Hanging Time (7 page)

She knocked over her handbag with her foot, leaned over to right it, showing off her cleavage and a black lace bra.

He had an uneasy feeling. Her flaunting was about on the level of a man carrying on a conversation with his hands in his pockets, rattling his change.
Guess what I’ve got in here
.

Milicia did a lot of rattling her change. Jason wondered why.

Her eyes slid around the room again. “Your books are reassuring. I’ve always loved books. If you’ve read them all, you must know what you’re doing.” She laughed briefly.

“The clutter is nice, too,” she went on. “It means you’re not one of those uptight people without any real feeling. You’re not a plastic person.” She studied him intently, a smile playing on the lower half of her face.

Jason didn’t respond to this foray either. He was clicking the camera on her. And also on himself as he measured his reactions to her. It wasn’t clear to him what was going on.

“So. Why don’t you tell me what’s happening with you, and what you think I can do to help,” he said.

There was a long pause while she gazed at him some more, as if trying to decide if she could trust him.

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” she said finally. “I need some advice, that’s all. I didn’t want to talk to Charles about this. He’s a client. I’m sure you understand about that.” She shrugged. “You impressed me the other day. I figured I could ask you.”

Jason nodded. “Go ahead.”

“I’m very worried about my sister.” She crossed her legs the other way, and readjusted the handbag at her feet. Once again the blouse fell open.

Jason picked up a new black and white notebook from his desk. “What worries you?”

“Her behavior, her moods. She’s very sick, and I have no one to help me manage her. I’m afraid she’ll hurt herself, or someone else.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Oh, God. She’s out of control. She’s depressed, moody, violent. She’s had a problem with alcohol and drugs for years. When she drinks she’s vicious, screams at people, hits them—why are you taking notes?”

Jason looked up. “Does it bother you?”

Milicia frowned. “It gets in the way.”

Jason closed the notebook. “Is there a special urgency about your sister right now?”

“What do you mean?”

“I get the impression this has been going on for a long time. Why are you seeking professional help now?”

Milicia bristled. “What kind of question is that?”

“Just asking if something special has happened, a crisis?”

“What if something really awful has happened? What do I do?”

Jason glanced at his notebook but didn’t open it. He didn’t have to. He was trained to remember everything he saw and everything he heard. He waited for her to go on. In a second she did.

“Do you know how hard it is on a family when there are two perfect children and then one of them starts going off? It’s like at the Olympics on the balance beam when the first back flip is straight on the mark and the next one a centimeter to the left. After that, a gymnast can’t get it back. She keeps going crooked until she falls off.”

She was silent for a second.

“And then the whole system comes crashing down, and nobody is left whole.”

Jason nodded, touched by the way she said it, by the image of the child gymnast doing it right to a certain point and then faltering, failing to be “normal,” thus destroying the careful façade of the family front.

“I know what that’s like,” he said gently.

He looked at her with his inner eye, searching for the real person under the cloud of flaming red hair and dusky perfume, the perfect makeup and bravado. Who was really in there and what piece of music was being played?

“Tell me,” he said to Milicia, “about falling off the balance beam.”

S
ometimes on very sunny afternoons spikes of light forced their way through the few clean patches in the cracked basement window. Today the light looked to Camille like white grass growing up through a cracked pavement. The floor was crunchy where fallen plaster from the ceiling and walls got walked on for many months before anybody bothered to sweep up. Bare bricks showed through everywhere, discolored and chipped.

It was very damp down there, even in summer, and the smell of urine was getting worse now that the puppy was older. Bouck said she had to do something about the smell.

Camille sat on the floor with her back pressed into a corner, waiting for the bright light to fade. She could hear Jamal on the other side of the wall, polishing crystal with the sonar machine. There was kind of a whine, or a hum, that she sometimes thought was human. As long as she could hear it, she felt safe.

Jamal wasn’t supposed to come on this side of the wall. The best chandeliers were in here, hanging from the low ceiling. On very bad days Camille stayed here, too, unable even to take the puppy out. The hum stopped, and she tensed.

He wasn’t supposed to come on this side of the wall
. Jamal smoked some kind of dope—hash or cocaine or something. And he touched her if he could get away with it. After he found out there were times she couldn’t move, he came in and touched her hair and her breasts. Now he wasn’t ever supposed to come on this side of the door.

Bouck told Jamal he would kill him. Bouck had three guns. Camille thought he would do it. He would kill for her. No doubt about it. But Jamal didn’t care about the guns. He wanted to touch her fine hair, that pale, pale reddish gold that was so rare. It was a color and texture Jamal had never seen in Haiti, or Trinidad, or Jamaica, or wherever he came from. Camille didn’t like to talk to him. His hair was all matted and he smelled worse than the dog. Some religious thing. He listened to reggae through a Walkman that Camille knew was the devil singing in his ear.

The light moved just a little bit, and she turned her head. Upstairs in the shop she could hear the phone ring and someone answer. It wasn’t Bouck. Bouck was at an auction. No, no, somebody died. Bouck was looking at a dead person’s estate. Sometimes he went and took things out of dead people’s apartments before the IRS could get there to tax them. Sometimes he bought the whole estate. Bouck had a lot of money. He gave her money all the time and laughed when she forgot where she put it.

“Easy come, easy go,” he said.

A few weeks earlier Bouck shot somebody who was trying to get into the shop. It was Puppy that first heard the noise.

Then Camille heard it. Nights were sometimes good for her and Bouck let her move around. That night she was free.

“Bouck.”

“Huh.” He jerked awake as if lightning had struck him.

She stood outside his door because she didn’t like to go into his room at night no matter what.

“Somebody’s downstairs.”

He was up before the light was on, the .38 already palmed. He was down the two flights of stairs and in the basement within a few seconds, with Camille not far behind.

It turned out to be a kid trying to jimmy the window in the basement. He didn’t even get inside. Before the window was all the way open, Bouck shot him. The bullet knocked him flat even though it didn’t kill him. Bouck would probably have shot him again, but the guy got up.

Together Bouck and Camille ran up the stairs and
watched out the window of the shop as the thief staggered down Second Avenue, bleeding all over the place. Bouck told her later the kid must have lived. There was nothing about it in the paper. He had Jamal wash down the sidewalk the next day, but no one ever came to ask any questions. Camille thought about the way Bouck had shot the boy. Even with Jamal around, Bouck always made Camille feel safe. Bouck could make war.

She listened for him.

Today wasn’t such a very bad day. The animal she called anguish was only a tightness in her chest, a weight holding her down, just above the level of hell. Today the animal was an almost manageable pain. She could think a little. By sundown the weight might lift enough to allow her to go upstairs. But then again, it might not lift for days. It all depended.

On good days it got better in the evenings. By six or seven her mind drifted back into focus and she started thinking she might be all right until the next day. Then it would start again with the dawn.

Madness seemed to come in the mornings, hitting her like a hurricane of wailing furies so loud and so ferociously violent, sometimes she shook all over. Sometimes she screamed and clawed at the wall. Bouck didn’t like her to do that.

When it was very bad like that she knew she would have to die to make it stop. Dying seemed like a good idea about eighty percent of the time. But Bouck kept pushing death back for her. She thought about dying every day. More than once she tried to get there. She just couldn’t find her way to the peace of death, though, where her parents were waiting to take her back. Whatever she did to end herself, Bouck kept pushing her back. Sometimes she knew death would come to her only if Bouck went first.

Camille knew where two of Bouck’s guns were. One was in his belt, and one was in his boot. On good days he let her play with his guns. The third gun, the automatic with the kind of bullets that exploded inside and could blow a man’s head off, was hidden somewhere else. She was pretty sure someday she’d find it.

The puppy lay across her lap, its head hanging over her knee. It could stay like that for hours, sprawled and boneless, just like Camille, almost as if the puppy, too, could die inside with the soul death of its mistress.

Then when Camille was finally able to stir herself after hours of inertia, the puppy would get up and race around. Round and round, up and down the stairs faster than any human could run. Camille knew if Puppy got away, no one could catch it. It was fast, very fast. She loved Puppy. More than Bouck. More than anything. She couldn’t live without Puppy. Upstairs the shop bell tinkled. The day was taking a long time to end.

E
ight of them were squeezed into Sergeant Joyce’s office, which was about the size of a walk-in closet. The window was on an air shaft. From time to time Sergeant Joyce tried to brighten the place up with a few pots of English ivy. There were two such plants on the windowsill now, dwarfed and brown-edged with neglect. April counted three crunched-out cigarette butts in the potted dirt and knew there were likely to be more below the surface. The tiny room with its three chairs was as close as the detective squad got to a conference room. Sometimes they sat in the locker room, where there was a refrigerator and a table. Sometimes, when it was quiet, the detectives gathered in a questioning room and questioned each other. Now, hours before the crime-scene photos were available, before the autopsy report told them exactly when and how Maggie Wheeler died, they assembled to get organized.

There were two women in the room. Only one got a chair. Sergeant Joyce sat behind her desk. April leaned against the windowsill near the dying plants. Healy and Aspirante, always the self-appointed honchos, sat in the two visitors’ chairs in front of Joyce’s desk. Aspirante’s beady eyes and large nose were moist with ambition and a lot more heat than the room’s air conditioner could handle. He was skinny, not a centimeter taller than April, and pugnacious to compensate. Now he was holding forth about psycho-killers he had known, not saying anything because he hadn’t ever known one, but pushing noise out his mouth all the same.

“It’s the guy on the tape,” Aspirante said. “All we gotta do is find him.”

Healy, at twice Aspirante’s height and girth and possibly half his intelligence, nodded his agreement.

Joyce put her hand over the receiver. “Shut up,” she said.

April glanced over at Mike. He was nonchalantly holding up the back wall as if nothing about anybody’s behavior bothered him in the least. It was their case. Theirs. They were the first men in, the ones who answered the call and found the girl. And Mike had to know there wasn’t a detective in the room who wouldn’t do anything in his power to upstage them and complicate the process as much as possible.

Mike nodded at her, a small smile teasing the corners of his mustache. Clearly he was thinking the same thing and coming up with a different take on it. She knew how he thought. Life is short, take a chill. Hah, some philosophy.

But April felt a sudden shock at the eye contact and the way he raised his chin at her. The jolt was unfamiliar and a little unnerving. All the time Sanchez was away experiencing his roots yet again, April hadn’t just missed him. She actually felt anxious, as if a part of her were missing. She didn’t like the sensation a bit and was pretty sure she wouldn’t feel that way if they hadn’t almost gotten blown up together last May.

Now she had to worry about the effects of gratitude on this relationship that Sanchez called “close supervision.” She didn’t like it. She had always felt safer just a little isolated and separate from everybody. “Watch your back” was not a sufficiently cautious approach to either life or work for her.

Maybe it was the effect of all those years hearing her mother’s litany of every possible danger of being alive in Queens, America, as well as constant replays of the violence and chaos, starvation, and family separations in China when she was young. In the fifties, in the Cultural Revolution, Tienanmen Square, now.

“Never forget best friends, even
Chinese
best friends, stab in front easy as back.”

April went to bed with those words in her ears the way she knew American children did the prayer “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”

She and Mike hadn’t talked yet. Maybe they wouldn’t have a chance today. She couldn’t help noticing how tan he was, must have spent his whole ten days in Mexico out in the sun with some Maria or other. Suddenly April was aware that Sergeant Joyce had hung up the phone and was frowning at her, as if already she had done something wrong. She hadn’t done anything wrong. All she did was take a call, cross the street to a fancy boutique—where neither of them could even think of shopping—and find a dead salesgirl in the storeroom. April wasn’t responsible for killing her, or hanging her up on the chandelier.