April went on quietly. “When you went into the storeroom, did you think he had done it?”
“No, I thought she did,” Block sobbed.
“She? You mean the woman who was in there with her?”
“No, after she left …”
April let her breath out. There it was. “What she, Mr. Block?”
“Maggie! I thought Maggie did it because of him.”
What? He confessed to murdering her when he thought she was a suicide? That didn’t make sense. Don’t try to work it out, April warned herself. Just let it pass. She went on.
“You saw somebody go in The Last Mango and then come out. Who did you see?”
“I don’t know. Some woman.”
“Come on, Albert. What did she look like?”
“I don’t know. She was wearing a long skirt. She had red hair. Lots of red hair. That’s all I remember.” He shook his head. His nose was running.
“Mr. Block, do you know what a transvestite is?”
“It wasn’t a man,” he said sharply. “I’d know if it were a man.”
“Sometimes they can be very convincing,” April murmured.
“It wasn’t a man.”
“How do you know, Albert?”
“She was wearing flats.”
April waited. Now she was the one sweating. So, the woman was wearing flats. So what?
Block looked at her. “Men dressed up as women always wear high heels. It’s part of the thing. The falsies, the lipstick, the wig, the tight short skirt, and the high heels.” He said it triumphantly. “This woman was wearing a long loose skirt, a loose top, and flat shoes. It was a woman.”
“Did it ever occur to you the woman you saw leaving the shop murdered Maggie?”
“No. It didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. It just—didn’t.”
Okay. “Would you recognize this woman if you saw her again?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. She was wearing a hat with a floppy brim. I didn’t really see her face.”
Oh, now she was wearing a hat, great.
“Then how did you know she had all that red hair?”
“I don’t know. I guess I saw it.”
“Well, would you recognize the hat? The shirt, the shoes, the blouse?”
Block shrugged again. He was a big shrugger. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
April looked at her watch. Twenty-five minutes had passed. Time to go. Had he clarified anything? Maybe he had. She told Albert Block she’d be back.
66
Milicia got out of the taxi a few yards north of Bouck’s building. Nothing could calm her down and cool the rage she felt. Not the hours of talking to Charles and Brenda, not the Valium Charles had given her. Not the sleepless hours she spent tossing around on her bed. What if going to the police had not been the right thing to do? They never would have found Camille, never would have put together what happened. And even now they were all mixed up. First they took Camille away, and now they brought her back. What was going on?
The police car parked in front of Bouck’s door puzzled Milicia. She didn’t like the police. She felt a sharp pain in her mind’s eye from the bad memories of police cars. They were on reels that played over and over. The worst ones showed the policemen making her father stagger along the yellow line on the side of the road all those times he had trouble driving at night.
“Let’s go for an ice cream cone, girls,” he used to say. Then, as soon as they were in the car, he suddenly remembered he had to meet somebody in a bar. He always said he’d be gone for just a minute. The girls were not allowed to leave the car. When he came out two, three hours later, he was always mad. He’d forgotten they were there.
Milicia approached the building cautiously, remembering everything, as if it were yesterday—she and Camille huddling under the old gray beach blanket that, year after year, no one ever took out of the car. The things they said—the whispering, wheedling, and whining. Crayon drawings all over the window. Cigarettes and matches in the glove compartment. Smoking. She wouldn’t ever forget the burn marks on the car seat, on Camille’s arm. Nobody ever figured out what the wounds were, even after they got infected and Camille had to go to the doctor.
Oh, yes. She remembered the police stopping them on the road. “You’re going to kill yourself one of these nights, Mr. Stanton.”
The bastard couldn’t even stand up. That was the reason he never locked the front door. Once he passed out before he got it open. She and Camille found him sleeping on the lawn the next morning when they left for school. And there was the time a policeman brought them home in the middle of the night, and then had to take them away again. He rang the doorbell over and over, but their mother was lying asleep in the living room, her makeup messed all over her face, with a puddle of vomit beside her. They saw her through the picture window. Then they were taken away to spend the night in a shelter.
It took a long time for the policeman’s predictions to be fulfilled. She and Camille were all grown-up. Daddy had to take Mother with him in the brand-new Mercedes the night of his crash. A few years earlier it could have been them. Milicia shuddered. And if Camille hadn’t run away from her to Bouck, none of this would be happening now. Camille just wouldn’t grow up. She was still a little girl dressing up in fancy clothes, doing destructive things. Only now they were worse things than drawing on car windows and mutilating herself.
Milicia could see that the front windows of the police car were open. Inside, a uniformed cop was eating a danish. For a few seconds she had the wild hope that maybe he had just stopped there outside Bouck’s building to eat. But even as she thought it, she knew it wasn’t true. If Bouck was really in the hospital, the policeman must be there to keep Camille from getting away.
Her mind raced. Her body vibrated with tension and fury. What happened in there? Did Camille find one of Bouck’s guns, shoot him, and tell the police he’d done it himself? Milicia didn’t know how she was going to manage this cleaning job. She was supposed to be at her office, supposed to be living a life. Instead, she was a wreck. Her face was bruised and puffy. She was having an anxiety attack. No, she was like an overheated car trying to dig its way out of a muddy bog. Every part of her was racing, and she wasn’t getting anywhere.
She moved toward the entrance of Bouck’s building without turning her head to acknowledge the strips of crime-scene tapes still stuck to the tree and the doorframe of European Imports across the street. She didn’t look that way, but she knew from the night before that the store was still sealed up.
Last night, after she had left the police station, she walked around the West Side for hours, all the way down Columbus Avenue and back, debating what to do. She considered running away. She didn’t want to think about the police going to Camille’s house and ringing the bell a hundred times, trying to get in. She knew Camille would be in some upstairs room, cringing at the sound of the buzzer. And the puppy would jump around, yelping. She hated Camille more than anything in the world. And somehow she found herself walking there, back to Second Avenue, hoping to be in time to watch them take her sister away.
And then when she got there, it was too late. No one would tell her anything except that neither Bouck nor Camille was inside. Her head hurt worse. A huge generator was heating things up inside so her blood boiled, and she could hardly breathe. Milicia stood on the corner across the street for a long time, watching the police bring things out of the house in paper bags. Finally, she turned to the phone, called Charles and Brenda.