Hanging Time by Leslie Glass Read Free Book Online Page B

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.”
Click
.
    “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
     

     
    W ithin 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 gotmore 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.