Songs of Innocence hcc-33

by Richard Aleas

  “Can be. But not if you do it right. You never have to meet anyone you haven’t vetted first over e-mail, and you can usually tell which ones are the creeps. And you don’t have to accept too many new clients if you start with a base of regulars you already know well.”

  “But Dorrie didn’t,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything.

  “How could she?” I said. “Didn’t she have to start over from scratch?”

  Julie suddenly looked tired. “She got me in a weak moment, John. I was in the hospital, all doped up on Percocet, I was thinking I was probably going to have to shut down Sunset anyway. And she was so desperate to get away. And it was my fault that she had to. And anyway it made me feel good, you know, to show I’m not like that fucker Ardo. So I told her go ahead, any regulars you’ve got, take ‘em. She didn’t have many, maybe three or four, but that’s a start, right? I told her, if you ask them and they want to go with you, they’re yours. Not that big a deal for me, and it meant a lot to her. What? Why are you looking at me that way?”

  “The regulars she took,” I said, “were any of them customers you originally took with you from Vivacia?”

  “I don’t think so.” She considered the question. I waited. “No. I don’t think so.”

  “No or you don’t think so?”

  “Jesus, John, I just came from having my hand cut open and put back together like a fucking jigsaw puzzle—‘I don’t think so’ is the best I can do.”

  “Will you think about it some more?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Sure. I’ll think about it. But not tonight.”

  There was more I wanted to ask her. Like: What’s a Hungarian doing running the best spa in Little Korea? But her eyelids were drooping; the medicine they’d given her after surgery was kicking in.

  “One last thing, Julie. Julie?” She forced her eyes open. “If I wanted to find the ads Dorrie ran after she left Sunset—the ones from when she went independent—what name would I search for?”

  “The same name,” Julie said. Her voice was muzzy. “Cassandra.”

  “I already looked up all the Cassandras on Craigslist,” I said. “They all had phone numbers—none were just e-mail.”

  She smiled. “You look under ‘Casual Encounters’?”

  “No,” I said. “Why would I? That’s not pros, that’s just ordinary people looking to hook up.”

  She closed her eyes again, sank back against the understuffed hospital pillow. “You’re so goddamn innocent,” she said.

  Back on Carmine Street, I fired up my computer, navigated to Craigslist again. “Casual Encounters” was a whole different universe from “Erotic Services.” It didn’t look like these were pros—there were few photos, no requests for money, no explicit lists of the things the advertiser would do if money were offered. But there were signs, if you looked hard enough, that there were some ringers mixed in with the amateurs.

  College co-ed, lonely, cute, seeks well-situated, established businessman for special relationship...

  W4M, 31, sensuous, open-minded, w/expensive tastes looking for luxury-loving man to satisfy all her needs...

  It’s Monday evening and I’m looking for a date to help take my mind off all the bills I’ve got piling up...

  I wondered whether everyone who used the service understood the coded language, or whether there were awkward moments when one civilian looking to score with another accidentally responded to the ad of a pro. Probably. But that was presumably the sort of thing pros were good at catching at the e-mail stage. Certainly I had to think that before a pro headed over to someone’s apartment or hotel room she made sure that the subject of payment had been raised and resolved.

  I typed “Cassandra” into the search box and got six results. They turned out to be six copies of the same ad, posted at the start of each of the previous six weeks: Tall, model-beautiful, well-educated tantric masseuse seeks kind, giving gentleman for passionate evenings in. Not seeking long-term relationship, just mutually satisfying encounters of an hour or two at a time. Donations toward continuing massage training appreciated. It was as close to an explicit request for money as any I’d seen in the Casual Encounters section; but then Dorrie hadn’t been an old hand at the game when she’d written it.

  I clicked on the word “Reply” and typed “This is a test” into the blank message that popped up, then clicked the Send button to shoot it off into the ether. Dorrie was gone—but automated systems like this had a way of continuing in operation until you did something to turn them off. A little like Dorrie’s answering machine, which had continued recording my messages long after it was too late to do her any good.

  Sure enough, after about fifteen seconds a chime sounded and an incoming e-mail appeared on my desktop. The sender was “Cassie19934@yahoo.com.”

  Thanks for responding to my ad! I offer an outstanding massage with a sensual finish that will leave you trembling. This is not full service so please don’t ask, but I promise you won’t be disappointed. My rates are $150 for the hour, $200 for a luxurious 90-minute session. Outcall only, anywhere within Manhattan. I’ve attached a photo so you can see what I look like. Before you book an appointment, I’ll need the same from you, along with your name and telephone number. (No blocked numbers, please.) I require this for my security—I only see a very small, select group of clients and need to feel comfortable with you before we meet. I’ll keep everything you send me strictly confidential, of course.

  I hope to hear from you soon—and I look forward to giving you a sensual massage you’ll never forget!

  Much love,

  Cassandra

  The photo was the one of her in the pink g-string and the hat. I wondered how many pictures of men she’d gotten in return. How many men would send a photo of themselves to a complete stranger over the Internet—and not just any complete stranger, but a “tantric masseuse”?

  Well, with any luck, I’d be able to find out.

  I went to Yahoo’s home page, clicked on “Mail.” When it asked for a Yahoo ID, I entered “Cassie 19934.” The next box asked for a password. The cursor blinked patiently, waiting for me to type something.

  A few keystrokes—that’s how close I was to getting into Dorrie’s e-mail account and whatever information it might hold. Not just the photos, but correspondence with her clients and who knew what else.

  But those few keystrokes were as formidable a barrier as the combination to a bank vault. What would she have chosen? I didn’t expect it to work, but I typed in “Dorrie” and clicked on the “Sign In” button. After a second, the message “Invalid ID or password” appeared on the screen in red letters. I tried “Cassie.” I tried “Burke.” I tried spelling each name backwards. I tried her birth date, forward and backward. Invalid, all of them.

  Damn it, when the time had come for her to choose a password, what would have occurred to her? It could be anything, of course; even a random sequence of letters, in which case I’d never be able to guess it. But in that case she’d never have been able to remember it either. It had to be something she could remember easily.

  I tried some more possibilities. Eva, her mother’s name. Douglas, her father’s. I looked at the teddy bear sitting on my shelf and tried “FAO.” I even tried my own name. Nothing.

  There were too many possibilities. I couldn’t think of them all, and even if I could it would take forever to try them all. There had to be another way. Maybe she’d have written the password down somewhere? Maybe in some file on her computer, or...

  Her computer.

  It felt like too much to hope for. But I remembered the sparsely populated directories I’d found on Dorrie’s laptop. She’d been at best a casual computer user, and as such she might have been the sort to take advantage of shortcuts when they were offered. She might well have taken advantage of the one I’d just thought of.

  I shut off my computer and headed across the street.

  Chapter 9

  Before Michael Florio inherited it from
his father, the Barking Boat was a neighborhood teahouse, an eight-table downtown hangout originally frequented by unemployed beatniks who liked to pay their tab by scrawling sketches and scraps of incoherent poetry on napkins. Florio père apparently let them get away with this, which left me wondering how he’d managed to stay in business for thirty years. Michael let me in on the secret: Out of the back room, his father had run a long-standing numbers operation, one blessed by the Genovese family. Those were the days when the people running organized crime would give their blessing to men with names like Vincent Florio. Today, the nod was more likely to go to a Dmitri or a Nguyen—or a Miklos.

  Michael did away with the numbers business when he took the place over, renovated the kitchen and the seating area, and did his best to turn the Boat into a real restaurant. But that didn’t mean that honest business was the only business conducted under his roof. When he wasn’t cooking, Michael liked to describe himself as a go-between, a provider of liquidity. My old boss, Leo, an ex-cop from the days before the sort of sensitivity training they forced on James Mirsky, put it more succinctly, calling him a fence and a shylock. Michael would take things off your hands for a fraction of what they were worth, and he’d loan you money when you needed it badly enough that you were willing to pay more than it was worth. There was always an angle with him. When I’d needed a new place to live three years back, he’d told me about the building across the street and had leaned on the landlord to give me a good deal; the condition was that every once in a while, when he was holding something particularly hot, he could treat my closet as an extension of his storeroom. I could live with that. For the rent I was paying, I could live with a lot of things.

  On weekends at brunch time, the line trailed out to the corner to get a taste of Michael’s Eggs Florentine, but right now it was a weekday evening in the dead time between the end of lunch and the start of dinner. The place was empty except for Michael’s one waitress, a 24-year-old whose longevity in the job probably had more to do with how she looked in a Barking Boat t-shirt than how good she was at waiting on tables. He trusted her and would discuss business in front of her, but I didn’t and wouldn’t. I pushed the swinging door to the storeroom open and gestured for him to follow me.

  Floor-to-ceiling metal shelves held sacks and cans and bottles of various supplies: red mesh bags of onions and potatoes, five-gallon containers of extra virgin olive oil, jars of cored whole pineapples in syrup, cardboard boxes of produce. I went to the corner furthest from the door and reached behind a box with Spoons written on it in barely legible magic marker. My knapsack was still there. I pulled it out.

  “What?” Michael said. “What do you want?”

  I tugged open the pair of buckles holding the knapsack closed, shoved the plastic bag of shredded paper to one side and pulled out Dorrie’s laptop. “Where’s an outlet?” I said. Before he could answer, I spotted one and headed over to it. I plugged in the adaptor, turned the machine on. It whirred quietly to life.

  “Listen, Michael,” I said, “I need to ask you something, and you can’t ask me why. Okay?”

  He looked unsure about it. “Okay.”

  “You ever hear of a man named Ardo?”

  I watched his eyebrows ride up on his forehead. He’d been going bald long enough that you’d barely call what he had left a hairline, so they had plenty of forehead to ride.

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ve heard about him. So have you. So’s everybody else in this city, though they don’t know it. Remember the Bishop murders last summer?”

  I shook my head.

  “Yes you do. Social club out in Red Hook, eleven people gunned down? Marty Bishop and his two brothers, some guys worked for them, the two bartenders? The waitress?”

  It rang a bell. Faintly. “I guess I read about it. That was Ardo?”

  “You never saw his name in the papers, but between you, me, and the lamppost, damn straight it was Ardo. Fuckin’ Hungarian psycho.”

  The laptop’s screen faded from black to pale blue and icons popped up like little square weeds. One of them showed the wireless modem searching for an Internet connection. I double-clicked on another to bring up Dorrie’s Web browser. The computer made some more soft whirring sounds.

  “I thought it was some street gang thing,” I said, stirring the cold ashes of my memory to try to get a spark.

  “The guys who pulled the trigger were in a gang, sure. But who gave them the guns and told them where to go?”

  “Ardo?”

  He nodded. “And why? Because Marty Bishop wouldn’t kick back a piece of the action from his houses when Ardo told him to. We’re talking houses out in Brooklyn, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Houses?”

  “Whorehouses,” Marty said. “ ‘Brothels’ to a college boy like you. That’s Ardo’s business—whorehouses, massage parlors, those Chinese tui-na places. If it’ll get you off and it’s in New York, Ardo’s got a piece of it.”

  “That can’t be true. There must be hundreds—”

  “So he’s got a piece of half of them. A third. I don’t know. But I do know he wants a piece of all of them. If he could find a way, he’d charge my wife every time she blows me. Not that he’d get rich that way, god knows.” He leaned over my shoulder. “What are you doing? Surfing for porn?”

  “Checking my e-mail,” I said, and turned the screen away from him. Yahoo’s home page had just come up. I typed “Cassie 19934” into the ID box and pressed the tab key.

  The password box automatically filled with a row of asterisks, eight of them.

  “What?” Michael said again. He’d seen my face, seen my reaction. Hell, he could probably hear my heartbeat, racing like a little triphammer. This was what I’d been hoping for. To save you the trouble of remembering your password at every Web site you visit, some Web browsers give you the option of having them remember your passwords for you and enter them automatically. It’s a shortcut, and it compromises your security, but it’s a compromise a lot of people decide they can live with. As Dorrie apparently had.

  I pressed the “Sign In” button and waited for the page to load.

  “That better be some e-mail,” Michael said. “You look like you hit a Pick 6.”

  “Michael,” I said, “do you have any idea where I’d find Ardo if I wanted to?”

  “You wouldn’t want to,” he said. “Seriously. You wouldn’t.”

  “But if I did.” The Yahoo Mail page was slowly assembling itself on the computer’s screen.

  “You wouldn’t. You know what this man did? Listen to me, you can read your e-mail later. With Bishop? He didn’t just pay those kids to shoot up the club. He didn’t just tell them to kill everyone in the place, not just Marty and his brothers but everyone in the whole fucking club. That wasn’t enough for him. You remember the waitress? The one who survived? Took two bullets in the stomach and one in the leg, but she wasn’t dead? They took her to New York Methodist. You remember what happened?” He tucked an index finger under my chin, forced my face away from the screen.

  “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 everyo
ne, 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?”