Hard Case Crime: Songs of Innocence (19 page)

“Good,” she said. She paused. “He’s not good person.”

“Lady,” I said, “you’ve said a mouthful.”

When Lisa finished cleaning me up, I cautiously stepped out into the main room. The lights were even lower than before; some of the candles had gone out and one or two were guttering. There was no one in sight. I looked in the sauna, and it was empty. A clock on the wall said it was almost two in the morning. I was sure there were a dozen beautiful girls on call somewhere, just like Julie had said, but for now I had the place to myself.

That made the first priority taking a shower, my first in days. I hung my robe on a hook, turned the knobs under one of the showerheads, and ran my arms and legs under the spray, trying to keep the bandages around my torso as dry as possible. I wrapped a towel around the bandages and soaped myself down, felt relief as sweat and grime sloughed off me. They had a small table set up by the showers with various amenities—Q-Tips, cotton balls, mouthwash, toothpaste, disposable razors. I brushed my teeth, spat the residue on the tile floor, watched it swirl into the drain. I gargled, spat.

I unwrapped a razor, shot a handful of foam into my palm and lathered up. The mud mask had softened my skin and the stubble came off easily. I shaved twice, once with the grain and once against it. Then I eyed myself in the mirror over the table, ran a finger through my hair. It wasn’t especially recognizable—it wasn’t like Steve Martin’s shock of white, or a mullet, or anything else you could easily describe in an APB report, but it was mine and I was sure they’d found a way to describe it. And unlike the rest of my appearance it was one thing I could easily change. I wondered briefly if they had any hair dye around here—but it was a spa, not a salon, and with a principally male clientele, I couldn’t imagine they’d have much demand for it. Then I remembered the man who’d exited the steam room when I’d been getting my tour, the one with the shaved head.

Well, if I wanted to look different.

I found Lisa, back in the meditation room. I asked her if they had any scissors, made scissor gestures with my hands. She returned a minute later with two pairs, one a miniature from a manicure set, the other a pair of barber’s shears, the sort with the extra curved bit that hooks onto your pinky. I took them both.

Standing in front of the mirror, I lifted my hair in fist-fuls, cut it off as close to the scalp as I could. When I was done, I looked like a cancer survivor halfway through chemo. I hid the patchwork clumps of stubble under a thick layer of shaving cream, unwrapped a new razor, and went at it with slow, careful strokes.

I’d never shaved my head before. You can say all you like about Michael Jordan making it sexy, and before him Yul Brynner and Telly Savalas, but on me it looked terrible, and not just because I kept nicking myself. Halfway through, I wished I’d never started. But it was a little late to back out then.

I stuck my head under the shower, washed off, looked in the mirror and attacked the few spots I’d missed. When it was done, I toweled off, slapped on some lotion, and turned away from my reflection. This wasn’t about beauty. This was about survival.

I looked at the clock again. Half past two. Still lots of time to kill.

I went into the steam room. My lenses fogged up immediately and when I took my glasses off it was no better—I couldn’t see anything through the thick white mist. But that was good. It meant no one else who might happen to walk in at three or four or five in the morning could see me either.

I settled in. I’d stay as long as they’d let me. I wasn’t bothering anyone, they had more than two hundred dollars of my money, the place was empty—they had no reason to kick me out anytime soon. And when they finally did, I thought, running my palm along my strange, naked scalp, when I showed my face on the street again, I wouldn’t be showing the same face the cops were looking for. It’d take two looks, not one, to recognize me.

It wasn’t much. But it would have to do.

The Food Emporium was where I’d been told to expect it. I looked around at all the buildings along Second Avenue as the cab pulled up to the corner. Lots of three-and four- and five-story holdovers from the turn of the century—the previous century—when this whole area, the east fifties near the river, had been an Irish slum. Back before the El came down, back before John D. Rockefeller bought up 17 acres of land that had once held slaughterhouses and, with no sense of irony whatsoever, donated it to the United Nations to use for their headquarters, certainly long before Stephen Sondheim and Katharine Hepburn and Kurt Vonnegut had decided the little buildings would make quaint and comfortable private residences, they’d been home to brawling generations of workingmen and their mates. Hints of this history still lingered—on this one block alone, a man with a taste for whiskey could bend an elbow at Jameson’s or Murphy’s or Clancy’s or the St. James Gate Publick House. Or he could buy microgreens and ten flavors of mustard at Food Emporium. You pick your poison.

I was wearing a new shirt—two new shirts, actually, a button-down in white polyester over a cotton wifebeater, each only $4.99 at the import/export store closest to Vivacia. I’d dropped my old shirt in a cardboard vegetable box that was waiting for garbage pickup at the curb and stepped out into the street to flag down the first cab I’d seen. It was just past noon. I’d managed to stay at Vivacia till the lunch-hour crowd began showing up; by the time the staff had started hinting I’d overstayed my welcome it had been time for me to leave anyway. I’d snatched a bit more sleep in the meditation room in the early hours of the morning, and though I wasn’t well rested, exactly, I felt as though I ought to be able to face the day.

But the first thing I saw when I stepped out of the cab shot that all to hell.

It was a newspaper vending box, the front page of today’s
New York Post
staring at me through the glass. Me staring at me, I should say: They’d dug up my mug shot from when I’d been arrested on suspicion of murder three years back. The headline next to my face said “gay slay?”

The
Daily News,
in the box immediately to the right, had gone with “killing on carmine street.” Their article began on the cover, and phrases from it jumped out at me:
...the victim, Jorge Garcia Ramos, 27, of Jackson Heights...found after an anonymous 911 call tipped police off...Blake, 31, has a record of two prior arrests...viciously slain...

I dropped a quarter in the
Post
box, pulled out every copy in there, seven or eight of them, and then took the one clipped to the inside of the glass as well. I dumped them all in the garbage can at the corner, taking care to make sure they landed face down. Then I went back and did the same with the
News.
It was a futile gesture, even a dangerous one, because what if someone had noticed me doing it and wondered why, but I did it and it made me feel better. Stupidly. There were hundreds of these boxes around the city. I couldn’t empty them all.

At least, I told myself, I’d had a full head of hair in the photos they’d run. And my old glasses, with the thicker, darker plastic frames. Now I wore sleek little wire rims and had a shaved head, and nobody could possibly tell I was the same person they’d read about over their corn flakes and toast. Jesus.

The sidewalk was packed, swarming with office workers on lunchtime errands, and every face I looked in looked back at me with what I was suddenly sure was a knowing stare, as if they were all mentally comparing me to the mugshot they’d seen in the paper. I tried to keep my face averted; but how, in a crowd like this? A woman walked past, talking furtively into her cell phone, and I couldn’t help the paranoid impression that she was talking about me, telling an eager 911 operator where I could be found. I ducked into a payphone, grateful for the small degree of privacy its narrow metal walls afforded, and dialed the phone number I’d gotten from Rodeo the night before. It rang three times before a woman said, “Hello?”

I struggled to remember the name I’d given last night. I couldn’t. “I have an appointment with Sharon at one,” I said.

“Is this Douglas?” Douglas. That was it.

“Yes,” I said.

“Where are you?”

“Right here,” I said. “At the Food Emporium. Where the woman I spoke to said I should—”

“On the payphone?”

“That’s right.”

“I need you to turn around, honey.”

I turned, reluctantly. The building across the way had sixteen windows. No telling which one she was in. No telling who might be looking out the others.

“All right,” she said after a pause that probably lasted less no more than a few seconds but felt endless. “You’ll go to 260 East 51st, ring the bell for
1FW
.”

“
1FW
,” I said.

“See you,” she said and hung up.

For a moment I thought about whether I should go, whether it was too risky. What if she had read the paper this morning? But it didn’t take me long to realize that the risks were much worse for me out here. If nothing else, given what she did for a living, she’d be less likely to call the cops than the people around me now.

I found the building and she buzzed me in. She was waiting just inside, standing in the doorway of the front, west apartment. She was about my height, slim, with brown hair tied back in a tight ponytail and a spray of freckles across her cheeks. She looked like she was in her late thirties—maybe even early forties, though that could just have been the toll the job had taken on her. She had on a thin summer dress and her nipples were tenting the fabric thanks to the cold air I’d let in from the street.

I waited for a moment of recognition, a sign of fear, some indication of danger, but I didn’t see any.

“Sharon?” I said.

She held a finger to her lips and didn’t say anything till she’d ushered me inside and closed the door behind me. Even then she spoke softly. “Sorry, I just don’t want to bother the neighbors. We’ve had some complaints.”

“I understand,” I said, quietly. “That’s fine.”

“Want to get comfortable?”

Even if I’d wanted to, the apartment wouldn’t have made it easy. It was tiny, even for a studio. There was just room enough for a massage table and a single folding chair, barely any other furniture; the phone was on the floor under the table.

But that was fine. I wasn’t here to get comfortable. I sat in the chair.

“Sharon,” I said. “A woman you used to know suggested I contact you. She calls herself Rodeo. I don’t know if that’s what she called herself when she worked here.”

“Sure. I remember Rodeo. She’s a good kid.”

“She told me you might remember another woman who worked here. A friend of mine. Her name was Dorrie Burke. You might have known her as Cassandra.”

As I said this, Sharon’s hand crept up to her mouth and she backed away. She couldn’t go far, not with the massage table behind her.

“I’m not here to get anyone in trouble,” I said, “I’m just trying to help, trying to find out what happened to—”

“You’re John Blake, aren’t you?”

Damn. “Listen, whatever you read in the paper, it’s not true. I swear.”

“The paper?” she said. “What paper?”

“The
Post,
the
News
—wherever you read my name.”

“I didn’t read your name,” she said.

“Then how do you know who I am?” I said.

“Dorrie told me,” she said. “She said you’d find me.”

“She what?”

“You’re the detective, right? She told me...oh, man.” She walked around to the other side of the table, bent over to open a small cabinet wedged in next to the radiator. When she came into view again, she was holding a laptop computer in one hand and a handbag in the other. The laptop was connected to the wall by a phone cable. She set it down on the massage table and reached into the handbag, took out a slightly creased envelope. The envelope had something written on it in blue ink. I couldn’t read it because Sharon’s hand was shaking.

“She told me she was going away. She said you might try to find her, and that when you were looking for her you might find me. And that if you did, I should give you this.” She held the envelope out to me. I could read what was written on it now. It was my name. The handwriting was Dorrie’s.

“You know she’s dead, right?” I said it softly. I’d have said it that way even if she hadn’t told me about the neighbors.

“Yes.” It came out almost like a sob. “I know.”

“How long have you had this?”

“Since Saturday,” she said.

“Why didn’t you get in touch with me? Why didn’t you tell me about it?”

She shook her head, back and forth, kept shaking it as she spoke. “I tried. Your phone number’s not listed.”

“You could have tried up at Columbia.”

“I did. I went there on Monday afternoon. I waited for more than an hour. You weren’t there.”

“You could have left a message for me.”

“I
did
leave a message. I left it on your desk.”

I thought of the pile of pink message slips I’d seen on my desk. None had looked obviously urgent or important. “What did you write?”