Hard Case Crime: Songs of Innocence

by Aleas, Richard

  I didn’t doubt her. I wished I did.

  “Listen,” I said. I grabbed a piece of paper someone had scotch-taped to the wall (“Submit to Quarto!”), turned it over, and took a pen out of my pocket. “I’ll give you the name of someone I know who can help you.” I wrote a name and phone number on the back of the piece of paper. “She’s very good at what she does. Better than I ever was.”

  The indicator next to the elevator door lit up and the door sluggishly slid open. A maintenance man got out, pulling a cart of cleaning supplies behind him.

  Mrs. Burke took the paper from me. For a second I thought she was going to say something. But instead she just folded the sheet of paper and tucked it away in her purse. The elevator door closed behind her without another word being spoken.

  When I got back to my desk, I called Susan. She sounded hoarse, like I’d just woken her up from a deep sleep after a long night’s binge on cigarettes and boilermakers. I hadn’t. That’s just what her voice sounded like, what it had sounded like ever since she got out of the hospital three years earlier with one lung fewer than she’d had going in. Someone I’d known had stabbed her five times in the chest and left her for dead. Someone I’d thought I’d known.

  “Hold on a second,” she said, “let me turn this off.” I heard the TV go off in the background, then footsteps approaching the phone. “I was watching the news. I don’t know why I watch it. It just makes me upset. Do you know they’re talking about passing a law in South Carolina banning the sale of sex toys? Five years in jail. You can sell guns all you want, but god forbid you should sell a woman a vibrator. So how are you, John?”

  “I’m sorry I haven’t called,” I said.

  “That’s okay, I didn’t expect you to. You’re busy, doing...what is it you’re doing again?”

  “I’m working up at Columbia, in the writing program. I’m the administrative assistant.”

  “Yeah, well,” she said. “That can keep you busy I’m sure.”

  “Susan, I’m sorry. Really. I didn’t mean to—”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I know.”

  “You seeing anyone?” I asked.

  “Let’s just say I’m glad I don’t live in South Carolina. Why’d you call, John?”

  I glanced around the office. No one else was left. Lane was back behind his closed door. I lowered my voice anyway.

  “I need to ask you a favor,” I said.

  “Okay.” She sounded wary.

  “There’s a woman who’s going to call you tomorrow, Eva Burke. I gave her your name. Her daughter was Dorrie Burke. You may have seen it in the papers, she was the Columbia student they found dead in her apartment up on Tiemann Place—”

  “Sure. That was the suicide, right?”

  “That’s what the police say, but the mother doesn’t believe it. She wants to hire a detective. She asked me.”

  “And you didn’t take the job because being an administrative assistant pays so well you just wouldn’t know what to do with the extra money.”

  “I knew the daughter, Susan.”

  She was silent for a moment. “Jesus, John,” she said, “I’m sorry.”

  “There are things I promised her, things about her life she didn’t want her mother to know.”

  “Things like what?”

  “Like how she paid her rent.”

  “Was it anything like how I used to pay mine?” Susan worked for Serner, probably the biggest detective agency in the city and certainly the best known. But she hadn’t always. When I first met her, she’d been working as a stripper.

  “More or less.”

  “Which is it? More? Or less?”

  “More,” I said.

  “She was hooking?”

  “Close enough.”

  “Look,” Susan said. “I’m not going to tell you it’s the right thing to do, but under the circumstances I don’t see why you have to tell the mother anything. You know? Just take her money, sit on it for a few weeks, then type up a report saying I’m sorry, ma’am, but it really was suicide. You know how it’s done, John. You taught me.”

  “Well, I’m asking you to do it this time.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’ll keep her occupied while I finish doing what I have to do.”

  “And what’s that?”

  I felt the broken rib aching in my chest. “I’m going to find the man who murdered her daughter,” I said.

  Chapter 2

  Dorrie Burke was taller than I was, not quite six feet in flats but pretty damn close, and she entered a classroom as if there was a curtain at one end and a row of photographers popping flashbulbs at the other. It wasn’t something she did deliberately, but she did it nonetheless, and the rest of us all turned and watched as she found her way to an empty chair, slid her shoulder-slung messenger bag to the floor, and sat down. You got the sense she was used to this reaction and that it embarrassed her, like a fat girl used to hearing boys snicker behind her back.

  She was beautiful in a way you’re accustomed to seeing on movie posters or the pages of a magazine but not in real life. Something about the shape of her face, the arrangement of her features; you did a double-take when you saw her for the first time and then found yourself staring when you didn’t mean to. I met a woman once who’d been in an automobile accident, a bad crash that tore up one side of her face. The plastic surgeons had done the best job they could, and for the most part they’d succeeded in giving her back a normal face, but there was something just a little bit off about it, and you couldn’t stop looking at her. It was similar with Dorrie. You couldn’t stop looking.

  I’d been at Columbia a year by then, working in the writing program office less for the salary it paid than because as an employee of the university I got to take classes for free. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with myself and taking courses seemed as good a way to find out as any. My first thought was that my years as an investigator would set me up well for a career in investigative journalism, but the journalism school didn’t accept me and I somehow ended up drifting into the writing program, which felt a little like flunking medical school and ending up a mortician. Since I was a decade past college age, the courses I took were in the euphemistically named “School of General Studies,” the division Columbia reserves for middle-managers taking economics classes at night and empty-nesters looking to fill their afternoons with something more satisfying than Oprah. But some of the students in GS weren’t that far removed from their college years—they’d dropped out of college a few credits shy of graduating and after bumming around for a year or two were now ready to finish up. Dorrie was in this category. And in a room where the average age was pushing forty, she stood out even more starkly.

  “Ms. Burke, I presume,” Stu Kennedy said, leaning across the seminar table on his bony forearms. His hands trembled, a combination of early-stage Parkinson’s and late-stage alcoholism. He could no longer type, he’d told me over a drink at the West End, and had started dictating his novels into a tape recorder.

  Dorrie swept her hair out of her face, nodded.

  “Then we are all here and can begin.” He leaned back in his chair, tented his fingers. “The name of the course is ‘Creative Nonfiction.’ What does this mean? It means telling the truth through judicious lying.” His voice was tremulous but very deliberate, like a Royal Shakespeare Company actor gone to seed. “And why are we here? I am here because the university sees fit to pay me a meager stipend on account of some generous reviews my books received round about the time you lot were being conceived. You, on the other hand, are here for a greater purpose: to become better writers. To help each other become better writers.” He turned to the man next to me, a muscular downtown type in a knit cap and two t-shirts, one worn over the other. Stubble on his chin, crude tattoos up and down his forearms in dark blue ink. “What do you wish to get out of this class, Mr. Wessels?”

  I remembered the guy’s essay on his application. He was our ex-con, Kurland Wessels; he’d s
erved three years for armed robbery and aggravated assault before his sentence was vacated and he was released. Second chances, all of us.

  “I want to finish my book,” he said, in a tense voice that still carried, I thought, the echoes of cell doors clanging shut.

  “And you,” Professor Kennedy said, turning to face Dorrie, “Ms. Burke: what do you hope to gain?”

  She shrugged, looked around the room uncomfortably.

  “Let me tell you what you can gain from one another. Stories.” He coughed wetly, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Young writers—and you’re not all so young, but you are all young writers—love nothing more than to write about themselves. That won’t do. You need to broaden your palette. Each of you needs fresh material, and as it happens each of you has fresh material to give. Your life is intensely familiar to you, but to someone else? It’s an unfamiliar, untold story. So. I want you to pair up and learn each other’s stories, and then tell them. That is your assignment. Do it credit.” He looked down at the class roster on the table and began rattling off pairings in no apparent order, marking each name with a penciled ‘X’ in the margin as he went. “Ms. Waithaka, Ms. Gross. Ms. Fenner, Mr. Reynolds. Mr. Wessels, Mr. Breen.” And so on, through eight pairs until at last I was the only one left on my side of the table and Dorrie Burke was the only one left on hers. “Mr. Blake, Ms. Burke.” The professor slapped his palm down on the table. “That is all.”

  Some nights later, when we were in our back booth at the West End, sipping our drinks as the clock crawled toward closing time, I asked him about his method and he smiled at me. “Ah, John, John. Who else was I going to give her to? Kurland? That would be like giving a steak to a Doberman. No, you, my friend, will treat her kindly; and perhaps, if we are fortunate, she will do the same to you.”

  We sat down over dinner at Restaurant Dan, a 24-hour tempura shop on Broadway and 69th. She was as shy with me as she had been in the classroom and to fill the silences I found myself throwing questions at her as if I’d never left my old job. Where was she born? Philadelphia. How old was she? Twenty-three. Parents? Divorced. The answers came a syllable at a time, at first. But I persisted, gently, and bit by bit she started to open up. Any brothers or sisters? One sister, but she’d died when Dorrie was three. How had she died? Some sort of leukemia, apparently; Dorrie’s mother had never been willing to talk much about it. But her mother had somehow blamed her father for it, and that was when their marriage had started to come apart.

  Where’d she gone to school? A semester at Moore College of Art and Design back home followed by two years at Hunter College in New York. Why had she come to New York? She’d wanted to work in fashion; fashion was in New York. Ergo. Did she still want to work in fashion? She blushed before answering this one, looked down at her plate and picked the batter off a fat slice of carrot with the point of her chopstick.

  “You know what the closest I’ve come to working in fashion is? In five years?”

  “What?” I said.

  She shook her head and the slender smile that had crept onto her face faded. “It was at FAO Schwarz,” she said. “The toy store on Fifth Avenue? I worked as their fairy princess, greeting people as they came in. The costume—it was a Bob Mackie original, they hired Bob Mackie to design it for them. A gown and satin shoes and a tiara, and a wand; I even had a wand. Little girls would come in and they’d see me there and their little faces would light up, and sometimes they’d be scared to come near me. It was like I was the most beautiful thing they’d ever seen.” When she looked up, I saw that there was a film of tears in her eyes. “And then three o’clock would come and I’d take it off and change back into my jeans and walk out through the store, and on the way out I’d pass the afternoon princess wearing it and all the little girls would be looking at her like she was the most beautiful thing they’d ever seen.”

  She dabbed at her eyes with a paper napkin, balled it up and tossed it on her plate.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “What for? Because I didn’t magically rise to the top of the fashion world on luck and looks alone? I never won the lottery either. Want to apologize for that?”

  “No,” I said.

  She shook her head. “Sorry.” And after the silence between us had stretched on for a bit she said, “I just don’t like talking about myself, I guess.”

  “That’s going to make this assignment hard.”

  “Well, half of it, anyway,” she said, and for the second time that evening she smiled. “So what did you do before you ended up working at Columbia? Let me guess. You were a talk radio host.”

  “No.”

  “Therapist?”

  “No.”

  “A priest?” We both smiled at this, and she leaned forward, closer to me. “You’re a good listener, John.”

  “Want to guess some more?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “I give up.”

  “Well,” I said, “I was a detective. A private detective. It’s a good job if you want to learn how to listen to people.”

  “A detective.”

  “That’s right.”

  “That sounds exciting.”

  “It wasn’t very. A lot of time spent on the computer.”

  “And listening to people.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you help a lot of people?”

  “Some.” Now I was the one doling out the one-word answers.

  “Why’d you stop being a detective?” she said.

  “Why’d you stop being a fairy princess?”

  “I asked you first.”

  I thought about it for a while. Finally I said, “A woman I’d loved died because of me, and another almost died. I couldn’t do it anymore.”

  There was something in her face then, something sympathetic, something hurt in her that recognized the same in me. She looked in my eyes and held them and didn’t say anything and neither did I.

  “Want to tell me about it?” she said.

  I found that I did. But there are things you don’t say in a restaurant with bored waitresses standing around pretending not to listen. We paid the check, collected our coats, and started back toward the campus.

  It was close to midnight, and we walked alone in the dark up Broadway. It was strangely silent, so that what few sounds there were—a single taxi whispering by on the street, a grocer at an all-night bodega scraping carrots for tomorrow’s salads—seemed like the ghosts of sounds, a lulling threnody.

  I found myself telling her about Miranda, my girlfriend from high school, and the murder on the roof of the strip club. I told her about Susan and how she’d almost been killed, and I told her how it had ended, with both women’s blood on my hands. I told her more than I’d ever told anyone. I hadn’t realized how badly I wanted to tell it.

  I felt tears start to come and I remember feeling grateful that in the darkness she couldn’t see them, this beautiful woman by my side, this stranger I was telling my secrets. But she must have heard it in my voice, because she stopped me and I felt her fingertips on my cheeks, and then I was in her arms and we were both crying for what we’d lost, what we’d been and were no longer.

  “John,” she whispered in my ear, “I’ll tell you why I stopped being a fairy princess.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said.

  But she did. She told me why she’d stopped, and she told me what she’d become instead.

  Dorrie died on a Sunday morning, some hours before dawn. Her landlord didn’t have a key to her top lock, so when the police came they had to break the door down. They found an apartment that was immaculate, as though it had been put in order for the benefit of visitors. Nothing was out of place: not a dish in the sink, not a piece of clothing on the carpet. There were some things missing, but they had no way of knowing that.

  The police found the apartment this way because that’s the way I left it. I did have a key to her top lock, had had one for months.

  I found her in the bathtub, the bathroo
m door open, the water still and cool. The plastic bag was taped tightly around her neck with gray duct tape and it was still slightly inflated with her final exhalations. Her eyes were closed.

  The empty pill bottle was on the edge of the sink, its cap by its side. There was some water left in the bottom of her toothbrushing cup.

  I stood there for I don’t know how long, looking at her, knowing that it wasn’t what it looked like, that it couldn’t be. Knowing that I’d have to find the person responsible. But first I did what I’d promised I’d do if this day ever came, what I’d hoped I’d never have to do. I found her laptop and her cell phone, packed them away in my bag; I found the bottles and tubes in her bedside drawer, a dozen of them; I found the sheer outfits folded neatly in her dresser, the g-string panties and mesh underwire teddies and the one long leopard-print chemise she’d told me a client had given her and liked her to wear. I took them all, together with what few papers I found intact on the shelf in her closet. In the bottom of her garbage can, beneath the blades of the crosscut shredder she’d bought herself at Staples, I found a pile of confetti that looked like it had once been phone bills, bank statements, photographs. I got a plastic grocery bag from under her sink and packed the shreds into it, taking care not to leave any fragments behind.

  On her bed, leaning against one of the pillows, was a large blue teddy bear, stubby arms spread wide as though asking for a hug. Across the bottom of one of its feet were the letters “FAO,” embroidered in gold thread. She’d bought the bear, she told me, with her first week’s pay as a fairy princess; even with the employee discount, it had consumed the better part of her paycheck. But it was plush and special and expensive, and for a two-time college dropout from Philly living in a one-room walk-up apartment in a bad part of town, owning one thing that was plush and special and expensive felt very important. Another woman might have bought an art print and framed it, or a nice dress. Dorrie bought the bear.

  In the kitchen there was one mug in the sink and one plate, and I washed them, dried them, and put them away. There were three messages on her answering machine; I’d left them earlier that morning, and now I erased them. I thought about fingerprints, but I knew it was useless to wipe the place down; I’d visited often and my fingerprints were all over. I also thought about the penalty for tampering with a crime scene. But I didn’t think about it for long. The police wouldn’t recognize it as a crime scene, because they didn’t know what I knew. They wouldn’t investigate, with or without the things I was taking away. All I’d accomplish by leaving them would be to reveal Dorrie’s other life, providing a sordid footnote that would make newspaper readers nod knowingly over their coffee, certain they’d identified the reason why a beautiful young woman would take her own life. And that’s what I’d promised I wouldn’t let happen.