Hanging Time

75

It was mid-afternoon, just before three o’clock. From inside 1055 Second Avenue came the sounds of running water and a dog barking. Downstairs, the chandelier shop was closed. Its heavy gate was locked with a massive padlock.

Two people had tried to enter 1055 in the last hour. A tall, bulky woman, well dressed in a designer suit, had walked back and forth in front of the building for nearly fifteen minutes, looking up for signs of life. She tried the bell a number of times, stepped back on the sidewalk, and looked up at the windows again. Her pale hair had recently been molded into a complicated style of swoops and swirls that didn’t move when she did. Finally she took a key out of her bag and tried it on the inside door. A second later she was back out on the sidewalk, hailing a taxi.

The other person who came to the door of the brownstone was a black man with dreadlocks. He, too, rang the bell and tried to get into the building with a key that didn’t fit. He, too, went away after a few minutes.

It was hot in the van. From time to time the whine of the dog came piercingly out of the amplifier.

Mike clapped his hands over his ears. “Ow, can’t you fix that, man?”

Ben, the sound expert, adjusted a knob. “That better?”

The barking stopped abruptly. Now they couldn’t hear anything.

“Uh-oh. Can you get it back?”

“I don’t know. I’m not getting anything. Maybe she took the collar off.” Ben played with the knobs.

“Shit.”

“She didn’t take it off,” April said after a minute. “She just picked up the dog. It stops crying when she picks it up.”

Discouraged, Mike sighed and stretched. “I knew this wouldn’t work.”

“We didn’t have a lot of options,” April murmured. They couldn’t exactly put a wire on Camille without her knowing it. They couldn’t bug the whole house. And they couldn’t just let her go back in there alone while they sat outside without any clue what was happening inside.

For a few minutes, nothing emerged from the speakers. Then a kind of humming started—one long, disconnected note, another one higher in the scale. A third one, lower down.

“What’s that?”

“Sounds like she’s singing.”

“Poor woman,” April murmured. “She shouldn’t be in there by herself.” April was usually too busy to think much about what happened to people after their cases were closed. She was supposed to retain the relevant parts for her experience file, the fund of knowledge that made her a better cop with each case, and then let the personal part go. But she had a feeling this crazy lady was going to stay with her for a long time.

“I wonder what she’s doing in there,” Mike muttered.

Now some scratching as well as a humming sound came out of the machine.

“She’s scrubbing something with a brush,” Ben said. A small, wiry man with a shaved head, he was wearing shorts and a Grateful Dead T-shirt, Nike Airs with no socks.

The whole van smelled of his feet.

April shrugged. Camille didn’t wash the dishes or anything else, but maybe this was a special occasion. Maybe she wanted to clean up the place for her lover’s return.

When she left the precinct, Camille had wanted to get Bouck’s sister to go with her to visit him in the hospital. She didn’t seem to know where the sister lived though, and so far there was no lead on any sister. They had located an elderly father in Florida with Alzheimer’s who no longer knew his own name, much less those of his relatives. He wasn’t going to visit anybody. They had also located an older brother in California. When the brother in California was informed Bouck was in critical condition in the hospital with a gunshot wound, he demanded: “What the hell do you expect me to do about it?”

Maybe Camille meant her own sister would go with her. April stuck her nose out the cracked window on the street side to get some fresh air. A few hours earlier in the precinct Milicia had seemed so eager to be with her sister. They knew she’d show up.

But she was certainly taking her time getting there.