Hard Case Crime: Songs of Innocence

by Aleas, Richard

“Reasonably well. We were friends.”

  “Close friends?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Did she seem depressed to you?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “She had a therapist she saw. He prescribed some medication.”

  “Yeah, we saw that. Did she ever talk about contemplating suicide?”

  I shook my head and lied to his face. “No.”

  “No? Like never, or like not very often? You understand, I mean no disrespect to the young lady, but it’s pretty clear what happened here. We’re just tryna wrap up some loose ends.”

  “Maybe once or twice,” I said, “but everyone’s got their days.”

  “Right, right,” Mirsky said. “Would you say she seemed depressed the last time you spoke to her? When was that, by the way?”

  Actually she had. It was why I’d called her three times this morning, why I’d raced uptown when she didn’t answer. “I talked to her last night. She seemed a little down.”

  “A little down.” He wrote in his book.

  The rookie, meanwhile, had moved on to my closet. I felt like asking him if he wanted to show me a warrant, but I kept my mouth shut. He stepped carefully over the suitcase-worth of clothing strewn on the floor. I shifted so my feet were in front of the suitcase.

  “Mr. Blake, I ran your name through the computer on the way downtown, and I see we’ve had you in the system, few years ago.”

  “The charges were dropped.”

  “That’s true. But if you don’t mind my asking, where were you this morning between, say, midnight and six AM? Just for completeness.”

  “Just for completeness,” I said, “I was lying in bed.”

  “By yourself?”

  “Just for completeness,” I said, “yes.”

  “That’s fine, that’s fine,” Mirsky said. “Gotta ask. You know how it is.”

  I did, and I told him so.

  “Between us, this one’s as cut-and-dried as I’ve seen,” Mirsky said. “Bottla pills, bag on her head, pardon me for being so frank. Book on the ground. Speakin’ a which, you ever seen this book?” He reached behind him and the rookie was there, silently handing him a transparent evidence bag containing my copy of Final Exit. They’d pull my prints off the glossy dust jacket if they hadn’t already.

  “Sure, we both read it.”

  “And yet you told me, where was it—” he flipped back a page or two in his notes “—that the young lady never talked about contemplating suicide. And here’s this book that’s all about how to commit suicide.” He spread his hands.

  “She also read The Art of War,” I said. “That doesn’t mean she was contemplating raising an army in China.”

  The good-natured veneer dropped away, leaving a suspicious stare in its place. The rookie was wearing one, too. He was learning.

  “Don’t smart off, Blake. If this wasn’t so cut-and-dried we’d be looking at you for it.”

  I put my hands up, palms out. “I’m sorry. It’s just...it’s a lot to take in.”

  Mirsky’s eyelids drooped again. It took more effort than he cared to put into it to be a hardass for long. “We’re gonna need to contact the deceased’s next of kin. You know who that would be?”

  “Her mother,” I said. “She lives in Philadelphia. Her name’s Eva.”

  “She doesn’t have anyone in New York?”

  There was her father, but I knew how she’d have felt about that. “No. Not that I know of.”

  Mirsky closed his notebook. The rookie tucked Final Exit back into the satchel hanging from his shoulder.

  “All right, Mr. Blake,” Mirsky said. “We’re sorry to disturb your Sunday morning and we offer our condolences. If you think of anything we oughta know, please call this number.” He extended a business card to me. I took it. A cell phone number was written on the back in pencil. “Have a good day.” And, on his way out: “You’ll want to get that doorbell fixed.” He poked it with a stubby forefinger. Clickclick.

  The rookie was standing behind him, staring back into the apartment, past my shoulder. I glanced back. You could just see the handle of the suitcase under the bed.

  “I’ll do that,” I said. “Thank you.”

  They walked off and I listened to them pounding down the stairs in their regulation shoes and their thirty pounds of gear. They didn’t have an easy job. But I could only drum up so much sympathy.

  I returned to my bed, pulled the suitcase out from under it, and opened it. Maybe I was being paranoid. But just to be safe, I emptied the suitcase and repacked all its contents into a canvas knapsack. I grabbed a handful of shirts from the back of the closet, things the rookie might not have seen, refilled the suitcase with them, and shoved it back where it had been under the bed. Just in case they came back with a warrant. Realistically they probably wouldn’t; realistically Dorrie’s death probably did look cut-and-dried to them and they’d drop it gladly and move on to their next case. But wouldn’t it be just wonderful if they decided it was murder after all, and then tried to pin it on me?

  I hefted the knapsack. This could stay safe in the back room of the Barking Boat across the street, tucked behind an industrial-size can of tomatoes or sack of rice. Michael would hold it for me. He’d probably think it was a stash of pot or something like that, but he’d hold it. I’d held worse for him.

  I looked out the window and craned to see as far up and down Carmine Street as I could. They didn’t seem to be waiting and watching, either on foot or in a car. But I’d give it a few minutes just to make sure.

  I pulled up Craigslist on my own computer, re-ran the search under “Services—Erotic” and clicked one by one on all the Cassandra links. Two of them were for places in Long Island, one was a woman in Queens, one down on Wall Street. One started “Sweet black sistah will do it all...” The rest were in midtown, which is where Dorrie had worked, and half of them had photos. Those I could eliminate: none of the women looked anything like Dorrie. That left the five without photos, and I copied down their phone numbers.

  At the bottom, one of the ads said, “Check out my reviews at The Erotic Review!” I clicked on the underlined word ‘reviews.’ A new window opened on the screen. The Web site that came up looked for all the world like a page from an online card catalog for a library, with dozens of little taxonomical entries describing something in put-you-to-sleep fine print. But the thing that was being described was a woman. “Build,” “Ethnicity,” “Age,” “Hair Color”—and that was just the start. “Piercings: None.” “Transsexual: No.” Breast Size, Breast Cup, Breast Implants, Breast Appearance. Tattoos.

  And that was just the start, too. Because the next section examined in loving detail just what this woman, this one of the city’s fifteen Cassandras, would do for a buck. “Massage,” “Sex,” “S&M,” “Anal.” And coyly tucked in the middle of the list: “Kiss.” I think it was that “Kiss” that broke my heart.

  I remembered Dorrie talking about her work; she didn’t talk about it often and I didn’t push her to, but one evening she was especially tense and as I kneaded her shoulders and neck she said, quietly, “Why do they always want whatever it is you’re not willing to sell?”

  I worked my thumbs against the knotted muscles. “Bad client?”

  She nodded. “If you just offer regular massage, they want a handjob. If you offer topless, they want bottomless. If you give handjobs, they want oral. Wherever you draw the line, they want whatever’s on the other side of it.”

  “Human nature,” I said. “We all want what we can’t have.”

  “It’s not about human nature,” she said. “It’s about power. It’s like what gets them off is knowing they made you do something you didn’t want to do.”

  “I think you just defined human nature,” I said.

  She’d reached back then and put her hand over mine. “You know what this guy wanted today? He wanted me to piss on him.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “I told him I couldn’t, I didn�
�t need to go. He’d brought a bottle of water. He said he’d wait.” She shook her head slowly. “And if I’d said yes, I do golden showers, I’m sure he’d have come up with something else he wanted. They always do. Always something else.”

  She slept over at my apartment that night; we spent it lying silently in each other’s arms. I watched her in the faint moonlight filtering in between my blinds, lay awake while her breathing became deeper and slower, her head a reassuring weight on my chest. I felt an overwhelming desire to protect her, to keep her from harm. But then the morning came and with it the recollection of what a lousy protector I was, and I was glad I hadn’t said anything to her in the night, hadn’t sworn to keep her safe the way I’d promised other women who were now dead.

  This particular Cassandra wasn’t the right one. In the “Appearance” section of the Erotic Review page about her it said, among many, many other things, “Age: 31-35” and “Hair Length: Super-Short.” A quick search on the site showed that eight other Cassandras had been measured and weighed by the Erotic Review’s dutiful members. I went through them all, from the most recent entry to one dated several months back.

  The last one was Dorrie.

  She’d been rated a ‘9’ overall for appearance and an ‘8’ for performance and was described in enough detail that it was pretty clear it was her. Height: 5’9”-5’11”. Hair Color: Brown. Tattoos: None. And so on.

  If there was any doubt, it was gone when I clicked on the link at the top of the page. The link took me to her Web site, which turned out to be a page shared by four women working from a single midtown location: Cassandra, Julie, Rodeo, and Belle. (Rodeo?) I clicked on “Cassandra,” and there she was.

  In the largest of the three photos Dorrie had on a wide-brimmed hat, angled down to cover all of her face but her lips and chin. She was standing against a wall with her arms outstretched to either side, fingers splayed. Her long, long legs were crossed at the ankles and she wore a pair of patent-leather stiletto heels with narrow straps that crisscrossed up her shins. She also wore a pink g-string, but that was the only concession to modesty. Her breasts were bare, her nipples hard, her acres of exposed skin pale and delicate.

  The other two photos were close-ups, blurred so her face wouldn’t show. In one she was lying on her side in bed, curled around a pillow, while in the other she was straddling a barstool.

  Beneath the photos, an animated image of a phone number revolved in slow circles. It was one of the five on my list. I crossed off the other four and picked up the phone.

  Chapter 5

  The subway let me out at 28th Street and I walked east to Madison. This was a business neighborhood full of old office buildings with filthy windows and on a Sunday afternoon it was almost completely deserted. In one bar I passed I heard cheering when some athlete on TV did something good, but other than that I might as well have been in one of those old Twilight Zone episodes where a guy wakes up and discovers that everyone in town has vanished. You don’t think of New York City ever being empty, not even for one block, but it can be; and an empty street with shuttered storefronts can be as desolate here as in as any Western ghost town.

  There was a pair of pay phones at the corner of Madison and I dialed the phone number again. The woman who answered sounded young and bored, though she was probably trying to sound sultry. “Hi, honey. Who is this?”

  “This is John,” I said. “I called you earlier. You said I should call again when I got to the corner of 28th and Madison.”

  “Sure, honey. Are you ready to come up?”

  I said I was.

  “The building is number 44. Ring the bell for the fourth floor, okay?”

  “Forty-four, fourth floor,” I said. “That’s pretty easy to remember.”

  She laughed and hung up.

  The building could charitably have been called a brownstone, except that there were no stones, just flat slab walls of poured concrete. It looked like the sort of thing a particularly unimaginative child would build with a construction toy: four walls, four floors, two windows per floor. I rang the bell. A buzzer buzzed and I pushed the door open.

  A freight-style elevator with a sliding metal gate inside the door carried me up to the fourth floor. When it grumbled to a stop, I slid the gate, pushed the door, and found myself in a dim hallway with a sign on the wall that said “Sunset Entertainment.” There was just one door. The sign looked slick and professional, as though this were an indie movie studio or a casting agency or something, but that pretense ended as soon as the door opened. There was nothing in the front room other than an armchair with a gray cat sleeping on the seat.

  The woman who’d opened the door was standing behind it, and I didn’t see her till she swung it shut behind me. “Hi—John?”

  She was about my height and slender, with blonde hair and a row of silver rings running up one earlobe, five or six of them. On one shoulder she had a tattoo of a Celtic knot, which I could see because she was wearing a halter top. A wraparound skirt and step-in heels completed the outfit. She stood with her shoulders thrown back to put her modest bosom on display and smiled. It was a brittle smile.

  She extended a hand and led me down a short hallway. There were two doors further down and one door here, which she opened. Inside, the lights were low. There was a padded massage table at waist height, a boombox on the floor playing Enya, and a metal shelf with a roll of paper towels, a few jars, a spray bottle, and a fat candle. It smelled like vanilla.

  Which one was she, I wondered—Julie, Belle, or Rodeo?

  “Samantha,” she said when I asked her name.

  “You’re not on the Web site.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, the site hasn’t been updated in, like, forever. Cassie hasn’t been here for months, and Julie...”

  “What?”

  The smile had flickered for a moment, but it was back. “Nothing. I’m sure she’ll get the site updated one of these days. Meanwhile—” She raised her hands and dropped them to her side. “I’m here, you’re here, so...” She nodded at a folding chair in the corner. “You want to put your things there?”

  I took out a handful of twenties I’d gotten at an ATM on the way uptown. “Samantha,” I said, “there’s something—”

  She shook her head. “Undress first.”

  “I’m not—”

  She put an index finger against my lips. “I can’t talk to you till you’ve undressed, sweetie.”

  Because I might be a cop wearing a wire. It was a reasonable precaution before taking money for a sex act. But that’s not what I was here for.

  I pressed the money into her hand, closed her fingers around it. “I’m not here for a massage, Samantha. Or for anything sexual, or for anything that will get you in trouble. I’m also not a cop. I’m a friend of Cassandra’s. Something bad’s happened to her and I need your help.”

  Her eyes went wide and her hand jumped to her mouth, taking my money with it. “Is she okay?”

  “No.”

  “Oh my god. Oh my god.” Samantha opened the door of the room. “Di?” she called. “Come in here!”

  One of the other doors opened and a black woman in jeans and a Nike t-shirt came running. “What? What is it?” She was looking fiercely at me. I recognized her voice from the phone. She didn’t sound bored anymore. “You trying something, asshole?”

  “No, no, it’s Cassie,” Samantha said, “he said something’s happened.”

  Di reached into the back pocket of her jeans and swung up at me with a slim black canister, her thumb on top, ready to squeeze down and launch a spray of something painful into my face. “You get the fuck out of here, mister, or I swear to god I will cut your balls off and feed them to you.”

  “Di!” Samantha put her hand up in front of the nozzle. “He says he’s a friend of Cassie’s.”

  “And you fucking believe him?” She pushed Samantha’s hand down. “I’m going to count to three and you’d better be out of here before I’m done. One—”


  I sat down on the massage table, put my hands out to either side, kept the palms showing. No one had ever told me I look dangerous—quite the opposite—but under the circumstances I wanted to be extra sure. “I’m sorry if I scared you. I just need to talk to you for a few minutes and then I’ll go.”

  “Two,” Di said. She took a step closer to me, extending the canister toward my face. “Get up.”

  “Listen to me, please,” I said. “Cassandra is dead. The police found her body this morning. In her apartment.” Di’s hand was shaking, and Samantha had started to cry. “They came to me because my number was programmed into her phone. She was a friend of mine. That’s the truth.”

  “Yeah?” Di said. “Then what’s her real name?”

  “Dorrie. Dorrie Burke. We took classes together at Columbia. That’s where I know her from.”

  “How’d you get this number?”

  “Craigslist,” I said. “She told me what name she worked under.”

  Samantha looked from Di to me and back again. Di’s hand slowly came down.

  “What’s your real name?” she said.

  “It’s John,” I said. “John Blake. I didn’t lie to you.”

  Samantha wiped one eye with the heel of her hand. “What—what happened to Cassie?”

  “They don’t know yet. They say it looked like suicide. I think someone got into her apartment and knocked her out, made it look that way. It looks like they made her swallow some pills.”

  “She OD’d?” Di said.

  I shook my head. “She was in the bathtub. Suffocated.” I described the scene to them. I hated to do it. I watched Samantha’s face go pale and both of them seemed to retreat into themselves. As bold as Di was, she was frightened, too. And why shouldn’t she be? If it was one of their customers who did it, it might as easily have been Di found dead in her bathtub instead.

  “You said that Dorrie hasn’t worked here for months,” I said. “How many months?”

  Samantha said, “Two? Three?” She looked over at Di.

  “Two,” Di said.

  “Why’d she leave?”

  They exchanged another look. “It was after what happened to Julie,” Samantha said.