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

by Richard Aleas

  “No,” I said. “I don’t remember what happened.”

  “He killed her, that’s what happened. First day she’s out of intensive care, there’s an accident, whoops, middle of the night she’s disconnected from the monitor they’ve got her on and has a heart attack and dies. A heart attack! In the middle of the fucking hospital, in the middle of the night, a woman 42 years old, and nobody sees anything, nobody knows anything.”

  “Maybe she really had a heart attack.”

  “Maybe I’ve got a twelve-inch dick and fuck unicorns in my back yard—what’s the matter with you? You stupid all of a sudden, Johnny? I’m telling you this man is hardcore scorched earth. We’re talking about a waitress here, she didn’t know anything, she wasn’t anybody. He just wanted to make a point. That nobody’s safe. Nobody gets out alive. You know what they call him on the street? Black Ardo. And it’s not because he’s a schvartze. It’s because he’s like the Black Plague, he’ll kill everyone, anyone, it doesn’t matter to him. The man’s not right in the head. And you’re asking how you can find him. Why not just lie down under a subway car? It’s safer.” Michael was flushed in the face, really worked up. I couldn’t help wondering what Ardo might have done to him, or to people he knew.

  “John, listen to me. Seriously. Cards on the table. You know how they ran all those stories in the papers ten years ago, how the Italian mob was getting outgunned by the Russians? And how the Russians were mean sons of bitches but they didn’t compare to the South Americans? And how even the South Americans were afraid of the Asians? Well, who do you think the Asians are scared of?”

  “The Hungarians?”

  “Fuck the Hungarians. They’re scared of Ardo.”

  The page had finished loading. But I wasn’t looking at it. I’d had a sudden flash of Julie lying in her hospital bed, sedated, sleeping, with no one guarding the door to her room, nothing to stop someone from walking in, taking that understuffed pillow from under her head and pressing it down over her face.

  Michael was looking at me, nodding, pleased that he’d finally gotten through to me.

  Maybe Ardo wasn’t quite as bloodthirsty Michael was making him out to be—no one outside the pages of a comic book was. But I was certainly prepared to believe that he was capable of extreme behavior. Julie’s hand was proof enough of that. If he found out where she was, I wouldn’t put it past him to send someone to finish the job. And given that she was registered under her real name...

  “Listen,” I said. “There’s a woman who’s in the hospital. Now, I mean. She’s someone I know. Ardo’s gone after her twice. I need to get someone to watch her room tonight. Do you know anyone...?”

  He shook his head, kept shaking it as he spoke. “No. No, John. Someone to stand in Ardo’s way? Who’d take that job?”

  “There’s got to be someone.”

  “You can hire a bodyguard, sure, but given who you’re dealing with, it’s going to cost you a shitload of money. You got that kind of money?”

  “I don’t have any kind,” I said. “That’s why I asked if you knew someone.”

  “Even if I did, it would cost. And with Ardo in the picture, it’d cost a lot.”

  “As a favor?”

  “Your apartment’s a favor,” Michael said. “Keeping your bag here, that’s a favor. Getting you someone who might wind up taking a bullet’s not a favor.”

  I thought about who else I could ask. There was Leo—but Leo and I hadn’t spoken since I’d quit, and that was three years ago. If I called him now...well, he might agree to help or he might hang up on me. And I wasn’t sure which would be worse. Because if he agreed to help it would mean Leo himself sitting at the door to Julie’s room, and if what Michael had said was true, there was a good chance he’d wind up facing people no one Leo’s age should be asked to face.

  That left...who? I could go myself, but it would be a futile gesture. Even without a broken rib I’d have hardly been an obstacle to the sort of person Ardo would send. I needed someone who could hold his own, someone who’d look frightening and could follow through on the promise if he had to. And, of course, someone who wouldn’t charge me—at least not in cash.

  I unholstered my cell phone, cycled through the address book till I got to ‘W,’ and waited while the phone on the other end rang twice, three times.

  On the fourth ring, the call was answered—it stopped ringing, anyway. But the person on the other end didn’t say anything. I hoped I hadn’t reached voicemail.

  “Kurland?” I said. “It’s John Blake.”

  “Yeah?” He sounded like he was outdoors. I heard traffic noises in the background.

  “I’m calling to ask you a favor,” I said. “It’s important. You’re the only person I know who can help.” Silence. “There’s a woman in the hospital, a friend of mine. Her name is Julie. A man attacked her earlier today. He may come after her again. I need someone to stay with her tonight.”

  There was some more silence. I pictured Kurland Wessels standing on a street corner, cell phone to his ear, overdeveloped bicep straining through his t-shirt sleeve, prison tattoos frightening away anyone who came close enough to notice them. He was a serious, intense memoirist and actually not half bad as a poet, but you’d have to have gone through a writing workshop with the man to know this. At a glance you’d figure his writing ability would top out at inking “LOVE” on one set of knuckles and “HATE” on the other.

  We weren’t friends. I wouldn’t even go as far as to say we liked each other. But two years in the program together meant we’d gotten to know each other. A lot comes through about a person in his writing, even someone as guarded as Kurland. And he and I had been through some of the same things in our lives, things most other people hadn’t. There was a level of understanding there.

  Plus it wouldn’t have escaped his notice that, thanks to my job, I had administrative privileges in the office that maybe could help him in some way at some point. I wasn’t in charge, god knows—I was more like a trusty in a jail, a fellow prisoner with some limited authority and access to the supply closet and the ability to influence whether your stay was an easy or a hard one. But I imagined that Kurland Wessels had done plenty of business with trusties in his day.

  “Why should I do this?” he asked.

  “Because I need your help,” I said. “And you might need my help some day.”

  He made a noncommittal sound.

  “Please,” I said. “She’s five-foot-one, she weighs maybe a hundred pounds, and the guy who put her in the hospital’s your size.” I thought back to the first piece he’d turned in, a vignette called “All In The Family,” about a ten-year-old girl and her older brother and the father that beat them both. It wasn’t the last we’d heard from him on the subject. “Every bone in her hand is broken. Every bone, Kurland. He took her hand and slammed it in a door. Three times.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Enough.” I could hear him breathing heavily, thinking it over. “You just need me to sit there?”

  “Hopefully,” I said.

  He didn’t sound happy, but then I don’t think I’d ever heard him sound happy. “You’ll pay me back.”

  It wasn’t a question. “I will,” I said. “Somehow.” I gave him the address and room number, told him to call me if anything happened.

  “Thank you,” I said, but he’d hung up.

  “Real smooth,” Michael said as I holstered my phone, “making it sound like she was beat up by her boyfriend or something.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You know what else you didn’t say? One word. It’s spelled A-R-D-O.”

  “Kurland did three years at Rikers for assault and armed robbery. He can handle himself.”

  “You’d better hope so,” Michael said. “And then you’d better hope he’s not too pissed off at you when he finds out just what it is you neglected to tell him.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “But in the meantime, at least I don’t have to worry about Julie mak
ing it through the night.”

  He put his hands up in a don’t-blame-me gesture. “Your call.” Then he pointed at the screen. “So, hey, what’s the story with that e-mail you were so excited about? There’s nothing there.”

  He was right. Dorrie’s e-mail account was open before me. The Inbox was empty. Zero new messages, zero old ones. I quickly clicked through the other folders. They were all empty too. Like someone had gotten there before me and wiped the place clean.

  Chapter 10

  It was the only possible explanation.

  Even if you assumed that Dorrie had been in the habit of deleting all her mail as soon as she read it and hadn’t kept copies of any of the messages she sent, even if Dorrie’s last Craigslist ad was old enough by now that responses were no longer coming in, even if none of her existing clients who knew to contact her at this address had written to her since the last time she’d checked her mail—even if you assumed all that, and it was a hell of a lot to assume—it was still impossible for her mailbox to be empty. Because I knew one person who had definitely sent a message to this e-mail address since Dorrie had died. Me. Less than an hour ago.

  And that meant someone had gone into her account in the past hour and erased everything in it. A lot, a little—I’d never know how much. But whatever it had contained was gone.

  Minutes. I’d missed it by minutes. If I’d been able to guess her password when I tried, or if I’d thought of coming down here sooner, or if I’d spent less time talking to Michael or hadn’t called Kurland...maybe I’d have beaten my invisible opponent to the punch. Or maybe not. Maybe he had some high-tech way to snoop on the e-mail account and had gotten an alert as soon as my message showed up, had raced in and erased everything within seconds. All that mattered was what I saw: the box was empty. I’d gotten in too late.

  Michael was still watching me. I told him it was nothing, that I’d been expecting a message that hadn’t come. It probably sounded like a lie, but what the hell, he was used to being lied to in his line of work. I was getting into something over my head, I could tell that’s what he was thinking; but it was, in the end, my problem, not his. He’d given me all the warnings he could. Now it was up to me to listen or not. He rose from his crouch and headed for the kitchen, cursing and limping because his leg had fallen asleep. I started to swing the laptop closed.

  But a sad temptation stopped me. Dorrie had had another e-mail address, her real address, the one she’d used when she was being Dorrie rather than Cassandra. And it occurred to me that if she’d set her computer up to automatically enter the password for one address, she’d probably have done it for the other as well.

  I told myself I needed to check it to be thorough, to find out if maybe there were some useful leads there. That’s what I told myself, and there was even some truth to it—but it wasn’t the reason I wanted to do it. Not really.

  I went back to the main Yahoo Mail page and entered “dorrie_burke” into the ID box. Sure enough, a line of asterisks appeared in the password box below. I clicked “Sign In.”

  This Inbox was as full as the other had been empty, the messages dating back more than a year in some cases. There were messages from her mother, from Lane, from students whose names I recognized. There were automated reminders from Columbia’s bursar about tuition payments coming due and there was junk mail touting penny stocks and Cialis. I saw my own e-mail address crop up here and there, messages I’d sent Dorrie over the months; things about school and short personal notes, answers to questions she’d asked me and random links I’d forwarded her when I thought she might be interested. I’d sent one of the earliest messages in the folder (Subject: Restaurant Dan?) and one of the last—just a couple of days back I’d finally dumped on her all the materials I’d dug up for her writing project, the miscellaneous notes and photos and Google hits I’d managed to amass about her parents and sister. I clicked through all these messages one by one and it felt as if I was walking through her apartment again, looking at all her personal things. The difference being that there was no equivalent here to the drawer full of lingerie and massage oil. Online, she’d kept her lives nicely separate—Dorrie on one side of the wall, Cassie on the other.

  But if I found nothing here that pointed to Cassie or her killer, to Ardo or Miklos or the massage clients she’d taken with her when she left Sunset, there was plenty that pointed to Dorrie. It was more personal than her apartment in some ways, seeing her through the messages she’d written and received, the ones we’d sent each other; she was present in a way she hadn’t been even when lying dead in the next room.

  It was strange, the way the Internet and computers had transformed not just our lives but our deaths. Once, the effects the dead left behind were tangible objects, the things they’d touched and held and made. Today what you left behind was as likely as not to be bits of light on a computer screen: digital snapshots, electronic mail. I couldn’t help wondering how many of Yahoo’s millions of e-mail accounts at any given point were like this one, an unintended shrine to the recent dead, how many grieving loved ones found themselves sorting through the cooling traces of e-mail like archaeologists sifting for precious artifacts in the ashes of Pompeii. Or how many e-mail addresses ended up used not as tools for communication but as repositories for remembrances, people sending final farewells knowing there was no possibility of reply.

  The last message in the Inbox was from Stu Kennedy. He’d sent it this afternoon from his home address, and it bore the stamp of his unsteady, one-fingered typing. “dear ggirl,” he wrote, “your turbulnt soul is now at rst, whre none csn do you harm.” I wondered whether he’d gotten an early start on his drinking today; under the circumstances, it wouldn’t have shocked me if he had.

  I also remembered, suddenly, his suggestion that we hold a memorial for Dorrie. I’d promised to talk to Lane. I checked the time on my cell phone. It was late, but not too late, not on a Monday. A lot of GS students were only free to take classes after work hours and Lane’s last class didn’t start till eight.

  I lingered for a moment, feeling like the worst sort of intruder but reluctant to let go. When I shut the laptop, it felt like I was drawing the lid closed on a coffin.

  I pulled the plug from the outlet, coiled the cable loosely, and slid the computer into the knapsack. I punched Lane’s number into my phone, held it wedged between my shoulder and my ear. While my call went through, I shoved the knapsack back behind the box of spoons. Lane would say yes—holding a memorial was the sort of idea he’d like. It was too late to get everyone together tonight, but we could do it tomorrow. We could even invite Dorrie’s mother, I thought. Do it right.

  Outside the Barking Boat, on the street, I weighed my options.

  I wanted to go home. I was tired, my chest hurt, and whatever flow of adrenaline had kept me going so far today was draining out of me like dirty water from a tub. But I knew I couldn’t—couldn’t go home, couldn’t rest. Kurland would sit with Julie tonight, but what about tomorrow?

  Somewhere in the city were the men who had attacked Julie and the man who had ordered it done. It was by no means a sure thing that he’d also ordered Dorrie’s death, but for now that was my best hypothesis. Meaning that he was the man I had to find. So he was a murderous bastard—so what? I’d dealt with murderous bastards before. You did what you had to. That’s what it meant to be—

  To be what, I asked myself, a former private investigator? I could almost hear Leo’s voice, admonishing me: No one’s paying you. It’s not your job anymore. You don’t have to do this.

  But the image of Dorrie came back to me, her body resting silently in the still water, her eyes closed, and I could hear her voice, I could feel her arms on my shoulders, her tears on my cheeks. Two days ago she was alive, two days ago she was in the world, and today she wasn’t, and it was because some son of a bitch had decided he liked it better that way. I couldn’t let someone do that and get away with it. I couldn’t. That wasn’t what it meant to be a detective. That’s w
hat it meant to be a human being.

  There used to be a big Hungarian neighborhood on the Upper East Side, just below where the Germans settled in Yorktown. Before their divorce, my parents sometimes took me there to visit the pastry shops with their yeasty smells and their glass cases filled with logs of strudel and wedges of chocolate kuglof. It was a small neighborhood now, almost all traces of ethnicity erased, but you could still see the last tenacious remnants clinging to their place in New York history. The Rigo bakery was gone, and so was the Red Tulip, and Mocca, and Tibor Meats, and the hole-in-the-wall newsstand that sold foreign-language newspapers in Hungarian and Romanian and Czech. In their place were a Dunkin’ Donuts, a Pottery Barn, and a Greenpoint Savings Bank. But up north the Heidelberg was still serving wurst and sauerbraten to septuagenarians who whispered behind their hands with Teutonic pride about the Steuben Day Parades of their youth, back when being German really meant something, and in the once thoroughly Magyar blocks below you could still find one bakery bravely turning out dobos torte and kifli and one butcher shop window strung with long links of sausage the color of paprika.

  There was also one Hungarian church left, and one dim Hungarian bar. In defiance of long-standing zoning rules they shared a street corner and as I exited the taxi I’d caught outside the Barking Boat I saw a heavy-featured older man leave one for the other. The church for the bar, naturally; he had some sinning to do before he’d feel the need for further repentance.

  They might have known Ardo at the church—or for that matter at the bakery or the butcher shop—but it was the bar I went to. There was a small crowd, eight or nine men talking at full volume in a tongue whose every syllable sounded alien, one or two in the corners silently nursing tall glasses of beer. The walls had pottery jugs hanging from nails and the Hungarian tricolor—red, white and green—was draped over a cherrywood highboy. Walking in here you didn’t feel like you were on the upper east side of Manhattan. Except for the backward neon letters spelling “Miller Lite” in the window, you might have been in Budapest.