Hanging Time

55

After they saw the restraint on the third floor, Braun called in one of his detectives from the street to help search the house. A few minutes later he found April in the other bedroom on the third floor. She was leaning over a table, studying Camille’s hairbrush and the tangle of long reddish-gold hair in its bristles. Arrayed around her were a number of rolling racks hung with women’s clothes. All kind of clothes. Up there, there seemed to be a warehouse of blouses and dresses and jackets and skirts the way the downstairs was a warehouse of furniture. Some items still had price tags on them. It looked like Camille did a lot of shopping.

Braun gestured at April. “Go check out the basement. See what you can come up with.”

Basement! Immediately her heart began to pound. Why the basement, when there was a treasure trove right here? She struggled to swallow the protest that jumped onto her tongue. What was wrong with this guy? Didn’t he know she was the first one in on this case and knew what she was looking for?

“You got a problem?” Braun said nastily.

She turned away for a second, lowering her eyes so the hot rage didn’t spill out there either. She didn’t have a problem. She didn’t love dark places like basements, but cops weren’t supposed to admit to little weaknesses like terror, repulsion, nausea, or rage at incompetent supervisors.

“No, sir, no problem.”

She had wanted to see if the missing items from Mrs. Manganaro’s store inventory were in this room. And he was a jerk.

“Then what are you waiting for?”

“I’m gone.” She headed for the door, leaving the gold mine of information in all those clothes. Braun didn’t know about the missing white blouse from The Last Mango. Elsbeth Manganaro had just told her. Braun would pass it by if it was there. She’d have to come back and look for it later.

Downstairs, she turned the thumb latch on the basement door and stood outside it, cursing herself in Chinese for being afraid of opening a door and entering a cave that might have ghosts in it. Only people like Skinny Dragon Mother, born in China, believed in ghosts. American-born Asians like herself knew better. Ghosts didn’t cross the oceans. They stayed on the other side. She switched on the light.

After she had the light on and the door at the top of the stairs open, it wasn’t so bad going down there. She could tell there wasn’t anything either alive or dead in the basement. It felt damp and cold, and the smell of ammonia made her eyes tear, but it wasn’t frightening. It felt the way she had described Camille to Jason—weird and upsetting, off-kilter in every way, but not frightening. Creepy.

April had a powerful sense of Camille’s presence in there. Wherever Camille spent time with her dog, there was the smell of urine. Either the dog was not trained to go outside, or Camille neglected to take it out as often as it needed to go.

She tried to visualize the dog and Camille in this place. What did they do in there? The room was nearly empty. There were three smallish cardboard boxes half filled with junk that April recognized as chandelier parts, ceiling caps, chains of various thicknesses and lengths, pieces of crystal with wires through them, brass arms. April spent several fruitless minutes raking through them.

An oil-burning furnace and a rusting water heater sat off to one side. There was no furniture. No tables or chairs. As in the front entry, the ceiling light was just a weak bulb, this one set in among the maze of exposed plumbing pipes. An odd-looking bundle sat in the corner behind the furnace. April had to circle the furnace to see it. Immediately she knew this was Camille’s corner. There was a piece of fraying blue carpet under the bundle. April shivered when she saw the way the carpet was positioned. From here Camille would be partially hidden behind the furnace, but able to see the barred window above. April had no idea why she could see Camille sitting there.

April studied the bundle. It was tied up by the arms of a shirt like a hobo’s sack in an old movie. She didn’t want to touch it. She had a feeling that everything about this place told a story just as the crime scenes in the two boutiques where the girls had died told a story. As she contemplated the bundle, she worried about what the team was doing upstairs. What if they needed another kind of expert? What if Braun was moving things around and missing their significance? She tried to put the politics of the case out of her mind, to let the little pieces of information patter down on her like rain, while she kept her own counsel and her own focus.

She’d never seen a restraint like the straitjacket on the third floor in somebody’s home; she didn’t have a good feeling about the bundle in the basement.

She heard the sound of voices overhead. They must be going through the kitchen. Reluctantly, she reached down to pick up the bundle. As she touched the fabric, she had the kind of bad feeling that conjured up her discovery of Lily.

It seemed like a hundred years ago that April found the sleeping bag in a Chinatown backyard that held the body of the missing child called Lily. Dozens of people on the case and April had to be the one to spot the bag. The moment she unzipped it, she recognized the white and purple sneakers ten-year-old Lily had been wearing when she disappeared. She was still wearing them when April found her.

It was the shoes this time, too. April had a description of Maggie’s favorite shoes from Olga Yerger, the salesgirl turned hooker. Olga said the shoes were brown suede flats with fake alligator insets across the top and fat gold chains over the inset. Copies of Gucci, Olga added. She thought they came from a shoe store called Maraolo, and was positive Maggie wore them nearly every day because they were comfortable and went with everything she had.

The shoes had been pressed together inside the sack and fell out first when April opened the bag. They were size five and a half. In the toe of one shoe was the dark blue eye shadow. In the toe of the other was the plum lipstick. April’s heart beat double-time. She shook her head, perplexed.

The voices above were loud and angry now. April retied the bundle the way it had been and headed for the stairs. It sounded as if the two factions of the department had gotten into a serious dispute over something. What a mess.

Halfway up the stairs she began to make out the words and realized it was not Sanchez fighting with Braun or Roberts.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing in here?” The outrage in the newcomer’s voice had reached the cracking point. The guy was furious, almost crazed. He was in the hall, must have just come in. “You can’t just break into someone’s house like this!”

“Sir, if you’ll just calm down, we’ll work this out.” It was Lieutenant Braun. He was not speaking in a calming tone, and did not get the hoped-for results.

“Are you crazy? I’m not calming down. You broke into my house. You asshole. I’m going to have your head on a platter.”

“No one broke into your house. Are you the owner, sir?”

“The fuck you didn’t!”

“Are you the owner, sir?”

“Yes, I am the owner.”

“Is this yours, sir?”

“What the—?”

“I’d advise you to calm down.”

“And I’d advise you to get the fuck out of here.”

April couldn’t see what was going on. At the top of the stairs, before she came into view, she put the bundle down. Then she pushed open the basement door.