Hard Case Crime: Songs of Innocence

by Aleas, Richard

  He let go of my throat and switched his grip to my upper arm, which he squeezed tightly enough to cut off circulation. “Move,” he said, and pushed me toward the front.

  He marched me into the elevator. The digital readout counted down as we dropped, like the timer on a bomb. I only hoped I’d kept him occupied upstairs long enough.

  When ‘2’ ticked over to ‘M,’ the door slid open. He stood behind me, his chest pressed against my back, one hand still holding onto my arm, the other arm wrapped around my waist. He wasn’t letting me get away. Together, we stepped out into the narrow hallway.

  At one end, I saw that the fire door was slightly ajar. We turned the other way, toward the street. But there was someone there, standing between us and the door. She had a gun raised in her left hand and a cast on her right. The gun was aimed a good nine inches above my head. I’m rarely glad not to be taller, but I was now.

  “Hello, Miklos,” Julie said. In her posh British accent it almost sounded welcoming. But the expression on her face left no doubt about her intentions.

  “This is your friend?” he said sneeringly. “This little fucking jap cunt?” He yelled at her: “You should have stayed in the car. I kill you both—”

  I felt the point of a knife then, punching into my back.

  The blade went in half an inch, an inch—but then it stopped. And through the pain I realized that Miklos’ hands were still both in view—one on my arm and one around my waist.

  His hold on me loosened. I staggered forward, out of his grasp.

  I turned around. He was standing, gasping, looking down at his belly. The point of a knife was protruding through his shirt. Blood was pouring out around it.

  He sank to his knees, then to all fours, and I saw the handle of a camp knife sticking out of his back. Behind him, Kurland Wessels stepped forward. Behind Kurland, the fire door was open wide.

  Kurland braced himself against Miklos’ back with one hand and drew the knife out with the other. The blade must have been eleven, twelve inches long. Miklos tried to crawl forward. There was blood coming out of his mouth now.

  “What did you do?” I shouted. “I said I wanted him alive!”

  “Yeah, well, Julie wanted him dead.”

  I dropped to a crouch beside Miklos’ head. He was struggling to talk, spewing wet and bloody curses in Hungarian.

  I could feel my own blood soaking into my bandages.

  “Talk to me,” I said desperately. “Did you kill Dorrie Burke? Cassandra, from Julie’s place—did you kill her?” I was holding onto his shoulders, pressing him back as he tried to bull his way forward. He was weakening, but he was still stronger than me, and I found myself inching backward as he pressed forward. “Tell me the truth. I can still get you to a hospital—but you’ve got to tell me the truth. Did you do it?”

  With an enormous lunge, Miklos raised one arm from the floor and buried it in the fabric of my shirt, pulled me toward him. His teeth were red like a feeding lion’s. “I...kill you...” He spat out a mouthful of blood and saliva, some of it in my face. He swung me, hard, into the wall. I grabbed his wrist between my hands, tried to pry his fingers open.

  “Answer me,” I shouted. “Did you kill Dorrie Burke?”

  He bellowed his answer: “No!”

  It was the last word he ever spoke. A gunshot split the air and a bullet split his skull. The wall behind him was spattered. The three of us were, too.

  Miklos toppled over sideways and lay there in a pool of his own blood.

  Julie walked up to him, gun still smoking. She was wearing heavy boots and used one of them to kick him viciously in the jaw.

  “I’m Korean, asshole,” she said, “not Japanese.”

  “Come on,” Kurland said. “Move.” He wiped the long blade of the knife on Miklos’ pants. I saw that he was wearing gloves. My pulse was racing and the little I’d eaten today was threatening to come up, but Kurland looked calm, unaffected. Well, the man was a professional. It’s why I’d asked Julie to bring him along. But now Miklos was dead and anything he might have been able to tell me about Dorrie had died with him.

  “I wanted to talk to him,” I said as Kurland hustled Julie and me toward the fire door. We raced down an echoing flight of metal steps and emerged at a basement door.

  “You got your answer,” Kurland said. “He said no.”

  “He was dying. He didn’t know what he was saying.”

  “He knew,” Kurland said.

  We were outside, behind the building, surrounded by black plastic garbage bags piled up in heaps. I saw a long tail disappear behind one.

  Kurland led us to a staircase that took us back up to street level. We came out on 33rd and starting walking north. You could hear honking and a siren a block away. It sounded like an ambulance, not a police car. Not that either would do Miklos any good now.

  I looked over at Kurland and noticed that the knife had vanished somewhere and so had the gloves. He was wearing a dark jacket, so you couldn’t see the blood on it. You could see it on mine.

  Julie ran beside us, keeping up with some difficulty. She was still holding the gun. Kurland took it from her, buttoned it up inside his pocket, propelled her ahead of him with a hand at the small of her back. They started down the flight of stairs to the subway station at 34th and I started after them, but Kurland stopped me with a hand on my chest. “Don’t follow us,” he said. “We don’t want to be seen with you.”

  I looked around. We were alone on the sidewalk.

  “You don’t want to be seen with me? You just killed a man. That’s more than I’ve ever done.”

  “First of all, that’s not what I hear on the news.” I started to protest and he threw a hand up. “Doesn’t matter. Second of all, you were in on this one as much as we were, so you’re certainly no virgin now. Think about that before you shoot your mouth off about this to anyone. And third of all— Ah, hell, there is no third of all. Just go. You’re on your own.”

  They plunged into the station, leaving me behind. I turned away.

  Now what, god damn it? Now what?

  Chapter 27

  I stripped off my jacket. The back was coated with blood, most of it his, some mine. My back hurt badly, though the tight bandages had contained the worst of it.

  I folded the jacket inside out and dropped it in the trash can at the corner. The cops would probably find it and the Post would have a field day with it, but I was past caring.

  I turned my cell phone back on. I’d shut it off to conserve the battery, and because they say the phone company can pinpoint your location if you keep it on. Who knows if it’s true. I didn’t want to find out.

  I tucked myself into a darkened doorway, faced away from the street, plugged one ear with a finger to deaden the traffic noises. Even after midnight, Herald Square is a roaring intersection. Susan answered after four rings. “Hello? Who...John, is that you?” She must have looked at her caller ID. The cops who were tapping her line were probably doing the same thing.

  “Where we met, Susan. Where we met. You understand?”

  “John—”

  I closed the phone, turned it off, and started walking toward Keegan’s Brown Derby.

  Technically, the Sin Factory was the first place Susan and I had seen each other. She’d been pole dancing and I’d been in the crowd, getting myself thrown out by the manager for asking too many questions. But it hadn’t been till later that night that we’d actually met, and that had been at a little pub down the block. Keegan had sold the place since then and the new owners had spiffed it up, adding a video trivia game at one end of the bar and some new track lighting. They’d kept the old name, though, I guess for fear of scaring off the old clientele. They needn’t have worried. The girls from the Sin Factory had nowhere else to go after their late-night shift ended, and the neighborhood drunks would’ve shown up no matter what you called the place.

  I stayed outside now, across the street, crouched beneath the front steps of a brownstone whose side ga
te I’d found unlatched. The building’s windows were dark and I figured the people inside were asleep. They wouldn’t begrudge me the use of their shadows.

  It took almost half an hour for Susan to show up in a cab. I waited while she paid and the car rolled off, its roof light glowing hopefully. Susan pulled the front door open and I watched through the windows as she looked for me, scanning the place table by table. Suddenly she stopped and pawed at her handbag, opened it, dug for her cell phone, got it up to her ear. I spoke into mine: “Across the street.” Then I turned mine off again.

  She headed out the front door, darted across the empty street, turned this way and that, trying to spot me. It didn’t look like she’d been followed. I came out from behind the big Rubbermaid garbage can that had been concealing me. I winced as I stood.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said, keeping my voice low. “It’s just my back.”

  I started walking, pulled her along with me. I didn’t feel comfortable standing in one place anymore.

  “What’s happening, John? Why’d you get me down here?”

  “Miklos is dead,” I said.

  “How?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it matters. Did you do it?”

  “No,” I said. “But I was there when it happened.”

  “John, you have to give yourself up now. If the police don’t find you, Ardo will, and that’s worse.”

  “Maybe you don’t want to stand so close, then,” I said.

  “It’s nothing to joke about.”

  “I’m not.”

  “So what do you want me to do, John? Other than stand further away.”

  It was a good question. But how could I give her the honest answer—that I was desperate, that my bag of tricks was empty, that Kurland’s words had rattled me: You’re on your own. I’d been on my own too long; I couldn’t keep it up much longer.

  “I was hoping...I don’t know, Susan. I was just hoping you’d found something since I saw you last. Anything.”

  “I didn’t,” she said. “I didn’t, John, I’m sorry. I heard back from one of the guys whose names you found—Smith. But I saw him and he’s just this random guy, completely ordinary, certainly no killer vibe. And Adams I’ve heard nothing from at all. His e-mail address seems to be working since I’m not getting bounces, but he’s not answering no matter what I send him. And believe me, I’ve sent him pictures of the biggest tits I could find.” She smiled at me, tried to coax a smile in response. I didn’t have one in me.

  “Smith,” I said, grasping at straws. “Tell me about him.”

  “There’s nothing to tell. He’s about 55, 56, lives downtown. I got a picture for you and an address, but John, what the hell are you going to do with it? You can’t go around questioning people when you’re wanted by the police for three murders yourself.”

  “Let me see.”

  She opened her bag, pulled out a folded sheet of paper, handed it to me. I carried it over to a streetlamp.

  “Please, John,” she said, “let me arrange something, a way for you to get yourself into police custody. I can make sure they treat you properly, that you’ve got the best representation...” She kept talking, saying something, but I wasn’t hearing a word of it. Because I’d unfolded the paper and seen the photograph on it, the picture of James Smith.

  “Oh, no,” I said.

  Chapter 28

  I’ve felt colder in my life, and I’ve felt weaker, but not often; and I don’t think I’ve ever felt worse. I could feel my guts hardening, turning to stone inside me. The knife wound in my back burned like there was acid in it. I felt rancid.

  I crumpled the photograph and stuffed it in my pocket. My hands were shaking.

  “Susan,” I whispered, “what’s Eva Burke’s phone number? Her home number?”

  “Why?”

  “Just give it to me.”

  She opened her phone, read it off. I keyed it into mine.

  “Why?” she said again.

  I didn’t answer. I could hear the phone ringing on the other end. It was one in the morning; she would be asleep. Well, that was too bad.

  “What’s wrong?” Susan said. “Do you recognize him? Who is he?”

  A sleepy voice picked up. I didn’t wait for her to finish her sluggish hello. “Mrs. Burke, this is John Blake. John Blake. Yes. I’m here with Susan. I need to ask you a question.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. She was awake now—she just wasn’t saying anything. She was waiting for the question, the way aristocrats during the Terror waited for the guillotine blade.

  “Mrs. Burke,” I said, “how did your other daughter die?”

  In college I was an English major. I’d never considered working as a detective. Who would? But Leo had posted a job in the NYU Career Development office and I’d seen it and we’d met over coffee to discuss it.

  “You want to know what it’s like?” Leo had said to me, clearly hoping to scare me off if I was considering the job for the wrong reasons. He’d had one assistant before me and it hadn’t worked out. “It’s like this. You work like a bastard for days and days and nothing makes any sense. You’re lost, you’re confused, you’ve got no answers and you’re wasting your client’s money. You’re a fraud, you’ve always been a fraud, and no one in his right mind would hire you to find Times Square on a map or add two plus two. Then one day, you think of something. Or you see something. Or someone tells you something. And suddenly, everything that didn’t make sense does. Only here’s the thing: nine times out of ten, you wish it didn’t. You wish you were a fraud again. Because the things people hire us to figure out are the ugliest fucking things in the world.”

  I’d nodded, kept my mouth shut, and taken the job. I’d needed the money.

  But Leo had been right, and more than once I’d wished I’d listened to him and walked away while I could.

  Until finally I did walk away.

  But obviously I hadn’t walked far enough.

  “Mrs. Burke?”

  “What is this?” she said. “What does this have to do with Dorothy?”

  “Just answer the question: How did Catherine die?”

  The words came slowly. “She was very sick. We took her to the hospital and they said she had...I don’t know, some long Latin name, I couldn’t tell you what it was. But she got worse. They put her on antibiotics, said it would help, and then two days later, she was dead. They said it was sepsis that killed her.”

  “Did they say what caused the sepsis?”

  There was a long silence.

  “We knew what caused the sepsis,” Eva Burke said.

  How much had I been able to find out about Catherine Marie Burke? Very little.

  I’d tried—Dorrie had decided to write about her for Stu Kennedy’s assignment, and I’d decided she needed help. She hadn’t asked me to help; I’d offered, and when she’d been reluctant, I’d insisted. It was a sort of atavistic machismo: If I’d been a carpenter I’d have insisted at some point on making her a cabinet; if I’d been a plumber maybe I’d have put in new pipes over her protests. But I didn’t know how to do those things. What I knew how to do was find people and information. And when I saw her frustrated by her mother’s unwillingness to talk to her about her sister, I’d gone to work. What’s the use of sharing your bed with a former private investigator if you couldn’t lean on him for something like this?

  Except that I’d come up empty. The girl was fourteen when she died—not a taxpayer yet, not married, not eligible for jury duty, had never been sued or dunned or garnisheed or subpoenaed. She’d died before making a permanent mark in any of the places our society records such things. There were a few school photos I found, some chicken scratch from doctors on her hospital charts, a death certificate; precious little else.

  So I’d decided to change the rules. I’d taken it on myself to track down her father, on the theory that maybe he’d be willing to tell Dorrie what her mother wouldn’t.
But he hadn’t been willing to talk to her at all, and his pointed rebuff had left her more miserable than she’d been before.

  I’d stopped searching then, and I could tell she was relieved that I had. To make progress on her assignment she’d resorted to making things up—judicious lying, if you will. She’d given her sister a rare form of bone cancer and her absent father a case of crippling insomnia, and who the hell knew whether either of these things were true, and it really didn’t matter.

  But it was too late. Things had been set in motion. Things I might have understood sooner if I’d known how Catherine Marie Burke had died.

  “She’d had a procedure,” Eva Burke said. “My husband took her to a private clinic. And she got an infection.”

  “What sort of procedure?”

  “She needed to have something removed,” Eva Burke said. “Like a tumor.”

  “Like a tumor,” I said. “What’s like a tumor?”

  Silence.

  “She didn’t have a tumor,” I said. “And she didn’t have something like a tumor. Did she.” No response. “Did she.”

  “Don’t you dare raise your voice to me,” Eva Burke said.

  “Then tell me the truth.”

  “The truth? She was fourteen years old, Blake. Fourteen goddamn years old. It was like a tumor. The kind that just keeps growing and growing. And it had to come out.”

  We spoke for another minute, then I gently closed the phone, pocketed it. The stone in my gut was turning to water. Very softly I said to Susan, “Go home. Go home. Tomorrow I’ll turn myself in.”

  “What did she say to you?”

  I took hold of her by the shoulders, leaned close and kissed her on the forehead. The smell of her shampoo was strong. I inhaled deeply. “Go home,” I whispered. “We’ll deal with it tomorrow.”

  “I’m not leaving till you tell me.”

  I stepped out into the street, into the path of an oncoming taxi. It screeched to a halt inches away from me. Mr. Lucky.

  I pulled the rear door open, got inside, waited for Susan to join me. “Two stops,” I told the driver when she did. “First is 60th and Madison, then we’ll go uptown to the park.” He turned the meter on and drove off.