Hard Case Crime: Songs of Innocence

by Aleas, Richard

  From behind my head, his throaty whisper came. “We need—” vee nihd “—to get you out of here.”

  “Your brother,” I said, and he hissed at me. I lowered my voice. “Your brother. Where is he?”

  “Out. You made him very angry. He is showing what a reasonable man he is by finding someone to kill.”

  “Why are you—” I heard the rope drop to the ground and my hands sprang apart. I brought them around in front of me. They were like objects, pieces of stone, not part of my body. “Why are you helping me?”

  He came around, pulled me to my feet, draped one of my arms across his shoulders. “You’re just a foolish boy,” he said. “You don’t deserve to die for it.”

  We started slowly to climb the stairs. In the unsteady beam of the flashlight, I saw that the door at the top was closed. I could barely walk and Andras had to support my weight all the way up. We made slow progress.

  At the top, he leaned me against the wall. Very slowly, sensation was leaking back into my fingers. I could tell it wasn’t going to be pleasant.

  Andras reached for the doorknob, but he never had a chance to turn it. The door swung open and light from outside splashed in. Miklos was there, a pistol in his hand.

  He looked from one of us to the other. He sneered at Andras. “What are you doing?”

  “Don’t you dare point that at me,” Andras said, but his voice trembled. “My brother—”

  “Your brother. Don’t talk to me about your brother, you...you bartender.” Miklos stepped between us, kept the gun up, aimed at Andras’ chest. He had something in his other hand. I couldn’t see what it was.

  “You,” he said to me. “Take this. Ardo wants you to have it.” I could lift my arm but couldn’t open my fingers.

  Miklos pressed the object against my chest, smeared it across my shirt. It left a dark streak. Then he slapped it into my palm, squeezed my fingers closed around it. It was the wallet. The streak was blood.

  “He says go home. He makes you a present of this one.” He swung the gun around to me, used its barrel to tip my chin up. “If it was me, I’d shoot you.” For a second he seemed to be considering it. “But Ardo says not this time. If I ever see you again, he says do what I want.” He leaned in close. “I think I will see you again,” he said. “Mr. Lucky.”

  “Get away from him,” Andras said.

  In an instant the gun was pressed against Andras’ forehead.

  “Point it at your own head,” Andras said in a quiet voice. “You know you might as well.”

  “Anyád hátán baszlak ketté,” Miklos said, with loathing in his tone. “Buzi.”

  Andras’ face went pale.

  “I should have let him rescue you,” Miklos said, “and take you home with him. Maybe you like the taste of an old man’s dick.”

  I pushed myself away from the wall. Andras must have seen something in my face because he said, “No. Go. He won’t do nothing to me. Ardo would skin him alive. He knows it and it makes him feel small.”

  “One day, old man,” Miklos said, “I won’t care.”

  “Go,” Andras said again.

  My legs were still stiff and painful, but with an effort I was able to control them. I looked back at the two men, who hadn’t budged. I walked out.

  I found myself in the nave of a church. I limped slowly down the long aisle between two banks of pews, listening with half an ear for footsteps behind me. Or a gunshot.

  Chapter 12

  I stepped out onto 81st Street. Andras’ bar was to my left, the church behind me. It looked to be early afternoon. The sunlight was jarring.

  I made my way to the curb and from there to the corner of Second Avenue, leaning on a tree and a mailbox along the way. My hands were burning, but my legs had progressed to the point where they were just painfully sore. I flagged a cab going downtown and fell into its back seat gratefully. I told the driver to turn around and head up to 116th Street—all the way up and all the way west. It would use up one of my remaining twenties, but I was in no condition to take the subway. I thought about calling Kurland to find out if anything had happened at the hospital—the battery on my cell phone probably had a little charge left. But my hands were still useless weights at the ends of my arms; it was all I could do to paw the money out of my pocket. I asked the driver to open the windows and I sank back against the door, my legs stretched out along the seat. A half hour later, the white stone and red brick and green metal roofs of Columbia’s campus came into view like some giant architectural version of the Hungarian flag. Or the Italian flag. I’d had enough of Hungarians for one day.

  By the time I got to Lewisohn Hall, I was walking steadily enough not to attract notice. I massaged each of my palms with the thumb of my other hand. Feeling was returning, though fatigue was creeping back with it. I stopped in the bathroom to wash my glasses and my face, straighten my hair. The brown smear on my shirt wasn’t going to come out. It was pretty obvious to me that it was blood, but maybe it wouldn’t be obvious to other people. Anyway, there was nothing I could do about it.

  I looked at Ramos’ wallet. Aside from the blood on it, mostly dried by now, it looked the same as when Julie and I had taken it out of his pocket in the tunnels. A driver’s license, a few dollar bills, a plastic card showing a 2002 calendar on one side and a zip code map of the city on the other. Nothing missing, nothing added. I pocketed it and tried not to think too much about where the blood had come from. Ardo had decided, apparently, that one of us deserved punishment and the other did not. I’d walked into the lion’s cage, but I hadn’t pretended to be the lion myself. Of course, Jorge Ramos hadn’t either— he’d never said Ardo sent him, I’d just reached that conclusion on my own. But I’d let Ardo believe he’d said it, and now Ramos lay somewhere, bloodied or dead. I didn’t feel terrible about it—the man had tried to kill me, after all. But I won’t say I felt good about it either.

  At my desk, I saw a small pile of pink ‘While You Were Out’ message slips. None of them looked pressing. The one voicemail message blinking on my phone was Lane saying that he’d reached Mrs. Burke and she’d be coming to the memorial at six. I looked at the clock. It was 2:30.

  Sitting on the desk where I’d left them were the two manuscripts Stu Kennedy had given me, the final pieces of the assignment Dorrie had been working on for him, or the last ones she’d completed anyway. I read the top page of one, turned it, bent the paper back against the staple. It was a scene with a young couple, two daughters, crushing medical bills, grim silences across the dinner table. The mother came off as a bit of a harridan, the father as long-suffering and put upon. Of course, Dorrie had grown up with her mother—her father had been conveniently absent, so it was easy for her to imagine him as the more sympathetic of the two. As for the sister, she had a whiff of Victorian melodrama to her, lying in her hospital bed, expiring from some ill-specified malignancy.

  I remembered Dorrie complaining about the assignment over dinner in back in March, her fingers tangled in her hair with exasperation. She’d wanted to find out some basic information: how old had Catherine been when she’d gotten sick, had she been at the hospital or at home when she died. It was her own sister, for god’s sake; she had a right to ask. But instead of answering, her mother had used their time together to vent decades of free-floating anger, disappointment, and frustration, and as for her father, well, I took it upon myself to track him down—a nice chance to exercise the old muscles again and maybe show off a little for Dorrie—but after twenty years of neglect the man had taken the easy road out again. Dorrie had shown me the letter she’d mailed him after I’d handed her his address and hounded her to use it; the envelope had come back returned, refused written across the front in red ink.

  “It’s not like I want anything from him,” she’d said. “One lousy hour, in a public place. Lunch. I’ll buy. Jesus.”

  “Maybe he’s embarrassed.”

  “Of what?”

  “He works in a shoe store.”

  �
��What’s wrong with working in a shoe store?”

  There was nothing wrong with working in a shoe store, not even if you’d once been a high school English teacher; but that didn’t mean he didn’t feel ashamed of it. Anyway, he’d refused her letter and refused to talk to her and now he’d never have the chance. Maybe if I called him today, I thought, he’d have an hour for Dorrie at last. I was sorely tempted. But then I thought about the mother and the stories Dorrie had told me about growing up in a house where all the family photos had neatly scissored holes where her father’s face used to be, and I decided that a matter-antimatter collision between those two was one headache I didn’t need.

  I opened my desk drawer to put the two manuscripts away. In there I saw the handwritten notes I’d made Sunday morning, the copy of all the appointments in Dorrie’s calendar and the entries from her electronic address book. I pulled the pages out, thumbed through them, looking for anything that might help. Some of the names I recognized, many I didn’t. Some entries had detailed information—address, phone numbers, e-mail—while others just had bits and pieces: just a cell phone number, just an e-mail address. I thought about this as I scanned the list. Just a cell phone number I could understand—that happened, you met someone and the only number they gave you was their cell phone. But it suddenly occurred to me that it was a bit strange to have no way to contact someone other than an e-mail address. Wouldn’t you generally at least have a phone number for anyone you also had an e-mail address for?

  Maybe not. Anything was possible these days. Maybe some of these were people she’d met online and didn’t know other than through the Internet, or boho types who didn’t stay any one place long enough to keep a steady phone number, or god only knows what else. But another possibility came to mind, too. Maybe some of them were people she dealt with exclusively through e-mail because she wanted to keep her identity secret—or because they did. Maybe, in other words, some of them were her clients. And if so, I had to figure the ones that had warranted an entry in her address book would be the regulars.

  I looked at the calendar entries. My handwriting was a scrawl—I’d been writing rapidly, not carefully. But the information was there: APPT—CA...APPT—RL... APPT—JS. I looked under ‘A’ in the address book, and there was one e-mail-only entry: Adams, Charles. Under ‘L’: Lee, Robert. Under ‘S,’ god help me, it suddenly shone out like a beacon: Smith, James. Sure, there were people named “James Smith” in the world—lots of them, and that’s why this entry hadn’t caught my eye when I’d copied it down in the first place. But sometimes a cigar is more than a cigar, and sometimes a James Smith is a john.

  I circled the three entries, hunted through the calendar for more. There was one: APPT—BV, which corresponded to a Vincent, Brian, though he broke the pattern by having a phone number as well as an e-mail address. Which may have meant that our boy Brian was careless, or cocky, or that he was single and blackmail-proof and didn’t give a damn who knew he bought himself a handjob every Thursday night at eight. Or, of course, it might mean that he was the wrong “BV.” I circled him. I could call him, e-mail the other three, see if I could get one or more of them to talk to me.

  It was tricky—one of them could easily be the man I was looking for. I’d have to think about the right approach. But at least these were leads I could follow up on, loose threads I could start pulling. They were something.

  And if these leads didn’t pan out, well, there was Spellbound on 51st Street to look into, not to mention people here at Columbia who might know something; hell, maybe even people from her time at Hunter, or back in Philadelphia. If I was going to do this right, there was no telling how far back I’d have to go.

  It was a little overwhelming. I felt the weight of all the things I might have to do pressing on me like a physical burden. If I hadn’t been so tired, so drained, I don’t think it would have affected me like this; but I was and it did. I took a few deep breaths, tried to organize my thoughts. First things first. Julie. My fingers were working again, and I used them to dial Kurland’s cell phone number.

  This time there were no street noises in the background when he picked up, just the sound of a distant P.A. system making an announcement I couldn’t understand. “Hello? Kurland? It’s John. You there?”

  After a moment, he said, “Oh, I’m here.”

  “Is everything okay? Did anything happen last night?”

  Kurland didn’t answer.

  “Did anyone show up at the hospital, Kurland? Did anyone try to get into Julie’s room?”

  “Tell me something, John. Who, exactly, were you thinking might have shown up?”

  It was a good question. Someone had sicced Ramos on Julie, but if you believed Ardo, it hadn’t been him. I gave the only answer I could. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Now that’s just not true, John. You do know, and Julie knows, and now I know—but only because she told me.” In the background I heard a loud mechanical beeping, then some footsteps and the beeping stopped. “When were you going to tell me, John?”

  “Kurland, listen to me. I know what Julie told you, because she told me the same thing. But she’s wrong. Ardo’s not the one who came after her, not this time.”

  “And what makes you say that?”

  “Because I saw him,” I said. “Last night. I talked to him. He told me.”

  There was silence on the other end of the phone.

  “Kurland, please,” I said, “just tell me, did anyone show up at the hospital?”

  The answer came reluctantly: “No.”

  “Have they released Julie yet?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “The doctors want to keep her one more day.”

  “Okay,” I said. “She’s probably safer there than at home.”

  “No probably about it,” he said. “She’s definitely safer here.” The ‘here’ took a moment to sink in. Then I realized what the background noises were.

  “You’re still at the hospital?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I appreciate it, Kurland, but I can’t ask you to—”

  “Yeah, well. You don’t have to,” he said. “She did.”

  “She did,” I said.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said. “She’s waking up.” And the call was disconnected.

  I put the phone down. I pictured Julie waking up this morning to find Kurland Wessels at the foot of the bed. Her first reaction must have been plain terror, not knowing who had sent him. And when he’d said that I’d sent him, would she have believed it? Well, apparently she had. Apparently he’d won her over, and apparently vice versa. I remembered Stu Kennedy’s comment about steak to a Doberman. Well, a Doberman can attack you or it can protect you; and if there was anyone who needed a Doberman on her side right now, it was Julie.

  “John?”

  I looked up. Lane was at his office door. He was looking at me with concern.

  “Are you okay? Is that blood on your shirt?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s—it’s—” I realized I was stammering. “It’s nothing. I’m fine, Lane. Really. I’m okay.”

  He didn’t look like he believed me. Which was to his credit. I wouldn’t have believed me either. But he took me at my word, which was more than I would have done.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t been in,” I said.

  “That’s okay, John,” he said. “I understand. This has got to be very hard for you.”

  I nodded. Let him think it was all a matter of mourning. He wasn’t entirely wrong.

  I asked him, “Do we need anything for tonight? Wine or...?”

  “Actually, yes,” he said, in an apologetic tone. “We could use a little food, something for people to drink. I figured maybe we could put up some photos. Are you sure you’re up to it, though? I can ask...”

  But there wasn’t anyone else he could ask. It was my job, and I’d neglected it enough over the past two days. I flexed my fingers. My hands felt human again, or nearly so. I was tired as hell and worn down a
nd on edge, and I wasn’t sure I had enough energy to get out of the chair; but what I said to Lane was, “I’ll do it.” It felt like doing penance, like something I owed Dorrie.

  The air had turned cold by the time I made it down to the street. The wind whipped my hair and stung my face. It felt like more of the sort of white noise I’d welcomed right after I’d found Dorrie’s body. I even welcomed the pain. It made it hard for me to think.

  The grocery store where Columbia had an account was eight blocks away, on Amsterdam, and by the time I got back with two armloads of heavy bags it was almost four. Then I had to set the room up, pushing all the furniture to the walls and setting out the things I’d bought and stacking plastic cups and an hour passed and it was almost five. Then people started showing up, and then it was six, and then Dorrie Burke’s mother asked me to find the man who had murdered her daughter and I didn’t know what to say to her. What I did was lie. Through my teeth. Because that’s what you do sometimes, to protect people, or yourself.

  And then everyone was gone and it was just me and Susan on the phone and she got the whole story out of me. The whole story. I didn’t hold anything back. And she said to me, you’re not doing this one alone. No way, John. No way. And I told her I had to, that Dorrie was my responsibility, not hers, that I couldn’t bear to put her in harm’s way again, and Susan said, did you hear me, John? I said no way.

  I was so grateful I started to cry.

  PART TWO

  Sooner murder an infant in its cradle

  than nurse unacted desires.

  WILLIAM BLAKE,

  THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL

  Chapter 13

  Susan lived on East 60th Street, in a mammoth white brick co-op that could have swallowed my little tenement building five times over. The doorman wore a naval cap and gold braid on his shoulders and watched with a tight smile as I walked through his carpeted lobby in my blood-smeared shirt and stubble. These days you can’t tell. Millionaires walk through the lobby in filthy shirts and stubble.