orders before she could see him. The first person she saw was Igor unloading his equipment—the cameras, evidence boxes, kits, and the vacuum. Good, they called for the same team that worked the other case. She waved.

Lieutenant Braun and Sergeant Sanchez were deep in conversation on the sidewalk in front of the store.

“Ah so, Detective Woo, thanks for joining us,” Braun said without turning his head in her direction.

April nodded at him, brushing off the sarcasm with a smile. She figured him for a heart attack in the not too distant future and comforted herself with the thought that someday she’d be the Lieutenant and he’d be dead.

“Morning, sir,” she murmured. From downcast eyes she noted that Braun’s stringy hair was thinning fast. He was wearing the same powder-blue jacket he’d worn the week before. It still looked clean. Maybe he had more than one.

“How ya doing, Mike?”

He looked at his watch, then at her. “You made good time.”

“Yeah, I took the tunnel.”

She didn’t have to ask why they were hanging around on the street. The air conditioner was on, and the unmistakable odor of a not-so-recent death pumped out to the sidewalk like the frying garlic from Chinese restaurants.

“Nobody reported this all weekend?” she asked, wrinkling her nose.

“Nope. Apparently the owner turned on the air conditioner when he got here. He said he wanted to air out the store, didn’t want to lose his merchandise,” Mike told her.

“Oh.” They’d all been contaminated often enough to know how persistently this odor lingered in the nostrils, on the skin, in whatever clothes they were wearing. It would cling to the walls and carpets of the store itself, like smoke after a fire.

“Did he touch anything else?” Igor, loaded down with cardboard evidence boxes, stopped beside them for a second.

“Igor, do you know Lieutenant Braun?” April asked.

“We’re old friends,” Braun said. “Keep-your-fucking-hands-behind-your-back Stan, we call him.”

Igor looked offended. “It’s the rules,” he muttered. “Some of you people can’t keep your hands to yourself. Mess up the whole thing. It’s not a hard one to keep your hands in your pockets.”

He jerked his head at Ari Vittleman, standing at a safe distance down the block, surrounded by officers physically preventing ABC from attempting to get their story.

“Did he touch anything else? I got to know.”

“He says no.” Braun turned to April. “He says they close at seven on Saturdays. He figures it happened about then.”

“Why? That was the storm day, wasn’t it? She could have closed earlier.” April looked around at the proximity of other stores. Who could have seen what in that rain? She saw the boutique had the kind of metal barricade that pulled down. Had it been down when the owner came? Would the neighbors have noticed anyone going in, coming out at closing time? From here she could see the plumbing supply store and the apartment above, where Maggie’s friend lived. The guy who claimed he hadn’t seen her in years but whose name and number were in her phone book. Her mind whirled with questions.

“That’s what your pal here said. What are you, hotshots or something?” Braun demanded.

“Yeah. Or something.” Sanchez smiled at April.

Braun shot her an appraising look. “Ready to go in?”

“Any time.” April took out her notebook and shifted her bag from one shoulder to another.

“Clasp your hands behind your back,” Igor called over his shoulder.

“What a piece of work. How am I supposed to take notes with my hands behind my back?” she muttered.

“It’s the rules.” Braun laughed at his joke.

April moved inside the store. She would take notes of everything—the weather, the time, the placement of each article in the small store, the whole setup. She’d never forgotten the example given in a John Jay class of a cut-and-dried homicide that was lost in court because the two detectives on the case couldn’t agree whether an article of clothing, totally irrelevant to the case, had been on the bed or the floor of the room next to where the crime had been committed. The defense attorney convinced the jury if the police couldn’t be trusted to agree on what was at the scene of a crime, none of the rest of their “evidence” could be trusted either. The guy got off.

April moved toward the smell.

“You going to be okay, Detective?” Braun asked.

“Yessir,” April replied. Lot of them didn’t know it, but after about three minutes in a very bad smell the olfactory nerves went numb. All those people who kept running in and out of horrendous crime-scene stenches for fresh air got hit with the same blast of nausea each time they returned. Anybody who lived with the pungent pickling and drying rotting smells of the Orient knew that.

But when she looked through the open door, she could not control a spasm of revulsion. This was worse than Maggie Wheeler. Clearly, it had been hot in there. The girl’s body was not in good condition. It had already begun to swell from the gases forming inside. Decomposition works from the inside out.

Aware of Braun behind her, gauging her reaction, April pinched her nose and breathed through her mouth, her internal camera continuing to click. What was she seeing here? What was the story? On the grimy bathroom floor under the hanging body there appeared to be some congealed blood along with the other fluids that had leaked out of her orifices after death. April looked for an open wound that would have bled. She didn’t see one. Several two-to-three-inch patches of blistered skin were visible on the dead girl’s neck and shoulders, but April had seen that before and knew they were post-mortem artifacts. Bacteria was eating away the tissues under the skin.

April noted that the rope the girl was hanging by appeared to be the same kind used in the Wheeler murder. Obviously the huge black evening gown on the small body, and the tinges of blue and red makeup, partially dissolved and further distorted by feeding beetles, told the same twisted tale that was understood only by the teller. Little girl dressed up as a big girl. Strangled. But what if it were a little boy dressed up as a big girl?

She remembered Ducci’s suggestion that they were looking for a transvestite. But transvestites didn’t kill. So, who was it? Where did this put them with McLellan now? As April wondered if anyone had bothered to call Ducci, the cop pushed into the space, stomach first.

“Hello, pretty one. How’s it going?”

She shook her head, backing out so he could take her place.

“Clasp your hands behind your back,” Igor admonished from the front of the store, where he’d begun dusting for fingerprints.

“Oh, fuck off,” the Duke told him.

“Nice talk.” Braun turned to Sanchez, who was busy taking notes. “Well?”

“Looks similar. No marks on the door. No signs of struggle in the store. Similar rope, not tied correctly for a suicide. Although, if the other hadn’t come first, this might have the appearance of a suicide.”

“Yeah?” Braun moved toward the door, hot-footed it outside. Sanchez followed him.

“She could have jumped off the toilet,” Sanchez said.

“Sure, and dressed herself up like that first.”

“I wonder where McLellan was Saturday night.”

April watched Ducci take in the scene. They were honored. His workload was too heavy for him to get out much anymore. For a half hour he worked with Igor and Mako, collecting and labeling, putting items in paper bags and then cardboard boxes. Like April, Ducci seemed puzzled about the blood on the floor. But, not to worry, blood wasn’t his business.

After the body had been sketched and photographed, Ducci lifted the black silk skirt, looking for a wound. All he could see was an irregular semicircle of small marks on the corpse’s right ankle.

“Looks like a bite,” he remarked loud enough to be heard in Jersey.

April looked where he pointed. From the showroom she could hear the sound of Sanchez’s derisive laugh at this outrageous speculation. “Oh, sure, oh, sure. Four days later on a decomposed body he can identify a bite mark.”

“Looks like the work of insects,” April said.

Ducci straightened and pointed to the mottled hands. “That’s insects. Just a mess with no particular pattern wounds. Here, there’s a distinct pattern.”

April nodded, though she had her doubts. Ducci was a trace man. It was up to the M.E. to tell them what happened to the body. Where the blood on the floor came from and what made the marks on the hands, the shoulders, and the ankle.

Sanchez called her from the street. “The Lieutenant wants us to go home now.”

April took one last look around and closed her notebook.