The Hollow Girl (A Moe Prager Mystery)

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  In the waning years of the last century, a lonely, nondescript girl became one of the first Internet stars by posting a video diary that purported to describe her daily adventures as a college freshman. She would remain anonymous and would be known to viewers only as the Lost Girl. The Lost Girl’s posts attracted a wide viewership over the span of several months during 1998 and 1999. The postings ranged from the mundane to the salacious. The Lost Girl was just as apt to describe poetry class with a boring professor as she was to detail her abusive relationship with her boyfriend Lionel or her intense sexual attraction to her roommate Victoria.

  Only after posting a particularly graphic entry on Valentine’s Day 1999 in which the eponymous Lost Girl detailed witnessing a traumatic sexual encounter between the two objects of her desire did the lie begin to unravel. During the now-infamous Valentine’s Day post, the Lost Girl, calling herself the Hollow Girl, feigned suicide by overdosing on red wine and pills. The post caused quite an uproar as the “dying” Hollow Girl pleaded for help. 911 call centers, suicide hotlines, and hospitals were inundated by pleas from desperate fans in a panic to save the Hollow Girl’s life. Squad cars, ambulances, and emergency personnel were dispatched throughout the country, throughout the world, and several innocent people were injured as a result of traffic mishaps.

  The Lost, or, as she would thereafter be known, Hollow Girl, was subsequently revealed to be a precocious high school senior and aspiring actress named Sloane Cantor. She has since legally changed her identity. She had perpetrated the entire hoax—which she claimed was simply performance art—from the basement and bedroom of her parents’ lavish home in a very well-to-do Long Island suburb. Although her viewership expanded after the Valentine’s Day post and the revelations about her true identity, the Hollow Girl could not survive the threats of criminal action and civil suits that followed in the wake of the “Suicide” posting. She somehow managed to come out the other end of it relatively unscathed, though she left much collateral damage behind her. Not only were people physically injured, but lives and reputations were ruined.

  In spite of her past history, the Hollow Girl recently resurrected herself in a somewhat new form. Until last evening’s post, I’d found the latest incarnation of the Hollow Girl rather snarky and claustrophobic. Now, regardless of the myriad disclaimers and false sanctimony about performance art, she has done it again. The Suffolk County Police reported a twenty-three percent increase in 911 calls in the aftermath of last night’s “S&M” post. Nassau County Police reported a similar increase. This time, at least, no cars were dispatched and no one was injured. Maybe Warhol was correct, and we shall all have fifteen minutes of fame. I hope that if it comes to me it does not come at the cost of fifteen minutes of shame, as displayed by the Hollow Girl last evening. But this must stop. I urge you not to watch, because to watch is to reinforce this kind of behavior, and this kind of behavior will breed copycats. Only your refusal to be part of the performance will close the show. Please, close the show.

  BitterArtBitches.com

  Monday, October 7, 2013

  by Cilla

  Last night we bore witness to an ascendancy the likes of which we are not apt to see again in many years. The Hollow Girl officially said Get the fuck outta here to poseurs like PSY, a chubby no-talent who wasted our time and whose only wisdom was Whop. Whop Whop. Whop Whop. I was totally gobsmacked by the Hollow Girl, who changed course from her intensely personal, parent-inflicted self-hating rants to a kind of still life, masochistic Kabuki. Her brilliant fucking use of clichéd symbolism was outstanding. The metal pole as phallus. The rope and tape as the restraints of a male-dominated society still bent on the subjugation of women. The ball gag to shut up those who would fight the power and as a reference to the male preference for women as exclusively sexual objects: silent, pliant, obedient. The fiercely tight rope a sign of male desperation at the sense of loss of control. The blood as the blood of a martyr, as menstrual blood, as blood of the whipped slave. But by far the most intriguing and poignant bit of theater was the detail of the photo at her bound feet. The woman in the photo, her identity, her true nature obscured by strips of black tape. The tape cannot be removed, her nature cannot be revealed until the Hollow Girl herself is freed from the restraints of male dominance. Is the identity of the woman in the photograph of any importance? Maybe not, but I confess to a desperate need to know who she is and to see her face. Some day I hope to kneel before the Hollow Girl and kiss her rope-burned thighs. I am hers.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  The sun hung low in the sky over the eastern jaws of Long Island, a veil of haze cooling its bright orange to a sickly, pale yellow. Here at the western tip of the island, in the other world that was Brooklyn, my breath made white smoke in the crisp morning air. A sad chorus line of freshly fallen leaves cartwheeled past my shoes as I stepped to my car. In the hum of the cars along the Belt Parkway and in the pier-slapping waters of the bay I thought I could hear the faint, unpleasant snarling of winter. But I think I woke up looking for omens.

  I’d gotten out of the condo before Nancy got out of bed so I could go down to my car and check the messages on my phone. I’d made a promise to Nancy to find her daughter no matter what. I was apparently untrainable. I should have known not to make promises, that promises were quicksand and swampland. I figured I might find some sign in my messages that would give me a sense of how deep the swamp was into which I was about to wade. I prayed it wasn’t much more than shin deep. At my age, with my knees, I didn’t even do that well on dry land.

  There were a series of increasingly angry and desperate calls from Julian Cantor. The three calls from Vincent Brock were just desperate. Man, the guy really had it bad for Siobhan. I didn’t know Siobhan except as the Hollow Girl. I didn’t much like her. I was willing to bet she had slept with Vincent to prove a point to her father. Sex as an oblique weapon often seems like such a good idea, though it rarely is. The person you’re trying to injure usually walks away untouched and, in the end, it’s always the innocents who bear the scars. That was certainly the case here. Cantor had admitted to me that he knew all about Vincent and his daughter. Once Siobhan found out that her father was okay with her bedding his whipping boy, Vincent would be shit out of luck. I almost felt sorry for the poor schmo. I didn’t call either Vincent or his boss back. Allaying their fears was low on my list of priorities.

  There were other calls, too. One from my daughter Sarah. She had seen the post. Suddenly she didn’t sound quite as happy about her dad playing PI again as she had been last Monday when we’d said our so longs. I wasn’t happy about having made a promise to Nancy, but I couldn’t say that about the rest of it. The soul-numbing, suffocating routine of the wine business had always heightened the pleasure of working a case. That was the corollary to the knot in my gut: the excitement, the stumbling around in the darkness. Not all the money I’d made nor the success I’d achieved as a shopkeeper could touch that. None of it could even touch the shifts I’d spent walking a beat on the boardwalk in the heart of winter, pellets of wind-whipped sleet gnawing at my face, the smell of Nathan’s hot dogs beckoning. I remembered that during the worst of the chemo and radiation, when I could barely raise my head to vomit, that I would have given anything to be back there, back on the boardwalk, alone in the sleet.

  The other call I got was the one I hadn’t expected. It was from Siobhan’s agent, the tough old bird, Anna Carey. Her voice made me smile. I liked thinking about her there in her office, drinking and smoking, too old and stubborn to give up her job or bad habits. I used to hate stubbornness in people. Now I found that I admired it. She needed to talk to me, to see me and pronto. I had to call her back. Well, no, I didn’t, but since I was going into the city anyway, I’d add her to the list of people I meant to see while I was there.

  * * *

  I hadn’t been to the offices of D&D Security and Investigations, Inc. in many years. Although they now did the security for our New York City and Long Island st
ores, I hadn’t had much need to pay them a visit. D&D was established by two of my former employees at Prager & Melendez Investigations, the firm Carmella and I ran out of 40 Court Street in Brooklyn. When our marriage dissolved the business melted away with it. Brian Doyle—an ex-NYPD detective with great instincts and a bad tendency to take shortcuts—and Devo—Devereaux Okum, a Zen-like high-tech wizard—had set up their own shop in Lower Manhattan near the courthouses and federal buildings.

  Doyle was a night owl, but Devo was there when I stepped out of the elevator into their offices. He bowed to me slightly, showing the shiny black skin atop his perfectly shaven head. Although he had put on a few pounds in the years since we’d first met, Devo was still nearly two-dimensional. And when he gestured with his willowy arm toward his office, it was more a tree branch swaying in a gentle breeze.

  “Boss,” he said, nodding for me to sit in the chair across from him. Neither he nor Doyle had ever gotten out of the habit of calling me “Boss,” and I have to say I was honored by it. “What do you wish of me?”

  “First, I need to tell you I’m leaving the wine business. The details have yet to be worked out between Aaron and me, but you guys have no need to worry. I’ll make sure Aaron keeps you on.”

  “Are you ill again?”

  “It’s not that, Devo. It’s just my time to go.”

  “As you say. I will inform Brian. But this is not why you’ve come today.”

  “Have you ever heard of the Hollow Girl?”

  Devo’s eyes, large and hypnotic, grew wide with curiosity. His eyebrows tilted. “I have.”

  I slid the envelope Nancy had given to me across his desk. “I need deep background on all the people listed there. They are all connected in one way or another to the Hollow Girl.”

  The corners of his lips curled up in what passed for Devo’s broadest smile. “And by deep you mean—”

  “Deep.” This was our code word for accessing things that weren’t strictly kosher to access. “Very deep. Especially those names I highlighted. I also need background on the fallout from the Hollow Girl’s 1999 Valentine’s Day post where she faked her own suicide. I did some preliminary digging, but only what I could get from a Google search. Did you see last evening’s Hollow Girl post?”

  “Indeed. Disturbing.”

  “To her mother, especially.”

  “I can imagine so.”

  “But top priority is for you to give the Full Monty to—”

  He raised his hand to stop me. “What is a ‘Full Monty’?”

  Sometimes I swore Devo had been abandoned on earth by a UFO. Maybe they didn’t show British movies on his home planet. I was just happy not to have to explain who the Hollow Girl was.

  “It means to give it your full treatment. Do your magic,” I said. “About the posts themselves, is there anything about the set or the room or anything that gives any indication of where it was shot? Can you see who manufactures the rope? Stuff like that.”

  “Go on.”

  “That photograph at the Hollow Girl’s feet. I need you to see if you can identify the woman beneath the tape.”

  “That would truly be magic, Boss. The tape was strategically placed to cover precisely those features that facial recognition software is designed to focus on. The photo was also placed at an angle to the camera, which makes identification more challenging. The camera, at least, was of high quality.”

  “And, Devo ….”

  “Yes.”

  “I need it all like yesterday.”

  “Do you believe the Hollow Girl is in danger?”

  “Remember when you worked for me, those knots I used to get in my kishkas?”

  “Say no more.” He stood up, shooing me out of his office.

  There were no goodbyes. That was fine. Devo had work to do.

  As I left Devo’s office, other employees were filtering in to work, but Brian Doyle’s office was still dark. It was comforting to know that some things never changed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  I got the sense that Giorgio Brahms would’ve been more pleased to see his bookie’s legbreaker at the door than me. I was forced to divine his displeasure from the grump in his voice because his Saran Wrap surgery had severely limited his subtlety of expression. Unhappy to see me or not, he was polite enough to let me in. Again, I was surprised by the stark contrast between the Battle of the Bulge condition of the brownstone’s exterior, and the nicely furnished and appointed front parlor.

  “Coffee?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said, following him into the kitchen.

  The kitchen was caught between the condition of the parlor and the brownstone’s façade. The old plaster and lath construction had been torn off two walls and taken expertly down to the studs. Some new wiring and plumbing had been started but left unfinished.

  Giorgio tipped over his French press. “How do you take it?”

  “Milk, no sugar.”

  “Well, there is something we have in common,” he said, grumpiness still in his voice.

  I didn’t take the bait, just the coffee and thanked him. Sipped. I nodded my approval. We sat at the rickety kitchen table.

  “So, I suppose I have you to thank for siccing the police on me.”

  I didn’t bother denying it. “I suppose you’re right. You had a connection to the guy, Giorgio. I wasn’t gonna withhold evidence from the cops for you. You sure as shit wouldn’t do it for me. But I did tell the Nassau cops I was pretty sure you had no connection to Anthony’s murder.”

  “Well, I guess I should be grateful for that. Let me kiss your ring,” he said, bitchy as could be.

  I waved my hands at him. “No rings. Too bad.”

  “So what are you doing here?”

  “Did you see Siobhan’s post last night?”

  “Pardon me, but no. I have a life. I’m not some prepubescent twelve-year-old girl, sitting by her computer, glued to the fucking Internet. Why do you ask?” As he posed the question, his eyes drifted over to the stripped walls. Unconsciously, he shook his head in a kind of disgust. He had retreated into his own world and mumbled something to himself.

  “What?”

  “Oh, sorry. I was just thinking aloud.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I noticed, but what about?”

  “Those damned walls. I hate them that way. If I knew how things were going to turn out, I wouldn’t have started the work in here.”

  “Have the work finished.”

  He turned his left palm up, rubbing his thumb across his other fingers. “You need money to do that and my source … forget it. Forget it. So, what do you want to know?”

  I asked him some more questions about Siobhan.

  No, he hadn’t seen Siobhan’s posts. No, he didn’t know where she was, nor did he care. His involvement with her had been facilitated by Millie McCumber. Yes, he confessed to wishing she had been his client and admitted that he had tried to persuade her to leave Anna Carey for him. But with Millie dead, he had lost interest in Siobhan. The more he talked about Millie, the angrier he seemed to get. He didn’t know anything about Anthony Rizzo except that he preferred catching to pitching and that the minute he orgasmed, he had his hand out for money. He didn’t know anything about any steroids or mobbed-up Russian brothers. What he did know was that he wanted me to finish my coffee and get out of his house. Even as he made that sentiment known to me, he couldn’t take his eyes off the walls.

  Back in my car, I called Michael Dillman’s office. When Giorgio was talking about his lack of funds to finish the construction, an image of Dillman in his fancy office came into my head. It struck me that when I’d spoken to Dillman the first time, I’d been way too quick to take as gospel his version of events. And I was curious to hear his reaction to the Hollow Girl’s latest stunt. Me, I wasn’t much of a grudge holder. Grudges were like jealousy: They ate away at the grudge holder, not at the person you held the grudge against. On a TV show once, I heard a character say that jealousy was like you swallow
ing the poison, but waiting for the other person to die. A-fuckin’-men! But I knew I was an exception, that some people, maybe most people, just couldn’t let shit go. And as far as justification went, Dillman had plenty of it to continue to carry a grudge against the girl he’d known as Sloane Cantor. He and his family had paid a big price for the simple gesture of letting a friend use a photograph in an art project.

  And seeing Brahms looking at his kitchen walls had reminded me that a copious amount of money was a great resource. That someone with a lot of money could afford to buy an expensive camera and recreate the rooms from Sloane’s old house. That if someone was holding the Hollow Girl against her will, a vacation home would come in mighty handy. That if you didn’t want to use your vacation home, then having the money to rent space would come in even handier. Then when I got the receptionist at Dillman’s firm on the line, the knot in my gut tightened so that it nearly strangled me.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Dillman has taken a leave of absence,” she said, her voice cold. “May I put you in touch with the person now handling his clients?”

  Leave of absence, my ass. I may not have been a player, but I spoke the language. Michael Dillman was out on the street. You had to love Wall Street firms. No one with a title gets fired. That would make the firm look bad. Instead, they take leaves of absence or new positions elsewhere, or they just go walkabout.

  “That won’t be necessary. May I please speak to Mike’s secretary?”

  The receptionist did everything but offer me eternal life to try and dissuade me from speaking to Dillman’s former secretary. In the end she relented for fear of having to confess that Dillman had been shitcanned or quit. The secretary was more polite than the receptionist, but equally unwilling to discuss the truth of Dillman’s departure.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m an old friend of Mike’s from high school and I’ve been in London for many years. Do you know, is he at his vacation house?” His secretary’s momentary hesitation was answer enough. Yes. I pushed. “Do you know, is it the house his dad used to have in East Hampton?”