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

by Richard Aleas

  “Will you join me, John?”

  “When did you see her last?”

  He stood, unsteadily, walked to the table, tilted the bottle toward the tumbler beside it. I saw his arm shake as he raised the glass to his mouth. He wasn’t facing me when he spoke.

  “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t already know,” he said.

  “It was on Saturday, wasn’t it?”

  “No. No, it was on Thursday. Thursday night.”

  “But not in the classroom.”

  “No,” he said, “most definitely not in the classroom. How did you find out, John?”

  “It wasn’t hard with you sending e-mails to every address she had.”

  “Ah,” he said. He pulled out a chair at the table, sat. Put the glass down. “I suppose that was unwise. One forgets that these things are not the ephemera they appear to be.”

  “What happened, Stu? What did you do to her?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I did nothing to her. And yet I did too much.”

  I felt pressure building up in my chest, in my arms. I could feel my fingers trembling. “Start talking, Stu, or god help me, I’m going to hurt you. I’ve had enough. I’ve had too much. I can’t take any more.”

  “John. Please calm down.”

  “Did you kill her, you son of a bitch? Did you kill her?”

  He creased his eyes shut. When he spoke, it was in a low murmur. “I’ve asked myself that question a thousand times. I don’t think so, John. I don’t think so.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He paused before answering, as if collecting his thoughts. “You know what Dorrie did for a living, John?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes. Of course. How could you not, you two were so close.” He sipped at his drink, for courage. “Well, I didn’t. I just saw an advert on the machine from a young woman who sounded like good company for an old bachelor on a cold night. I pecked out an e-mail in reply—carefully, carefully, one little letter at a time. Oh, it took me forever. But these women won’t respond to a message that looks ragged or in any way distressing. They’re quite choosy—as, I suppose, they need to be.”

  I pictured Stu on his computer in the office, scanning through the ads on Craigslist, finding himself tempted by several and finally responding to Dorrie’s. Was it the phrase “well educated” that had attracted him? I couldn’t see him being drawn in by “tantric masseuse.” Though who the hell could say. Before this, I wouldn’t have pictured this man hiring a massage girl at all.

  “When I came to the door, she was startled to see me. And so she should have been. But no more startled than I was to see her. In her photo...she’d covered her face with a hat, John, how could I have known?”

  “And your photo, Stu? What did you cover your face with?”

  “Time.” He leaned over the table to where a bookcase stood against one wall. With one finger he tugged a slim volume off the shelf. Anatomy of a Youth Misspent. His second book, out of print since the year it came out. The back cover showed a young man in ascot and shades and a sleek Vandyke, trying to look awfully continental and chic in the style of the day. It had been taken before I’d been born.

  “For Christ’s sake,” I said.

  “It’s the best photo I have of myself.”

  “It looks nothing like you!”

  “Thus does vanity blunt the sharpened edge of truth,” he said. “In the words of a better writer than I.”

  “Fine,” I said. “She placed an ad, you answered the ad, you met at the door, you were both mortified. What happened?”

  “I invited her in, just to sit, to talk. To take the edge of the shock off. I was there in my robe, she in what I suppose were her working clothes, rather daringly cut under her coat. There was no way to disguise what we had each intended. We might have cried or laughed; she seemed willing, thank heaven, to laugh.

  “We took a drink. I asked her about her work, about why she’d never used it in her writing—what a fascinating set of stories she must have had to tell. At which point, I recall, she asked me how I would feel if she told this particular story, the story of meeting me, and I allowed that I’d prefer if she didn’t.

  “We had a second drink. I did, anyway. I don’t think she did. We talked some more.”

  He closed his eyes again.

  “The money, John. It was sitting there, out on the table. I’d left it there, for the girl to see and take. They hate having to ask for it, and I hate offering it. So I’d left it out, and it was there between us, and we’d been talking about money, John, about why she had to do this work, and it was money at the heart of it; and there was this tidy pile of twenty-dollar bills, a dozen of them, crisp bank notes, stacked before us and as good as spent already, and I pushed it toward her. ‘Take it, please,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t,’ she said. ‘You must,’ I said. ‘I can’t,’ she said, ‘I’ve done nothing to earn it.’ ”

  He looked at me then with the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen. Tortured, really. But not tortured nearly enough.

  “No,” I said. “You didn’t.”

  “She was so beautiful, John. So beautiful. And it’s what she’d just told me she’d done with a hundred other men. Surely I wasn’t worse than all the others. I may not be young, John, and my hand may shake, but I’m still a man. I still—” His face contorted into a grimace and he began to bawl, silently, his chest heaving.

  “Goddamn it,” he said, biting off the words viciously. “I was a right bastard. I gave her the money, I pushed it on her, I begged her to service me. I’d be quick, I said. Just a touch would be enough. And then she needn’t feel bad about taking my money.”

  He tossed back the last of the whiskey in his glass, wiped the back of one hand across his eyes.

  “She walked out, of course. Very politely. Too politely. She should have slapped me, should have thrown my money in my face. But she just said, ‘I’ll pretend you didn’t say that, Mr. Kennedy. Because in the morning you’ll wish you hadn’t.’ And she walked out. And I didn’t see her Friday. And on Saturday I sent her an apology. And on Sunday she was dead.

  “But not because of me, John—I won’t believe that. Maybe she was angry with me and she had every right to be...maybe she was afraid I might retaliate in some way, though I wouldn’t have done anything, god, I’d never...but she didn’t kill herself because one old drunk made a lewd advance, or out of fear her filthy old professor might expose her secret. She didn’t. She wouldn’t.”

  The last thing I felt I owed this man was comfort. But I gave it to him anyway.

  “No,” I said, “she didn’t. She was murdered.”

  He looked up at me with his quavering, red-rimmed stare. “Good lord, John, what are you saying? She wasn’t. Was she?”

  I reached out, took hold of the bottle between us, gripped it by the neck. There was a part of me that wanted to raise the damn thing overhead, swing it down against his skull, smash it and him to bits. For what he’d done to Dorrie. For what he’d wanted to do.

  He saw this in my eyes—I could tell, since I saw sudden fear in his, combined with an odd look of resignation, maybe even of relief.

  It took an act of will to make myself let go.

  “Yes,” I said. “She was. And I’m glad it wasn’t you that did it. I’d have killed you if you had.” I saw him flinch. “Without a moment’s hesitation, Stu. You’d be dead now, you understand? And you’d deserve it.”

  It was just an impulse to be cruel, a need to lash out, to make someone else hurt the way I hurt. But I realized when I said it that it was true. Maybe I should have known before.

  When I found the man responsible for Dorrie’s death, I’d kill him.

  I wouldn’t be able to hold myself back.

  There wasn’t will enough in me.

  PART THREE

  What the hammer? what the chain,

  In what furnace was thy brain?

  What the anvil? what dread grasp,

  Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
>
  When the stars threw down their spears

  And water’d heaven with their tears:

  Did he smile his work to see?

  Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

  WILLIAM BLAKE,

  SONGS OF EXPERIENCE

  Chapter 21

  I sank beneath the earth, in the slow metal cage the MTA provided for the wheelchair-bound and infirm. It drew me down, to the deepest point in New York City’s subway system, eighteen stories below street level. Four miles north of Columbia on the 1 train, in the wilds of Washington Heights, the 191st Street station was almost literally the end of the line, before Manhattan dead-ended at the bend of the Harlem River and looked fearfully across the water at the Bronx. The train left you on a platform marked with smears of grime and decades of accumulated rot. It was damp and it was cold and the walls themselves looked tired, faded, the chipped mosaic tiles of the sign spelling out 191st Street looking like the remnants of a long-abandoned jigsaw puzzle.

  And then this old, terrible elevator brought you to the very bottom. I’d come here once before, on a case for Leo—a runaway had made her home here, had found shelter here in the middle of one of the worst blizzards New York had ever seen, and then had died here with a filthy needle stuck in her arm, her skin a cyanotic blue. Her parents had paid us the better part of their savings to find her and had spent the rest to have her brought home and buried. I’d never felt worse about taking someone’s money.

  The door to the room in which Julia Cortenay had died was labeled “Trash Room,” but the room behind it was actually empty and unused, a left-behind remnant of a scientific experiment some NYU professors had long ago paid the city to house there. They’d needed a safe, quiet place to set up a delicate instrument designed to detect cosmic rays, which apparently could penetrate the 180 feet of solid rock overhead while other forms of radiation could not. They’d set up their machine and watched it for years and then at some point they’d taken it away, wiser or not I couldn’t tell you. But the room was still there and Julia Cortenay had found it, and I needed a place to hide, and I found it now.

  It wasn’t empty today. There was a wizened heap of skin and clothes in one dark corner, sucking down swallows from a bottle half hidden in the folds of a brown paper bag. He looked up at me, briefly, and then down again. I wasn’t a cop; I wasn’t, apparently, a threat; I didn’t matter. The air in the room held the rank smell of sweat and piss, and when I pulled the door shut behind me there was almost no light, just a single bulb glowing feebly overhead.

  In the station near Stu’s home, I’d made two purchases: a cheap digital watch with a plastic band and, with the last of my quarters, another copy of the Post. I couldn’t help it—I wanted to see the worst. I stripped the middle out of the paper, spread it on the ground, and sat on it. I opened what was left of the paper to the cover story, bending close to the page so I could make out the type.

  They train them, I think, in the newsroom, the way they train Rottweilers to attack, by giving them raw meat to sniff so that if they ever get the scent again later in life they start salivating. And my case gave them plenty to drool over. There was the sex angle—Ramos had been found in my bed, after all; fully clothed, it’s true, but that didn’t stop them from speculating. There was my history of arrests—only two, but that was two more than most of their readers had. And then there was my mysterious escape from the apartment just moments before the police arrived. I was a dangerous fugitive. I was presumed armed, said police department spokesperson Delia Cisneros. The police had a number of leads.

  What leads, I wondered. And on the jump page I found out. They’d found the button that had come off my shirt, had found Ramos’ blood on it; and in a dumpster several blocks away—god damn it—they’d found the shirt, with more blood, and the wallet, with more blood still. Fingerprints confirmed that—

  I balled up the paper and threw in the corner. I was well and truly screwed, I knew that now. What the hell had I been thinking? It was all the fault of movies, and books. Men survive on the run for years in books, your Jean Valjeans, your Fugitives. Harrison Ford makes it look so easy. It never smelled like this in the movies. No one wound up cowering under 180 feet of rock and thinking maybe it’d be just as well never to come up again.

  I looked at the watch, pressing one of the buttons on its side to faintly illuminate its face. Hours to go. Hours till it was as dark outside as it was down here, till I could make my way under cover of night to the Cop Cot and to Susan.

  And then what?

  I didn’t know. I couldn’t think that far ahead.

  I slept in snatches, waking once to find the other man tugging gently on one of my shoes. I shook my foot but he didn’t let go—he’d committed to his bit of larceny and by god he was going to follow through. I felt bad kicking him and did it as gently as I could. He tipped backwards and crawled back to his corner, defeated.

  Hours later, demonstrating a more congenial bit of cellmate spirit, he came near again and offered me a hit off his bottle. I declined. This seemed to make him madder than the kick had.

  He didn’t bother me again. Or if he did, it was while I was asleep and I’d just as soon not know.

  The watch’s alarm chimed at eight. I rode the elevator back up and the nearly empty train downtown. I’d taken the crumpled newspaper with me and I held it in front of me in my seat, the front few pages folded back so an underwear ad was showing on one side and Page Six on the other. Gossip, movie stars, an editorial cartoon—nothing to attract attention, nothing with my name or face on it.

  The train let me out on 72nd Street. To the east, Central Park loomed against the night sky, its ranks of trees penned in behind a waist-high stone wall. There were pedestrians but they had places to be and brushed past me without a glance. I kept my head down, my hands in my pockets, my shoulders high; I tried not to appear to be in a rush. Once inside the park, I cut across a patch of grass and into the shadows of the trees. I kept off the paths, stayed out of the cones of light cast by the old-fashioned metal streetlamps. At one intersection, I spotted a pair of uniformed policemen talking, one of them swinging his nightstick by its leather strap, and I did an about face that would have been the envy of any marine and quietly fled in the opposite direction.

  The park is long but narrow, and even taking a circuitous path it doesn’t take you long to cross from west to east. I found myself at the foot of the hill on whose crest the Cop Cot sat with ten minutes to spare. I climbed it quickly and found it empty, thank god. I didn’t sit and wait, though—the place was too exposed, too open to view from all sides. I walked a dozen yards away to where a cluster of trees offered at least partial concealment.

  One man showed up, sat briefly on one of the Cop Cot’s wooden benches, sipped from a steaming cardboard cup. He stood again when Susan arrived, exchanged a few words with her, and left. Very polite, New Yorkers. Don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise.

  I waited a few more minutes, but no one else appeared. Finally, when it seemed safe, I whistled softly.

  Susan looked in my direction, her hand up to shield her eyes. She was wearing knitted gloves and a heavy overcoat and a scarf. The funny thing is that I didn’t feel cold until I saw how she was dressed. Then I realized I was shivering.

  “Susan,” I hissed. “Over here.”

  She walked in my direction, and when she was within reach, I pulled her toward me by the wrist, led her deeper into the shadows. I sank to a crouch between the roots of a huge maple and Susan took a seat beside me. She pulled a Mini Maglite out of her pocket and switched it on, aiming it down at the ground.

  “Did anyone follow you?” I said.

  “Of course not,” she said. “But John—listen to me. This is no good. You’ve got to turn yourself in. You’re all over the news.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you? In the cab over here, on the radio, the top story was how they have footage of you from two ATMs, one downtown and one I think up on 32nd Street.” S
he reached out, touched the side of my face. My beard was coming in again and the fabric of her glove caught on it. “You can’t keep running like this forever.”

  “I don’t have to run forever. Just long enough.”

  “What’s long enough?” she said.

  “That depends on what you’ve found.”

  She set her handbag down, opened it, dug inside. Under her cell phone, her wallet, a pack of tissues, she found a sheaf of papers secured with a paper clip. She took it out. “Well, I saw Mrs. Burke. She’s a piece of work, all right. I can’t say I’d want to be her daughter. But there’s something you’ve got to respect about her. She really loved Dorrie. In her way.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “She’s taking the body back with her to Philly. There’s going to be a funeral tomorrow morning at a place called—” she flipped through the papers “—Greenmount. Where her sister’s buried, if I got the name right.”

  She had. I’d found it online when I’d been tracking down information for Dorrie—Greenmount Cemetery on Front Street, row after row of neatly kept graves, plenty of room for a girl who’d died at 13. Plenty for one who’d died at 24.

  “She’s as convinced as you are that someone killed her daughter, though in her case it’s entirely an act of faith. I told her that, told her she was probably wasting her money. You’d have been proud of me.”

  “She hired you anyway?”

  “She hired us anyway.” She flipped through the papers some more. “I also reached Brian Vincent, by phone. It’s his real name and he was happy to talk to me. He’s an art director with BBD&O, which I guess is one of the big ad agencies. He’s single, 27, looks a little like Matt Damon. I pulled this photo off the agency’s Web site.” She tugged a folded page out of the stack, pointed the flashlight at it. The man didn’t look like Matt Damon to me, but what the hell.

  “Seems like a genuinely nice guy when you talk to him. But forget that. The crucial point is that this past weekend he was in Las Vegas at something called the ‘iMedia Brand Summit.’ I don’t think he flew an extra ten hours back and forth to come back here and kill Dorrie.”