Hard Case Crime: Songs of Innocence

by Aleas, Richard

  The elevator was fast and silent and ticked off 27 floors on its digital readout before coming softly to a stop. I wasn’t sure which direction to turn when I got out till I saw Susan standing in a doorway at the end of the hall.

  She watched me come and I watched her watch. Neither of us said a word. The first time I’d seen her, on stage at the Sin Factory, stripping down to a g-string for a screaming, drunken crowd, she’d struck me as beautiful in a conventional way. Playboy magazine beautiful, Girls Gone Wild beautiful—the kind of beautiful that doesn’t stir anything inside you. It’s wallpaper. It’s Internet porn.

  But standing in her hallway three years later, leaning her face against the side of her door, she was beautiful in a whole other way and it broke my heart. She had a sadness in her eyes, a loneliness, and it was my fault. A whole series of faults, all of them mine. Starting with the attack that had almost killed her, and then the recovery, and then the distant, uncomfortable months that followed. I’d tried to protect her. It wasn’t what she’d wanted from me.

  I stumbled once, put out a hand to catch myself against the wall. I saw her eyes go to my exposed wrist, the red, raw flesh where the ropes had bound me. But she didn’t move, didn’t come out to help me, and I was grateful.

  I reached the door under my own power, stood a hand’s breadth away from her, felt her eyes on me. She reached out, touched my cheek with her fingertips. We still hadn’t said anything. I didn’t know what to say.

  “Why didn’t you call me sooner, John?” Her voice was like the whisper of a rasp against soft wood.

  “It was my problem to handle,” I said. “I couldn’t ask—”

  “No,” she said, “you never could.”

  I saw the lines at the corners of her eyes, fine lines; I saw the creases deepen at either side of her mouth as she smiled gently. She was younger than me but had led a harder life, dancing on the east coast circuit as “Rachel Firestone,” four sets a night, six nights a week. Not to mention what had happened after. But now she lived in a tony high-rise, earning six figures tracing ex-husbands and doing CEO background checks, the stuff of any professional investigator’s life. She was a natural on the phone, and when I’d gotten her the job, I’d asked them never to put her on the street, to keep her in the office instead, where she’d be safe. I’d also asked them not to tell her I’d made this request. They broke both promises, and she never forgave me.

  “You could’ve been killed,” Susan said.

  “Better me than you.”

  “Better neither of us, John.”

  “Sure. Better none of us. But that’s not the way the world works.”

  She stepped back from the door, made room for me to enter. I squeezed past her into the entryway, a six-by-six foyer with African masks hanging on the walls.

  She spoke to my back. “Were you in love with her?”

  I turned around.

  “I looked up the articles online,” she said. “She was very beautiful. Dorrie.”

  We stood there for a while, looking in each other’s eyes.

  “No,” I said finally. “I wasn’t in love with her.”

  Susan considered this for a bit, then nodded. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “But it’s sweet of you to lie.”

  The apartment was an alcove studio, neatly furnished. There was no place in the apartment where you could sit and not see the bed, looming in its dark corner. We both avoided looking at it.

  Susan made coffee in one of those French press machines you see at Brookstone or Williams-Sonoma, the sort no one needs but that seem to come with the lease when you live on the 27th floor of a Manhattan apartment building. Susan’s shirt and skirt were Ann Taylor and her straight black hair looked straighter and sleeker than I remembered, no doubt the work of some fancy salon treatment. I didn’t begrudge her any of it. She was a rising star at Serner and she’d earned it. It’s just that sitting on her suede couch, drinking from her Mikasa cup, I felt grubbier even than when the doorman had given me the once-over.

  “You’re telling me,” Susan said, after I’d walked her through the highlights of the story again, “that you were this woman’s porn buddy, basically.” I must have been staring blankly. “You know—when two guys agree that if anything happens to one of them, the other will come over and clear out his buddy’s stash of porn before the guy’s parents or girlfriend can stumble onto it. You never heard the term?”

  “No.”

  She smiled. “I forget sometimes how vanilla you are.”

  “Vanilla.”

  “That’s right.”

  I took a long swallow of her coffee. “Fine,” I said. “I was her ‘porn buddy.’ Only what I was supposed to get rid of wasn’t porn, it was evidence of her work as a massage parlor girl. And when I got there, all her records were already shredded.”

  “But her outfits were still there, you said. And the massage oil.”

  “Right.”

  “And you’re thinking either she’d have gotten rid of everything or nothing.”

  “I’m thinking someone broke in, shredded anything that might have had his name or picture on it, and killed her. Not in that order.”

  “How’d he get in?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he talked his way in. Maybe he picked the lock.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “Okay, fine, it’s a Medeco, he didn’t pick the lock. Maybe he climbed down from the floor above, came in through the window.”

  “Is there a fire escape?”

  “No.”

  “So you’re saying he rappelled down, like a mountain climber, on a rope.”

  “Maybe he got a copy of her key somehow.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What’s your point?” I said.

  “Have you considered that maybe it’s what it looked like?” Susan said. “Maybe she killed herself. Maybe she got rid of some stuff and not the rest because she wasn’t in her right mind, and paper shreds while lingerie doesn’t.”

  Yeah, and maybe I’ve got a twelve-inch dick and fuck unicorns in my back yard. I didn’t think Michael’s line would go over so well here. But I didn’t need to say it for her to know what I was thinking.

  “I’m just saying, John. I’ve known these women. Strippers, massage parlor girls, they’re not always the most rational.”

  “Dorrie wasn’t your typical massage parlor girl.”

  “No, of course not. But that doesn’t mean—”

  “She didn’t kill herself,” I said. “You’re got to trust me on this one.”

  “All right,” Susan said. “Then who killed her?”

  I dropped the address book sheets with the circled names on the couch between us. “Take your pick.”

  We looked through the list together, and I explained how I’d picked out the ones I had.

  “You think one of them’s the killer?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s possible.”

  “How were you going to approach them?”

  “E-mail. I figured I’d call this one,” I said, pointing to Brian Vincent’s phone number.

  “Sure,” Susan said. “But what are you going to say? Why would they answer you? If I were Brian Vincent, I’d just hang up on you.”

  “If you were the killer, you’re saying.”

  “No, regardless. Some stranger calls out of the blue, says he knows you used to see this dead hooker—no offense—I’d get off the phone as fast as I could.”

  “So what would you suggest?”

  She thought for a while. “What if we sent them e-mail from the address Dorrie used? So it looked like it was coming from her.”

  “You’re forgetting, someone has access to her e-mail account. We’d never get the responses.”

  “Fine, so we take the same address on another service, Cassie at hotmail.com, or juno.com, one of those. And we write a message that sounds like her. We can look up her ads, imitate the style. We say we want to meet. If we get a name and address, we’re golden. If
one of them asks to meet at a hotel, we wait till he shows up, follow him home, get his name and address that way.”

  “Why would the killer agree to meet someone he knows is dead?”

  “He wants to know who’s writing to him under her name.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Okay, then how about this,” Susan said. “We send e-mail saying I’m Cassie’s long-time partner, now that she’s dead I’m taking over her clients, I have duplicate copies of all her records; you, Mister Smith, appear prominently in those records and I think it’s in both our interests to meet.”

  “And...?”

  “And we set up an appointment, like I said.”

  I nodded. “And if it’s at a hotel, I’m waiting when they show up and I follow them.”

  “Basically,” Susan said. “Only you don’t follow them, I do.”

  “You? No. Like hell you do.”

  “I can take care of myself,” Susan said. “You do realize that, don’t you?”

  “I realize you think you can. All it takes is one gunshot to prove you wrong.”

  “Same’s true of you, John.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but it’s my bullet to take.”

  “Your bullet? What does that even mean?”

  “It means you’re not getting yourself killed over a woman you didn’t even know.”

  “Tomorrow that woman’s mother is going to show up in my office and write a check to my employer. At that point it’ll be my job to find her killer. Not yours. Mine.”

  “Your job, Susan, is to keep her out of my hair.”

  “No, that’s what you want me to do. My job is to serve my client. I’m not some scared stripper anymore, John. I’m a professional investigator and I’m a good one and if you send a job to me, I’m going to do that job. Do you understand?”

  I’d never seen her like this. It was a little frightening. But I won’t say there wasn’t a part of me that was proud of her. “All right,” I said. “I understand. But you’ve got to tell me what’s going on every step of the way.”

  “Of course.” She got up. “Now show me those ads.”

  Susan’s computer was on a desk beside her bed. She sat in the chair in front of it and powered the machine up while I sat on the bed. It was the only other place to sit.

  “Cassandra?” she said, and I nodded. She brought up the Cassandra ads on Craigslist, the ones under Erotic Services. I directed her to the right one. The headline said “Sensual Massage from Curvy, Tall College Student—W4M—21.”

  “How old did you say she was?” Susan said.

  “Twenty-four.”

  “I’m surprised she didn’t claim to be eighteen. In her ads, I mean.”

  “She didn’t look eighteen.”

  “This is the Internet, John. You have forty-year-olds saying they’re eighteen.”

  She read through the text of Dorrie’s ad a few times, then started typing out a draft of an e-mail. She took a few stabs, erased what she had, started again. I watched over her shoulder, put in my two cents from time to time. When I leaned close to see the screen, I tried to ignore the faint smell of her shampoo, a fruity smell that brought back memories of other evenings, other apartments. I tried to ignore the shadow of a bra showing through that Ann Taylor blouse.

  A few times she glanced away from the screen and caught me looking at her. I didn’t flinch or look away, and neither did she, but each time we went back to work without saying anything about it. It was strange for me, being here with her again, and I imagined it was strange for her, too. We’d loved each other once. We’d been together for almost a year. I’d been with her at the hospital, all through her recovery, and she’d been with me in turn when my mother died, fighting to make herself understood after the stroke had robbed her of all but the rudiments of speech. Susan had been an important part of my life and I of hers. But then it had ended. We were good for each other, but only to a point; and when we reached that point she’d moved on. She’d moved here, specifically; and I’d gone into a sort of seclusion, my life reduced to the room on Carmine Street, the desk on 116th, and the long subway ride in between. There hadn’t been other women. Until Dorrie, there hadn’t been much at all.

  Susan finished a draft of the e-mail and I read it over. It was fine. I thought it stood a good chance of tempting Dorrie’s clients into at least writing back.

  We sat looking at it, then looking at each other.

  “I’m sorry, John,” she said.

  “What for?”

  “All the women in your life...you have an incredible talent for finding these birds with broken wings. Miranda. Dorrie. Me.”

  “You turned out okay.”

  “I did,” she said. “We didn’t.”

  “You didn’t need me anymore,” I said.

  “I didn’t need your help anymore. That doesn’t mean I didn’t need you.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  She raised her hand and stroked the side of my face. I wanted to lean in and kiss her. I wanted it terribly. I didn’t do it.

  She said, “The problem with a broken wing is it either gets better or worse. It doesn’t stay the way it is. I’ve always thought there’s part of you that wishes it could.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t wish that.”

  “But we all end up leaving you,” she said. “One way or the other.”

  I lifted her hand off my face, laid it down on the table. “Send the e-mail,” I said.

  Chapter 14

  I flagged down a taxi, blew my last twenty on the trip home. I paid the driver at the corner, folded the few bucks change, and walked the rest of the way to my building. I hadn’t been home since...when? It had been more than a day. Not since I was trying to guess Dorrie’s password. It felt like a very long time ago.

  I climbed up the stairs to my apartment, unlocked the door. The curtains were open and blowing in the breeze, but the place stank. Enough light was coming in through the window for me to see an odd bulk on top of my bed. I felt for the light switch, flipped it on.

  Miklos’ words came back to me: Go home. He makes you a present of this one.

  I stood there with my finger on the light switch and looked at my bed, where Jorge Ramos’ corpse lay.

  His throat had been cut. There was blood everywhere, even on the ceiling.

  The smell was very strong; only the air flowing through the open window kept it from being stronger.

  I swallowed heavily, checked the door behind me. It was closed.

  My mind raced. How had they gotten him in here? Unlike Dorrie I did have a fire escape, but could you carry a struggling man Ramos’ size up the outside of a building? Miklos and Ardo were both big men themselves, but that was asking a lot. Then I realized how they must’ve done it: one of them would have climbed up the fire escape, broken in, and unlocked the door from the inside, while the other lured or forced Ramos to my apartment and brought him in the conventional way.

  I thought of Ardo and his cavernous grin. They’d spent hours on this, tracking Ramos down and setting him up just so. Just so what? Apparently so I could take the heat for killing him. Two birds with one stone. Sure, maybe I’d tell the cops that Ardo had done it, but would they believe me when I had the dead man’s blood on my shirt, his bloody wallet in my pocket, and his bloody corpse, throat slit from ear to ear, in my bed? But officer, it wasn’t me, Black Ardo did it! Sure he did, son. Sure he did.

  Enough. I had to concentrate. I thought about what I needed to do. My first instinct was to get rid of the body somehow, but that was hopeless. Carting a dead body down five flights unnoticed wasn’t a lot easier than carting a live one up. Not when he weighed more than I did. My next thought was to call the police. But I knew how that would go. Maybe I’d beat the rap at trial—maybe—but that would be months from now and until then I’d be locked up. That left one option: run.

  I pulled open my shirt, my fingers fumbling with the buttons. One button popped off and went springing along th
e carpet. I ignored it. I pulled a new shirt from the closet, tugged it over my head, balled up the bloody shirt and the wallet and stuffed both into a plastic garbage bag. I’d find somewhere to get rid of them, somewhere far from here. I took a quick look around. Was there anything I needed? Because I probably wasn’t going to be able to get back in here any time soon.

  I couldn’t think of anything. And I was conscious of time ticking away. Who knows what one of my neighbors might have seen or heard. Or smelled.

  I took one last look at Ramos’ body. His eyes were open, his lips brown with bloody spittle, his teeth bared.

  Who the hell is Jorge Ramos?

  Ardo’s words echoed in my head. I wished I knew the answer. He’d come after me and Julie with a gun, and he’d been ready to use it. But why? Who’d sent him?

  I let myself out of the apartment, locked up behind me.

  I’d made it down to the third floor when I heard footsteps below me, coming up. Heavy footsteps. Familiar heavy footsteps. The labored steps of men carrying thirty pounds of gear. I peeked over the banister and snatched my head back instantly, then turned around and started to climb, two steps at a time. As quietly as I could, as quickly as I could, my heart hammering in my chest.

  What had I seen? I’d seen the hairless face of James Mirsky’s partner, and he did not look happy.

  I rounded the corner to the fifth floor landing and kept going. The cops would stop there, would knock on my door, would wait for an answer, but they wouldn’t wait long. Those regulation shoes may not have been stylish or comfortable, but they did one hell of a good job when it came to kicking doors in, especially the flimsy ones in these old tenement buildings.

  And then they’d find what they were looking for, what surely someone had tipped them off that they would find in my apartment. Because I didn’t believe it was a coincidence that they’d shown up here just minutes after I had. Someone had called them, someone who’d been assigned to watch my building and drop a quarter in a payphone when I came home. And why not? Why should a man like Ardo go to all the trouble of building a neat little frame and then not invest the extra bit of effort needed to ensure his work hadn’t been wasted?