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

by Richard Aleas

  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.

  “I’ll need to ask you to pay for this, Susan,” I said. “I have no money. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s fine, John,” she said, digging out her wallet. She pressed a handful of bills on me. I took a twenty, made her take the rest back. “But tell me what Mrs. Burke said.”

  “She didn’t say anything. Nothing at all.”

  “That’s not true,” Susan said.

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow,” I said. “Please, Susan. Trust me. It’ll keep overnight.”

  She looked into my eyes and either saw something there or didn’t. Anyway, she gave in. I wasn’t giving her much choice.

  At her building, she slammed the door shut and then leaned on the half-open window. “You’re not going to do anything foolish, are you, John? You’re going back to the park and you’ll wait for me, right?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  She seemed reluctant to go. But the meter was ticking and the driver honked. She stepped back.

  I pressed my hand to the glass, and she waved back. I smiled. How had Harper put it? It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

  “So now we’re going up to the park?” the driver said as we pulled away.

  “No,” I said. “Now we’re going down to the Bowery.”

  Chapter 29

  We turned in on Fifth Avenue at 61st Street. Three blocks later, we passed FAO Schwarz, closed for the night but all lit up by the ten thousand tiny lights that dot the ceiling there. The thing can be programmed to show constellations like the night sky, or an undulating rainbow, or a flood of blue and white like a crashing surf; but tonight it was frozen on a single color, ten thousand dots of red blazing silently in the night like pinpricks or jewels or tears.

  I thought of Dorrie standing beneath that jeweled sky with her satin shoes on and her tiara and her wand, dispensing fairy dust to girls too young to die shivering and sweating in a hospital bed the way Catherine Burke had.

  I was a fairy princess once, she’d said, and I’d asked her, Why’d you stop? And she’d told me, she’d told me.

  The driver didn’t speak to me on the way downtown and didn’t play the radio, didn’t honk his horn. We met no traffic on the way, just coasted silently beneath the ranks of glowing traffic lights and past a thousand shuttered storefronts. If the ancient Greeks had lived today, I imagined this would have been their Charon, a silent taxi driver ferrying souls along a concrete Styx.

  I found myself wishing it could continue, that I could keep riding this taxi to the edge of the river and beyond, could coast endlessly through the night. But at Eighth Street we turned east, and then there wasn’t much ride left at all.

  I gave the driver Susan’s twenty, didn’t ask for any change in return. He pulled away from the curb and left me in darkness.

  The building was five stories tall. A craggy relic from perhaps 1870, maybe earlier, its windows decorated with the fancy stonework that even tenements boasted back then. The fire escape bolted across its face was a later addition, a sop to building codes and regulations effected after good Father Demo took his stand.

  I had to hunt halfway down the block before finding a trash can I could upend and climb on to reach the lowest rung, and when I pulled myself up I could feel the edges of the cut in my back pull apart beneath the sodden bandage. It hurt enough to bring tears to my eyes, but I kept climbing.

  At the second floor, I knelt by the windows and looked in. One opened on a narrow kitchen, the other on a parlor. There were no lights on, but at the far end of the parlor I could make out a closed bedroom door.

  The parlor window was locked, but the kitchen window wasn’t, and with some effort I was able to lift it. I climbed inside and pulled it shut behind me.

  There were dishes stacked neatly in the sink and on the drainboard, and beside the garbage can a row of empty bottles stood sentry—Skyy, Beefeater, Kahlua, Glenmorrangie, Baccardi, Baileys. The refuse of an equal-opportunity drunk.

  I pulled open a drawer by the kitchen door and sorted through a tray of cutlery until I found a heavy wood-handled steak knife. Nothing like the camp knife Kurland had wielded, but weapon enough.

  I crossed the tiny passage that connected the kitchen to the parlor, then stopped by the bedroom door. I couldn’t hear any sounds from the other side, and realized there was some chance he wasn’t home—he could, for instance, be drying out again in the hands of Cornerstone or one of the city’s other rehab clinics. But, no: the dishes in the sink had still been wet. He ought to be inside.

  I turned the knob and swung the door open.

  He was sitting in an armchair with a glass in his hands and he raised it to me as I entered. He was wearing the same shirt and pants he’d been in before, at the cemetery. I saw the tweed cap lying on a writing table off to one side.

  “Robert,” he said.

  “Doug.”

  “Should I call you that, or do you prefer John?”

  “Either way,” I said.

  “I thought you might come,” he said. His voice was thick. “That woman today, the one who wrote to me, then never showed up—she was one of yours, I assume? That’s how you found me?”

  “I found you months ago, Doug. I did it for Dorrie, so she could send you her letter. The one you refused.”

  He nodded slowly. “Then that woman today—ah, never mind. It doesn’t matter. Would you like a drink?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Have a seat?”

  I shook my head.

  “Why are you here?”

  “I want to hear the truth,” I said.

  “And then...?”

  “That depends on what you tell me,” I said.

  “I see. And what exactly do you want to know?”

  “Was a handjob from your younger daughter enough, or did you make her fuck you like her sister?”

  He winced. Took a sip from his glass. “Don’t be crude, Robert.”

  “Answer the question,” I said.

  “I suppose you’ve been talking to my ex-wife,” he said.

  I stepped closer, raised the knife. He didn’t react, just looked from me to it and back again. “You’re not going to use that,” he said. “You told me yourself. You’re no killer.”

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  “I understand,” he said. “You’re angry at me, you want to hurt me. But you’re not going to do it. Because you’ve got one thing I’ve never had.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Self-restraint,” he said. “Most people have it. You’re lucky if you do. In rehab you meet all the people who don’t, and not a one of them’s happy.”

  He was slurring his words slightly. I wondered how many of the bottles on the kitchen floor he’d emptied since returning from Philadelphia.

  “I can’t want something and not have it, Robert. It’s just how I’m made. When I’m hungry I eat.” He held up the glass. “When I need a drink, I drink. I try not to, but the craving builds and builds and eventually... You never met my older daughter, Catherine. You’d have only been nine or ten, I guess, when she died. But if you had met her—my god, you’d have felt, well...I’m guessing the way you felt about Dorrie. You’d have fallen in love. Now imagine having that under your roof every night, the adorable little girl becoming an entirely different species, a grown woman, and not just any grown woman, but the most beautiful you’ve ever seen. You catch a glimpse of her in the bath or playing in the front yard in her swimsuit and you say to yourself, my god, where did that come from?

  “But Robert, if you’d been her father, that’s where it would have stopped. You’d have admired her, loved her, maybe imagined the man that would one day win her heart—maybe even, in the dead of night, admitted to yourself how that glimpse of her had made your heart race—but you would never
have done more than that.”

  “No,” I said.

  “ ‘No.’ You say it so easily. It was not so easy. I couldn’t do it.”

  “Was it your child she aborted?” I asked. “In the clinic you took her to?”

  “Probably. No way to be sure, is there? But I don’t think she was sexually active. Outside the home, I mean.”

  I wanted to put that knife through his chest, pin him to the back of the chair with it like an insect. I could feel it in my arm, the wanting. My palm was sweating, aching. I didn’t do it.

  “How did you find out what Dorrie did for a living?” I asked.

  “I told you, I went to her apartment—to her building, I should say. I didn’t ring the bell, I think I told you that too. But I didn’t leave. I waited for her. I couldn’t talk to her, I couldn’t face her. But how could I leave without seeing her?

  “She came out and, Robert, I don’t have to tell you what one look at her did to me. I couldn’t let her go, couldn’t let her out of my sight. I walked behind her to the subway, got on the same car as she did, rode it to the same stop. When she got out, I got out with her, thinking at every moment, ‘Now I’ll speak to her,’ and ‘Now,’ and ‘Now’...but I never did, I just followed her till she got to where she was going and went inside.”

  “Sunset?”

  He nodded. “I waited outside. Why, I don’t know. Some instinct maybe. Or more likely just the thought that if I waited long enough she’d come out again. And she didn’t—but one man after another did, arriving and leaving a half hour later, or an hour, and eventually I stopped one of them and asked what that place was. In retrospect, I was lucky he didn’t beat me up, or call the cops, or think I was a cop. But he didn’t. He was a fat little guy, about my age, and he was glad to tell me, glad to let me in on his little secret, man to man. He gave me their phone number, told me to ask for Samantha, who was his favorite.”

  “But you didn’t ask for Samantha, did you?”

  “I didn’t do anything! Robert, I went home, I tore up the phone number, I threw it out, I got stinking drunk. I told myself to let it drop, to forget I ever saw her. But I couldn’t. How could I? She was so very beautiful. And this was no 13-year-old girl, Robert, no virgin not to be touched—she was taking money every day, five, six times a day, from little fat men old enough to be her father—”

  “But they weren’t her father.”

  “And so what if one of them was?” he said. He looked at me with longing in his eyes. “What possible difference could it make? She didn’t know what I looked like—she’d told me in her letter about Eva cutting me out of all their photographs. I wasn’t going to tell her. And I would be the perfect customer, on my best behavior, I’d tip generously, every dollar I could save would go to her...

  “It did, you know. Whatever I didn’t spend on food and drink and rent, it went to her. I haven’t bought anything for myself in six months. I have no savings anymore. And I felt good about it. I was paying her tuition, I was helping her get ahead. Finally doing something good for her.”

  “You were fucking your daughter!”

  “We never had sex,” he said, with great dignity. “I’ll have you know. I asked—but she wouldn’t. She drew the line.”

  I touched the knife to his throat. “Where?” I said. “Where did she draw the line?”

  “Why ask me that?” he said. “You don’t want to know the answer.”

  “I need to know it.”

  “Please,” he said.

  “Where?” I roared.

  “Oral,” he said quietly. “She drew the line there.”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “I never meant for her to know—”

  “You bought blowjobs from your own daughter,” I said.

  “So did dozens of other men—”

  “They weren’t her father!”

  “No,” he said.

  I was crying now and so was he. The hand holding the knife was trembling and I let it sink slowly.

  “But Robert,” he said, “you’ve got to believe me, I didn’t kill her. I swear to god, when I read in the paper that she was dead, my heart broke. My only daughter, the only one left in the world that I cared about, and she was gone.”

  I placed the tip of the knife against his chest, beneath the sternum, held it as steady as my shaking hand allowed.

  “Robert, it’s the truth! I swear, I swear, I loved her, I would have given her anything. You have to believe me. I didn’t kill her.”

  “No,” I said, and I was weeping as I said it. “I did.” And I shoved the knife into him.

  Chapter 30

  It felt like slipping a playing card between the pages of a closed book.

  His blood spilled out over my knuckles and my wrist, hot and sticky and it just kept coming. It spilled onto his lap and started spreading on the floor beneath him. The glass fell out of his hand, rolled along the carpet. His eyes got wide and he tried to speak, to say something, but no sound came out.

  He died looking into my eyes. I forced myself not to look away. I couldn’t help thinking of Kurland bracing me at the train station, one hand on my chest, telling me I wasn’t a virgin anymore. It was a simple thing, crossing the line. Dorrie had done it, going from booking massage appointments to servicing them herself. Doug Harper had done it, some sunny morning in 1985, after glimpsing his daughter once too often in the yard. Now I’d done it. There was no thunder in the sky, no crash of cymbals, just blood all over my hands and a dead man in a chair. But there was a before and an after, and I was something different on either side of that line.

  I found the bathroom and scrubbed my hands under the taps, turning the hot water on as high as it would go. I revolved the bar of soap between my hands till no trace of blood remained. Then I bent over the sink and threw up.

  I couldn’t stop heaving. There was nothing inside me anymore, but I kept trying, choking from straining to expel something that wouldn’t come. I turned on the cold water, splashed some on my face, tried to swallow some. I couldn’t get any into my mouth, my hand was shaking so badly.

  I had a headache suddenly, a full-on migraine, and I was shivering. I needed to sit down, to catch my breath, to get my racing heartbeat under control. But not here.

  I exited by the front door after fumbling for a minute with the locks. On the way downstairs, I left my fingerprints everywhere—on the banister of the staircase, on the wall, on the glass of the front door.

  I was less than a mile away from Carmine Street, from my home—from what had once been my home. But there would be policemen there, staking the place out, watching for me to return, waiting to take me into custody, to put me on trial. I turned east instead, started walking.

  I found my way to a subway station, one of the system’s many unmanned platforms, and only once I reached the bottom of the stairs realized I had no money for a fare. There were some discarded MetroCards scattered on the ground and I picked them up one by one, slid them through the reader, hoping one might still have a single fare left on it. One did. I passed through the revolving gate and sank onto a wooden bench by the tracks.

  She’d promised. We’d promised each other. If either of us ever became desperate enough to actually do the thing we’d sometimes talked about in whispers, we’d call each other. But when the time came, she hadn’t called. And then I’d found all her papers shredded, her phone bills, her photos—something she would have had no reason to do. Naturally my mind had jumped to murder. Because nothing else made sense to me.

  But now—

  I remembered our dinner Friday night. One week ago. We’d eaten at Shabu-Tatsu on Tenth Street. Dorrie had been excited—she was almost finished with her last chapter for Stu Kennedy. The last chapter of the family history he’d assigned her to write, her sister’s story, the one she’d written with next to no help from her mother and no help at all from her father. I’d done what I’d been able to; I’d found the man for her. If he wasn’t willing to talk to her, there was no
thing else I could do.

  Except send her my files.

  For whatever little they might be worth.

  Bits of extra color and information, bits she might want to use when writing her second draft, to bring the story to life a little more. Some genealogical information I’d tracked down about her mom. The name of the hospital where her sister had died. A description of the shoe store where her father worked. A description of the man himself—this man she’d never had the chance to meet, this man who’d left her when she was three years old. And, hell, why stop at a description? I had the photos of him that I’d taken the day I’d followed him home to get his address—easy enough to include those in the e-mail as well.

  What must it have been like for her, I thought, to open that e-mail from me on Saturday morning and see Doug Harper’s unkempt, swarthy, bearded face staring out at her from her computer screen, and to know him, to recognize him as her long-time customer James Smith?

  I was underground, but only one flight down, not the eighteen stories deep I’d been buried up at 191st Street, and my cell phone still showed a signal. A weak one, but a signal.

  I redialed Eva Burke’s number.

  I thought I might wake her again, but she answered immediately, as though she’d been waiting for my call. “Are you ready to tell me what this is all about, Blake?”

  “No,” I said. “I just called to let you know that you should pick up a New York newspaper tomorrow. The man responsible for Dorrie’s death...you’ll see he died tonight. I don’t imagine this is much comfort to you, but I hope at least it’s some.”

  “What are you talking about? Blake? Blake!”

  I hung up on her, dug out my wallet. I found the compartment where I’d tucked James Mirsky’s business card, with its penciled-in cell phone number on the back.

  I dialed the number, got voicemail.

  At the beep, I told him where he could find Harper’s body.

  I also told him I’d killed Miklos. What the hell. I’d promised Kurland I’d pay him back somehow. And he and Julie deserved every chance.

  How desperately Dorrie must have wanted to keep me from knowing what I’d done. So she’d spent Saturday covering the traces. Any phone bill that might have shown Harper’s number—she couldn’t leave those for me to find. Any photos her clients had sent her—into the shredder wholesale, no time to sort through them one by one. All the e-mail “Cassie” had sent or received—erased. All future e-mail forwarded out of my reach. And then, just to be safe, she’d written me that letter, the one she’d left with Sharon. Just in case all the shredding and erasing turned out not to be enough to keep me off the trail. John Blake, the great detective—she’d made one last, desperate attempt to keep me from finding out. Darling, don’t, she’d written. For your sake, not mine. Let it go.