“Yes, they died in a car accident about a year and a half ago.”
“That’s rough.”
Milicia chewed on her lips and nodded. He felt sorry for her then. She described having to sell the house she had grown up in and most of its contents. She told him about her fury at the IRS for expecting so much money. What was left would be split between her and Camille, but that was a ways off.
“You don’t get the money until the estate is audited. The IRS has three years after the death to do it. Anyway, the money is in trust. Camille can’t do anything crazy with it,” Milicia said.
Jason asked her if she was worried about that. Maybe her concern here was really money.
“No, no,” Milicia assured him. It wasn’t the money that bothered her. She was afraid of Camille herself, afraid of what she might do.
It was then that she told him how she’d seen Camille kill an animal. “We were baby-sitting together—I used to go with her sometimes. She didn’t have a lot of tolerance for little kids, so I’d go to keep a lid on.” She shrugged.
“This time one of them—it was a girl, about five—got to her while they were playing with a pet rabbit—Camille’s anger seems to be focused on girls. Well, she grabbed the rabbit and threw it at the wall so hard, it didn’t get up. Then she put it back in the cage and told the girl’s parents it died in its sleep. So, you see, I’m concerned.”
Jason did not have time to ask Milicia what her part was in that baby-sitting experience when her younger sister lied to the parents of her charge about the death of her pet. The forty-five minutes were over. He did try to get her to pinpoint her reason for coming to a professional, for choosing him in fact—apparently out of the blue—when their parents had died nearly two years ago, and Camille’s problems, if indeed they existed, were many years old. At this point he had no reason to either believe or disbelieve what Milicia told him. He was just listening, trying to figure out what it was all about.
Milicia was impatient at him for not getting it. He asked her if she would like to come back and talk about it some more.
“Well, I have to, don’t I? There’s this thing that’s happening, and you haven’t told me what to do yet.”
“I can give you the name of a good psychiatrist for Camille,” he said.
She shook her head. “I need to talk to you. There’s more to it than that.”
“My fee is a hundred and seventy-five dollars an hour for consultations.”
“I told you I don’t care about money. I care only about my sister. She’s all I have left.”
Jason remembered all of this and a great deal more. What he wrote was: Woman, middle thirties. Concerned about behavior of sister. Informant does not present herself as a patient in need of help for herself. Eloquent, expressive, sexually seductive. Too much perfume—Opium. Story about sister is difficult to conceptualize symptomatically. Informant says sister’s paranoid, possibly dangerous. No delusions or history of assaultive behavior or OMS. Impression deferred.
He heard the outer door close and looked at the clock. It was six-thirteen. He placed a call to Charles to ask him about Milicia. Charles’s answering machine was on. Jason left a message, then checked the skeleton clock again. Six-fifteen exactly. He got up to open the door. He had two more patients and a number of phone calls to deal with before he had to face looking for food and going home. He had heard many stories like Milicia’s. They were always puzzles; their true meaning came together slowly over a long period of time. Milicia could very well be a hysteric looking for attention for herself. It was way too soon to tell. He dropped Milicia’s notebook in the filing cabinet under his desk and closed the drawer. By the time he opened the door for his favorite patient, Daisy—a twenty-five-year-old affective schizophrenic he’d been seeing for many years—he was no longer thinking about Milicia.
13
It was still light at eight o’clock. Downstairs, three reporters hung around, hoping to get more details on the case before their deadline for the morning papers. At two, the NYPD spokesman from downtown had read from a statement about what the reporters were now calling “the boutique slaying.” The information had come too late for that day’s papers and left a whole lot of questions unanswered, including the victim’s identity. By five that information was released so Maggie Wheeler’s name could appear on the six o’clock news along with the clip of her corpse bag being loaded into an ambulance.
April and Mike didn’t have to see the news to know what was in it. As they came in, the desk sergeant was busy with a huge woman in a black silk dress. A thick coating of a white powder covered the woman’s face like a mask. She was claiming that a calico cat in the neighborhood was Christ.
“What would you like me to do about it?” the Desk Sergeant asked politely.
They headed for the stairs, passing the reporters camped out in Reception without being stopped. That was one advantage of not being in charge.
Upstairs in the squad room, the noise level was high, and the air conditioner wasn’t up to its job. The accused mugger who had been so disruptive earlier was no longer in the pen. Two other detectives, both older men with their stomachs sprung and their hair going, were sitting at the desks April and Sanchez had used on the day shift. They didn’t look up from their typewriters as April and Sanchez headed straight for the squad supervisor’s office without stopping first to check for messages.
Sergeant Joyce was still there, the phone receiver plugged into her ear. She looked as if she’d been in a dogfight, short hair on end, eyes bloodshot and pouchy, blouse a mess. She hadn’t given up her office to the night supervisor, probably had to kill him for it, April thought.
Hah, considering her boss’s concentration right then, Sergeant Joyce was probably talking to the Mayor himself. April had to revise that speculation when Joyce banged the receiver down at the sight of them. “Well?”
“Scratch Olga,” Mike said, taking a chair. “She didn’t go in that day and says she doesn’t know a thing.”
“Didn’t work at all Saturday?”
“Oh, she worked, just not at the store.”
April took her usual place on the windowsill so that Sergeant Joyce had to turn her head to address her.
“What the fuck does that mean, Sanchez?” Joyce didn’t have a lot of patience. This was the kind of case that drove everybody nuts. Columbus Avenue, just around the corner from the precinct, was an upscale neighborhood. Lot of wealthy people lived and shopped there. Reporters in bush jackets no less were hanging around downstairs, cluttering up the place and making everyone nervous with their expectation of a break in the case at any moment. The press was like having a bunch of the other team’s cheerleaders jeering “Do something, do something. When are you going to do something?” all day long while the detectives on the case tried to ignore them and get their work done.
Word had come down that the Captain wanted this one tied up in a day or two, like the cop found shot in the head in the marshes out by LaGuardia Airport, or the millionaire lawyer stabbed in a motel in the Bronx. Both cases were highly visible; both were nailed within forty-eight hours.
On the windowsill, April got the frigid blast from the air conditioner full force in the face. Reminded her of Maggie Wheeler’s hair blowing in the cold wind and the skin on the dead girl’s arms raised in goose bumps. April knew the goose bumps were a post-mortem thing, had nothing to do with the girl’s being refrigerated for several days. Still, it was unnerving. The corpse seemed to be alive and suffering still. No question her spirit was still there. April shivered. If Maggie were Chinese, her family would try to coax her spirit out of the storeroom and into a joss stick so she could have a peaceful afterlife. But no one would do that for Maggie Wheeler.