Hanging Time

50

I want to talk to you.” Sergeant Joyce crooked her finger at April and made some wiggling motions with it. “In here.”

It was after nine that evening. April followed her into her office.

“Close the door.”

April closed the door.

Sergeant Joyce returned to her desk. When she was settled in the same kind of old-fashioned wooden, rolling, tilting chair April had in the squad room, she turned to April. April could see that the order to stay behind in the precinct had not exactly been easy for her supervisor to take. April felt a little sorry for her.

Out in the squad room someone began screaming obscenities. “Fucking pig hit me. Asshole fucking cop. I’m gonna file a complaint. I’m gonna have your fucking ass.”

The screaming stopped as suddenly as it started.

A breeze drifted in through the open window. It was cooling off and beginning to smell like fall. In the second of silence April noticed there was water in the saucers under the two plants on the windowsill. Sergeant Joyce must have been really desperate for something to do. The plants looked happier now. Sergeant Joyce didn’t.

Only two hours before, Sergeant Joyce had had the pleasure of being chewed out with her two best detectives in front of the captain of the precinct by a Lieutenant from downtown. For once April knew more about what was going on than she did. Sergeant Joyce didn’t like not knowing what was going on. Her desk was a mess. It looked to April as if she’d spent the time since the skirmish messing up the number-coded forms and eating her fingernails.

Right now her face was screwed up into a big question mark.

“Where’s Mike?” she demanded.

“Down at the district attorney’s office, trying to get a search warrant.”

Joyce frowned. “Any particular reason?”

“Whole thing looks suspicious.”

“What about the boyfriend, wouldn’t he let you in?”

“He wasn’t home.”

Sergeant Joyce raised an eyebrow. “So what’s going on here?”

April told her how Braun and Roberts had pulled Camille off the street while she was walking her dog, brought her in for questioning and gotten nowhere, then called April in from the stakeout to see if she could do any better.

“Nice of them to inform me. Jesus, what fuck-ups. Where are they now?”

“Braun and Roberts went back to the building in question to wait for the boyfriend. They seem to think the boyfriend might be involved.”

“Oh, yeah. What makes them think so?”

“The woman is—wacko. When I went in there she was chewing on her arm. And I’m not kidding. Bite wounds all over.”

April stood in front of the desk, her face impassive, reporting like a soldier.

Sergeant Joyce cocked her head, nodding for her to take a seat. Reluctantly, April sat down. She could see Joyce, thinking through her nerve endings, trying to figure this one out.

Ducci had said the fibers in Maggie Wheeler’s ring were dog hairs. Camille Honiger-Stanton was found walking her dog.

“Where’s the dog?”

“Braun took the dog away from her. When she got the dog back, she responded better. It’s still with her.”

“What kind of dog?” Sergeant Joyce jumped on the question.

“Poodle. Apricot-colored. They’re downstairs.”

“She fit Ducci’s description?”

“Kind of.” April fell silent, uneasy.

“Well, what did she tell you?” Joyce demanded impatiently.

“Uh.” April pulled out her notebook. It had been necessary to take some notes. What Camille had said was all on tape. But what she had done during the interview had to be written down on paper. The woman was really weird.

“She said her sister was a witch,” April began.

“Millie?”

“Milicia. Said she made her—Camille—sick. She rolled her eyes back in her head. Then she told me I was going to die of cancer.” April looked up.

“Oh, why is that?”

“She said there was a big cancer-growing agent in the precinct. Anyone who’s in here could catch it.”

Sergeant Joyce frowned. “That’s not so crazy. I’d agree with her on that. What else?”

“Eyes roll back in head. Growling noise. That meant she was thinking about the dog. She said she was worried about the dog catching it, then said the dog couldn’t get precinct cancer as long as she was holding it.”

“Great.” Sergeant Joyce impatiently tapped the desk with a pencil.

“She said the sister had been projecting radiation rays at her. She wanted to report it, but didn’t think the police would do anything about it. She said the sister tried to kill her in other ways, too. I asked her what ways. She said poison, through radio waves. She has a whole list.”

“Uh-huh, so why does the sister want to kill her?”

April continued reading from her notes. “She said Milicia was always trying to kill her. Said she’d be dead now if she didn’t have Bouck to protect her.”

“So what is this? Some kind of sibling-rivalry thing?”

“Yeah, Camille said Milicia was jealous because their parents loved Camille more. She said Milicia killed her parents and she—Camille—was the only one who knew. So now Milicia has to kill her, too.”

“Okaaaay.” Sergeant Joyce tapped the desk with the pencil. Two sisters and two boutique salesgirls in a dance of death with a poodle.

“Anything in that?” she asked about the murder of the parents.

April shook her head. “Milicia told me their parents died in some kind of car accident about two years ago. Greenwich, Connecticut. I have someone checking it out.”

Sergeant Joyce sighed. “What about the boyfriend?”

“Name’s Nathan Bouck. I’m going to run a check on him. Camille says he owns the whole building and the chandelier shop downstairs. She says he’s God. He can do anything he wants.”

“Must be nice,” Joyce murmured.

“Yeah, even Milicia the witch is scared of him.”

“So, ah, what do you think?”

April closed her notebook. Her neighbors next door in Chinatown when she was growing up had a cousin. Name of Lee Hao Chung. Fat boy, stupid-looking. His movements were jerky just like Camille’s. Lee Hao did a lot of naughty things, stole the best food, tortured the other kids. Got away with everything because he was kind of crazy upstairs. April remembered Skinny Dragon Mother telling her again and again, “Lee Hao not crazy, smart. Do anything he want, never have to work in life. Family always make excuse. Pah.”

Could be like that with Camille. Maybe crazy, maybe not. Maybe parents made excuses. Maybe sister not so tolerant. April could see how Milicia would not like being troubled with a sibling who covered her face with her hair whenever she got upset and talked about cancer traveling in radio waves—not that such a thing was completely impossible. April had read somewhere that power lines near farms out west had killed whole herds of cattle. And lots of people in New Jersey were getting leukemia. Could be radio waves. Why not?

“So, is she a murderer?”

April shook her head. “I have no idea. The crime scenes were very—organized. Crazy, but organized, know what I mean?”

“Yeaaah,” Joyce said doubtfully.

“So the homicides look like the work of a crazy person, doesn’t mean they are.” April leaned forward, trying to gather her thoughts into a coherent whole. “Camille acts crazy. Lieutenant Braun was completely freaked. Maybe she’s too crazy to do anything. Braun thinks so.”

“What do you think?” Joyce pressed some more.

“I don’t know, Sergeant. I wish I did.”

“Let’s go have a look at her.”

“Sure.” April stood. Last she saw Camille, the curtain of red hair was covering her face. Sergeant Joyce was going to love this.