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

by Richard Aleas

  If only that were true, I thought.

  Chapter 25

  The first red light we hit was near Tavern on the Green, and I was out of the car and over the wall before he knew it. I’d hesitated before leaving the twenty in the back. But I’d said I would, and I did.

  I raced past Sheep Meadow, which on a summer day would have been filled with sunbathers and voyeurs but this time of year was empty. I found my way east toward the least developed part of Central Park, the portion the designers had left wild, untouched. It was called the Ramble and in the 1970s was mostly known as a place gay men cruised for anonymous sex. AIDS brought the level of activity down; Giuliani’s tenure as mayor took its toll as well. And then 9/11 happened and no one felt much like fucking in the bushes. But all things pass, and I imagined activity was probably up again.

  But not in the middle of the afternoon on a cold fall day. Brisk winds had more power to keep crowds away than all the terrorists and mayors in the world, and I saw no one on the heavily wooded paths now. At one spot, deep in the forest, a steep-sided boulder loomed. We’d found it together, Susan and I, and she’d know it was where I’d meant she should meet me. The same qualities that made it a perfect summer trysting spot made it a good choice now: you could see people coming from any direction, and unless you were standing, they couldn’t see you.

  I climbed it and waited. While I waited, I tried to coax one more call out of my cell phone battery, but it was futile.

  I was cold and felt exposed on the flat surface of the rock. There were patches of sparse grass that shivered when the wind blew them, and I shivered too. On every side, the trees had started losing leaves, and with every breeze a few more would fall.

  Shortly after two, Susan showed up. She was wearing the same heavy coat she’d had on the day before, and it didn’t make climbing the rock easy. I leaned over the edge and held an arm out for her. She ignored it, climbed the last few feet on her own. When she was sitting next to me, she peeled off her gloves and then slapped me barehanded across the face.

  “What was that for?” I said. My glasses were hanging crookedly and I straightened them.

  “Where’s my goddamn wallet?” she said.

  I reached into my pocket and dug the wallet out, deposited it in her outstretched hand. “Susan, I’m—”

  “I don’t want to hear it, John.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you? The police are looking for you. Two people are dead. And you’re sitting here in Central Park like...like some kind of homeless man. Look at you, you must be freezing. Here.” She opened her handbag and pulled out a thin cardigan. She threw it at me. “Jesus Christ, John. I’ve never seen you like this.”

  I unzipped my jacket, took it off, pulled the sweater on over my head. Put the jacket back over it.

  “Here.” She threw something else at me. I unfolded it. It was a knit cap.

  “Susan—”

  “Just put it on,” she growled. “And tell me what I’m going to find on my credit card bill next month.”

  “Train tickets.”

  “Train tickets,” she said, and threw her hands up. “You went to the fucking funeral. Why didn’t I hear about this from Mrs. Burke?”

  “She didn’t see me.”

  “She didn’t see you. Of course. Where were you, hiding behind a tombstone?” She lifted the hat out of my lap and fiercely pulled it onto my head. “John, does your behavior seem normal to you? I’m just asking because it does not seem anywhere near normal to me.”

  “Normal? No, Susan, it’s not normal. A woman I cared about a great deal was killed. I’ve been shot at, tied up, held at knifepoint, I’ve had a man’s body left in my bed like something out of The Godfather. All I wanted was to know what happened to Dorrie. I didn’t want any of this. I never wanted my life to be like this again. Why do you think I stopped working for Leo?”

  “You stopped working for Leo because of Miranda,” Susan said. “Let’s be honest. You felt guilty.”

  “Of course I felt guilty. She died because of me.”

  “Yeah, and I almost died because of her. Life goes on.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  She looked at me ruefully. “John. You’ve got to let it go. Miranda, and me, and Dorrie. You’re not responsible for what happened to us.”

  “Not to you, no,” I said. “Not the good things, anyway.”

  “Turn yourself in, John. I’ll get you a lawyer. I’ll pay for it. If you didn’t do it, we’ll be able to prove it—”

  “Not till I settle this.”

  “What do you mean ‘settle this’?”

  “What happened to Dorrie.”

  “What if you can’t?”

  “Don’t say that,” I said. “We can. Between the two of us... Don’t tell me you haven’t made any progress. You’re too good. I wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Yeah? You want to see the progress I’ve made?” She opened her handbag, dug out a piece of paper, a printout of a digital photograph. I looked at it. It was some kid, maybe seventeen years old. Shaggy curls, glasses, bad posture. He was standing in a hallway, knocking on a door.

  “Who is this?” I said.

  “That’s Robert Lee,” she said.

  I looked at it again, then at her. “You’re kidding me.”

  “His real name’s Micah Goodman.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Seventeen. He’ll be eighteen next month.”

  “He’s a kid!”

  “He’s not just a kid, he’s Robert Goodman’s kid. I don’t know if the name means anything to you. Goodman’s a partner at Goldman Sachs. Took home $35 million last year in bonuses.”

  “So he’s a rich kid—”

  “A smart kid, too. He goes to Stuyvesant. And he’s a lonely kid. And what does a lonely, smart kid do when he can afford to blow $200 in an afternoon? He goes on Craigslist.”

  “You’re telling me this kid hired Dorrie?”

  “I’m telling you more than that. I’m telling you he was one of her regulars. Since he was sixteen.”

  I took a minute to think about that. “But you don’t think he killed her.”

  “Not a chance,” she said.

  “Why ‘not a chance’?”

  She took the photo back from me. “I shot that in the hotel where he came to meet me. I hadn’t planned on confronting our mysterious Mr. Lee, but when I saw him...let’s just say I decided I could handle him. We talked for an hour. We would’ve talked longer, but he had to get to Social Studies. He had a paper due. You get the picture? He wasn’t terrified I’d tell his wife—he was terrified I’d tell his parents.”

  I was trying to make it add up in my head. “I don’t know, Susan. Terrified of his parents, lonely, a misfit—seventeen’s not too young to be a killer.”

  But she was shaking her head. “He was crazy about her, John. Not crazy bad—he was...he liked her. And not, you know, obsessively. Just very, very earnestly. He was really broken up by her death.”

  “Could be an act.”

  “You think I can’t tell the difference? It wasn’t an act. He misses her. Like he lost his best friend.”

  “He misses her so much so that he agreed to meet you at a hotel.”

  “He thought I was going to blackmail him.”

  “He thought you were going to give him a handjob, Susan. Big tits, remember?”

  “Yes,” she said, “I remember.”

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry.” I lay back, stared up the sky. The clouds didn’t care. “Maybe he didn’t do it,” I said. “Maybe you’re right.”

  “It does happen once in a while.”

  “What about the other two?” I said. “Adams. Smith.”

  “Adams I’ve heard nothing. Zero. Smith I got an auto-response saying he’s out of town, he’ll answer his messages when he gets back, which is supposed to be today. I’m going to try again later.”

  “So one of them could be our man.”
>
  “Or they could be horny seventeen-year-olds too.”

  “You think so?”

  “No, John,” she said. “I don’t think so. I don’t think they’re teenagers and I don’t think they’re killers. I think they’re unhappy men who sometimes pay women to make them a little happier for an hour.”

  “Somebody killed her, Susan.”

  “Or not,” Susan said.

  I closed my eyes. “No,” I said. “What she wrote in that letter she left with Sharon...there was something going on. Something she felt she couldn’t tell me. Something bad enough to make her decide to go on the run—only her killer got to her first.”

  “You keep telling yourself that,” Susan said, “but that doesn’t make it true. Any more than when her mother does the same thing. It’s an act of faith.”

  “Or maybe I’m right. That happens once in a while, too.”

  She didn’t say anything. I heard her cram the sheet of paper into her bag.

  “Can you do me a favor?” I said. I was almost embarrassed to ask.

  “What.”

  “My cell phone...it’s dead.”

  I heard her rummage through her bag, then a click. A slim rectangle of plastic landed on my chest. I sat up, swapped the new battery into my phone, handed her the dead one.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “I guess I should be grateful you didn’t steal it,” she said.

  I started to say “I’m sorry” again but she waved my words away.

  “So,” she said. “You going to stay out here all day?”

  “No,” I said. “I have to keep moving.”

  “But you’re going to want me to meet you here again tomorrow, right? Deliver my daily report, like a good little soldier? Or do you want to pick a different rock for tomorrow?”

  “This one’ll be fine.”

  “John—for your own good. Please let me get you some help.”

  “I will,” I said. “I promise. But not yet.”

  Despite what I’d told her, I stayed where I was. There was no better place I could think of. All I’d have accomplished by moving was to put myself at risk. At greater risk.

  I made two phone calls, then put my phone away. One was to check my voicemail, which was filled to capacity, but not with anything I needed to hear. The other was to Kurland, who told me Julie had checked out of the hospital and was staying with him. He must’ve known I was on the run—how could he not?—but he didn’t say anything about it. He put Julie on the phone when I asked him to. We didn’t talk long.

  It got colder as the afternoon wore on, but with my sweater and my hat, it wasn’t too bad, at least until the sun went down.

  My eyes got used to the dark, my body to not moving. No one bothered me. Once I saw a cop pass on the path beneath me and I was tempted for an insane moment to call out to him. A voice from the rock. A voice from on high crying, “Here I am!”

  But I stayed silent and he passed, and the time passed, and then it was 11:20 and I had somewhere to be.

  Chapter 26

  There was a different woman at the front desk, but she was cut from the same bolt. Willowy. Slender. Glossy lips, slightly parted. Soft voice.

  “Have you been here before?” she said.

  I told her I had.

  “Would you prefer a massage or a scrub?”

  I had too little money for either; I didn’t even have enough to use the facilities.

  “Actually,” I said, “I’m just here to meet someone. He’ll be here in a couple of minutes. I was hoping you’d let me wait for him back there.” I nodded toward the changing area. I could see her getting ready to say no. Before she could get the word out, I held out two folded bills, a twenty and a ten. It was the last of my cash.

  She took it, spread the bills, and took a minute to consider whether it was a respectable bribe or an insult. She pocketed the money. “Stay in the changing area,” she said. “Keep your clothes on.”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  Thankfully this time there was no one else there. I pulled one of the high-backed couches toward me to block the view a bit more. It was five minutes to midnight.

  The train ride downtown had been excruciating. I’d kept my hat pulled low and my jacket collar high and a copy of the Village Voice in front of my face, but all the same I’d been expecting to feel cuffs cinched around my wrists every time the doors opened, every time someone got on or off.

  Now I was indoors and alone, but if anything the tension was worse. Because now I was waiting for a man who’d told me he’d kill me if he ever saw me again. A man who’d killed two people because of me.

  I asked myself why I was here. I’d asked it all the way down. The answer was because he’d killed Di. (Candace, I reminded myself. He’d killed Candace.) I’d believed Ardo when he’d said they didn’t kill women. In his own crazy way, he’d meant it—it seemed to be a point of pride with him, of integrity, maybe dating back to when he’d been a child and seen his sister shot by the Arrow Cross.

  But Miklos hadn’t seen his sister shot. And Miklos didn’t seem to have a problem killing women.

  He’d certainly attacked Julie, and I was confident he’d been the one who’d strangled Candace—why the hell should I believe he wouldn’t have killed Dorrie?

  If nothing else, he was my leading candidate for who Dorrie had been preparing to leave the city to get away from. I already knew Dorrie had been afraid to tell me about him once—she hadn’t said a word to me about the incident with Julie’s hand. That didn’t guarantee it was Miklos she’d been too scared to tell me about this time...but how many people that frightening could she have known?

  The clock on the wall ticked slowly toward true north.

  I was carrying nothing I could use as a weapon. I thought for a moment about tracking down the barber’s shears Lisa had found for me the last time I’d been here—at least they had a sharp point. But realistically I might just as well have asked her for the manicure scissors, for all the good they’d do me. Might as well ask for a toothbrush.

  12:01 came and went, 12:02. Then I heard the dull chime that accompanied each opening of the elevator door. Moments later I heard heavy footsteps on the wooden walkway. Over the tops of the couches I could see the crown of his head approaching.

  When he turned the corner and saw me, he didn’t recognize me, not at first. Then I saw recognition blossom on his face as he extended his key toward one of the lockers. He let his hand drop, tossed the key on the seat beside him.

  “Blake?”

  His hands slowly closed into fists. Opened and closed. Slowly.

  “I’m just here to talk, Miklos.” I held my hands up, palms out. “I’m unarmed.”

  “So?” He laughed. “So what you’re unarmed? Mr. Lucky.” He stepped forward, closing the distance between us. “Tell me, Mr. Lucky, do you want I should kill you fast or slow?” The smile that spread across his face was an ugly thing. “Or should I make you suck me off first like your faggot bartender friend would?”

  I felt sweat running down my sides, from my armpits to the bandages strapped around my torso. This would work or it wouldn’t work—and if it didn’t work, I was dead. It was that simple.

  “Before you kill me, Miklos,” I said, “there’s something you need to see.”

  “Something I need to see like what?”

  “Evidence,” I said. “Evidence you left behind, tying you to Candace Webb’s murder. Starting with those King Kong fingerprints of yours, but that’s just the beginning.”

  “Don’t bullshit me,” he said. “You got evidence like that, you’d take it to the police, get them off your back.”

  “I can’t go to the police—thanks to you. Even if I showed them I didn’t do Webb, they’d lock me up for Ramos. But I’ll tell you who I can go to, Miklos. I can go to your boss. And we both know how he feels about killing women.”

  “This woman pulled a fucking gun on me—”

  “Well, maybe you can explain that to Ardo
. While you’re at it you can explain why you weren’t able to take a gun away from a woman half your size without killing her. He’s probably a very reasonable man when it comes to these things. That’s certainly what they say on the street.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “You remember what he told me,” I said, “the last time we were all together? ‘People who work for me sometimes make mistakes. They pay for them when they do.’ ”

  He remembered. I could see it in his face.

  “I’ve also got evidence, Miklos, that you were a regular at Julie’s place long before Ardo sent you there to break her hand. How do you think he’s going to like that? That you were giving your business to a woman who stole customers from him?”

  Between clenched teeth he said, “What do you want?”

  “I need to get out of town—at least till this blows over, maybe for good. And that takes money. You know how much money I have?” In another context, my thumb-to-forefinger gesture might have meant Okay. “You got me in this mess—now I want you to fix it.”

  “Yeah? How?”

  “You give me ten thousand dollars, cash, I’ll hand you all the evidence I’ve got and we’ll go our separate ways. You’ll never see me again and neither will Ardo.”

  He reached out and closed one hand around my throat. “How about I break your fucking neck and take the evidence off your dead body?”

  “You think I’m stupid?” I said. “It’s not on me. I’ve got it downstairs, in my car.”

  “Your car.”

  “That’s right. And if I’m not downstairs in five minutes, unharmed, my friend who’s driving my car has instructions to take the evidence to Andras, hand it over to him. He’ll know what to do with it.” I stared at him over his outstretched arm, tried to keep my voice from breaking. “I think you know he’ll do it, too. My faggot bartender friend.”

  I saw temptation in his eyes. His palm was pressed against my throat, his fingers almost touching at the back of my neck. One hard turn of his wrist and I had no doubt my neck would snap. Then he could deal with my hypothetical friend in my hypothetical car at his leisure.

  But what if the car and friend weren’t hypothetical? What if they did make it uptown to Andras and Ardo before he could stop them? What if I really had something on him?