I hesitated at the front door, one hand on the light switch. Then I went back into the bedroom and returned with the bear under one arm.
From a payphone a few blocks away I called 911. I told them I was a neighbor across the street, that I’d seen something through the window that frightened me, a woman taping a plastic bag over her head. I gave them the address, hung up when they asked for my name.
I waited till I heard a siren approaching, then climbed the stairs to the subway platform at 125th Street. There was only one other person in the subway car with me when I got on, a gray-haired man in a khaki jumpsuit, like a maintenance man’s uniform. He pointed at the bear. “For your daughter?” he said.
I hesitated, then nodded.
“Oh, she’s gonna love it,” he said. “Big bear like that. Gonna make her very happy. Very happy. She’s one lucky girl.”
Then the car plunged into its tunnel and the squeal of its wheels against the track mercifully drowned out whatever more he had to say about happiness and luck.
Chapter 3
I got off the 1 train at Houston Street and walked the few blocks to Carmine, near Bedford. It’s a long way from 125th Street. It’s a long way from anywhere.
The bookstore on the first floor of my building called itself “Unoppressive Non-Imperialist Bargain Books,” which gave you a sense of the neighborhood. Down the block was Father Demo Square, named for the pastor who’d held rallies there for the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Around the corner was the Little Red Schoolhouse, so called for more than just the color of its bricks. Jack Kerouac used to hang out down here and so did Allen Ginsberg and Dylan Thomas and on and on—there were signs to tell you if you didn’t already know. All of which added up to a nice little progressive neighborhood, and if you asked people they’d tell you that’s why they chose to live here, but it wasn’t true. There was only one reason to live way the hell down on Carmine Street, and it was the same reason Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac had liked it: because it was cheap.
I let myself into my studio apartment. I cleared off a space on a bookshelf and set the bear down. It shared the shelf with a shabby styrofoam bird in a wooden cage, another bit of flotsam to which I’d developed a sentimental attachment. At this rate I’d have a menagerie before long.
I plugged Dorrie’s cell phone into its charger and the charger into a wall outlet, then turned it on and began the painstaking process of copying out all the entries in her address book and calendar by hand. I imagine there was some way I could have connected the phone to my computer and downloaded it all at the press of a button, but I didn’t know what it was, and anyway the mechanical labor was good for me. It occupied my brain with the mental equivalent of white noise; better than what would’ve occupied it otherwise. Because I was furious. I wanted to scream. I wanted to punch a wall. But that would have helped no one, least of all Dorrie. So I copied. Allgor, Alison. Avena, George. Ballinger, Max.
She hadn’t killed herself. Not because she wouldn’t have—she’d talked about suicide plenty. We both had. It’s what unhappy people who were ashamed of their past and not too sure about their future did. I wasn’t proud of it and neither was she, but you know what, better to talk about it than to do it. And that was the promise we’d made each other: If one of us ever felt like doing it, seriously felt that way, we’d call the other and talk it out instead. I’d never gotten to that point myself, but she had, more than once, and she’d called me every time. But not this time. And she would have. She would have.
Then there was the other half of the deal. She promised me she’d call me first—and in return I promised her that if I was ever unable to talk her out of it and she went ahead and did it, I’d...I’d...
Glazier, Lane. Harrison, Melanie. Katz, Maria.
If she ever went ahead and killed herself, I promised I’d come there and clean the place out, get rid of any trace of her professional life, so her mother would never have to know, and her father, too, for that matter; neither of them would have to read in the paper that their little girl had paid her rent by performing sexual services for a hundred eighty dollars an hour plus tips. No, not that. Just that she was dead. Which god knows would be so much easier to take.
I opened the grocery bag full of shredded paper, fingered the pieces. Someone had done that shredding. Not Dorrie, someone else. Someone who thought it set the scene for a suicide better and who maybe also had something to hide. Someone whose number appeared on those shredded phone bills, maybe, or whose face was in one of the photographs. Maybe. But someone, and not Dorrie. She wouldn’t have. That’s what she had me for.
If—just saying if, just imagining—if you speculated that she’d been so upset over something that she’d killed herself in a white-hot rage of self-obliteration, an impulse so powerful that she couldn’t take the time to call me first, well then she damn well wouldn’t have spent an hour patiently feeding pages one by one into a shredder either. If she’d had the presence of mind and the patience for that, she’d have had the presence of mind and patience to call me. You couldn’t have it both ways.
I finished with the address book and started on the calendar. There wasn’t much there, just her class schedule and, peppered around it, entries labeled “Appointment,” each showing a time and a set of initials, presumably of the person she was meeting. She had full days of appointments every Friday and Saturday, half-days on Sunday. Once in a while a nighttime appointment during the week. I wrote it all down.
I did this with one eye on the clock. It wouldn’t take the police very long to connect my name to Dorrie’s. It was widely known that we’d been more than just classmates; people had seen us together. And of course my prints were on file. They might not launch an investigation, but they’d certainly be coming to talk to me. Which was fine—but not if they found her papers and her laptop in my apartment when they arrived. That might not be for a day or two, but you never knew.
I had a suitcase in the bottom of my closet and I emptied it out, tossing the clothing it contained on the floor. Dorrie’s outfits and the dozen little bottles of lube and massage oil went in there, along with the phone and charger and the papers, both shredded and whole.
Leaving the suitcase open, I booted up Dorrie’s laptop and quickly sifted through her home directory. It was pretty sparse—Dorrie hadn’t been a power user of the machine. There were a few songs stored in her “My Music” folder and a batch of word processor documents in “My Documents.” One folder was labeled “Kennedy” and contained various drafts of the assignments she’d turned in that first semester when we’d been in his class together and of the longer project she’d been working on for him ever since. I opened a few files at random. Along with some pieces I remembered discussing in class, there was a fragment titled “First Time” that I didn’t. As I read it, I could see why she hadn’t turned it in.
The assignment had been for us to write a scene from the point of view of the opposite gender. As I recalled, Dorrie had submitted a piece about a young husband pacing in a hospital corridor while his wife was having a Caesarian in the next room—“Birth,” there it was in the folder, dated just two days later. She’d based it, she told us, on the experience of a cousin.
But “Birth,” it seemed, hadn’t been her first stab at the assignment.
FIRST TIME
“Undress anywhere you like,” she said, waving her hand in a little circle. It wasn’t clear what she meant by ‘anywhere.’ The whole apartment was one room, maybe nineteen feet one way and eleven the other, with a sectional sofa against one wall, a stereo and an incense burner against another, and a padded table covered in tan leather a few feet away from the third. There was also a short entrance hall and, off to one side, a lighted alcove that held a tiny kitchen. Maybe she meant it was okay to undress in the kitchen.
She carried my money to a table in the hallway, counting it as she went. I watched her shoulders, tight and angular under the straps of her blue tank top, and I watched her legs, w
hich were shaking just enough that you had to be looking for it to notice. Her hands moved quickly, darting into the handbag she pulled from a drawer in the table and coming out empty. The rest of her moved quickly, too. She chewed up the distance between us in three strides and then was past me, replacing the New Age CD that had been playing with another, newer age one. She checked the incense: smoldering, just as she had left it. And the lights: dimmed. She dimmed them a little more. “You can lie down,” she said. “On the table.”
I finished unbuttoning my shirt and laid it on the sofa, rolled my pants up into a ball next to it. Dropped my wristwatch into one of my shoes. She looked away as I pulled down my underwear, busied herself with a row of plastic bottles by the CD player as I hoisted myself onto the table and lay down.
It was too dim to see whether she blushed when she turned around. “Face down,” she said. She passed me by and fiddled with the lights some more.
I rolled over. She crouched by the bottles again, uncapped one, and carried it back to the table.
She was wearing a peach-colored bra and a red bikini bottom now—she’d lost the tank top somewhere along the way. Once she was behind me, I heard her taking the bra off.
Harp strings played on the CD. So did flutes.
Her hands were cool and damp with lotion. They traveled down my back and up, down and up, down and up. Eventually they stayed down, and eventually she said I could turn over onto my back and I did.
The incense had a sweet-and-sour smell. It was probably supposed to be jasmine, but it smelled like Chinese food.
“Close your eyes,” she said. She’d been working her way up from the soles of my feet and by then had spent about as much time as she could get away with kneading my shins. She worked up to my thighs, and then hesitated. After a second, she squirted some more lotion into her palm and kept going.
I opened my eyes. Her legs weren’t shaking now. They were locked rigidly in place. Her shoulders were thrown back and her elbows were pinned by her sides. She was still wearing the bikini bottom and a thin gold necklace with a tiny cross on it, but nothing else. Tiny goosebumps stood out all over her breasts.
One of her hands was resting on my arm. The other wasn’t, either on my arm or resting. She was looking across the room at a poster for the 1988 season of the Metropolitan Opera, staring so hard at it that you’d have figured her for a real opera lover.
It didn’t go on much longer.
She’d told me the story, standing on the sidewalk at midnight; how one of her former classmates from Hunter had let her know about an open part-time position as a receptionist—just a receptionist—for a massage parlor, answering the phone, quoting prices, scheduling appointments. How after a few weeks the nine dollars per hour she was pocketing started looking paltry compared to the ninety the other women kept out of every hundred-eighty, not to mention the tips, and all for what? Fifty-five minutes of no more than you’d do if you worked at the finest spa in Manhattan and five of no more than you’d do after a so-so date with some guy who’d bought you two drinks and a plate of chicken marsala. No sex, not even oral, just a massage with a happy ending, a manual release, call it what you will; a full-body massage, and Jesus Christ, girl, what was wrong with that? You’re going to tell me, one of her co-workers said, that rubbing some guy’s thighs and shoulders and smelly feet for an hour is okay but rubbing his cock for ninety seconds is not? That’s bullshit. It’s just some more skin.
This from the woman who’d held the receptionist position immediately before Dorrie and who’d since moved up to become a masseuse herself. Later, Dorrie heard the joke that everyone in the business knew: What’s the difference between a phone girl and a masseuse? Thirty days.
There was a time when this would all have bothered me more than it did now—back before my high school girlfriend, who’d been headed for medical school to become an eye doctor, had ended up working as a stripper, and worse. Back before the years I spent, fresh out of NYU, doing legwork for Leo Hauser and getting to see every shitty thing one human being could do to another in the course of a day. Hell, if some men needed to pay to have a woman touch them and some women were willing to take the money, fine. If they both left feeling a little degraded by the experience, well, they didn’t have to repeat it. I’m no crusader. I hadn’t tried to talk Dorrie into quitting the job.
But now I couldn’t help wondering, would it have made a difference if I had? Was it one of her customers who’d done this to her, some crafty sociopath observant enough to spot Final Exit on her shelf and mirtazapine in her medicine cabinet?
I shut down the word processor and opened a Web browser. Nothing stood out on her list of bookmarks, the Web pages she visited most often, except for Craigslist, the site where all the city’s sex workers ran the classified ads that drew in their customers. In the old days, brothels and massage parlors would advertise in broadsheet rags sold under the counter at newsstands—or if they were the classy, upscale sort, they’d advertise in coded language in the back pages of New York magazine. You still saw some of that, but this was the Internet age, when a DSL connection was as indispensable to the sex trade as a pack of condoms, and most of the business had migrated online. Craigslist was sort of the eBay of sex. Anything you wanted, you could find, more or less anytime you wanted it. Horny guys could try to find it for free first under “Personals—Casual Encounters,” and when that failed, they could find it for a price under “Services—Erotic.”
Which is where I went. There was a search box, and I typed into it the name Dorrie had told me she worked under: Cassandra. Fifteen links came up, quite possibly none of them hers. There was no shortage of Cassandras on Craigslist. All I could do was take them one at a time—
I heard it out of the corner of one ear first, the faint clickclick, clickclick of my busted doorbell.
My fingers hung over the keyboard. I didn’t move.
Clickclick.
Then the brisk rapping as a fistful of knuckles landed against the surface of the door.
“Mr. Blake?” It was a man’s voice, nasal and sharp. “We’d like to talk to you. This is Patrolman James Mirsky of the NYPD.”
Chapter 4
Mirsky looked like a cop, and it wasn’t just the uniform. On his day off, standing at a hibachi in shorts and a polo shirt, he’d still have looked like a cop, getting ready to interrogate the burgers.
The younger man with him was clearly a rookie, barely old enough to shave, it seemed. But old enough to carry the gun riding in a holster on his hip, apparently; and as for looking like a cop, he’d grow into it. They all did.
They both stood there, uniform caps in their hands, scanning the room thoroughly. That didn’t mean anything, of course. They taught you in the academy to scan rooms that way. You walk into a bathroom, you take it all in first, left and right, before you unzip.
They saw the bear and the bird and my bed and my desk, and my computer on my desk, but they didn’t see Dorrie’s computer or my suitcase. While Mirsky and the rookie were looking in either direction, I pushed it further under my bed with my heel.
“Mr. Blake, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you,” Mirsky said, the formality of the diction sitting uneasily in his mouth. They’d trained him to talk this way to grieving relatives; left to his own devices, he’d have talked like a teamster. “Wouldja care to sit down?”
“That’s okay,” I said, trying to decide how surprised I should act when he sprang the news on me. I’m a lousy actor. “What is it?”
“You know a woman named Dorothy Burke?”
“Sure, I know Dorrie.”
“Sit down, Mr. Blake, why doncha?”
“I don’t want to sit down. What’s going on with Dorrie? Has she done something?”
“Looks like it,” Mirsky said. He worried his hat between his fingers absently. He didn’t like this part of his job, standing in crowded, stuffy tenement apartments, telling people their loved ones were dead. “She was found earlier this morning. I’m afra
id she’s deceased. Your phone number was the only one on her speed dial.”
Speed dial. I’d erased the answering machine and taken the cell phone, but hadn’t even thought to check the phone hanging on the wall.
I sat down. “How did she...?”
“We won’t know till we get the coroner’s report, but between you an’ me—” he shook his head at the pointlessness of it all “—it looks like the lady took her own life.”
I didn’t know what to say, how I ought to react, and then I decided that that was a perfectly good response in and of itself. People can be speechless when they get bad news.
Mirsky flipped open a spiral-bound notepad, thumbed a ballpoint out of the metal loops and uncapped it. “I’ve gotta ask you a few questions...”
Meanwhile, the rookie was padding softly around the room, peering at this and that. I saw him stop at my desk, lift the phone cable that had been plugged into the laptop when they came knocking. He laid his hand down flat on the desk surface, felt something, raised his hand, rubbed his fingers together. The heat. A laptop gets hot when you use it, and the desk must still have been warm.
“How well did you know Ms. Burke?”
Hard Case Crime: Songs of Innocence Page 3