“Please,” she sobbed. “Don’t turn me in. I only yust started. Yust started.”
“Shut up,” the other girl snapped. “They’re not here about that.”
The waterworks stopped abruptly. Olga smiled tentatively.
April glanced at Mike. He was choking on a cough.
April said, “Tell me about Saturday.”
“Saturday?” Olga darted an anxious look at her mentor. “You said—”
The girl rolled her eyes.
“We want to know about the shop The Last Mango. Who came in. Who bought things. We want to know about Maggie, okay?”
Olga frowned. “Maggie?”
“Maggie Wheeler, the girl who works in The Last Mango with you.”
A look of pure amazement crossed Olga’s otherwise vacant face. “Is she whooking, too?”
“No, she’s not whooking. She’s dead. Someone killed her on Saturday evening in the store.”
This was clearly news to Olga. She collapsed onto several sections of sofa. “Wow.”
“So we need to know everything that happened in the store that day.”
“I don’t know that.”
“What don’t you know?”
“I don’t know what happened in Lost Mango. I didn’t go Saturday.” Glance at mentor.
“She had a cold,” mentor explained. “She stayed in bed all day.”
“I’ll bet,” Mike said.
“Ja, ja. Sneeze, sneeze all day.”
“Looks like you recovered enough to get back to work today.” Sanchez was getting impatient.
“Don’t go Moonday. Moonday day off.”
“I meant your other work,” Mike said pointedly.
“Huh?” Olga gaped at them.
April shook her head. This wasn’t getting them anywhere. “Why don’t you tell us everything you know about The Last Mango and Maggie Wheeler.”
Olga turned to her friend for guidance one last time and nodded okay when none was forthcoming. April took out her notebook and wrote the date, the time, the place, and Olga Yerger’s name. The buzzer sounded from downstairs. Ah, their customer had arrived. The mentor with the brain hurried out the door to head him off.
12
The outer door clicked shut as Milicia departed. Jason returned to his desk and checked the skeleton clock. It was six o’clock and still running. He had a fifteen-minute break. A patient was due at six-fifteen and another at seven. His stomach rumbled. He had eaten the last English muffin for breakfast, and as far as he knew, his kitchen had nothing else in the way of food. After his last patient, he’d have to go over to Broadway or Amsterdam to get something to eat. He dreaded the prospect of sitting in a restaurant alone.
Evenings were the worst for Jason. The worst was going out the door of his office, turning right to the door of his apartment, twisting the key in the lock, and finding the lights off, the air still. No sounds of activity reached out to him from the kitchen or bedroom. No discernible human odors hung around to comfort him. At nine-thirty, when he finally went home, his patient hours over and his many procrastinations all used up, the soothing aroma of that morning’s coffee had dissipated some fourteen hours before. With the air conditioner off, the temperature rose to the eighties by noon, baking the dust and emptiness into a stuffy animal’s den that his return didn’t seem to diffuse.
Every day without Emma was a new shock. He had always felt a couple could negotiate for anything—lifestyle, time, attention, love. He had been wrong. There was more to a good relationship than tough bargaining for the satisfaction of needs. Some things had to be given gratis, with no expectation of return. Jason felt a little dizzy, even nauseated, as he remembered how resentful he used to feel at the banalities of domesticity. Now what he faced every night in the different rhythms of his many ticking antique clocks, and smelled in the nighttime gloom of his airless apartment, was despair.
He was comforted by the thought that he didn’t have to worry about going home for several hours. His work wasn’t over. He sat down at his desk and reached for the black notebook he had started for Milicia Honiger-Stanton.
There was the little look of triumph that came over her face when she asked him not to take notes and he slapped the notebook shut. Her expression did not escape him. He knew what body language and the order of words meant. He knew what to watch out for and what to ask. He did not need to take notes to remember what Milicia said, or the order in which she said it. He took information in and swallowed it whole, processing and saving it like a computer. He had fourteen minutes now to re-create what Milicia had told him about her family. He got to work, writing quickly.
Milicia and Camille Honiger-Stanton grew up in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where, as she put it, “nobody was poor.” They lived in a big house on the road to the public beach. Milicia described their mother as German in origin, slavish, and depressed. Their father was an alcoholic. The father’s family was English. In Connecticut such things mattered. The Stantons were the ones with the culture and the money. Hilda Honiger, Milicia told Jason, probably started her career in America as a maid. She never conquered her accent. Milicia said she didn’t know when, or why, her parents’ names were joined by a hyphen. She thought it must have amused her father to annoy his family. He liked turmoil, she added.
“Did your mother or father ever get treatment for their problems?” Jason had asked.
Milicia laughed. “Are you kidding? They didn’t think they had problems. Camille had problems.”
“Camille is older or younger?”
“Than me? Two years younger. She’s twenty-eight now.”
“When did her problems start?”
“Eighth grade.” Milicia said it firmly.
Well, Jason had asked himself: if Camille had problems dating back to eighth grade, why the urgency now, more than a dozen years later?
“So what were Camille’s problems?” he asked.
“Oh, God. What weren’t?” Milicia pursed her lips. “She had screaming tantrums. Uses foul language. She’s sexually promiscuous, does kinky things with black men.”
Jason mentally noted the change in tense.
“She was accident prone, always hurting herself. She’s tried suicide. She drinks a lot. Takes drugs, too. What else?” Milicia shook her head. “I told you about the tantrums. Um, she screams at people and throws things, hits people. Of course, you wouldn’t know it if you looked at her. She looks beautiful, vulnerable. That’s her thing. But she’s really vicious. She thinks she’s ugly and starves herself. She’s been bulimic. I don’t know what else.”
“Does she hear voices, see things?”
“I don’t know. Uh, I don’t think so.”
“Does she feel anyone is out to get her? Strangers, or people she sees on the street?”
“Yes, yes. That’s probably so.”
“Who does she think is after her?”
Milicia thought about it. “Oh, you know, she gets really frustrated and hurt when a man dumps her. Resentful. She starts to look at men funny, really crazy. She says men are out to get her, hurt her.”
That didn’t sound so crazy to him. “You seem very convinced there’s something terribly wrong with your sister. What exactly is your concern?”
“She can be dangerous. There’s nobody to look out for her but me. What if she hurts someone? I wouldn’t want to be responsible.”
“What about your parents?”
“They’re dead.” Milicia had said it flatly, tapping her foot with impatience at him.
Why impatient, he wondered. Maybe it was her own perception that her sister was crazy. Maybe she was the one in need of help. “Both of them?”