Hanging Time (26 page)

In the Bronx, where he came from, very few trees dotted the sidewalks; every building was the same squat configuration of brick and concrete. Even in comparison to Riverside Drive, with its attractive park along the Hudson River, the
town of Canyon Beach was beautiful. Still it seemed a pretty fragile setup.

The first night he slept there he could see the shape of the tree, far blacker than the sky, framed in the skylight, and had to resist thoughts of it crashing through the roof of the house in a light wind. He was afraid of an earthquake, a natural disaster that would end in total destruction of the entire West Coast and most particularly this tiny portion of it. The foundation of Emma’s charming house seemed unbearably flimsy, the angle of the street going down to the beach way too steep.

And he knew his anxiety about the durability of the setting was a mask to cover his grief about the fragility of his marriage, indeed the whole structure of his life. Emma told him she hated his lifestyle, his philosophy of work and being, his rigid personality. And then she let him hold her, make love to her. Indeed, kept him up half the night with the other half of her ambivalence.

Jason lay still, listening to the quiet. He was used to sirens screaming all night long, used to hostile encounters on the street. Used to the pace and the dirt and the difficulty of getting around in New York. He lived in the psyches of people who couldn’t fall in love, couldn’t work, couldn’t face their death or their life. He worked all the time without thinking much about where he lived or what he ate, how much his back hurt from sitting so still all day. His physical comfort was not a high priority to him.

He figured that was what Emma meant about his rigidity. Even in his sleep he did not escape the tortured world of his patients. He worried about them all the time. After a peaceful dinner three thousand miles away from her he felt compelled to call Milicia again. Just in case.

“Where are you?” she had demanded angrily.

His patients were often angry when he went away. They seemed to expect him to have no life but theirs to think about. Some of them punished him by hurting themselves. Women got pregnant. Men had accidents. Emma didn’t bother to ask him what made him call, or what made him shake his head when he hung up.

The next morning, watching the sun rise, he wondered if
the calls from Milicia were just another attempt to get his attention and control him. He wasn’t particularly worried about it. He returned to his anxiety about an earthquake and all the things Emma had said in the past three days.

“It isn’t worth the effort” was the last thing she said before falling asleep. “We’re too different.”

He knew it was stupid to tell Emma he would change. Nobody could really change very much. The best they could do was feel better about who they were.

“Nothing worthwhile comes without effort” was his wimpy reply.

“That’s just shrink talk,” she grumbled.

She didn’t want to admit there was anything worthwhile about him. Still, he got the picture it was no picnic being a single woman in California.

“It’s no different from high school,” she had remarked the first day.

“Are you surprised?” he asked. They were walking on the beach, waiting for the sun to set. Emma glanced around at the crowd gathering at the water’s edge.

“I was surprised none of these pretty people has anything to say. There’s no one to talk to.”

So. He was still good for something. It was his first soaring indication that he would not have to sleep in the loft.

Now, as the sun rose higher on the last day, he had to prepare himself for the separation. Emma was still asleep, her body pressing his. Once again they had been up much of the night. She’d fallen asleep with her head on his chest and her shoulder somewhat painfully crushing his arm.

He hadn’t wanted to disturb her by moving. Now his arm and shoulder were numb, and he still didn’t want to disturb her.

“I could go for this,” he murmured.

He liked walking on the beach, liked the feeling of the place, the perfume of the sea and the foliage. The brilliance of the sun. He looked up at the eucalyptus tree, wondering how long it had been there.

“What?” she said sleepily.

“The whole thing. I like the whole thing, Emma. It’s all
great. I love you. If this is what you want, you should have it.”

He was surprised when she answered. “So?”

Now he could see that she was awake, had been feigning sleep all along.

“So we could try to work it out. I could visit. You could visit. We don’t have to make any decisions now.”

She sat up suddenly, brushing her hair away from her face, fully awake, totally feminine and confusing, with a logic all her own.

“I don’t know what to do. You’ve ruined me, Jason,” she wailed. “I can’t trust anybody but you anymore.”

He was silent for a long time. It wasn’t the most romantic thing he had ever heard. In fact, she made him feel like an old shoe. Still, he wouldn’t forget the way she had loved him in the dark. And trust was more than just a place to start. It was central to everything.

“Yeah,” he told her finally. “Me, too.”

T
he owner of European Imports, an Israeli who owned a number of small boutiques around Manhattan, discovered the body of Rachel Stark at nine o’clock on Tuesday morning. Ari Vittleman made the rounds of his stores every weekday, never varying his routine. He always started at European Imports and worked his way downtown to the garment district, then to the Lower East Side in the shabby yellow van with the slogan
ARI ENTERPRISES
on the side. His travels took him back and forth across town in a zigzag pattern that always led to a hole-in-the-wall deli on Hester Street that had been in the same family and in the same location for over seventy-five years.

Though none of it was relevant to the case, Ari explained all this to the two officers from the 17th Precinct who responded to the call at nine-seventeen. Bald as an egg, with nearly forty extra pounds on his five-foot-seven-inch frame, Ari wore a shiny silver-gray suit, a heavy gold watch, and a large diamond ring on his right pinky finger. Right from the start he wanted it known that he was a conscientious, hardworking person whose appetite and ability to sleep would be affected for some time to come and whose confidence in New York and all things American was badly shaken.

He told the officers he had served in the Israeli Army during the Yom Kippur War and had seen a few things in his time. But nothing he had ever seen shocked him as much as the sight of his former employee hanging from an exposed pipe in his bathroom.

Over the weekend Rachel’s head and neck had turned a greenish red under the makeup. After twelve hours, maggots had already emerged from the fly larvae laid in her eyes and nose within ten minutes of her death. By Monday afternoon beetles could be seen working at the dry skin of her arms and shoulders not hidden by the expensive size-fourteen evening gown she was wearing.

The smell of rotting meat had drawn Ari to the bathroom. Her body, blocking access to the toilet, forced him outside to the street, where he vomited loudly in the gutter next to his van before pulling himself together enough to call the police.

It took only twenty minutes for the commanding officer at the 17th Precinct to connect this homicide with the boutique murder at the Two-O. There are twenty-two thousand law enforcement agencies and no centralized homicide reporting in the United States. If the second case had been in Staten Island or New Jersey, or Long Island, or indeed nearly anyplace else, the authorities might not have put them together. Since the first was just across town, Lieutenant Braun, the officer in charge, was located within minutes and called in his troops.

April worked the eight-to-four shift on Monday. She had spent most of those hours interviewing a dozen reasonable-sounding, wholesome-looking right-to-lifers who claimed Roger McLellan was in Albany the weekend Maggie died. Several of them had sheets a mile long for cutting phone and power lines, spray-painting and stink-bombing abortion clinics, threatening doctors and clients. Even though no demonstration had occurred at the State House, or anywhere else in Albany, during the crucial time in question, April had not been able to shake their story that McLellan had been there.

On Tuesday her hours were four in the afternoon to twelve at night. She’d started studying for her Sergeant’s exam at five
A.M
., her hundreds of pages of notes and exercises laid out all over the bed and floor. The phone rang at two minutes to ten.

“April?”

“Yeah?” she confirmed without enthusiasm.

“Mike. There’s been another one.”

The adrenaline kicked in like a shot, instantly filling her with energy. With just those words she knew what he meant. “Where?”

“Little boutique on Second Avenue. Fifty-fifth Street.”

“I’m on my way.” The location rang a bell. It was where the other friend of Maggie’s lived, the one who didn’t get out of bed.

B
y the time April got there, over fifteen vehicles and thirty cops jammed the area that was already roped off with sticky crime-scene tape. The two beat officers from the 17th Precinct who got there first and were responsible for securing the scene were still fighting a losing battle trying to keep interested colleagues out of European Imports. At least a dozen people had marched into the store to have a look. All had come out in a hurry, green as the corpse.

The ABC news van that April had seen the week before outside the bagel store on Fifty-sixth Street must have picked up the police call while they were getting breakfast. They were already setting up for a special broadcast.

“Get them out of here!” Lieutenant Braun barked at the beat officers, pointing to the news team.

Two other officers from the 17th were trying to direct the traffic. The street was a mess. Vehicles, including half a dozen blue-and-whites from each precinct, the news van, an EMS ambulance, and a crime-scene station wagon were all triple-parked on Second Avenue, slowing the traffic to a frustrated trickle.

April had double-parked her white Le Baron a block down and walked back. She heard Braun barking orders before she could see him. The first person she saw was Igor unloading his equipment—the cameras, evidence boxes, kits, and the vacuum. Good, they called for the same team that worked the other case. She waved.

Lieutenant Braun and Sergeant Sanchez were deep in conversation on the sidewalk in front of the store.

“Ah so, Detective Woo, thanks for joining us,” Braun said without turning his head in her direction.

April nodded at him, brushing off the sarcasm with a smile. She figured him for a heart attack in the not too distant future and comforted herself with the thought that someday she’d be the Lieutenant and he’d be dead.

“Morning, sir,” she murmured. From downcast eyes she noted that Braun’s stringy hair was thinning fast. He was wearing the same powder-blue jacket he’d worn the week before. It still looked clean. Maybe he had more than one.

“How ya doing, Mike?”

He looked at his watch, then at her. “You made good time.”

“Yeah, I took the tunnel.”

She didn’t have to ask why they were hanging around on the street. The air conditioner was on, and the unmistakable odor of a not-so-recent death pumped out to the sidewalk like the frying garlic from Chinese restaurants.

“Nobody reported this all weekend?” she asked, wrinkling her nose.

“Nope. Apparently the owner turned on the air conditioner when he got here. He said he wanted to air out the store, didn’t want to lose his merchandise,” Mike told her.

“Oh.” They’d all been contaminated often enough to know how persistently this odor lingered in the nostrils, on the skin, in whatever clothes they were wearing. It would cling to the walls and carpets of the store itself, like smoke after a fire.

“Did he touch anything else?” Igor, loaded down with cardboard evidence boxes, stopped beside them for a second.

“Igor, do you know Lieutenant Braun?” April asked.

“We’re old friends,” Braun said. “Keep-your-fucking-hands-behind-your-back Stan, we call him.”

Igor looked offended. “It’s the rules,” he muttered. “Some of you people can’t keep your hands to yourself. Mess up the whole thing. It’s not a hard one to keep your hands in your pockets.”

He jerked his head at Ari Vittleman, standing at a safe
distance down the block, surrounded by officers physically preventing ABC from attempting to get their story.

“Did he touch anything else? I got to know.”

“He says no.” Braun turned to April. “He says they close at seven on Saturdays. He figures it happened about then.”

“Why? That was the storm day, wasn’t it? She could have closed earlier.” April looked around at the proximity of other stores. Who could have seen what in that rain? She saw the boutique had the kind of metal barricade that pulled down. Had it been down when the owner came? Would the neighbors have noticed anyone going in, coming out at closing time? From here she could see the plumbing supply store and the apartment above, where Maggie’s friend lived. The guy who claimed he hadn’t seen her in years but whose name and number were in her phone book. Her mind whirled with questions.

“That’s what your pal here said. What are you, hotshots or something?” Braun demanded.

“Yeah. Or something.” Sanchez smiled at April.

Braun shot her an appraising look. “Ready to go in?”

“Any time.” April took out her notebook and shifted her bag from one shoulder to another.

“Clasp your hands behind your back,” Igor called over his shoulder.

“What a piece of work. How am I supposed to take notes with my hands behind my back?” she muttered.

“It’s the rules.” Braun laughed at his joke.

April moved inside the store. She would take notes of everything—the weather, the time, the placement of each article in the small store, the whole setup. She’d never forgotten the example given in a John Jay class of a cut-and-dried homicide that was lost in court because the two detectives on the case couldn’t agree whether an article of clothing, totally irrelevant to the case, had been on the bed or the floor of the room next to where the crime had been committed. The defense attorney convinced the jury if the police couldn’t be trusted to agree on what was at the scene of a crime, none of the rest of their “evidence” could be trusted either. The guy got off.