“Yes, she’s been dead for a week.” Braun shot them a get-real look. “If you didn’t know that, how come the lawyer?”
“I’ve been out of town. I didn’t know,” McLellan protested. He suddenly got interested in his bitten cuticles, examined one finger after another. “Jesus, all I wanted was to save it,” he muttered. “… So that’s why she never called me back.”
“What?”
“You want to establish Mr. McLellan’s whereabouts on the Saturday Maggie died, is that correct?” Langworth demanded.
“We want to know Mr. McLellan’s relationship to the deceased as well as his whereabouts.” Braun had not spit his gum out. April could see it wadded in his cheek.
“I was in Albany. We had an agreement. She promised me she would wait.”
“Wait for what?” Braun’s face did a little dance. It was clear neither patience nor tact was one of the Lieutenant’s virtues.
“Just wait a second, Roger. You were in Albany. You don’t have to say anything. Lieutenant—uh—”
“Braun. Like the coffeemaker.”
“Maggie had a botched abortion, right?” McLellan looked angry.
“Unh-unh. Someone strung her up on the chandelier in the boutique where she worked.”
“Oh, God. My baby,” Roger McLellan cried. “She killed my baby.” He shook his head back and forth, horrified. “How could she do it?”
“Who’s she?”
“Maggie. You said she hung herself. Oh, God, that stupid bitch—”
“No, Mr. McLellan. She didn’t kill herself. Somebody killed her.”
McLellan slammed his hand on the table. “That’s not possible.”
“Okay, Roger.” Braun dropped the “mister.” “Why don’t you tell us about your relationship with Maggie and why she might want to kill herself?”
The young man shook his head, as if he didn’t want to, then started hesitantly. “We were friends. I don’t know why she’d want to kill herself.… Well, she got pregnant. I don’t know how it happened.”
“You don’t know how it happened.” Braun jerked his head at April to underline that particular remark in her notebook. The man had the mental and emotional awareness of a tree. He didn’t know how it happened. “Got that?”
April, the secretary, nodded, repeating, “He doesn’t know how it happened.”
The door opened. Sanchez handed a folder to Braun. Braun opened it, looked inside briefly, then passed it to April. Sanchez took a chair and made a silent drumbeat on the edge of it with his fingers while April looked over Roger McLellan’s priors. Guy had over two dozen arrests for obstructing entrances to abortion clinics, harassing clients of abortion clinics, various types of vandalism to abortion clinics, demonstrations. One B and E.
“She wanted to kill my baby, and it looks like she did.”
April finished reading and looked up. McLellan had hidden his face in his hands. His shoulders were shaking with some emotion or other. It wasn’t clear exactly what his regrets were. He seemed more upset about the baby than Maggie. Langworth put his hand on Roger’s arm to comfort—or restrain—him. It struck April that neither of them cared what had happened to Maggie Wheeler.
“Come on, Roger, I’ll take you home.”
“Not so fast. We’re not finished here,” Braun broke in.
“Look at him. He’s in no shape to answer any more questions. In any case, he was out of town when Maggie, uh, died. You can see he doesn’t know anything about it.
“You want a subpoena, fine. We’ll get a subpoena.”
“Do that, but don’t forget: If you try to harass a prominent leader of the right-to-life movement, we’ll have the press all over you.” Langworth stood up. So did his client.
The demure Asian lowered her eyes to hide her reaction of total disgust. Way to go, Braun. Well handled. Tactful. Now the possible suspect will walk out of the precinct, get his lawyer pal to rip his shirt and mess his hair, then call the press and scream police brutality. She shook her head, not daring to look at Mike. The two of them would have done a lot better.
38
Jason stood on the patio, watching the fog dissipate from the trees below, listening to the nine new messages on his machine since the previous day. He checked his watch. Eight Sunday morning made it eleven on the East Coast. Odd. Three calls from Milicia.
“What is it?” Emma came out of the glass doors holding a glass of orange juice.
He frowned, shaking his head. “Nothing.”
“That’s what you always say.” She turned around and headed back into the house. “It’s always something, and you always say it’s nothing.”
“Hey, don’t go away mad.”
“I know. Just go away.”
“I didn’t mean that.” He followed her through the doors, still holding the phone. A Dr. Wilbur Munchin from Austria was speaking to him on tape, asking about having some meaningful correspondence about his latest paper on listening. Herr Docktor Munchin was in New York and wanted to meet. Then Charles was telling him he was in Manhattan on his own for the weekend and wondered if Jason was free for dinner. Then the fourth call from Milicia, breathless, saying she was desperately worried about her sister. It seemed that she was always desperately worried about her sister. Maybe worrying about her sister was her thing. Milicia rang off, and his patient Douglas started telling him he was having a panic attack over flying to Chicago to his father’s funeral. “Do I really have to go?” came the plaintive cry. Jason pushed the button to save the calls.
“Was that for me?” he asked, watching Emma drink the orange juice he’d watched her squeeze only moments before.
“No.”
“You know I have to call in.”
“You have only two speeds, Jason. On and on.”
“I’m off now. Look.” He put the phone back in its cradle. But he felt bad about Douglas, torn between the funeral and his terror of the skies.
“I guess I’d feel better if I knew who they were,” Emma murmured. “All these unseen rivals for your love and attention.”
“The whole point is that no one knows who they are,” he replied mildly. It was better not to get defensive with Emma over old grievances. He refrained from adding no one was supposed to know who she was either. And her film career had changed all that.
Emma swallowed the last of the orange juice without offering him a single sip. She would never have done that in the past. He sighed. “I miss you,” he said.
She went back into the kitchen without answering. After a minute or two he looked up Milicia’s number in his telephone book and dialed it. In spite of Milicia’s desperate eagerness to talk to him, she wasn’t waiting for his call. He got her answering machine and spoke to her on tape. Same with Douglas.
He heard the sound of the juicer and perked up. He and Emma still had a whole day and night.
Sometime between five and five-thirty on Monday morning, Jason watched the dawn slowly suffuse Emma’s room with a soft gray light from the skylight over the bed. A thick blanket of fog did not descend low enough to hide the branches of the eucalyptus tree that towered over the house on the side of the back patio.
In the Bronx, where he came from, very few trees dotted the sidewalks; every building was the same squat configuration of brick and concrete. Even in comparison to Riverside Drive, with its attractive park along the Hudson
