Hard Case Crime: Songs of Innocence (16 page)

“John
—
!
” I heard a sharp intake of breath.

“Di?”

“Where are they? What have you done with them?”

“Where are who? What are you talking about?” I said.

“Julie! And Joey, goddamn it—”

“I can tell you where Julie is. I don’t know any Joey. Would you please just let me up? I can’t talk down—”

The buzzer buzzed and I stepped inside. The elevator slowly hauled me to the fourth floor and I knocked on Sunset’s door. Three brisk footsteps approached on the other side and I heard the locks turning.

“Di, listen, I—” I said as the door swung open.

Then she was in front of me with her arm raised and the canister of pepper spray in her hand and she pushed down with her thumb and shot me full in the face.

In sixth grade I had perfect vision; then the summer came and something happened, and when we all showed up for the first day of junior high in the fall, I was four inches taller, my voice was an octave deeper, and I’d turned into a nerd, at least by outward appearance. Not once since then, not one day, had I been grateful for needing to wear glasses. Not once.

Until now.

I whipped my hand up and knocked Di’s arm away. I heard the canister hit the floor and bounce away. I couldn’t see what I was doing—my lenses were coated with a slick, oily film that turned the room into a prismatic haze, Di into a dark, featureless shape. My cheeks and forehead were burning and I could feel the spray running down my skin. I brushed the back of one hand across my forehead to stop any of it from getting in my eyes.

“What are you doing?” I said. “Jesus, Di, Julie’s fine. She’s in the hospital, but she’s okay. And—” I carefully lifted my glasses off my face, held them out at arm’s length. “Where’s the bathroom in this place? I’ve got to wash this stuff off.”

I saw her bend and lunge for a corner of the room. She had to be going for the canister. I quickly wiped the lenses of my glasses against my shirt and put them on again. “Di, stop it. I don’t know what you think I’m going to do to you, but I’m not, I promise.”

“You son of a bitch,” she said. Through the smears on my lenses I could see she had her arm up again. She came toward me and I circled around, trying to keep her a few steps away. “You motherfucking son of a bitch, where are they? Where’s Joey?”

“Who’s Joey?”

“My fucking boyfriend! You know who he is!”

“No I don’t.”

“I told her,” she said, and there were tears in her voice, “I
told
her not to go, I told her you’d pull some shit, but she said, ‘What’s the worst he can do to me in a public place?’ Like that makes a difference.”

“Di—”

“He called me. I told him to follow her, keep an eye on her, make sure she was okay, make sure you didn’t do anything to her, and he
called
me afterwards, said you grabbed her, dragged her into some
tunnel,
and when he followed you, you hit him with a fucking
two-by-four,
left him lying in the fucking
dirt...
”

My gut seized up as she spoke.

“Joey,” I said, “is that short for something?”

“Jorge!” she shouted.

Jorge.

I pictured Jorge Ramos as I’d first seen him, eating on the grass across from Buell Hall, looking in our direction from time to time. Then, when we moved, picking up his stuff and following, doing his conspicuous stretches. Then pulling his gun. But when? When had he pulled it? I remembered my conversation with Julie growing heated. She’d shouted at me; she’d slapped my hand away and said “Don’t touch me.” And I’d shouted at her. From yards away, could it have looked like I was threatening her? Especially to someone who’d been told I might?

And then he’d pulled his gun, and I’d grabbed Julie and run. She’d struggled, she’d screamed—
Let go of me! Get your fucking hands off me!
—and what had I done? I’d dragged her into a building and down a flight of stairs and into a tunnel underground.

What else was the man supposed to think was going on?

And now—

And now, thanks to me, he lay in my bed, the wound in his throat gaping. His last sight had been his blood geysering toward the ceiling of my room.

“Di, stop,” I said. I let my hands drop. Something in my voice must have gotten through to her, since she stopped circling, stopped making little lunges at me with the canister.

“Julie’s okay. She’s actually the one who hit... Joey. We thought he was trying to kill her—trying to kill both of us.”

“You thought he was trying to
kill
her? He was trying to protect her!”

“He had a gun,” I said. “He pulled it and came after us. We thought Ardo had sent him.”

“He brought the...I didn’t tell him to bring the gun!”

“Well, he brought it. And we thought what you’d have thought if you saw a man come after you with a gun.”

She shook her head. “Fuck.”

“But I promise you, he was okay when we left him,” I said. “Unconscious, but breathing. I took Julie to St. Vincent’s—she needed more surgery on her hand. That’s where she is now.”

“So where’s Joey?” she said. “He called me at work, but when I got home, he wasn’t there. He won’t answer his cell, I can’t find him anywhere.”

No, I thought, he won’t answer his cell. But you can find him somewhere. Right now, that would be the police morgue.

“Di, I’ll tell you what happened, but you’ve got to promise not to spray me—”

“Just talk.”

“Promise.”

She hesitated, then slammed the canister down on a shelf, walked five steps away from it. “Tell me what happened.”

I told her.

Samantha wasn’t working tonight, but another woman was, a tiny Latina with little teacup breasts and enormous eyes. This was Rodeo, only she corrected my pronunciation when I said it—“No, no, man, Ro-DAY-oh, like the drive, you know?” I said I knew. She got me a cold compress, which I used to mop my face. I washed my glasses twice, using Palmolive from the kitchenette, but they didn’t get completely clean. I wondered if they ever would.

Di had been crying, but Rodeo had gotten a compress for her, too, and now her face was set in stern lines, her eyes focused a thousand miles away. She was thinking about her daughter, I imagined, thinking about her job, about her life. Thinking about her dead boyfriend. I wondered if he’d been her daughter’s father. None of my business. Just that much worse if he had.

I’d told her Miklos and Ardo had killed him after tying me up in the church basement. I hadn’t told her of my role in the whole thing, about how I’d tossed Jorge Ramos to the wolves—to the lion—in order to keep him from devouring me. But I’d told her the rest, including how I’d found his body and how the police had found it minutes later, how the newspapers would be full of it tomorrow.

“Shit, man,” Rodeo said, “ ‘Spanic man found dead on Bedford Street, no paper’s gonna be full of that, ’cept maybe
El Diario.”

“Even if he’s found in a white man’s apartment?”

“In the Village?” Rodeo said. “They’ll just think it’s a gay thing.”

They might. I hated myself for it, but silently I was hoping she was right, that the city’s persistent racism would work in my favor, would keep the story buried on page 39 or 56 or nowhere at all.

“I’ll kill them both,” Di said in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice. She’d been saying things like this on and off for the past hour. She didn’t look at either of us as she said it. We might as well not have been there.

Then the phone rang, and since Di was very obviously in no condition to answer it, Rodeo ran to get it. When she returned she said, “It’s Willie. Little Willie. He’s here.” She put her hand on Di’s shoulder, snapped her fingers twice. Di turned her head, slowly, then stood and walked to the back room without saying anything.

Rodeo turned to me. “You stayin’ or goin’, man? You can’t be out here.”

“I’d like to ask you some questions. About Dorrie—Cassie, I mean. You going to be long?”

“With Little Willie?” She laughed. “Twenty minutes, tops. Man can’t last worth a damn.”

“Okay. I’ll be in the back. With Di.”

The buzzer buzzed then, and I went to the back room, closed the door behind me. Through the wall I heard the elevator chains dragging and clanking, then the elevator door sliding open and, moments later, Little Willie’s knock. I sat down in the folding chair next to Di’s, at a round plastic table scarred with cigarette burns all along its edge.

“Little Willie, huh?” I said.

“He’s a small man,” Di said. “With a large penis. John, why’d they do it? Why’d they have to kill Joey? He’d never done anything to them. Never. Nothing.”

I didn’t know what to tell her. Sometimes you lie through your teeth, to protect people, or yourself. Sometimes you just can’t. I didn’t have the energy to lie, so I took the coward’s way out and kept my mouth shut.

“And you...you say they had you tied up? How did you manage to get away?” There was more than a hint of accusation in her tone: Why are
you
alive when my boyfriend is dead?

“I just got lucky,” I said. Hearing Ardo’s voice in my head:
Yes. Just look at you. I’ve never seen anyone luckier.

“And why did you come here? Not to tell me about Joey—you didn’t even know who he was.”

“No,” I said. “I’m still trying to figure out who killed Dorrie. If it wasn’t Ardo or Miklos.”

“You think it wasn’t?”

“They say it wasn’t.”

“And you believe them?”

“They’re not shy about it when they kill people.”

“No,” she said. “They’re not shy.”

“Di, tell me the truth, was there anyone who had it in for Dorrie, anyone who didn’t like her? Any client who seemed at all, I don’t know, off or dangerous in any way?”

“Any
client who seemed off or dangerous? How about all of them?”

“That can’t be true,” I said. “You must get plenty of ordinary guys who are just bored, cheating on their wives or girlfriends.”

“Ordinary guys don’t pay two hundred dollars for a handjob,” she said, her voice cold. “We get the men who can’t get it any other way—fat ones, old ones, skin problems. We get the ones who like to make women crawl. The husbands who are too scared to hire an out-and-out hooker, so they do this instead and tell themselves it’s not really cheating. We get the men who get off on corrupting women, getting them to do things they don’t want to do. They’ll dangle extra money and see how far they can make them go. That’s the men we get. You ask me, every one of them’s just a small step away from picking up a knife and giving a girl five inches that way.”

“Maybe so,” I said. “But most of them never take that step. With Dorrie someone did. Were there any clients that gave her a hard time? Any that pressed her to do something and she said no?”

She closed her eyes. “Probably,” she said. “Nothing’s coming to mind.”

“How about regulars, people she took with her after she left. Julie told me she gave Dorrie the green light to take her clients with her. Do you know who they were?”

“I can’t help you, John,” she said. “I can’t. Not tonight. Not after what you told me.”

“I understand,” I said.

“We don’t keep records like that anyway—just first names. I’m sure there are some guys who haven’t been here since she left, but all I could tell you is ‘Steve’ or ‘Paul’—and anyway, who’s to say she’s the reason they haven’t come back? Maybe they just haven’t gotten horny again, or haven’t saved up enough money. You know?”

“Okay,” I said. And: “I’m sorry, Di. I’m really sorry.”

But she wasn’t listening. “I’m going to kill both of them,” she said, mostly to herself.

When I heard the front door swing shut and the elevator start its ponderous rise, I left the back room, drawing the door closed behind me. I met Rodeo coming out of the bathroom, wiping her hands on a paper towel.

She favored me with a conspiratorial smirk. “When that boy comes he really comes, you know what I’m saying?”

“Can’t say I do,” I said.

“Boom! One time, he shot himself in the eye, another time up the nose. Man! Least he tips well.” She balled up the paper towel, dropped it in a trash can. Shooed the cat out of the armchair and sat down. “How’s Di?”

“Like you’d expect,” I said. “Taking it hard.”

“Yeah, poor woman, losin’ her man like that.”

She didn’t sound too broken up about the whole thing.

“Tell me about Cassie,” I said. “Did you know her well?”

“Know her? We was like sisters.”

“Did she ever talk to you about the place she worked before coming here?”

“She didn’t need to talk to me about it—that’s where we met, at Mama Jay’s. On 51st.”

“That the same as Spellbound?”

She nodded. “Spellbound’s its real name. Mama’s just what we called it. ’Cause of the woman runs it. Ran it, I should say.”

“Ran it?”

“Yeah, she’s retired now. She was kind of forced out. Three stick-ups in one month, you know it’s not an accident. Way I heard it, first two times, they just took money, but the third time, they beat her up bad. Someone wanted her to get out of the business and eventually she said, okay, I’m gettin’.”