Hard Case Crime: Songs of Innocence (11 page)

I went back to the main Yahoo Mail page and entered “dorrie_burke” into the ID box. Sure enough, a line of asterisks appeared in the password box below. I clicked “Sign In.”

This Inbox was as full as the other had been empty, the messages dating back more than a year in some cases. There were messages from her mother, from Lane, from students whose names I recognized. There were automated reminders from Columbia’s bursar about tuition payments coming due and there was junk mail touting penny stocks and Cialis. I saw my own e-mail address crop up here and there, messages I’d sent Dorrie over the months; things about school and short personal notes, answers to questions she’d asked me and random links I’d forwarded her when I thought she might be interested. I’d sent one of the earliest messages in the folder (
Subject: Restaurant Dan?
) and one of the last—just a couple of days back I’d finally dumped on her all the materials I’d dug up for her writing project, the miscellaneous notes and photos and Google hits I’d managed to amass about her parents and sister. I clicked through all these messages one by one and it felt as if I was walking through her apartment again, looking at all her personal things. The difference being that there was no equivalent here to the drawer full of lingerie and massage oil. Online, she’d kept her lives nicely separate—Dorrie on one side of the wall, Cassie on the other.

But if I found nothing here that pointed to Cassie or her killer, to Ardo or Miklos or the massage clients she’d taken with her when she left Sunset, there was plenty that pointed to Dorrie. It was more personal than her apartment in some ways, seeing her through the messages she’d written and received, the ones we’d sent each other; she was present in a way she hadn’t been even when lying dead in the next room.

It was strange, the way the Internet and computers had transformed not just our lives but our deaths. Once, the effects the dead left behind were tangible objects, the things they’d touched and held and made. Today what you left behind was as likely as not to be bits of light on a computer screen: digital snapshots, electronic mail. I couldn’t help wondering how many of Yahoo’s millions of e-mail accounts at any given point were like this one, an unintended shrine to the recent dead, how many grieving loved ones found themselves sorting through the cooling traces of e-mail like archaeologists sifting for precious artifacts in the ashes of Pompeii. Or how many e-mail addresses ended up used not as tools for communication but as repositories for remembrances, people sending final farewells knowing there was no possibility of reply.

The last message in the Inbox was from Stu Kennedy. He’d sent it this afternoon from his home address, and it bore the stamp of his unsteady, one-fingered typing. “dear ggirl,” he wrote, “your turbulnt soul is now at rst, whre none csn do you harm.” I wondered whether he’d gotten an early start on his drinking today; under the circumstances, it wouldn’t have shocked me if he had.

I also remembered, suddenly, his suggestion that we hold a memorial for Dorrie. I’d promised to talk to Lane. I checked the time on my cell phone. It was late, but not too late, not on a Monday. A lot of GS students were only free to take classes after work hours and Lane’s last class didn’t start till eight.

I lingered for a moment, feeling like the worst sort of intruder but reluctant to let go. When I shut the laptop, it felt like I was drawing the lid closed on a coffin.

I pulled the plug from the outlet, coiled the cable loosely, and slid the computer into the knapsack. I punched Lane’s number into my phone, held it wedged between my shoulder and my ear. While my call went through, I shoved the knapsack back behind the box of spoons. Lane would say yes—holding a memorial was the sort of idea he’d like. It was too late to get everyone together tonight, but we could do it tomorrow. We could even invite Dorrie’s mother, I thought. Do it right.

Outside the Barking Boat, on the street, I weighed my options.

I wanted to go home. I was tired, my chest hurt, and whatever flow of adrenaline had kept me going so far today was draining out of me like dirty water from a tub. But I knew I couldn’t—couldn’t go home, couldn’t rest. Kurland would sit with Julie tonight, but what about tomorrow?

Somewhere in the city were the men who had attacked Julie and the man who had ordered it done. It was by no means a sure thing that he’d also ordered Dorrie’s death, but for now that was my best hypothesis. Meaning that he was the man I had to find. So he was a murderous bastard—so what? I’d dealt with murderous bastards before. You did what you had to. That’s what it meant to be—

To be what, I asked myself, a former private investigator? I could almost hear Leo’s voice, admonishing me: No one’s paying you. It’s not your job anymore. You don’t have to do this.

But the image of Dorrie came back to me, her body resting silently in the still water, her eyes closed, and I could hear her voice, I could feel her arms on my shoulders, her tears on my cheeks. Two days ago she was alive, two days ago she was in the world, and today she wasn’t, and it was because some son of a bitch had decided he liked it better that way. I couldn’t let someone do that and get away with it. I couldn’t. That wasn’t what it meant to be a detective. That’s what it meant to be a human being.

There used to be a big Hungarian neighborhood on the Upper East Side, just below where the Germans settled in Yorktown. Before their divorce, my parents sometimes took me there to visit the pastry shops with their yeasty smells and their glass cases filled with logs of strudel and wedges of chocolate
kuglof.
It was a small neighborhood now, almost all traces of ethnicity erased, but you could still see the last tenacious remnants clinging to their place in New York history. The Rigo bakery was gone, and so was the Red Tulip, and Mocca, and Tibor Meats, and the hole-in-the-wall newsstand that sold foreign-language newspapers in Hungarian and Romanian and Czech. In their place were a Dunkin’ Donuts, a Pottery Barn, and a Greenpoint Savings Bank. But up north the Heidelberg was still serving wurst and sauerbraten to septuagenarians who whispered behind their hands with Teutonic pride about the Steuben Day Parades of their youth, back when being German really meant something, and in the once thoroughly Magyar blocks below you could still find one bakery bravely turning out
dobos torte
and
kifli
and one butcher shop window strung with long links of sausage the color of paprika.

There was also one Hungarian church left, and one dim Hungarian bar. In defiance of long-standing zoning rules they shared a street corner and as I exited the taxi I’d caught outside the Barking Boat I saw a heavy-featured older man leave one for the other. The church for the bar, naturally; he had some sinning to do before he’d feel the need for further repentance.

They might have known Ardo at the church—or for that matter at the bakery or the butcher shop—but it was the bar I went to. There was a small crowd, eight or nine men talking at full volume in a tongue whose every syllable sounded alien, one or two in the corners silently nursing tall glasses of beer. The walls had pottery jugs hanging from nails and the Hungarian tricolor—red, white and green—was draped over a cherrywood highboy. Walking in here you didn’t feel like you were on the upper east side of Manhattan. Except for the backward neon letters spelling “Miller Lite” in the window, you might have been in Budapest.

The heavy-featured man I’d seen on his way in turned out to be the bartender. He was hanging his windbreaker on a hook by the cash register when I took an open stool and signaled with a finger to get his attention. I passed my last two twenties across the bar.

His accent wasn’t Bela Lugosi thick, but it was close. “What you want?” he said.
Vot you vont?

“An introduction,” I said. “I want to find a man named Ardo.”

His fingers closed slowly around the money. “There’s many men named Ardo,” he said. “It’s a common name.”

“Only one Ardo someone would pay for an introduction to,” I said.

“You sure about that?”

“Pretty sure,” I said.

“What’s his last name?”

I’d assumed Ardo was his last name. “I don’t know. Some people call him Black Ardo.”

“Ardo Fekete,” he said. He pushed the bills back across the counter to me. “You don’t need no introduction to him.”

“Why not?”

“Young man, I think you should drink a beer and go,” he said. “What you like, Beck’s, Heineken, Miller? Or we got Dreher, you want something Hungarian.” He was trying to sound casual, but his tension was obvious and the accent made his voice ominous:
You vont sumting Hongeiryen.
I noticed his eyes slide briefly to the left, then back. There was no one sitting next to me. But there were people behind me. I didn’t turn to look.

“This man, Ardo,” I said, “he hurt a friend of mine badly. Another friend of mine is dead. Today a man with a gun chased me through a tunnel and I got this for my troubles.” I lifted the tail of my shirt, let him see the bandages. “I need to talk to him.”

“What you need”—
vot you nihd
—“is to go home and lock your door and be glad you don’t got worse than that.”

“That’s what I keep hearing,” I said. “But I can’t spend my life behind a locked door.”

“You want to have a life to spend,” the bartender said, “you’ll walk out right now.” He put his hand on my forearm to emphasize the point. It was heavy, like a block of wood. I lifted it off, took my money back.

“I’m pretty sure someone here can help me. If you won’t.”

“Mister,” he said quietly, “this is not a game. You gonna get yourself killed.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But I’m not walking away. I don’t let people get away with murder.”

“You don’t let...?” he said. “Do you hear yourself? People get away with murder every day.”

“Not of my friends,” I said.

He leaned close, so that I could hear but no one else. “You’re young. You’re American. You don’t know. During the war...you know which war I mean?”

A Hungarian man in his seventies? I knew which war he meant.

“I was on Széchenyi Utca, the street where my family had a house,” he said. “This was 1944. I saw them take my sister, the Arrow Cross, they took her to the Danube, put a gun to her head, and they shot her, just like that.” He made a gun of his forefinger and thumb, touched his fingertip to my temple, pushed gently. “You say you don’t let. It’s not up to you to let or not let. There are things you can’t stop, and you can’t punish either. You understand? The Arrow Cross soldiers, I wanted to kill them—I wanted to
kill
them. But I knew better than to try.”

“You were a child,” I said. “You must’ve been—”

“That’s right. I was twelve years old, with a six-years-old brother to take care of, and if I’d done anything, we’d both be dead too. Floating in the Danube with our sister. So I walked away. I took my brother’s arm and we walked away.”

“That’s awful,” I said.

“What they did to our sister? Or that I walked away?”

“You were twelve.”

“And you’re what, twenty-four? Twenty-five? A bullet kills you just the same. Listen to what I am telling you. You’re a young man, you got a life ahead of you. Walk away.”

There was a part of me that wanted to. It was the part of me that had walked away three years ago while Murco Khachadurian and his brutal son were climbing upstairs to Miranda’s apartment. I’d known what they were going to do. I’d made it possible for them to do it. In that instant I’d even thought I wanted them to do it. But I’d been dreaming about it ever since, reliving it every night. You can’t walk away from some things.

“I appreciate what you’re trying to tell me,” I said. “Really. I do.”

“But you won’t do it.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t.”

I pushed back the stool I was on, walked to the center of the room. There was a table with one empty chair. I pulled it out, stood on the seat. I took Jorge Ramos’ wallet from my pocket. Held it up over my head. Conversations petered out one by one.

“I have something here for Ardo Fekete,” I said. “For Black Ardo. It belongs to a man he sent to kill me. Which of you can tell me where to find him?”

There was silence in the room. I’d never heard such silence. The dripping of the beer taps, the creak of a chair leg. Breathing. Shallow, shallow breathing.

“Which of you,” I repeated, “can tell me where to find him?”

I turned, took in the room. Looked every man in the face. At the far end was one of the men sitting alone. He still had half a glass of beer and as I watched he drank it down. He set the glass down on his table with a crack that sounded like a gunshot.

He raised his hand. He had the longest fingers I’d ever seen.

Miklos rose from his seat, came forward. Even standing on the chair, I was only half a foot taller than him. He held his hand out, that enormous mitt like a basketball player’s, and I dropped the wallet on his palm. He didn’t look at it. His eyes were locked on mine.

Suddenly I felt hands at my elbows, gripping tightly, lifting me into the air. More hands at my back, on my shoulders. They set me jarringly on the floor. Then a piece of heavy fabric came down over my face. A bag, maybe burlap. It stank of spilled whiskey and wet rope. Someone cinched it at my throat, the drawstring digging into my skin. I felt a hand on my chest, pressing, turning me around, then around again. My head spun. I tried to say something but I couldn’t make myself heard. The bag was muffling my voice, blurring it.

I shouted, “I’m a private investigator. The police know where I am—” But even to me, the words were unintelligible, echoing inside the bag. My face was sweating and I was finding it hard to breathe. I felt myself steered across the floor, then down a pair of steps. For an instant, it was cooler—I felt a breeze.

I had no sense of direction, hardly even a sense of time. How far did we walk? Led through the dark, my nose filled with the stink of damp burlap, my heart pounding against my sore ribcage, I couldn’t say. We walked. That’s all I knew.

After a time, I was led by the wrist across a short distance—were we still outside?—and then along an echoing corridor and down a flight of stairs, stumbling twice. Only the grip on my arm kept me from falling.