A small, neatly made double bed covered with an old red quilt was pushed against one wall. Three matching pillows had been carefully arranged at the head. There were no clothes on the floor or the one armchair in the room and no decorations. No TV, just a clock-radio. No photographs. No art. No lists of things to do or groceries to buy. The place was empty, really empty, as if Maggie had just arrived or didn’t plan to stay long.
April quickly went through the cupboards and closet. There were enough plates and cups for four people if they didn’t eat much, a few pots and pans, and a toaster, all very clean. In the closet her clothes were neatly arranged. Nice clothes, colorful dresses, blouses, and skirts. Well, she worked in a clothing store. They had to be attractive. April fingered the belts. There were six of them hanging on a hanger, different styles and materials. April’s clothes were very businesslike. A cop couldn’t accessorize. She checked out the bathroom. Here was a surprise. Maggie used expensive soaps and bubble baths, expensive makeup in pale colors, not like the garish stuff that had been smeared on her face after she died. She’d hung up some wire shelves that were loaded down with cosmetics.
Mike was going through a letter box covered with decorative paper when April came out of the bathroom.
“It was under the bed,” he said.
Her valuables consisted of a Chemical Bank checkbook, canceled checks, pay stubs, paid and unpaid bills, an address book, a calendar with an appointment book, two gold bangle bracelets, a teddy bear pin with amethyst eyes, and a few personal papers. Sanchez opened the address book and found Wheeler in Seekonk, Massachusetts, then turned to the telephone.
“Look at this,” he said, pointing to the answering machine under the phone. “She didn’t have a TV, but she had an answering machine.”
April took the address and appointment books and put the box with the rest of the things back under the bed for the time being.
Mike pushed Play. There were five messages on the machine. Four were from her mother, first asking Maggie why she hadn’t called as she promised, then demanding that she call right away. Sandwiched between her mother’s calls was one from a man who didn’t leave a name. April stood beside Mike as they listened.
“Hi,” the male voice said. “It’s me. Don’t think you can get away with it. No one is on your side. And no one will ever forget.”
“What the hell is that?”
Mike pushed the rewind button and played it again, then popped the cassette out. “Let’s hope his number is in her book.”
Neither said much on the way back. It was too early to speculate.
8
Within a second of Milicia’s entrance the air was charged with her perfume. Jason knew it would still be there in an hour, and his next patient would remark on it. What was it—woody, herbal, spicy? Not his favorite aroma. He made an effort not to sneeze.
Milicia slowly appraised his office, turning around, showing him her back so he could study her if he wanted to. He didn’t. He had long ago learned to focus on one of the clocks or the window, even his cuticles if absolutely necessary, anything but the bodies of his female patients when they walked around his office.
Well or sick, a large number of women these days took the position that men looking at them any way whatsoever was a kind of sexual harassment. Jason never let any of them make that an issue with him.
So he focused on the pendulum of the clock on his desk. But even watching its measured process back and forth across four inches, Jason did not miss any of the many attributes of Ms. Honiger-Stanton. As indeed she did not wish him to.
In a red blouse open at the neck that in no way disguised her ample breasts, and a short red skirt, she had a statuesque presence. Everything about her signaled a difference from the ordinary, including her level of self- confidence. Her perfume was definitely spicy, not flowery or herbal, Jason decided. Maybe it was Opium. He didn’t like Opium.
The perfume reminded him of the day he dared to ask his skinny, discontented father for a baseball glove. He got more than no for an answer. His father, already a bitter and defeated old man, shook several tobacco-stained fingers at him, warning if Jason got what he wanted, it wouldn’t make him happy.
In ominous tones Herman Frank illustrated his point with a story about how Jason’s mother, Belle, had spent a great sum of money, “more than a week’s worth of food, on some gardenia perfume,” Herman said, “to please me on our wedding night.”
He inhaled his cigarette down to the very end, and fiercely stabbed it out, still angry over that long-ago extravagance.
“And you know what?” he demanded, blowing smoke into his son’s puzzled face.
“What?” Jason remembered the smoke choking him.
“It smelled so bad I couldn’t stand to be near her. Made me vomit.” Herman ended the story in triumph, hacking up a lump of brown phlegm and spitting it into his grimy handkerchief.
It took Jason a long time to figure out what his father’s vomiting on his wedding night had to do with Jason’s being denied a baseball glove fifteen years later.
Milicia examined his environment critically, as if it were an architectural disaster in need of complete rehabilitation. Jason felt a stab of insecurity. His office was comfortable, had a bit of a view into himself in it—his clocks, gifts from his patients that included small sculptures, watercolors, needlepoint pillows, paperweights. The paint was beginning to peel in a number of places on the ceiling. It was clear to anyone with an eye for these things that the place had never seen a decorator.
Her striding into his office, posing for him, demanding attention, and smelling as if she’d doused herself on the way up in the elevator was very far from the usual nervous and highly stressed behavior of a person in need of psychological counseling. His clinician’s sensitive antennae bristled.
Finally she finished her visual tour of his furniture, which was the usual collection of aged leather, semi- matched pieces, Oriental carpet on the floor, objects on his desk and windowsill. His bookcases were far from adequate for his growing collection of reference material. Books and periodicals of all kinds covered every available surface.
“I like this building,” she said, finally settling into the Eames chair behind Jason’s analyst’s couch and crossing her legs.
Jason nodded and took his desk chair opposite her. For many years he had liked this building, too. It was a jewel, a copy of the kind of buildings in Paris and Austria that were built before the turn of the century. It had a sandstone facade in the front and a heavy wrought iron and glass front door. The centerpiece of the ornate lobby was an elaborate staircase that wound around a central space open all the way to the top floor, where there was a stained glass skylight. The elevator was a cage with a folding gate that had never been replaced with anything more modern. Now that Emma was gone, Jason was seriously considering moving, growing a beard. He stroked his chin in a rabbinical sort of way, waiting for Milicia to reveal her reason for being there.
She swiveled from side to side, showing off her long legs.
“I feel a little nervous,” she murmured. “It’s an odd situation, particularly since we met socially.… Of course, you must get this all the time.”
Jason smiled neutrally. So far Milicia had revealed that she was sophisticated. She could appropriately identify the awkwardness of the situation and relate it to the present social context. Saying he got this all the time was meant to flatter him by enhancing his professional identity. His impressions of her were camera clicks.
She knocked over her handbag with her foot, leaned over to right it, showing off her cleavage and a black lace bra.
He had an uneasy feeling. Her flaunting was about on the level of a man carrying on a conversation with his hands in his pockets, rattling his change.
Milicia did a lot of rattling her change. Jason wondered why.
Her eyes slid around the room again. “Your books are reassuring. I’ve always loved books. If you’ve read them all, you must know what you’re doing.” She laughed briefly.
