The Hanging

Chapter 6

Three of us stood shoulder to shoulder looking up, Kate’s husband Roger, me, and Sid Bishop, the captain from the nearest LA County fire station, as two paramedics and five backup firemen pounded up the stairs to reach Holloway.

Roger dropped his chin down enough to look at Bishop, who was a good half foot shorter.

“Would it spoil their fun if we told them there’s no need to hurry?”

“They need the practice,” Bishop said, watching his men intently. “When was the last time something like this happened out this way?”

“It’s the first to go down on my watch,” Roger said, emphasis on my. “And I’ve been Anacapa’s police chief for ten years.”

That got my attention. “There hasn’t been a murder in Anacapa for ten years?”

“More like sixteen years,” Roger said, still watching the paramedics. “Woman, wife of a doctor, caught the doc cheating with his office nurse, so she shot three of their four kids and herself to get back at him. She survived, the three kids didn’t.” He folded his arms across his chest. “But I wasn’t here then.”

“Dear God,” I said.

“Maggie, why do you think I took this job?” he asked, bringing his gaze down to me. “I had my fill of wet calls working Homicide down south. I like it just fine out here in the sticks.”

He bumped his shoulder against mine. “Until you rode into town and shot my stats all to hell.”

The paramedics had reached the top landing. Bishop gave them a few moments to look at the victim before he called up. “Gus?”

The paramedic who responded to the name leaned over the railing. “Goner. Not that there was any question about it. You need to call the bus, Sid.”

“Roger did already,” Bishop called up. “Any reason to bring him down before the coroner and Scientific Services guys get here to take over the crime scene?”

Gus looked at his watch. “What’s their ETA?”

“It’s Friday, rush hour. Coroner is coming from downtown LA, Scientific Services is way out in Alhambra.” Bishop looked at Roger and shrugged. “Two hours?”

“Be my guess.” Roger raised his face to Gus. “As long as the head isn’t ready to sever, better leave him as is for the coroner.”

I admit I felt a little squeamish, fought back the image that suddenly flashed behind my eyes of the decapitated corpse of Park Holloway crashing to the floor at our feet.

Bishop was studying the ceiling, looking at the fixture in the center from which Holloway’s noose was suspended.

“Any idea how we’re going to get him down, Rog?”

“That thing Holloway’s garrote is attached to up there connects to an electronically operated pulley. It was put in last week to support a big sculpture that’s going into the stairwell. If there’s any reason to bring Holloway down before Scientific Services gets here, we’ll open that panel over there, hit the switch, and lower away.”

“Interesting,” Bishop said, going over to the panel. He nudged it with the toe of his boot and the door popped open. I could see pry marks on the wall where the panel’s lock had been forced, marks that had not been there when I saw it earlier in the day.

“Better come away from there, Sid,” Roger said. “There might be prints.”

The radio on Bishop’s belt began to squawk. He took it off, had a brief conversation that sounded like code. Still holding the radio, he addressed Roger.

“There’s a collision on Kanan Road-car’s on fire. Because of budget cuts, we’re two crews short. I gotta get these guys up there. Any reason you need one of them to stick around?”

“Go ahead,” Roger said. He gestured toward Holloway. “Nothing you guys can do for him. Go on. We’ll wait for the coroner.”

“We?” I asked.

“You’ll need to answer questions, Maggie. You found him.”

Bishop summoned his crew and they thundered out as rapidly as they had entered.

In the quiet they left in their wake, I said, “Two’s company, three’s a nightmare.”

“You want to go over everything you did and everything you saw for me?”

“You gonna grill me, Officer, sir?”

He chuckled. “No, I just want to hear your story.”

There wasn’t much to tell, but I ran through it. I entered, the building seemed empty, I saw Holloway in the stairwell, and I called 911. The 911 tape should have captured everything except the first sixty seconds.

“You came here to film the empty stairwell?” he asked.

“I did.”

“Where’s your camera?”

I pulled it out of my bag where I dumped it when I went to open the big front doors for the paramedics. I hadn’t turned it off so, although inside my bag there were no images to shoot, the camera had continued to record sound.

He pushed his chin toward the stairs. “You think you can go up there and take some pictures?”

“If you need them.”

“Not a bad idea,” he said. “In two more hours he’ll be in full rigor and all his blood will have settled into his feet and lower legs. Let’s film a complete record of him pretty much as you found him.”

My lack of enthusiasm must have been apparent. Roger put a big hand around the back of my neck and brought his face down close.

“I’d do it myself, Mags,” he said. “But that’s a pretty fancy camera. Kate’s the picture-taker in our family, out of necessity. And, anyway, I should wait down here in case anyone shows up.”

He smiled his broad, white-toothed smile at me.

Roger was a big man, graying at the temples, softening in the middle, maybe a year from his sixtieth birthday, and though he wore old jeans and holey baseball sleeves-he had come straight from his fifteen-year-old daughter Marisol’s softball practice-he was still too handsome for his own good.

Before he took the job heading Anacapa’s little police department, Roger had put in his twenty-five at a big-city police department down the coast. For fifteen of those years he had been, like my husband Mike, a homicide detective. He had accepted promotion to commander for the last couple of years so he could pad his retirement as a matter of pride, in case it ever became necessary for his family to rely on his income.

Kate, his wife, was a true egghead who never concerned herself about money because, unlike Roger, she never had to. When Kate was sixteen her father died, leaving her, according to Forbes, the fifth richest teenager in California. Not that she cared one whit.

I looked up at Holloway, cringed, and stalled every way I could think of; I was in no hurry to get up close and personal with his remains. With luck, the coroner would show up right now and take his own damn pictures. I changed the battery pack on the camera, checked the available space on the photo disk. Next I tried diversionary conversation.

“So, Roger,” I said, “how does it feel to be working a homicide again?”

“Are you stalling?” he asked, grinning at me. “I know you’ve taken crime scene pictures before.”

“Sure. And no, I’m not stalling.” A little fib. “I’m just asking.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, rightfully skeptical.

“So, back in the saddle again, huh, Roger?”

“The thing of it is,” he said, “my department can’t handle a homicide. My guys don’t have the experience and we don’t have the resources. Mostly what we do here is write traffic tickets and haul in drunken college students on weekends. So, no, I’m not back in that saddle.

“I put out a call to the LA County Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau, and they’re dispatching a team of detectives who’ll take over as soon as they can get here.”

“Too bad,” I said. I turned on the camera and, feeling resigned, headed up the stairs. “This one could be interesting.”

“Maggie,” Roger called behind me.

“I know, don’t touch anything.”

While I filmed Holloway, Roger kept up a conversational stream, friendly chatter as counterpoint to the grim images I was seeing through my lens. I was grateful to him.

“So,” he said as I started with the soles of Holloway’s shoes. “Kate tells me you finally got the okay to talk with Sly’s mother.”

“Finally, yes.” I zoomed in on a dark blob of something stuck on the outside of the heel of his left shoe. “Tomorrow morning, crack of dawn, I’m headed to Frontera State Prison for Women.”

“Traffic out to Corona shouldn’t be a problem that early.”

“It’s coming back I’m worried about.”

Dark blue trousers with a narrow gray pinstripe, creases from sitting and a little shine on the ass from wear. I could see a bulge in his right rear pocket that might have been a wallet, and the edge of a linen handkerchief showed at the top of his left pocket. Black leather belt, silver-gray dress shirt creased in the back, probably from leaning back in a chair, and a Mont Blanc pen clipped in the breast pocket.

“I have afternoon plans tomorrow,” I said, glancing down at Roger. He grinned at me.

“Right, Mom meets the boyfriend.”

“I’m over forty, Roger. Boyfriend doesn’t sound right.”

“He’s French, yeah?” he said. “How about petit ami?”

“That’s better.”

There was a narrow stripe of darkening blood that ran from a gash on Holloway’s forehead, down his face, along the edge of his yellow silk tie, and into the top of his trousers. Something had connected with the back of his head with enough force to crush the bone, leaving a fist-sized indentation that was now crusted over with black and sticky blood.

“Someone hit him, Roger,” I said.

“I saw that. Clocked him a good one.”

I couldn’t see whatever it was that had been used to garrote or hang Holloway because it was imbedded in the bloated flesh of his neck. About his face I will only say that hanging victims don’t often get open coffins.

“What are you hoping to get from Sly’s mother?”

“A handle on who his father was,” I said, turning off the camera. “There is no father named on Sly’s birth certificate.”

“Is this for the film you’re making about Sly?”

“In part. Most of all, it’s for Sly. Not knowing gnaws on him.”

“You want to take some shots of the area up there?” Roger said. “Railings, floor-you know the drill.”

Dutifully, I turned the camera back on and started shooting the area around Holloway, continued, focused on the floor, as I walked back downstairs.

“It’s important to know where you came from,” I said.

“You would know that better than most of us,” he said, referring to my own recent discovery of family I had grown up knowing nothing about.

When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I asked, “Will that do it?”

“One more thing,” he said, gesturing me closer.

He took the camera from me and scanned me with it, front and back, hands and feet in close-up.

“Insurance for you,” he said, handing the camera back, “in case some idiot detective gets notional about you.”

I turned the camera off and started to take out the photo disk to give him. But he stopped me.

“Any way you can make a copy of what you got before we hand it over?”

“Sure.” Like hell he wasn’t back in the saddle. I dug a memory storage stick out of my bag, plugged it into the camera’s USB port, and made a copy of the photo file. Then I made a second copy. One I dropped back into my bag, the other I handed to him, along with the camera’s image card.

“That do it?” I asked.

“Just one more thing,” he said. “Any idea where we can find a coffeepot around here? It’s going to be a long night.”