The Hanging Read online

  WENDY HORNSBY

  The Hanging

  A Maggie MacGowen Mystery

  2012 • Palo Alto / McKinleyville, California

  Perseverance Press / John Daniel and Company

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, places, and events are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people, companies, institutions, organizations, or incidents is entirely coincidental.

  The interior design and the cover design of this book are intended for and limited to the publisher’s first print edition of the book and related marketing display purposes. All other use of those designs without the publisher’s permission is prohibited.

  Copyright © 2012 by Wendy Hornsby

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-1-56474-764-8

  A Perseverance Press Book

  Published by John Daniel & Company

  A division of Daniel & Daniel, Publishers, Inc.

  Post Office Box 2790

  McKinleyville, California 95519

  www.danielpublishing.com/perseverance

  Distributed by SCB Distributors (800) 729-6423

  Book design by Eric Larson, Studio E Books, Santa Barbara, www.studio-e-books.com

  Cover painting by Robin Gowen, Unending Hills

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Hornsby, Wendy.

  The hanging : a Maggie MacGowen mystery / by Wendy Hornsby.

  p. cm.

  ISBN [first printed edition] 978-1-56474-526-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. MacGowen, Maggie (Fictitious character)--Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.O689H34 2012

  813’.5—-dc23

  2012014301

  You would not be reading this if it were not for the help of a good number of generous people. To my husband, Paul, always the first reader, ever the cheerleader; my amazing editor at Perseverance Press, Meredith Phillips, whose insights and meticulous reading make every book better; the publishers, John and Susan Daniel, ever helpful, ever supportive; and my mole in law enforcement, Sergeant Richard Longshore, thank you.

  I teach at a community college, but I assure you that Anacapa College, its faculty, administration, staff, students, and location are entirely creatures of my imagination and do not represent any actual person living or dead. The effects of the current economy on higher education are, however, real enough.

  Chapter 1

  “I’m going to kill the bastard, Maggie.”

  Sly burst into my classroom as full of angry bombast and thunder as the wild storm blowing outside. Water poured down his red face; cold, rain, fury, tears, all of them at once. My students looked up from their work—the unit was film editing—and set off a murmur of low-volume conversations, a humming Greek chorus well suited to the drama unfolding.

  I spooled a couple of feet of stiff brown paper toweling off the roll I had pilfered from the faculty lounge to keep my drenched students from dripping onto their equipment and handed the wad to Sly.

  “Who are you going to kill?” I asked as he mopped his face.

  “That bastard Holloway.”

  The way he spat the name of the college president, it might as well have been a four-letter word with a spitty fricative at the end.

  “Your shirt is soaked,” I said, holding out my hand. He peeled off his sodden hoodie and handed it to me.

  In lieu of the real thing, I had served as part-time surrogate mother to Sly ever since he was a very little boy. Now that I was teaching a few film production courses at the community college where he was a sophomore, he was a frequent visitor to my classroom. Several of the students were filming Sly’s progress on his award-winning sculpture for their semester projects. So it seemed perfectly natural to them that Sly, when he was so very upset, would come to me.

  “I swear to you, Maggie, the man needs taking down.”

  “What, exactly, did Holloway do?”

  “You read the call for proposals last fall,” he said, fury rising anew. “It said ‘permanently.’ The chosen artwork would be installed in the college administration building lobby ‘permanently.’ Right?”

  “As I remember, yes it did.”

  “Yeah. And I got the award, right? And the award letter said the same thing. My sculpture is supposed to hang ‘permanently.’ That means forever.”

  A trio of camera flashes came from behind me and hit Sly in the face. To be expected; my students were a collection of camera geeks and news junkies. I turned and saw two digital video cameras in operation and four cell phones.

  I said to my tyro filmmakers, “You better get releases signed before you download those images.” Didn’t deter them for a moment.

  I asked Sly if he wanted to talk about things privately, after class.

  He shook his head as he plopped onto a chair, distraught still, certainly, but winding down. When you’re nineteen life can be full of drama, and sometimes it’s nice to have an audience of peers. My daughter, who was the same age, would have wanted her cohorts around her, too.

  I looked at the drenched bunch in the studio classroom. Though it was pouring rain outside, most of them wore flip-flops, the standard rainy day footwear on any campus in Southern California, so their toes were red with cold. Every one of them also wore some version of Sly’s wet hoodie. I could understand the flip-flops—why ruin your shoes?—but does no one in California under the age of thirty own a raincoat or an umbrella?

  I turned back to Sly and brushed a strand of dark, wet hair from his eyes.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  He looked up at me with his big brown eyes, his narrow, wolflike face pinched with pain.

  “The bastard said my piece will only hang for a year. One, stinking, little year.”

  I had to think about that for a moment because it sounded so wrong. Behind me, Sly’s chorus chimed in with versions of “that just sucks,” “he sucks,” “cocksucker.” Sly acknowledged their assessment by nodding agreement.

  Raised as a ward of Los Angeles County on and off since he was three months old, until recently Sly had never had so much as a dresser drawer that he could call his own for very long. Emancipated from the foster system a year ago, he desperately wanted to belong somewhere, to own something. For Park Holloway, the college president, to yank away the promise that his artwork would hang in a public place permanently must have felt to him like a denial of his very presence on this planet; rendered invisible, one more time.

  Sly, AKA Ronald Miller, was nine years old when I met him on the streets around MacArthur Park, a drug- and gang-infested neighborhood west of downtown Los Angeles. Underfed, foul-mouthed and dirty, there was nothing cute or charming about him. He and his acolyte, a middle-class runaway fourteen-year-old girl who called herself Pisces, were running a scam against pedophile johns. The girl would lure a likely prey—an old perv from the suburbs would be the favored mark, and the older the better—into some dark place, get him into a vulnerable position, and then Sly would swoop in, snap the man’s picture and take all of his cash. It worked well enough to keep the pair more-or-less fed, and now and then paid for a spot to sleep at a nearby flophouse. But it was a dangerous game, and in the end it got Pisces killed.

  I am a documentary filmmaker, not a social worker. I should have known better than to get involved with Sly and his problems, but I did not regret that I had.

  Now, here he was, nineteen, on his own, a sophomore at Anacapa Community College doing well, a young man, it turned out, who possessed the soul of an artist. My chest swelled and my eyes filled thinking about how different his life could have been if we hadn’t retrieved him. Though Pisces we lost, Sly we saved. So far, anyway.

  Accu
stomed to disappointments, maybe he had misheard the college president.

  I said, “Park Holloway actually told you that your sculpture would come down in a year?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “He said my piece was a nice—he said nice—example of student work, but because the piece will be the first thing college visitors see when they walk into the new administration building lobby, it would be better for the college’s image—his word again—to have the work of a professional artist in the space.”

  “Bastard,” I said.

  He held out his hands in a gesture meant to connote, “Duh.”

  “He won’t get away with it, Sly. There were too many people involved in the award decision for him to have the authority to change the terms of the award after the fact.”

  “He said he could.”

  “He can’t.” Sly watched me take out my phone and hit speed dial.

  “So, can I kill him anyway?”

  “We’ll leave that to Uncle Max,” I said, hearing the number I dialed connect.

  “Hey, Maggie.” Lew Kaufman, chair of the Art Department and Sly’s mentor on campus, answered on the second ring. “Have you seen Sly? We need him in the gallery to advise the engineers about the assembly of his piece; it goes up next week. God, it’s looking phenomenal.”

  “He’s with me.” I glanced at the clock—ten minutes until the end of the class period. “We’re coming right over. We need a powwow.”

  I dismissed my class early and hit speed dial again.

  “You calling the bastard? Gonna burn Holloway’s fat ass?”

  “I’m calling my Uncle Max.”

  “Max?” He furrowed his brow. “Why?”

  “Sly, my friend.” I brushed the same strand of hair out of his eyes again. “Whether you sue the bastard or kill him, you’re going to need a good lawyer.”

  Chapter 2

  “How about a bowl of pho?”

  “It’s a little early in the day for soup, Lew,” I said, checking my watch. It was just half past ten.

  “There’s a pretty decent Vietnamese place over in the Village. Looks like the rain has stopped for a while; I saw some patches of blue sky up there. Sly has things well in hand here, and he seems to have calmed down. I thought it might be a good time to take a break. Stretch our legs, get something warm to eat.”

  “Off campus?” I said.

  “Yes.” He dropped his head nearer mine and said, pointedly, “Off campus.”

  I glanced across the student gallery to make sure that Sly was busy with the engineering students who were helping him assemble the infrastructure for his award-winning sculpture over an eighteen-foot frame. The completed piece would be wheeled over to the administration building where it would be lifted off the frame and hung in the well of the lobby’s grand stairway.

  Lew had calmly reassured Sly that Park Holloway had no authority to remove the work, not in a year, not ever. But once Sly was occupied with his work crew, Lew had called the chair of the Academic Senate, History professor Kate Tejeda, and explained why she needed to schedule a meeting right away with Park Holloway. The unveiling ceremony was only a week away and he wanted to make sure there would be no bumps in Sly’s road.

  “Maggie?” I turned toward Sly when he called my name. “What do you think?”

  I looked at the piece taking form in the center of the gallery.

  “It’s amazing,” I said, though so far it was little more than a network of steel cables. “Lew and I are going to get something to eat in the Village. I know you can’t get away right now. Can we bring you something?”

  Of course we could; he was nineteen. If the Italian place was open, he’d accept a pizza. If not, a couple of burgers from the diner across from it would do. Until lunch.

  I stopped by my faculty office to grab a coat and an umbrella in case it began to rain again, and we set out to walk the four blocks to the Village. There was a brisk, chilly wind. I buttoned up my coat and tried to keep up with Lew’s long stride as we walked through the upscale neighborhood that circled the college. Trees along the street were already in full bloom, like clouds of white and pale pink. Wind gusts swirled fallen blossom petals around our ankles; it was lovely to be out.

  Lew Kaufman was about six and a half feet tall, very thin, still on the shady side of fifty but already stoop-shouldered and nearly bald. The hair he had left was pulled into an untidy brown ponytail and tenuously secured with a strip of rawhide. His clothes—jeans, a well-washed Nirvana T-shirt and green high-top Keds—were stained with various art media: paint, ink, charcoal, clay. Like many people who live a life of the mind, he seemed to be oblivious to his outer wrappings. My dad had taught physics at a big public university, so the academic disregard for physical appearances was fully familiar. I found Lew, in a geeky way, to be quite attractive.

  We did not speak until we were off campus. Once we were clear, I turned and looked up at him.

  “So? Can Park Holloway do what he said?”

  “What, take down Sly’s piece in a year?” Hands thrust in deep pockets, focus somewhere in the distance, he shook his head. “Doubtful. Kate Tejeda agreed with me that Park has no authority to do a damn thing to Sly’s piece. But just to dot all the i’s, Kate and Joan Givens—you met her yet, director of the Foundation?—have asked for a meeting. They’ll explain the tenets of shared governance and the principles of the Magna Carta—not even the king is above the law—and it will all be settled by the end of their meeting.”

  “What he told Sly just seemed so...out of left field,” I said. “Any idea what it was about?”

  “Muscle flexing.” He looked down at me. “But that’s about normal where Park Holloway is concerned. Maggie, the man is a complete fish out of water trying to run a college campus. None of us can figure out what the hell he’s doing here.”

  “Have you heard any ugly scuttlebutt about him?” I asked. “Any rumors about why he left Congress? Or why he came here?”

  “You mean like mistresses or naked-photo tweeting, that sort of thing?”

  “Any sort of thing.”

  “Nope.”

  “When he announced that he wouldn’t run for Congress again, he said he wanted to go home and spend more time with his family,” I said.

  “Yeah? How often is that excuse a euphemism for ‘I’m in deep shit and I need to get the hell out before it all hits the fan’?”

  Lew cocked his head, smiled wickedly. “Besides, his parents are gone, his kids are grown, his wife had already left him, and his home is way up north in the San Joaquin Valley.”

  I held up my hands, but offered, “He has a heavy-duty academic degree. Maybe guiding a college is something he’s always wanted to do.”

  “Uh-huh.” Lew’s narrow-eyed expression was full of skepticism. “He has a Ph.D. in Chinese Economic Policy from Harvard with a post-doc from the London School of Economics. If that’s what he wanted, wouldn’t you expect him to show up at some elite private college or, even more likely, a big research university? If not there, then a think tank or a major international corporation. So, I ask you, why would a high-power politician—there was talk of him running for governor—bury himself at a two-year community college out in the far fringes of suburbia?”

  I chuckled, mulling over what he said. “It’s a mystery.”

  “It is that.”

  He slipped a hand into the crook of my elbow, a companionable gesture. “That’s not the only mystery around campus.”

  “No?”

  He shook his head, grinning at me. “Inquiring minds also wonder why a high-power filmmaker like one Maggie MacGowen is teaching lower-division film production at that same community college.”

  I put the toe of my boot under a clump of blossoms and watched them scatter to the wind.

  “No mystery there,” I said. “Kate Tejeda is an old friend—she was my college roommate. When I told Kate my network series was cancelled, she talked me into signing a one-
semester contract to teach here.” I looked up at him. “Something different to do for a little while.”

  He looked down at me through narrowed eyes. “Kate told me she was your high-school roommate.”

  “That, too,” I said. “Our parents parked us at the same convent school. And then we both went off to Berkeley.”

  He smiled wryly. “I can’t imagine either you or Kate in a convent school.”

  “Neither could we,” I said. “But we weren’t consulted. Anyway, teaching here gives me an excuse to check in on Sly from time to time and to hang out with Kate more often. The commute’s good.” I pointed up toward the Santa Monica Mountains that rose like a wall on the western edge of the Conejo Valley. “I live right up there in the canyons.”

  “It’s just that...” He hesitated, watched a flight of birds migrating overhead rather than looking at me. “You’ve done some really big public exposés. Some folks speculate that you’re here undercover, spying on Park for a film. Or doing undercover work for Kate’s husband—he is chief of police in Anacapa.”

  I laughed; Lew was off the mark. So far, anyway. The germ of a film idea was beginning to take form. Why was Park Holloway at Anacapa? “Lew, don’t you think that if Roger needed some undercover work done, he would ask Kate?”

  He laughed at that, catching the unintentional double entendre before I did.

  “Sorry,” I said, “no mystery. I’m just taking a break.”

  He was quiet for a moment, seemed to be thinking over something. After a couple of shallow breaths he started to speak, hesitated, finally managed to get his words out.

  “I suppose maybe you need a break.” Another uncomfortable pause. “Kate tells me you recently lost your husband.”

  Kate is not a gossip, so I wondered how the topic came up, unless he asked.

  I said. “It’s been almost a year.”

  “Must be tough,” he said. “You doing okay?”

  Watching the street ahead, I nodded. “I am, thanks.”

  “Almost a year, then?”

  I waited for whatever was coming next, though I had some notion where this was headed.