Hanging Time (12 page)

“That’s true,” April agreed, finally rolling over and sitting up. A lot of people thought like her mother, didn’t like this new Spanish thing, thought the Spanish should learn English.

“Not Spanish lestlant on every brock.
Chinese
lestlant on every brock. Chinese best food, best people.” Sai pounded her tiny fists on her flat chest to indicate her pride.

April smiled. “That may be, Mom. But the department still wants everyone to speak Spanish.”

“Humph.” Sai turned her back and touched the little table beside the couch. It slanted a bit on the floor.

“What’s bugging you, Mom?” April closed the book guiltily because her mother was right about one thing. This, of all mornings, she didn’t have to be studying Spanish during her exercises. She could be doing management styles, or preparing the oral answer to such questions as:
Crime analysis is an important tool for the police supervisor. Please explain to this board the purpose of crime analysis and how you would use this information as a police sergeant
.

“Taber no good. Maybe taber bad spilit in your rife.”

All her hope and confidence fled in an instant. April frowned, the dread of bad luck in her exams, her life itself, descending like a pall over a wedding. “I don’t have a bad spirit in my life.”

“Yes.
Dr
. George Dong says he’ll meet you—no promises—you no rant meet him. Must be bad spilit in this house.”

“Maybe the bad spirit is downstairs. I never heard of the guy,” April protested.

“He no guy. He docta.”

“That’s great, Mom. But I never heard of him.”

“Now heard of him.” Sai picked up the table and moved it to the other side of the room. “There, taber frat. Now spilit happy. You two can meet, mally, have many babies. Some boys, some girrs.”

April nodded. Great, now her mother was a feminist. She must really be desperate, never used to pray for girls.

“Mom, I have a new case. Want to hear about it?”

Sai nodded, padded across the room to April’s kitchen, and started rattling around. Feng Shui over, match made. Now she would make worm daughter’s breakfast and solve the case. April sighed and headed for the bathroom to take her shower.

She arrived at the precinct before seven-thirty. The Desk Sergeant who’d been on night duty was still there. He nodded at her. Upstairs the squad room was empty. It still smelled of old smoke. The evening shift were all smokers. The day shift were all trying to quit. It smelled disgusting. April had never tried smoking. She dusted the piles of cigarette ash off her desk, sat down, and punched out the number of the M.E.’s office to see if the autopsy report was coming in today.

No one answered, so she took out the copy of Maggie’s address book and dialed one of the numbers she’d tried the night before. The phone rang a bunch of times before a grumpy voice answered.

“Yeah.”

“Is this Bill Hadgens?”

“Yeah.”

“This is Detective Woo from the New York Police Department.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t do it.”

“Didn’t do what, Mr. Hadgens?”

“I didn’t kill old Maggie. That’s what you’re calling about, isn’t it—hey, is this for real?”

“Yes, this is for real. Where are you located? I’d like to talk to you.”

No reply for quite a while. “How did you get my number?”

“It was in her telephone book.”

“So that doesn’t mean anything. We come from the same town is all.”

“I didn’t say it meant anything. I’m just trying to locate people who knew Maggie. Trying to find out what happened to her.”

Bill Hadgens thought it over for a while, then spoke. “I saw it on the news last night. Eleven o’clock. Really weird.”

“What was weird?”

“I don’t even watch the news. Last night I watch the news, and someone I know got killed. Weird.”

It wouldn’t be so weird to watch the news if he already knew what would be on it. She took Hadgens’s address, then called the M.E.’s office again. This time someone with a friendly voice picked up the phone, listened to April’s identification and questions, said, “Just a minute, please,” and put her on hold for five minutes.

Then a less friendly voice came on that seemed to come from a different department. April repeated the same things about being the detective on the Maggie Wheeler case and needing the autopsy yesterday afternoon. She got put on hold again. Finally someone came on who knew something. The Wheeler autopsy was scheduled for right about now, and they should have the report by early afternoon. April offered to go over and pick it up and was told that wasn’t necessary. She decided not to argue.

April looked at her watch. Eight-fifteen. The place was filling up. Sergeant Joyce, in a black skirt and apple-green blazer, her hair sticking straight up in a style that defied description, stopped by April’s desk and peered at the pile of papers she had laid out.

“Early afternoon for the autopsy report,” April said. She resisted the impulse to cover her notes with her hand.

“Bastards,” Joyce said. “Anything else?”

Sure. “I’m checking out the boyfriends. Where’s Sanchez?”

“Twentieth Street.”

“What’s he doing there?”

Sergeant Joyce shrugged and walked away, either didn’t know or wouldn’t say. Maybe Sergeant Joyce was the bad spirit in her life. Muttering under her breath, April picked up her bag and headed out to meet Bill Hadgens on Fiftieth and Second.

I
never went out with her,” Bill Hadgens insisted for the third time, eyeing April uneasily. “I can’t tell you anything about her.”

He lived in a filthy one-room apartment overlooking Second Avenue above an old-fashioned plumbing supply store. The furnishings consisted of a nasty-looking bed and a wooden chair. Dust balls had collected around piles of dirty clothes on the bare wood floor. Four or five years of grime clung to the windows, long since replacing the need for curtains. One window boasted a rasping fan that didn’t have enough power to stir the dust.

Bill Hadgens sat on the edge of his bed with his hands on his grubby bare knees. He had not bothered to pull himself together in anticipation of a visit from the police. After April’s call he had clearly gone back to bed. He was wearing cut-off jeans and no shirt. The side of his long, horsey face was sheet-creased and didn’t appear to have been troubled by a razor in some time. His shoulder-length brown hair was tangled and dirty. He didn’t look sullen so much as completely unconcerned, as if people he knew got knocked off every day.

“Why bother with me?”

“I told you. She’s a murder victim. We bother with everybody. Maggie had only a few male names in her telephone book. Yours was one.” April took a look around as she spoke. Guy looked like he didn’t eat much and hadn’t been out of bed in days. How many days—since Maggie’s death?

It had taken him a while to get to the door when she rang the bell. Then he looked surprised to see her there. He was grumpy and seemed to have forgotten she was coming. Guy was really whacked. She made a note to herself that she could always come back and take him in for possession if he didn’t want to cooperate.

“Yeah, well, we went to the same school. I knew her years ago is all.”

“What was she like?”

He shrugged, pursing his lips in a show of contempt. “She was kind of a dog, know what I mean?”

April shook her head. “Explain it to me.”

He shrugged again. “A dog. You know what a dog is.”

“If you thought she was such a dog, how come you’re in her phone book?” April crossed the room to the window and looked out. Not much to see. She wondered where the stuff was. His eyes were pretty dilated. Must be around somewhere.

“Who knows.”

“Then how’d she get your number?”

“Fuck if I know. Maybe somebody gave it to her.”

“You have any idea who that might be?”

“No—hey, what’re you doing?”

She took her hand away from the pile of clothes on the chair. “You have a problem with my sitting down?”

“Don’t touch anything, okay?”

April moved away from the chair and changed tack. “What do you do for a living, Mr. Hadgens?”

“Huh?”

“I asked how you support yourself.”

“I, uh, freelance—I’m a writer.”

“Oh, yeah? What kind of writing do you do?”

He stared at the chair. She figured the stuff was there.

“I’m working on a novel.”

“No kidding.” She didn’t see a typewriter. “When was the last time you saw Maggie?”

“I don’t know. Long time. Months, maybe years. I lose track of time.”

“I bet you do. You want to tell me about Maggie’s other friends? She have a boyfriend?”

“No way. Maggie was lunchmeat.”

Okay. “Mr. Hadgens, where were you last Saturday?”

“Nowhere near Maggie Wheeler. I can tell you that. I don’t go to the West Side.”

“Thanks.” April moved toward the door. She didn’t think Hadgens was telling her the whole truth, or even half the truth. Guy was a druggie and a liar. No point in pursuing the subject now. She’d try him again later.

It stuck in her mind that he had described Maggie as lunchmeat. Nice. The girl was dead. Why make such a point of her lack of attractiveness in the distant past when he claimed to have known her and they went to the same school? Was the real story the reverse—that he liked Maggie Wheeler a lot and got rejected by her? Did he go visit her in the boutique last Saturday, have a fight with her, and fix her up for all time? April tried that scenario out, played it through as she descended the grimy stairs to the street.

Nah, this guy didn’t look organized enough to do all that with the dress many sizes too big and the makeup on the victim’s face. That was really weird stuff. This guy looked whack, but not particularly weird. Still, he wasn’t telling the truth. Maybe he didn’t do it, but had some idea who did.

Out on the street the temperature was climbing steadily. It had to be close to eighty-five. April decided to go over to the police labs on Twentieth Street and find out what Sanchez was up to.

H
ey, Mike, whatcha got?” Fernando Ducci, known as Duke, finished the last of a Snickers bar and tossed the wrapper into his wastebasket. At eleven o’clock in the morning, it was his third candy bar of the day. He wore a blue shirt with a white collar of the kind Captain Higgins liked, the sleeves rolled all the way down and buttoned. His dark blue tie was Italian silk. There was no shoulder holster on his person. Duke did not like to carry. He kept his gun in his locker. With his smooth round face and thick black hair, he looked more like an aging choirboy than a cop in the hair and fiber section of the police labs.

“Stuff from the M.E.’s office.” Mike Sanchez dropped the brown cardboard box on Ducci’s desk.

Ducci looked past him toward the door. “Hey, where’s the pretty one? She avoiding me, or what?”

“She’s out.”

“I’m hurt. I want the stuff from her. We like continuity around here.”

“Yeah, well, I’m continuity. I could have just let them put this shit on the shelf and forgotten it like everybody else. You’re always saying you want everything in the beginning. Well, here’s everything.”

“Ah, well.” Ducci tapped on the box. “Hey, go ahead, keep me guessing. What case are we talking about?”

“Same as yesterday. Boutique thing.”

“Oh, and here I thought something else came up. Shit, why can’t you guys get your act together and give it all to
me at once?” He knew damn well why they couldn’t, but liked to annoy.

Ducci was a man who hadn’t gone outside for the last twenty years. He had a slide collection of every kind of dirt, asphalt, stone, fiber, head hair, pubic hair, leaf, pine cone, bird feather, tree bark, grass he’d ever come across. He’d analyzed so many things from so many cases, working over the years in so many departments in the labs, he now believed he could tell what park a grass stain on a pair of pants came from, and what activity the wearer was engaged in when he got it. Some people said he had a bit of an ego problem.

Before Mike tossed the box on it, Ducci’s desk had already been piled high with folders, odds and ends, boxes of slides, relics of various sorts. Now it was definitely overburdened. Ducci looked around for another place to dump the box, debated putting it on Bryan’s desk for a little while just to piss him off when he came in. Right next to his in the long, narrow room with windows across the other side, Bryan’s desk was clear.

Ducci thought Bryan was a real asshole, kept everything so goddamned neat, no one could ever find anything he worked on. Ducci was the brilliant one, and Bryan was always complaining, saying he couldn’t work in the same room with such a pig. Judy, who was a scientist and not a cop, was the mediating agent on the hair and fiber team. But she wasn’t there. She was on vacation in a canoe somewhere in Wisconsin.

Mike pointed at Ducci’s other chair. It had a pile of papers with a skull on top of it. Some of the teeth in the skull were missing. The ones remaining indicated quite a lot of tooth decay and no visits to an orthodontist.

“Mind if I sit down?” he asked.

“Hey, no problem.”

Ducci stepped around some debris from another case he was working and removed the pile of stuff from the chair. He placed it on the empty chair in front of Bryan’s desk. Bryan used the phone in there, but most of the time he worked in another lab. Hair and Fiber had three desks and
three sets of shelves in it, all facing the wall opposite the windows. The tile walls and floor were sea green.

In the old days, when there were fewer people in the police labs, there had been just one desk to an office. Now with three, it was hard to get around, hard to make calls, hard to think. And even with three, they didn’t have anywhere near enough people for the workload.

Ducci had a whole lot of complaints about the system. Every case in the city that had hair and fiber evidence came through this lab. Coordination between detectives and the scientists was not so great. A lot of things got messed up. Ducci had fantasies of a different setup, police labs with only scientists and absolutely no police at all.