Hanging Time (31 page)

In psychiatric time ten days was nothing. Jason kept wondering if there was something he should have picked up right away from the very incomplete picture Milicia gave him when they met the first and second times.

He had a feeling of helplessness as she left the office. It was another one of those occupational hazards that went with being a shrink. He couldn’t be with his patients when they made their actions. He couldn’t stop them or help
them, or rewrite the story as it was happening. He could only discuss it with them afterward.

Milicia walked out of his office to talk to the police about murder. Jason knew the procedure because he had been there, knew the precinct, knew how the detectives, particularly April Woo, would deal with her. He was deeply involved and yet he had to miss it.

Daisy came into the waiting room. Jason had heard the door open and close. Daisy was always difficult, a challenge.

He nodded at Milicia as she went out the door. She didn’t look back. If she didn’t call him to tell him what happened, he wouldn’t call her. April would no doubt fill him in.

The brass bull clock on his bookshelf hit the quarter hour with a tiny click. He waited until he was certain Milicia was gone, then came out of his office, prepared for Daisy, smiling slightly and looking as if nothing important had happened to him in a long time.

B
raun sauntered up Second Avenue, in no hurry now, though he had grabbed only twenty minutes for his hamburger. April watched him unwrap a stick of gum and fold it into his mouth as he stepped up on the curb at the corner. The suspect’s tiny dog ran over to greet him, sniffing at his cuff. Camille quickly jerked the dog away. Braun shook out the crease in his pants, chewing, while his mouth tried for a smile.

He passed Camille. Slowly it occurred to him. His head turned. On his second take he sought guidance from Sanchez and Woo, sitting in the unmarked car as they had been ordered to. Braun looked at them and cocked his head behind him at the tall redhead now crossing the street with the little dog.

Is that the suspect?

Mike and April kept their faces neutral, unwilling to commit on yea or nay to such a jerk.

Lieutenant Braun decided it without their prompting, spun around, and ran back to her. Roberts followed.

“Shit,” Mike muttered.

Braun and Roberts approached the suspect like a freight train racing at full throttle. They blocked her front and back. Braun shoved his badge in her face. She cried out, reeling back.

“No! Don’t touch me.” She reached down to pick up the dog, then tried to get back to her front door. She didn’t get there.

Sergeant Roberts’s arm snaked out to stop her from resisting
an officer. The suspect panicked and started screaming. April shook her head as the two men subdued her and put her in their car. Before they pulled away, Braun made a sign for Sanchez and Woo to remain where they were until further notice.

C
amille’s eyes darted wildly around the room. She could hear them, and she could speak if she wanted to. She wouldn’t speak though. No matter what. She wouldn’t ever tell them the secret, even if they sent her to prison for the rest of her life. She didn’t want to think about prison. Milicia said in prison they’d do bad things to her. Really bad.

The beating of Camille’s heart sounded like thunder. It was hot. She worried that the place they put Puppy was even hotter. The big one said they had a special place for Puppy, would give her back when they were finished. She didn’t believe him. She stared at him, willing a knife to enter his throat. He was fiddling with something on the table. The other one was staring at her as if she were a witch. Beads of perspiration dotted her forehead.

Yes, I am a witch. A very bad witch
.

She gnawed at her bottom lip. They told her to cooperate. She shivered.

“Okay, got it.” The one who had taken Puppy away nodded at the one who grabbed her off the street.

“All right, let’s begin. Would you state your name.”

Camille unclenched her jaw, releasing her lip. She licked it carefully, sticking her tongue way out. He said some things into the microphone. She didn’t listen to what they were.

“Uh, your name.”

She didn’t answer.

“Would you like something to drink?”

“Camille,” she said suddenly.

“Ah. Camille what?”

“Camille Honiger-Stanton.”

Camille sat back, gathered her bottom lip back into her mouth, gnawed on it while her eyes blinked open and closed.
There
, she told them.

“Where do you live, Camille?”

“Hmmm.”

“Can you tell us where you live?”

Camille watched the tape recorder. She counted softly to thirty.

The taller man looked at the smaller one. Camille noticed that he had a big mole on his face. Black.

“Ten fifty-five Second Avenue.”

“Okay, good. Are you married or single?”

Camille giggled. He was going to die soon. She could see it happening. The mole on his face was cancer. She didn’t like being so close to it, having to look at it. Quickly she combed her hair over her face with her fingers until it was a dense curtain she couldn’t see through. That was better. She sat back in the chair.

“Uh, Camille?”

“Who’s calling?”

“Um, it’s Lieutenant Braun.”

“Did you know you have a mole on your face?” Her voice came from behind the curtain.

There was a brief pause before he answered. What the hell was this? He decided to humor her.

“I didn’t know. Where is it?”

“Underneath your eye.”

Camille moved her hair enough to see the man with the mole lift his hand to his cheek. She tossed her hair back, leaning forward suddenly to look closer.

“There.” She stuck her finger at his face.

The man recoiled. The word “Christ” jumped out of his mouth.

“Did you know those kind of things cause cancer?”

He looked wildly at the other guy. “Roberts, do you see a mole?”

“No, sir.” The other man didn’t look, but he was smiling a little.

“I don’t have a mole on my face.” But he was a little uncertain now.

“Oh, yes, you do,” Camille said angrily. She reached into a pocket in her dress and pulled out a small artist’s notebook with a pen stuck in the spiral binder. She took out the pen and flipped the pages until she came to a clean one.

“What’re you doing?”

Braun was alarmed. Every movement the woman made was jerky, ungainly, weird. He was afraid she might stab him with the pen. He reached over to take it away.

She moved it out of his reach. “I’m drawing your face is what I’m doing. Don’t disturb me, I’m concentrating.”

She stuck her tongue deep in the side of her cheek. It bulged out, distorting her face.

“Camille, we have to concentrate on these questions,” Braun said. His eyes were nervous now, flitting back and forth from Camille to the guy sitting next to her, guarding the tape machine.

Camille didn’t look up. She pounded her left hand on the table irritably. The recorder jumped.

“Don’t interrupt. I want to preserve this moment.”

“Jesus,” Braun muttered under his breath.

Then he was silent for a while, watching her pen move in swift strokes across the paper. It didn’t take a genius to see that she wasn’t drawing anything.

He looked at his watch. “It’s getting late. You must respond to these questions.”

Camille laughed. His eyes were rolling all over the place, looked about to jump out of his head.

“What are you laughing at?”

He looked upset.

“What’s so funny?”

Camille directed her pen at his eyes and poked across the table in their direction not far enough to touch him but far enough to make him nervous.

“It’s all in the eyes. You can see it all in the eyes.” She stared at him, her eyes blinking quickly open and shut. Then
she dropped her gaze to her drawing, became absorbed by it. She nodded and fell silent.

Horrified, Braun looked at the woman with her head bobbing up and down.

“Okay, that’s it.” He gestured to Roberts to turn off the tape. He got up, his hands rubbing the skin around his eyes and above his cheekbones, turned his back on the table where Camille sat like an insect, a big insect, with hair sticking out from her head like crimped red filament wire. Cold. Weird.

“Get Woo in here.”

“Yes, sir.” Instinctively Roberts reached for the tape recorder and took it with him.

Braun followed him quickly to the door. “Stay here,” he told Camille. “We’ll be right back.”

But she wasn’t listening to him. She was thinking about Puppy and how frightened Puppy must be.

Camille didn’t know how long she was there before a different person, a woman, came in. The woman took a look at her and said, “Stop that” very sharply.

Camille growled and continued biting at her arm.

“You can’t do that.” April approached her matter-of-factly and pried the arm out of Camille’s mouth. A little blood oozed out of the places where she had chewed some holes in it. The bitten arm looked raw, as if it should be hurting quite a bit.

“There’s no need for that,” April said.

Camille gnashed her teeth, snapping at the air now.

“I guess you’re having some trouble, huh?”

“Rrrrrr.”

“I’m April Woo. You’re acting like a dog. I’d guess you’re worried about your dog.” April stood there with one hand on her hip. She was used to crazy. It happened all the time. The police department could do it to anybody.

“Would you feel better with your dog in here?”

Camille stopped growling and fell silent.

“Will you talk to me if I bring you the dog? What do you say?”

“Yes,” Camille whispered. “I’m better with Puppy.”

What was so hard about that? April leaned out the door and talked to the officer who was standing outside. He hadn’t been doing his job. The woman should not have been allowed to mutilate herself while in police custody.

I
want to talk to you.” Sergeant Joyce crooked her finger at April and made some wiggling motions with it. “In here.”

It was after nine that evening. April followed her into her office.

“Close the door.”

April closed the door.

Sergeant Joyce returned to her desk. When she was settled in the same kind of old-fashioned wooden, rolling, tilting chair April had in the squad room, she turned to April. April could see that the order to stay behind in the precinct had not exactly been easy for her supervisor to take. April felt a little sorry for her.

Out in the squad room someone began screaming obscenities. “Fucking pig hit me. Asshole fucking cop. I’m gonna file a complaint. I’m gonna have your fucking ass.”

The screaming stopped as suddenly as it started.

A breeze drifted in through the open window. It was cooling off and beginning to smell like fall. In the second of silence April noticed there was water in the saucers under the two plants on the windowsill. Sergeant Joyce must have been really desperate for something to do. The plants looked happier now. Sergeant Joyce didn’t.

Only two hours before, Sergeant Joyce had had the pleasure of being chewed out with her two best detectives in front of the captain of the precinct by a Lieutenant from downtown. For once April knew more about what was going on than she did. Sergeant Joyce didn’t like not knowing what was going on. Her desk was a mess. It looked to April
as if she’d spent the time since the skirmish messing up the number-coded forms and eating her fingernails.

Right now her face was screwed up into a big question mark.

“Where’s Mike?” she demanded.

“Down at the district attorney’s office, trying to get a search warrant.”

Joyce frowned. “Any particular reason?”

“Whole thing looks suspicious.”

“What about the boyfriend, wouldn’t he let you in?”

“He wasn’t home.”

Sergeant Joyce raised an eyebrow. “So what’s going on here?”

April told her how Braun and Roberts had pulled Camille off the street while she was walking her dog, brought her in for questioning and gotten nowhere, then called April in from the stakeout to see if she could do any better.

“Nice of them to inform me. Jesus, what fuck-ups. Where are they now?”

“Braun and Roberts went back to the building in question to wait for the boyfriend. They seem to think the boyfriend might be involved.”

“Oh, yeah. What makes them think so?”

“The woman is—wacko. When I went in there she was chewing on her arm. And I’m not kidding. Bite wounds all over.”

April stood in front of the desk, her face impassive, reporting like a soldier.

Sergeant Joyce cocked her head, nodding for her to take a seat. Reluctantly, April sat down. She could see Joyce, thinking through her nerve endings, trying to figure this one out.

Ducci had said the fibers in Maggie Wheeler’s ring were dog hairs. Camille Honiger-Stanton was found walking her dog.

“Where’s the dog?”

“Braun took the dog away from her. When she got the dog back, she responded better. It’s still with her.”

“What kind of dog?” Sergeant Joyce jumped on the question.

“Poodle. Apricot-colored. They’re downstairs.”

“She fit Ducci’s description?”

“Kind of.” April fell silent, uneasy.

“Well, what did she tell you?” Joyce demanded impatiently.

“Uh.” April pulled out her notebook. It had been necessary to take some notes. What Camille had said was all on tape. But what she had done during the interview had to be written down on paper. The woman was really weird.

“She said her sister was a witch,” April began.

“Millie?”

“Milicia. Said she made her—Camille—sick. She rolled her eyes back in her head. Then she told me I was going to die of cancer.” April looked up.

“Oh, why is that?”

“She said there was a big cancer-growing agent in the precinct. Anyone who’s in here could catch it.”