Hanging Time

68

April had one of the older cars. It needed to go in for repairs. She could feel a vibration in the drive shaft. She tried not to think about that as she raced up Tenth, then cut over to Amsterdam.

“Sergeant Joyce’s not at her desk right now,” Gina had told her when she had stopped to call in.

“What about Sanchez?”

“He came in a few minutes ago, but he’s not here right now. You want to leave a message?”

“Yeah, tell them to keep the Honiger-Stanton sisters separated until we’ve had a chance to question them. It’s very important, Gina. I’m on Sixty-third Street. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Then, at a red light on Seventy-ninth Street, she considered turning left to Riverside Drive and stopping by Jason’s building. That would be her third tangent of the morning. She was supposed to be getting the damn dog. But everything had gotten more complicated. She needed Jason to come and question Camille right away.

The light changed; April wavered. The problem with Jason was she couldn’t just go over there and knock on his door. He wasn’t the kind of doctor who’d drop everything and let her in. She’d have to leave a message on his machine and wait for him to call her back. She stepped on the gas, wishing she had a phone in the car, turned right on Eighty-second Street, and started looking for a place to park. Finally, she left the car double-parked in front of the precinct, the third in a line of three.

Upstairs, it was quiet in the squad room. Half the squad was working the case, canvassing the neighborhood with photos of Bouck and Camille, asking questions, looking for witnesses who saw either one of them on the Saturday night Maggie Wheeler was strangled.

They were deep into the second week of the case and already way backed up on their other cases. People called in, left messages, got mad. There were about a dozen messages on April’s desk, in addition to the ones she hadn’t been able to return the day before. The stack of pink slips next to the files of unresolved cases she hadn’t had time to work on was the kind of thing that gave her a headache. She hadn’t been able to study for her exam either.

Her whole body pulsed with anxiety. Even though she’d told the assistant D.A. she’d bring Camille and the dog back in, she’d put them on hold on the off chance Albert Block could identify the killer.

She didn’t want to mess up on this one. She’d checked in with the surveillance team at Bouck’s building three times to make sure Camille and the dog had stayed put and were all right. And still she worried. Penelope Dunham hadn’t seen Camille. She didn’t know how hard it would be to make a case against her. Right now they didn’t have enough physical evidence to make a case stick against anybody.

Gina pointed in the direction of Sergeant Joyce’s office.

“They’re in there.”

“Thanks.” April smelled pizza or something coming from the locker room. She realized that even after a large meal of crab and ginger dumplings late last night to celebrate the continued interest of George Dong, she was hungry. She had to go to the bathroom, too, wanted to splash water on her face and calm down. She didn’t have time to think about romance or anything else. She put her physical needs out of her mind as she headed toward Sergeant Joyce’s office.

The door was closed, but from the other side she could hear an angry voice. “I want to see my sister. You can’t stop me. This isn’t some Latin-American dictatorship. You can’t keep people under house arrest here.…”

April knocked on the door.

“Yeah, come in.” Sergeant Joyce’s voice.

April pushed the door open. Joyce nodded at her. Her face was a model of reason and grace under fire. Sanchez was in his usual place, leaning against the back wall. He smiled.

Milicia Honiger-Stanton sat in one of the visitors’ chairs. She was wearing a severe gray suit, not unlike the A.D.A.’s but with a much shorter skirt. Her pose revealed the considerable length of her legs and most of her thighs. She didn’t seem to be aware of her thighs at the moment though. Her face was redder than her hair, and her tirade continued on uninterrupted as the door opened.

“It’s my sister, and I demand to know what’s going on.”

Sergeant Joyce raised her eyebrow at April. April cocked her head at the hall.

“Excuse us for a moment.” Joyce crooked her finger at Sanchez, and the two of them followed April into the locker room. No one was in there, but a pizza box sat on the table. April touched it. It was still warm.

“So?” Joyce demanded.

“I went to see Albert Block. He says he was waiting for Maggie in the bookstore, watching from the window.”

“No shit.” Mike’s nostrils twitched at the enticing smell of pizza.

“Albert says he saw a woman come out of The Last Mango. He waited for Maggie to close up and come out—or for her boyfriend to show up. He knew about the boyfriend. When she didn’t come out, he went in looking for her.”

“Huh? How’d he get in?”

“He’d taken the key from the counter earlier in the day.”

Joyce sniffed at the pizza box, scowled, and turned her back on it. “He used the key, and he went in, and he found Maggie dead, is that it?”

“That’s what he said.”

“He saw the murderer, and he didn’t call us?” Mike was incredulous.

April shook her head. “He saw a woman come out. He didn’t think homicide. He thought Maggie committed suicide.”

Sergeant Joyce’s face also wrinkled with puzzlement. “He thought she’d committed suicide, then confessed to killing her?”

“I know he doesn’t make a lot of sense,” April muttered. “But I think he’s telling the truth about this.”

“How does he know it was a woman?”

“She was wearing flats.”

Sergeant Joyce thought it over.

“Uh-huh,” she said finally.

“He says transvestites always wear heels.”

“Uh-huh. Sure, I knew that. Whose damn pizza is this?” Sergeant Joyce finally acknowledged the pizza.

Mike shrugged.

“Don’t look at me,” April said. “I don’t have time to eat.”

Like a lightbulb, Joyce switched off the pizza again. “Okay, so where are we?”

“Block remembers the red hair and a long skirt,” April said.

“What about the dog?”

“He didn’t say anything about the dog.”

“Can he identify her?”

“Maybe.”

“Our forensic dentist took a look at Rachel Stark’s ankle. He says it looks like an animal bite to him. He wants to make a mold of the dog’s teeth to see if there’s a match.”

Sergeant Joyce shook her head. “Do you have the dog?”

“No. Something else came up. The Honiger-Stanton sister you’ve got in your office also has a poodle. I went by her building. She wasn’t there, but I talked to the doorman.”

“She wasn’t there because she went over to see her sister,” Mike threw in.

“So it appears,” April said, still upset because she hadn’t taken the time to get Camille’s dog on the way over.

“But they wouldn’t let her in. So she came over here.”

Aspirante charged into the locker room. “You didn’t touch my pizza, did you?”

“Yeah, we got hungry. We ate it,” Mike said.

“Shit, you didn’t!” Aspirante punched a locker. It made a nice metallic bang.

“It didn’t have your name on it,” Mike said, deadpan.

“It was mine.” Aspirante pushed by him and opened the box. Three congealing slices with pepperoni and mush-rooms were neatly arranged in the middle.

Aspirante turned away from Sergeant Joyce and mouthed the words “fuck you” at Sanchez.

Mike nodded.

“Cut the shit,” Joyce said sharply. “We just left a suspect in the office.”

Where the case file was. Very smart.

They trooped to the office. By the time they got there, they had a plan.

April turned to Mike before they went in. “How’s Braun?”

Mike shook his head. “He’ll probably limp for life—and get a citation. He said he missed you, wanted to know why you weren’t there at the hospital, paying your respects.”

“Nice. What did you tell him?”

“I said you were busy, but you were planning to come by first minute you got.”

“Oh, wonderful. I’ll remember that.”

Sergeant Joyce opened the door quickly. Milicia sat there with her legs crossed the other way, drumming her fingers on the arm of the chair, trying to look as if she hadn’t made a move since they left. The Maggie Wheeler file was where Sergeant Joyce had put it, under a stack of color-coded forms with her empty coffee cup that said LIFE IS A BEACH on top.

“Would you like a cup of coffee, Miss Stanton?” Sergeant Joyce sat down at her desk.

“I want to see my sister. I’m extremely worried about her.”

“I understand, but we need your help first. Can you tell us a little about your dogs?”

Milicia stared. “What?”

“Your dogs. You and your sister have little poodles. We’re going to need to know all about those dogs.”

A muscle jumped in Milicia’s cheek. She didn’t speak for a long time. It didn’t take a genius to see she wasn’t prepared for any dog questions.

April glanced at Mike. His mustache twitched with the ghost of a smile. The ghost struck her in the heart. She left the room to make a call.