Hanging Time Read online

  Maggie resisted and felt something give in her shoulder.

  “Help!” she screamed, but the door to the street was closed and locked. On the other side of it, the sidewalk was empty. No one was window-shopping. There was an alarm button by the money drawer. Maggie was dragged away from that, too. She couldn’t reach anything. For an instant she saw the dog sitting on the floor in the shop, watching her struggle with great interest. Then it squatted and peed. Maggie’s last thought before she was shoved into the back room and the door slammed on them was that the dog was a girl.

  “Bitch,” the woman cried. “I’ll teach you to touch other people’s things.”

  “Ow.” Maggie clawed at the door with her uninjured hand.

  “Stop that.” The woman started shaking her so violently that her head snapped back and forth. “Stop that! Stop taking my things. You can’t have my things.”

  “I didn’t—I don’t—No!”

  The woman let go of Maggie’s shoulders and gripped her throat. With both hands she started shaking her by the neck.

  “Always taking my things. Can’t have my things. Think you can fool me. No. You can’t fool me.”

  “Agggh.” Maggie was choking. Her eyes bulged. “Agggh.” She kicked out, trying to scream, to get away. She blacked out for a second, then revived when the pressure eased.

  “Bitch!”

  Pain exploded in her head for the last time. The woman had slipped a cord around her neck and was yanking hard.

  Twenty minutes later Maggie Wheeler hung from the light fixture in the storeroom in a five-hundred-dollar size-fourteen flowered summer dress that hung way down over her shoulders and hid her feet. Purple lipstick and blue eye shadow, grotesquely applied, further disfigured her mournful little face. The air conditioner, set on high and blowing on her, ruffled her hair and skirt, and gave her the appearance of eternal living death.

  2

  What was left of the former potato field stretched over several acres at least, flat and vegetation-free. Set back a hundred or so feet from the newly created road, the house in progress soared over the emptiness, straining for even a tiny glimpse of the ocean, a quarter of a mile to the south.

  Charles stopped the BMW at the construction site with a jerk and jumped out excitedly.

  “What do you think?” he demanded of his oldest friend in the mental health field.

  Jason Frank, author of scholarly texts, teacher, and psychoanalyst, got out of the passenger seat slowly, as if both of his long, well-muscled legs had recently been broken and were not yet fully healed. For a minute he took in the Portosan, the construction trailer, the advertising signs of the architect, builder, landscape architect, and the dozen suppliers that littered the site. Without going a step closer he could tell that the eleven-room house would be fully air-conditioned, would have a tennis court and swimming pool, and was already alarmed against vandals and thieves. This was some beach shack for a psychiatrist whose hourly fee was fixed, like Jason’s, at a hundred and sixty-five dollars for those who could pay, and less for those who couldn’t. There was no way he could afford such a house on his earned income.

  The familiar twinge of jealousy, now almost twenty years old, threatened to seize Jason in the region of his heart, probe around for the weakest place, and strike him down with despair. Charles was independently wealthy, had all the glamour and worldly goods, and Jason was stuck with the driving ambition to do something important and leave his mark on the profession.

  Charles fixed Jason with the same look of eager anticipation that had charmed him when they met and became friends at the Psychiatric Center the first day of their training. Jason had just returned to New York from medical school in Chicago and Charles was finally home from Yale. Both were eager and idealistic about psychiatry, their chosen specialty; and both were unhappily married to their high school sweethearts.

  The similarities between them went a little further. They looked like they could be brothers, were six feet tall and athletic. Jason had the body of a runner, the brain of a scientist, and the all-American good looks of a Kennedy. For him it was an unlikely mix, bred from five thousand years of dark Jewish angst in northern Europe, an unhappy childhood in the Bronx, and the iron will to do better than his forebears. His parents, his grandparents, and their grandparents had all been poor, struggling peasants. Brilliant and intense, Jason was not only tall, light-brown-haired, and handsome, but the first financial success in his family.

  Charles, on the other hand, was more of the Mediterranean type. He was dark-eyed, dark-haired, passionate. He was also less angular in his features than Jason, had more of a nose, more flesh in his face and body, and was a good deal more hedonistic in his approach to life. The pampered only son of a rich Westchester family, he had always been able to do exactly as he pleased, and never hesitated to do it. While Jason was still struggling to support his family and first wife, Charles already had two children, two cars, and a house in the suburbs that he wanted to be rid of. Now, nearly fifteen years later, Charles had four children, two belonging to his second wife, Brenda, three cars, three houses, and, Jason suspected, a mistress. Charles couldn’t be happy with one of anything. He was also secretive. He never said a thing about this new plaything in all the months of its planning and construction.

  Jason looked up at the looming structure with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. If he hadn’t been so heavily focused on his teaching, his patients, and his writing all these years, he might have at least a few possessions, too. He was on the brink of forty, and three months ago his second wife, the actress Emma Chapman, went to California to make a movie. After the shooting stopped, she told him she wasn’t coming back.

  “Is this the living end, or what?” Charles demanded when no awed praise from Jason was forthcoming.

  He put a protective hand on Jason’s shoulder as if to say, We’ve been through a lot together—two divorces, two remarriages, Emma’s kidnapping in the spring. Hell, we’ll find a way to get through the separation, too.

  Jason nodded. It was the living end, all right.

  He glanced over at Milicia Honiger-Stanton, who had hung back for a moment to get the fifty oversize pages of house plans out of the car. He watched her reach in, leaning all the way across the back seat, so that her short, tight skirt hiked up and displayed long, shapely legs and an extremely well-formed derriere. Charles caught the direction of Jason’s gaze and raised an eyebrow in approval.

  “That’s it, take an interest, get the blood flowing again,” he murmured.

  Jason turned away, frowning. When he first got off the train that morning and saw Charles and Milicia together waiting for him at the station, Jason suspected that the tall and extraordinarily dramatic Milicia, of the wild red hair and deep green eyes, must be the mistress Charles had hidden somewhere in the woodwork of his life.

  It would be just like Charles to go so far as to actually build a house to provide a project for the architect he lusted after. Jason couldn’t imagine any other reason to construct a house in the Hamptons when he already had one in Bedford. Then they got to the house Charles and Brenda were renting while their new one was being built. When Brenda ran out to greet him all excited and pleased in a way he hadn’t seen her in a long time, he realized the house was for her. And Milicia was a red herring. He shook his head at himself. He missed the cue. Must be losing his grip.

  As Jason crunched across the pebble drive, Brenda ran out to meet him, waving enthusiastically. “I’m so glad you came. I’ve been thinking about you.”

  She was all in white—big white blouse, flowing white skirt. They made her dark hair and tanned skin stand at attention. She reached out her arms and engulfed him in a cloud of some floral-mix perfume that was both unidentifiable and immensely appealing. Jason had always liked her. Brenda was a small, elegant woman with a lovely shape and at least as much intelligence as her husband. Her embrace at that moment was devastating. Jason worked in a field where no one touched. He hadn’t receive
d a hug in some time. He released himself from it quickly to stop his heart from breaking.

  “How are you doing? I can’t not ask,” she said almost apologetically.

  “You can ask. I’m fine. Fine.” He nodded to show how fine he was.

  “I think about you and Emma all the time. What do you hear from her?” She took his arm as they walked to the house, shaking her head, as if baffled by Emma’s desertion after what Jason did for her.

  The situation with Emma wasn’t what Brenda thought. Jason looked around, trying to hold on to his equilibrium. It was a pretty place. The rented house was surrounded by rose gardens, all in bloom. A wave of sadness swept over him as he thought how much Emma would have liked it. The smell of the roses, the smell of the sea, everything. He pulled himself together.

  “She lets me call her on Fridays. We have a scheduled time. We talk. She’s still—” Traumatized, of course. He shrugged and changed the subject. “What about you?”

  “Well, this is me. I feel good here.” Brenda laughed ruefully, letting the bruises from a difficult second marriage that she had expected to be heaven show for just a second.

  “You know how I never could stand all those woods and trees. So closed in. Wait till you see my house. It’s everything I like—decks and sun and sky everywhere. Funny-shaped rooms with light streaming in from above.”

  Jason smiled at her pleasure. No, he had no idea she didn’t like Charles’s stone house with a fireplace in every room, very little light, buried deep in a heavily wooded area. What was this, revenge? The harbinger of the end of the marriage?

  He hoped for both of them that they could work it out. Brenda was perfect for Charles, wealthy herself, independent, lively, thoughtful, deeply caring of his two children, and certainly at least as clever as he. Her eyes hardened with her awareness that he was studying her.

  “Sorry, I’ll stop.” It was an occupational hazard. He constantly evaluated everyone. Emma used to say every time he looked at her she felt as though he were taking her emotional temperature. Ever the shrink, checking for sanity.

  “It’s okay. I like you, too. If you ever want an ear, I’ll listen.”

  Touched, Jason smiled. “The same to you.”

  “Listen,” Brenda said. “I won’t go with you to the house. Take a look at it on your own, and don’t mind Charles’s matchmaking. Milicia’s an interesting person, quite talented, I think. But after Em—” She paused, confirming Jason’s own personal view that his estranged wife, should she ultimately decide not to return to him, would not be easy to replace.

  Brenda looked over at her husband, leaning against his car, deep in conversation with the beautiful architect, and shook her head as if she were truly puzzled.

  “It always amazes me how a really good shrink like Charles could be such a jerk about women,” she said.

  Jason wondered if she were speaking about him as well. He had had everything he thought he wanted in a woman, and was too busy healing other people to make her happy. From three thousand miles away, Emma twisted the knife a little more and pain shot through him.

  He couldn’t get over the irony. How often had he heard his patients describe the black hole, the bottomless pit of agony they felt when they failed at love, were left behind in the empty apartment, with the empty bed, and the days stretching out into an eternity of aloneness. Countless times. How many times had he empathized, never for a second thinking it could happen to him.

  “Here we are.” Milicia bundled the plans under her arm and hurried up to them, flashing Jason a brilliant smile that, lovely as it was, failed to warm him.

  Again Charles put his hand on Jason’s shoulder as if to say, Come on, old man. Get back in the saddle again.

  Jason shook his head. Thanks anyway, he had other fish to fry and had no interest in getting to know any new people.

  Still, several hours later, after they had looked over the house three or four times, taken a walk on the beach with Brenda, and had the requisite barbecued steak ritual, Jason was feeling better in spite of himself. When Milicia offered to drive him back to the city just as dusk was falling, he nodded, grateful to accept.

  3

  Span of control, unity of command, delegation of authority, positive discipline, negative discipline, lost time management.

  Detective April Woo, Detective Squad, 20th Precinct, New York City Police Department, gathered up the pile of index cards she had made of the management aspect of being a Sergeant. She zipped them into a pocket of the looseleaf notebook she had created over the last three months as a study guide for her police Sergeant promotion test, which was coming up in less than two weeks. The notebook contained hundreds of notes on job tasks associated with being a sergeant, as well as procedures and investigation techniques, department rules and regulations. The notebook was open to the section on leadership styles. Theory X and Theory Y management behavior, autocratic leaders, free-rein leaders (laissez faire). April didn’t know any leaders in the last category. She closed the book.

  The clock beside her bed read 6:01 and already the sunlight streaked halfway across the room. She could tell summer was on the wane by the fact that only a few weeks earlier the patch of brilliance had been in the same place nearly an hour earlier. In a month or so the light wouldn’t be waking her up early enough to study before work at all, but by then it wouldn’t matter. She will have taken the test, and her fate would be decided. On the sergeant’s score anyway.

  April knew she’d have to have an overall score of 95 or 96 to get it. One of her professors at John Jay had told her she had to want it bad. She knew that already. The same professor had also quoted an old Chinese proverb. “Learning is like rowing upstream; not to advance is to drop back.” She already knew that, too. Also, that she would not have another chance at promotion for five years. That was a scary thought. She was determined to be Sergeant Woo. And maybe even Lieutenant Woo someday. She shook herself a little to get going, and didn’t get anywhere.

  Downstairs, April could hear her mother and father already squabbling in Chinese in their half of the two-family house they shared. They had financed the house with their combined incomes for different reasons. Woo parents said they wanted house so they could live Chinese-American style, together-apart in great happiness someday soon when April came to senses, left the police, married a Chinese doctor with a good practice, and had many babies.

  April knew they said they’d be happy only if every one of their ten thousand most-wanted blessings were granted, but in fact their most important dreams had already been fulfilled. April had helped them buy the house so they could live well, period. Never mind who she married. Or even if she married, which most days she was pretty sure she wouldn’t.

  The beam of sunlight inched over, pressuring her to get moving. She slid out of bed and padded into the bathroom. It had green ceramic tiles and a white curtain blowing in the open window. She was glad no one ever had to see the bathroom shelves loaded with cosmetics, moisturizers, bath oils, and small, shiny objects of decoration.

  In fact, her own home was the only place she didn’t have to convince herself she was glad to be single. She liked not having to fight over who got the sink, or who was going to break down and wash it out afterward. As she began her exercises, she thought it would be terrible for someone to see her doing her hundred and fifty sit-ups, her squats and leg lifts, the work on her upper body with the free weights, and the grip exercises she did to keep her .38 as light as chopsticks in her hand.

  She began to sweat after the thirty-fourth crunch. She was five foot five, which was not as bad genetically as it could have been, but slender as a reed, like her father, a cook in one of the better Chinese restaurants, who ate all the time and never gained an ounce of flesh. She took a break for three minutes to wash her face and assess herself critically in the mirror. It was hard to tell an Asian’s age, she knew.

  At nearly thirty, April looked ten years younger. She had a perfect oval face, and a well-defined but not too
pointed chin, small mouth, long, delicate neck, and a short layered haircut that had been singed pretty badly in the explosion but was nearly grown out now. In the mirror her eyes looked calm and determined, protected by their mongolian folds and years of training. As a cop she was supposed to feel normal no matter what terrible things she saw, or happened to her. But it was no secret that the police had a very high suicide rate, a lot of alcoholics, and multiple marriages with bitter endings.

  April didn’t feel normal yet. She was still thinking about the case every day. She could still feel the scorching blast that knocked her and Sanchez, the Sergeant supervising her, through a door and sent them crashing down a flight of stairs into the garage below. If they’d hit the wall of the upstairs room instead, they would not have survived the fire. Sanchez lost his mustache, his eyebrows, some of his hair, and had burns on his ears, neck, and forehead. He had shoved April behind him at the last second even though she had her gun drawn and could have shot him. So there were no scars on her face, only on her hands and ankles. She owed him.

  In her first days of being a detective, when April didn’t have to wear the blue uniform anymore, she had tried dressing in skirts, like a woman. In the summer she wore short sleeves on the street. After a few experiences of scrambling around garbage cans, trying to catch a mugger, her legs all scratched and hanging out, and getting a favorite skirt caught in the barbed wire somebody had put on his back window in Chinatown to discourage intruders, she knew better. Now she wore long-sleeved blouses, jackets, and man-tailored trousers all year around.

  Sometimes when she looked down at the scars on her hands that might never match the brown of her skin, she thought the blouse, the jacket, and the pants had spared the rest of her. But deep inside she knew it was really Sanchez’s macho reflex—to protect the women at all costs—that saved her. She often wondered if he would have made the same move if she had been a male detective, or a Sergeant like himself.