Songs of Innocence (Hard Case Crime (Mass Market Paperback))

by Richard Aleas

  “Why’d she leave?”

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

  I waited.

  “There’s this guy,” Di said. “Man probably a foot taller than you, skinny, but with big hands, really long fingers. The girls called him E.T.” She stuck out an index finger: Phone home. “He was a regular, would come once a month, sometimes twice. Sam had him a few times.” Samantha shivered, nodded.

  “He liked to brag about how he was connected and all that,” Di said, “talk about the guys he did jobs for—they were like Russians or Slavs or something. But he never got nasty with anyone here. And he tipped well.”

  “He grabbed me once,” Samantha said. She indicated one of her wrists. “I had a bruise for a week.”

  “When you say he’s connected,” I said, “do you mean—”

  “What do you think I mean?” Di said.

  “Fine. So what happened?”

  “The man calls up for an appointment,” Di said. “He wants to come over at five and I say, you can see Cassie then, but he says no, he wants Julie. He’d never asked for her before. I told him okay, but she won’t be here until six. He says he’ll wait.”

  I looked over to one side. Samantha had her arms wrapped around herself and she was crying again.

  “So he shows up at quarter to six. I put him in here, this room. When Julie shows up, I tell her he’s here, waiting for her. She drops off her stuff in the back, changes, and goes in. Cassie’s with me in the back. We’re watching some game show, shooting the shit.

  “Then maybe five minutes later, we hear the door slam. And suddenly Julie’s screaming. I don’t mean screaming like she’s yelling at someone, I mean just screaming, at the top of her lungs. Like...” She shook her head. “I don’t know what it was like. I’d never heard anything like that. Then we hear the door slam again—bam. Real loud.”

  Samantha sobbed.

  “So we run out. And he’s standing here, inside the room, with one hand on the doorknob. Julie’s on the floor.” She stepped over to the doorway, next to the light switch. “Right here. Face down. He’s got one of her wrists in his right hand and he’s holding her arm up, like this. And her hand’s bloody. The wall, too. The door. His shirt.”

  “What did you do?” I said.

  “What did I do? I stood there. And he looked me in the face, and Cassie behind me, and he slammed the door again. He held Julie’s arm up and stuck her hand here—” she touched the doorframe “—and he slammed the door on it. You could hear the bones break.”

  She waited for me to say something. I said, “That’s horrible.”

  “Yeah. It is. When the door swung open again, he’d dropped her arm and had a gun out, pointing at us. I remember Cassie saying ‘Why?’ and he said, ‘She knows why.’ ”

  “You let him go?” I said.

  “The man had a fucking gun! I had pepper spray!”

  “You call the police?”

  “The fuck do you think the police care if a girl at a massage parlor gets her hand broken? No we didn’t call the police. We grabbed a cab and took her to the emergency room.”

  “And then Cassie quit?”

  Di shook her head. “It’s not like that. This isn’t Proctor and Gamble. You don’t quit. She just stopped coming. And we stopped expecting her.”

  “You didn’t stop coming.”

  “No I didn’t,” Di said. “The electric company wasn’t going to quit sending me bills. The A&P wasn’t going to quit charging me for baby food. I’ve got two jobs and I don’t have the luxury of quitting either of them.”

  “But you also didn’t step up into Cassie’s place. Isn’t that what normally happens in this business? It’s more money.”

  “Not for me,” Di said, and shot an apologetic look toward Samantha. “I’ve got to hold my daughter with these hands.”

  In a broken voice Samantha said, “What are you going to do?” It wasn’t a rhetorical question. She was asking me.

  I got up off the table. “I’m going to find out who killed Dorrie. I’m going to make sure he never hurts another woman.”

  “If it’s E.T.,” Di said, “you better have a gun yourself.”

  “I don’t like guns,” I said.

  “You like living?”

  “Some days,” I said.

  Chapter 6

  Monday morning it was in the papers. Up at Columbia, everyone was talking about it. The News 7 van and the Channel 2 van were parked on the cobblestones where FDR once walked. Two-man camera crews were doing stand-up interviews in front of the statue of Alma Mater, students saying how surprised they were, how sad it was. They hadn’t known Dorrie, had nothing useful to say, but weren’t about to miss a chance to get their face on television.

  I told Lane what the police had told me, and he told the rest of the writing program staff. Over the course of the morning it filtered out to the students in the program and one by one they came by my desk in the center of the main area on the fifth floor to tell me how sorry they were. I thanked them. They went away.

  This being September, work was light—the incoming class had been admitted, grades for the summer session had been filed, and it was early enough in the semester that midterms and course drops were still months away. There were phone calls to answer and mail to open, but not a ton of either and it was just as well. I couldn’t have kept my mind on it if there had been. There were classes I was supposed to attend, but they’d go on fine without me.

  Each time I closed my eyes, and sometimes when I didn’t, I saw Dorrie lying in the bathtub. And though I hadn’t seen it, I imagined the scene Di had described, Julie’s hand viciously getting crushed in the door, presumably as some sort of punishment. Was there a connection? It seemed likely. Dorrie had witnessed the attack on Julie, and now she was dead. But Di had witnessed it, too. Did that mean she was next on the killer’s list?

  It was a hard conclusion to avoid. But that didn’t mean it was right. Certainly Di was banking on it not being right, since she’d told me she planned to keep showing up for work at Sunset Entertainment and pocketing the tax-free nine dollars an hour they paid her. At least, she’d told me, she rarely had to see the customers—she got to do her job over the phone, behind a closed door. But a closed door wouldn’t stop the man who had mangled Julie’s hand. And even a locked door hadn’t kept Dorrie’s killer out of her apartment.

  At eleven, when his first class let out, Stu Kennedy stopped by my desk and slowly let himself down into my guest chair. His movements were exaggeratedly careful these days, like a drunk picking his way down a flight of stairs. Sometimes in the evenings it was because he was, in fact, drunk, but not at eleven in the morning, and never in the office. He seemed to be exerting enormous effort just to sit still.

  “My boy,” he whispered, inching his hand unsteadily across the desk toward me. “I heard.”

  I reached out and pressed his hand, which trembled under mine.

  “John,” he said, “I very much hope you don’t blame yourself. I believe you did her quite a lot of good. That she decided to do this, to end her life, it...it isn’t your fault.”

  “No,” I said. “I know that.”

  “She had come awfully far, you know. Some of the work she was writing for me now was quite fine.”

  He pulled his hand away, rummaged in the accordion-file portfolio he always carried with him. He took two manuscripts out and laid them down in front of me. “I thought you might like to see her most recent chapters,” he said. “We hadn’t gone over these yet, but I thought...well, I thought you would appreciate seeing them.”

  Each of the manuscripts was perhaps a dozen pages long. I knew what they were, though I hadn’t read them; she’d told me about the assignment when he’d given it to her in January, and I’d done what I could to help her with it. You only had to look at his own books about growing up in Bristol to know that family history was one of Stu’s favorite topics, but it had been a difficult one
for Dorrie. Her relationship with her mother was strained at best, and my suggestion that she write about her father instead had worked out about as well as she’d predicted it would. She’d ended up writing about her sister, who of course she’d never known, and since her mother wouldn’t tell her much, she’d been reduced to inventing everything from whole cloth. That was fine with Stu—it just meant a little less truth and a little more judicious lying—but I know it frustrated her.

  I took the manuscripts and thanked him for them.

  “Do you think there will be a service?” he asked.

  “I’m sure there will,” I said. “I haven’t heard.”

  “We should hold one,” he said. “Here. For her classmates. Don’t you agree?”

  If she’d been alive, being the center of attention would have been the last thing she’d have wanted. But she wasn’t and the rest of us were, and I could imagine it making at least some people feel better, including Stu, apparently. “I’ll talk to Lane about it,” I said.

  Stu nodded gravely and levered himself out of the chair. Glancing past him, I saw someone approaching from the direction of the elevator. A student by the looks of her, though one I didn’t recognize. Asian, maybe five feet tall, with shoulder-length black hair, khaki cargo pants and a sleeveless t-shirt with FCUK style written across her chest. Stu’s path crossed hers, and she stopped him to ask a question. I saw his arm go up, one finger pointing at me.

  She came the rest of the way and I waited for her to ask me for an application package or directions to a classroom. Then I noticed the padded glove on her right hand.

  “You John Blake?” she said, surprising me with a British accent.

  “I am,” I said, grabbing my jacket from the back of my chair. “Thanks for coming, Julie.”

  “Di told me I shouldn’t,” Julie said, pulling a cigarette and a matchbook from her pocket. “Said just talk to you over the phone. I said, fuck it, it’s a public place, what’s the worst he can do to me here?” She slipped the cigarette between her lips, where it wagged as she spoke. She lit it one-handed with a maneuver she’d obviously practiced a lot, pulling one match down, bending it backward till its head touched the striking surface on the opposite side, and thumbing it to life. I raced to keep up with her as she clattered down the stairs.

  She pocketed the matchbook again, shoved the door open, and suddenly we were out in the sunlight on the west side of campus. Plenty of people about, making her point for her. Even if my intentions were as bad as Di apparently still feared, what could I do about it here? It was why I’d suggested meeting here when Julie’s e-mail had come in just before midnight. And no doubt it was why she’d agreed.

  “Besides,” she said, “you don’t look the type.” She waved the cigarette at me, tweaked my button-down shirt collar with the same hand, scattering flecks of ash on my shoulder. “Sorry, love. Don’t look so crestfallen. I’m sure you’re a real tiger where it counts.”

  I’ve been hearing it all my life. When I turned eighteen, I looked fifteen; at twenty-five I was still getting carded. Now I was thirty-one and could order a drink without proving my age, but people still looked at me, with my slight frame and my glasses and my Central Casting, part-on-the-left, Iowa cornfield hair, and saw someone they didn’t have to cross to the other side of the street to avoid. It was a good thing, sometimes; it made it easier to get strangers to open up. But it was also a bad thing sometimes. All depends on what impression you’re trying to make.

  “Listen,” I said, taking hold of Julie’s arm and steering her toward the steps at the foot of Low Library. We needed a place to talk where we wouldn’t be overheard by a dozen curious undergrads and the occasional professor wandering by. “I want you to tell me everything about what happened to you. There’s no way to know what’s relevant—I need to hear the whole story.”

  She shook her arm loose of my grip. “People pay to touch me, love.” She sucked on the cigarette and blew out a stream of smoke. “Anyway, they used to.”

  I pointed her toward a patch of grass in the shadow of a red brick building, a little gabled house that didn’t match the elegant, monumental buildings that made up the rest of the campus. This house was the oldest building on campus, a remnant dating back almost two hundred years to when these were the grounds not of a university but of the Bloomingdale Lunatic Asylum. Now called Buell Hall, the building once was home, depending on who you asked, either to the asylum’s warden or to his wealthiest male patients. Maybe both. No one wanted to knock the thing down, but somehow, except for a few French classes that had nowhere else to meet, no one much went there either. We sat in the shadow of one of its eaves. The nearest person I could see was a brawny Hispanic man sitting well out of earshot, eating his lunch under a tree.

  “So,” Julie said. “The story.” She raised her gloved hand. “Six weeks in a cast, three weeks of physical therapy, seven pins in there holding it together, and this is the best they could do.” With her left hand she pulled open two Velcro straps, one at the wrist and one across the palm. She tugged the glove off, roughly enough that I winced. The hand under it was a motley pink and white from all the scar tissue and the fingers were bent at wrong angles. Her fingernails, I noticed, though trimmed short, had a coat of polish on them, a dark plum color. “Lovely, no? You’d like to get a handjob with that beauty, wouldn’t you.”

  She flexed the fingers. They moved, but not very far.

  “That’s me making a fist,” she said. “I’ve got to do it fifty times a day. Hurts like a bitch. But I’m a good girl, I am, and I does what the doctor tells me.” Her accent had gone up an octave and taken on a cockney flavor. She stared at me. “Christ, what’s it take to get a laugh out of you?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I just don’t find it very funny.”

  “Yeah, me neither. But you laugh or you cry, right? And I’ve done all the crying I’m going to.”

  “So who did that to you?”

  “Di told you what happened, right? Big guy, name’s Miklos, known to all and sundry in the business as E.T. You know, like the little monster in the movie, ‘cause he’s got these fingers—”

  “Right,” I said, “I get it, E.T., with the fingers. But who put him up to it and why?”

  She took a long pull on her cigarette. It was almost down to the butt. “What makes you think someone did?”

  “That’s his job, isn’t it? Doing strongarm work for the Mob?”

  She shrugged. “If you believe him.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Will it surprise you to learn, Mr. Blake, that the men who hire women like us to jerk them off sometimes lie about what they do for a living?”

  “Di said Dorrie—Cassandra—asked him why he attacked you, and he said ‘She knows why.’ Meaning you.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “I think you were unconscious.”

  “And thank god for small favors,” Julie said. “She knows why. Well what if I told you I don’t.”

  “I’d say you were lying to me.”

  She raised her bad hand to me again and the fingers bent inward by a fraction. “That’s me giving you the finger.”

  I didn’t smile.

  “Ah—come on,” she said, “that was funny. Don’t tell me it wasn’t.”

  “Why’d he do it, Julie? It’s important.”

  “Why’d he do it. He did it to Teach Me A Lesson.” Her hands went up as if to frame her words but only on her left hand did the first two fingers curl downwards. “Jesus fucking Christ,” she said, “I can’t even make proper air quotes anymore.”

  “What lesson?” I said.

  “Thou shalt not steal, you might call it.”

  “Why? What did you steal?”

  Instead of answering, Julie stubbed out her cigarette and bent forward, the fabric of her t-shirt stretching from the weight of her breasts. “You think I’m pretty, don’t you?”

  She was more than just pretty. She had some of the same quality Dorrie had ha
d. But I didn’t know what she was getting at. “Yes,” I said, cautiously.

  “Right. Men do. Always have. And I gave a great massage. You’ll have to take my word for that, I haven’t learned to do it lefty, but when I was working, I was the best. You came to see me once, you wanted more. Understand?”

  “What did you steal, Julie?”

  She laid an index finger against my lips, much as Samantha had. I wondered if Samantha had picked up the gesture from her.

  “You want the whole story, love, you need to learn some patience.”

  Patience. Dorrie was lying in a morgue; I didn’t feel very patient.

  I looked around, noticed the Hispanic guy under the tree again. His sandwich was gone and the Gatorade bottle next to him looked empty, but he was still sitting there, looking in our direction. Enjoying the view, no doubt, and who’s to say that none of the talk about handjobs was audible at forty feet?

  I got up, gestured to Julie to get up, too.

  “What?” she said.

  “Let’s go over there,” I said. “A little more privacy.” She picked up her glove and I led her around the corner to the rear of the building.

  When we were seated again, I said to her quietly, “The man who did this to you, Julie, may also have killed Cassandra. And I’m not at all confident that it’s going to stop there. Di could be in danger, Samantha could, and frankly, so could you. I’m trying to be patient, Julie, but please—I need you to answer my questions.”

  She pulled her glove back on, fitting each finger carefully and securing the Velcro snugly. It took her a few tries till she got it the way she wanted it. I didn’t say anything. I’d pushed her as hard as I could. She’d talk or she wouldn’t.

  “The whole story,” she said finally. “There isn’t much of it, and I’m sure you’ve heard stories like it before. You know I was only seventeen when I came over? Fresh off the plane from London, had a backpack and a copy of Time Out New York, nowhere to stay, needed cash and didn’t much want to work for it. It’s not a very original story, Mr. Blake. Not hardly. But that’s the way it was.”

  She looked at me with a challenge in her expression, but I kept mine blank.