Hanging Time

65

What are you doing here? I thought you were finished with me.” Albert Block stood at his front door. He had a mug of coffee in his left hand.

“I was in the neighborhood,” April said. “I thought I’d drop by to say hello.”

“I don’t think I believe that.” Block was dressed in another plaid shirt and string tie, jeans, and his lizard cowboy boots. His face was bloodless, as if he’d been deprived of oxygen for the last day or so. He looked nervous and scared, and sorry he’d pushed the buzzer downstairs to let her in.

April glanced around the living room. It looked as if he had decorated it very recently from Ikea. The black-and-white area rug on the floor was so new, a piece of its price tag was still wired to the end. The white nubbly sofa against one wall had a white pillow at each arm and a squat blond wood coffee table in front of it. On the coffee table were two twisted candlesticks with unused candles in them, and a brass pot filled with what looked like a sheaf of wheat. A matching blond wood table with two chairs floated in the middle of the floor by the closed folding doors of the tiny kitchen. There was not much in the way of clutter. Everything was very clean, neat. April wondered if Maggie Wheeler had ever been entertained there. She guessed not.

Block followed her eyes. “You’ve already searched the place. What do you want?”

“I just wanted to talk to you. Do you mind?”

He shrugged. “Yeah, sort of.” But he closed the door behind her anyway.

“Why’s that?”

He shrugged again, put his mug down on the single mat that indicated his place at the table. The mat was some kind of black woven plastic. There was nothing else on it.

“I don’t have anything else to tell you.” He said this like a man who’d been thinking things over and decided for sure he didn’t want to be a murderer after all.

“I think you do.”

He shook his head. “I saw the papers.”

April looked around again. She didn’t see any newspapers. “So?”

“So, I know, uh—there’s been another one. I didn’t have anything to do with it. I didn’t know her. Nothing.” He waved his hand at the sofa. “You want to sit down?”

“Sure.” But she didn’t want to sit on his sofa. She pulled out the closest chair at the dining room table and retrieved her notebook from her bag, checked her watch. She had only a few minutes for this. She wrote the day and date, the location and Block’s name.

“I’m not here about the other one. I’m here about Maggie,” she said.

He played with the empty cup. He didn’t want to talk about Maggie anymore.

“You and Maggie were friends, right?”

“I already told you that,” he muttered. “I didn’t kill her.”

“No, I never thought you did.”

“How did you know?” He seemed as surprised now as he had been before when they let him go.

“You’re too short. The bruises on Maggie’s body indicate her killer was a taller person.” April played with her pencil, giving him a moment to calm down.

“You can tell that?”

“Yes.”

“So what do you want from me?”

She cocked her head to one side, like an inquisitive bird. “You don’t look like a happy man, Mr. Block.”

“I told you. Maggie was my friend. I liked her.”

“You told me you were in the store, and you saw her.”

“Maybe I was—kind of imagining things.”

“You imagined some parts of the scene pretty well. So we believe that you were there.”

“She was already dead,” he said quickly.

“How do you know?”

“She was hanging there. Her eyes were open. Her face was all …” Sweat broke out on his forehead. His fingers trembled as he reached up to wipe it off.

“Albert, do you know that doctors can do amazing things these days? Revive people who’ve drowned, transplant hearts. There was a mother who saved her kid. He’d been struck by a van and hadn’t been breathing for six minutes. She administered CPR while a police officer drove them to the hospital. Only a few blocks away from here. Remember that?”

Albert Block looked doubtful. “She looked dead to me.”

“Have you ever seen a dead person before?”

“No. But she was hanging there.” His eyelid twitched, and he made a face to get control of it.

“Didn’t it occur to you to try to help her?”

“You’re not supposed to touch—you know—” Block looked away.

“She was your friend.”

“I didn’t think there was anything I could do!” he cried.

“There was a phone right there. You could have called nine one one. Why didn’t you?”

He looked defeated. “I don’t know. I keep asking myself that.”

“Mr. Block, you left your friend hanging for three days without calling the police.”

“I know. It was stupid.”

“It was more than stupid. What kind of friend is that?”

Block hung his head. “I said it was stupid. What do you want from me?”

“For Maggie’s sake, I want you to tell me the truth. How did you get into the store?”

“I had her keys. I took them off the counter when I asked her to have lunch with me and she said no. I fixed it so she couldn’t go out for lunch without me.”

“So you used the keys you’d stolen to get back in.” April made a note.

“I rang first, but she didn’t answer. So I used the keys.”

“Where are the keys now?” They had searched his apartment and hadn’t found any keys.

“I threw them away.”

He threw them away. “Okay, let’s go back to before you went to the store. What were you doing before that?”

“I told you—I was hanging around in the bookstore.”

“The Endicott.”

“There isn’t another.”

April nodded. “Were you looking at books, or were you looking out the window, watching for Maggie?”

“Both. I told you that, too.”

“I know.” But things were different now. “So you could see who was coming and going from the store.”

Block shrugged. “Maybe.”

“So who did you see?”

Block shook his head. “I didn’t see anybody.”

April found that she was holding her breath. “Nobody?”

“I wasn’t watching every second.”

“So what were you waiting for? How did you know Maggie was still there?”

“She always left at exactly seven o’clock. She was afraid of the old lady. She wouldn’t dare close up before then. I got there about six forty-five.” He was perspiring heavily.

April could smell his fear. “And?” She had stood by the window of the Endicott Bookstore and knew exactly what he could see from there. The man at the register knew Block and confirmed that he had been there that evening. She didn’t let her breath out.

“And I hung around. I spend a lot of time there.”

“You were in love with Maggie. Did you know she had a boyfriend and that she was pregnant? Were you standing there in the bookstore watching for her boyfriend?”

Block angrily shook the pain out of his eyes. “He was one of those hypocritical Christians.” He spat the word. “He didn’t want to use anything, and then when she got pregnant, he didn’t want her to have an abortion. She was just so upset—” He crumpled. His tears splashed on the tabletop.

April went on quietly. “When you went into the storeroom, did you think he had done it?”

“No, I thought she did,” Block sobbed.

“She? You mean the woman who was in there with her?”

“No, after she left …”

April let her breath out. There it was. “What she, Mr. Block?”

“Maggie! I thought Maggie did it because of him.”

What? He confessed to murdering her when he thought she was a suicide? That didn’t make sense. Don’t try to work it out, April warned herself. Just let it pass. She went on.

“You saw somebody go in The Last Mango and then come out. Who did you see?”

“I don’t know. Some woman.”

“Come on, Albert. What did she look like?”

“I don’t know. She was wearing a long skirt. She had red hair. Lots of red hair. That’s all I remember.” He shook his head. His nose was running.

“Mr. Block, do you know what a transvestite is?”

“It wasn’t a man,” he said sharply. “I’d know if it were a man.”

“Sometimes they can be very convincing,” April murmured.

“It wasn’t a man.”

“How do you know, Albert?”

“She was wearing flats.”

April waited. Now she was the one sweating. So, the woman was wearing flats. So what?

Block looked at her. “Men dressed up as women always wear high heels. It’s part of the thing. The falsies, the lipstick, the wig, the tight short skirt, and the high heels.” He said it triumphantly. “This woman was wearing a long loose skirt, a loose top, and flat shoes. It was a woman.”

“Did it ever occur to you the woman you saw leaving the shop murdered Maggie?”

“No. It didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. It just—didn’t.”

Okay. “Would you recognize this woman if you saw her again?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. She was wearing a hat with a floppy brim. I didn’t really see her face.”

Oh, now she was wearing a hat, great.

“Then how did you know she had all that red hair?”

“I don’t know. I guess I saw it.”

“Well, would you recognize the hat? The shirt, the shoes, the blouse?”

Block shrugged again. He was a big shrugger. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

April looked at her watch. Twenty-five minutes had passed. Time to go. Had he clarified anything? Maybe he had. She told Albert Block she’d be back.