Hard Case Crime: Songs of Innocence (20 page)

“My name and number,” she said, “and that it was about Dorrie.”

All the messages had been about Dorrie. Everyone had been calling with condolences. Another name, another phone number—it hadn’t stood out.

“I’m sorry, Sharon” I said. “I didn’t realize—”

“It’s okay,” she said.

I took the envelope from her. As I ran my thumb under the flap to break the seal, I thought of Dorrie licking it shut. This envelope must have been one of the last things she’d ever touched. It was probably the closest I’d ever be to her again.

There was a single sheet of paper inside.

John,

Please, please, if you’re reading this I know you’re trying to understand why I’m gone, but don’t. Darling, don’t. Sharon doesn’t know, and she can’t know, and you can’t know either. For your sake, not mine.

You’ve been so good to me, John. You deserve someone better than me. Find someone. Or don’t, if that’s not what you want — but forget you ever knew me. Please. I don’t want you hurt.

I know how badly you must want answers, but please, John, this once, just let it go.

D

I folded the page, tucked it back into its envelope, then saw the look on Sharon’s face and took it out again. Reading it wouldn’t make her happy, but not reading it would be worse.

She handed it back a moment later.

Let it go,
she’d written. Like hell I’d let it go.

The desperation in Dorrie’s voice, the fear—I could hear it as if she were standing next to me speaking.

“Sharon, I need to know exactly what she told you,” I said. “When she said she was ‘going away.’ Did she say where she was going? Why was she going?”

Sharon was shaking her head again. “I don’t know. She didn’t say. She just said she was going somewhere far away. But isn’t it obvious what she meant?”

“What?”

“Well...” Sharon stopped. “You know. She killed herself. That’s where she was going. Far away.”

“That’s very poetic,” I said, “but there’s one thing wrong with it. She didn’t kill herself. Someone made it look that way, but that’s not what happened.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” I said. “Really. And based on what you’re telling me and what she wrote, she obviously knew she was in danger. That’s the only reason she’d leave in a hurry and not tell anyone where she was going.” What I meant was: not tell me. “The question is who she was in danger from. Did she say anything at all...?”

“No. Nothing.”

“When did she say she was planning to leave?”

“Right away. That’s why she had me forward her mail for her.”

“Her mail?”

She pointed to the laptop. “She asked me how to set it up so that all her mail would come to my address. I showed her how to do it, from the Options screen. Yahoo makes it pretty easy.”

“You’re talking about her e-mail.”

“Yes.”

“Show me.”

She opened the machine, brought up a Web browser. The familiar Yahoo mail page appeared, the same one I’d looked at in Michael’s storeroom. I couldn’t see the password Sharon typed in, but the address was “hotsharon85.” She angled the screen toward me.

“See?” She pointed. “I made a folder for her mail, showed her how to set it up so her mail would get forwarded. This way each time someone sends a message to her, Yahoo sends it here instead. She’s gotten, let’s see, ninety-six messages, all since Saturday. I haven’t deleted any of them.”

I glanced through the list. Lots of spam, lots of unfamiliar addresses. But in the middle of the list a familiar address stood out. Mine. I clicked on it and my message came up, the one I’d sent on Monday.
This is a test,
it said.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why did she want you to get her mail?”

“She said she didn’t know when she’d be coming back. She didn’t want messages piling up, she didn’t want her customers to get angry when nobody responded to them. Of course when I read about...about what happened, I figured she was really just setting things in order before...well, you know.”

“Before killing herself.”

“Yeah,” Sharon said softly. “It was like she was giving away her things. Sending her customers to me because she knew she wasn’t going to need them anymore.”

“That’d be true if she just moved away, too,” I said. “She wouldn’t need customers in New York if she’d gone to the other side of the country.”

“That’s what I figured she meant at first, sure.”

And it’s what I figured now. She’d decided to run, so she put her customers in the hands of someone she felt she could trust to service them, to keep them warm. It seemed to me it was a clear sign that she’d planned to come back at some point, because otherwise why bother?

Of course, Dorrie had done more than just forward her mail. She’d also taken the trouble to clean out her system, to erase all her old messages—every message she’d ever written, every message she’d ever received, all gone. Like leaving an apartment broom-clean when you moved out. No personal items for the new tenant to find. But in this case, who was the new tenant she was afraid of? Who had she been afraid might one day be poking through the old e-mail she’d exhanged with her clients?

“Have you talked to any of her customers yet?”

“I’ve seen one so far. I’ve written back to a few.”

I wondered if any of the ones Sharon had written to were the same regulars Susan was trying to contact right now. It could be awkward—some guy hears from two separate women, each claiming to be a former colleague of Dorrie’s. On the other hand, who could say, maybe that would be exactly the extra pressure it took to drive Dorrie’s killer out into the open.

“Sharon,” I said, “have you read all these messages?” She nodded. “Were there any that struck you as odd or suspicious...?”

“They’re pretty much what you’d expect. A couple of guys saw the articles about her in the paper and wrote to say
Was that you?
or
I hope that wasn’t you,
and I wrote back to say I’m sorry but it was. There was one...hang on.” She bent over the keyboard. “There was one I thought was a little funny. Sort of misspelled and rambling, like maybe the guy was drunk or high or something, but it was obviously someone who knew her, since he used her real name.” She found the message, brought it up on the screen.

I read it. I didn’t say anything.

“You see what I mean?”

I saw what she meant.

I didn’t know whether the man who wrote it was drunk when he typed it or just suffering from the condition that had made him switch from typing to dictation, but I sure as hell knew that rambling, misspelled style.

dorrrie, sweet grl, poor sweet girl, what man could willngky caus you grirf/ forgive me pls my importunate illjudgd attentions. my photo hid too mch but so did yrs dear girl so did yours

I rang the doorbell at the top of the steps, the steps I’d helped him up so often, sometimes giddy and stumbling myself, sometimes stone cold sober like I was right now. I’d cabbed it up to Morningside Heights, another twenty out of my pocket, and that on top of the eighty I’d forced on Sharon before I’d left. Not her fault I wasn’t the paying customer she’d been led to expect, and I didn’t want the house’s fifty percent to come out of her pocket.

I’d stayed long enough to scan the other 94 messages myself, one by one. I found it amazing how many men, when asked to supply a photo of themselves by a young woman over the Internet, responded by sending a digital snapshot of their penis. But then I’m mister vanilla, we’ve already established that.

One of the messages had come from Brian Vincent: “Cassie, I saw this piece in the Post, it looked like you—but it wasn’t, right? Hope not, girl. Don’t you ever do anything like that, understand?” None of the other addresses were ones I recognized. No sign of Mr. Adams, Mr. Lee, or Mr. Smith.

They weren’t much on my mind, though. Let Susan find them. I had Mr. Kennedy to deal with.

No one answered the door, even after I rang twice more and pounded on it with the side of my fist. It was a brownstone in a poor neighborhood; some instructors qualified for faculty housing but Stu didn’t and he couldn’t afford better than this. Two families shared the building with him, but apparently no one was home right now. I looked both ways down the empty street, saw no one coming from either direction, and rammed the door with my shoulder. I felt the impact in my chest, and it wasn’t a pleasure. But the door popped open, as I’d seen it do more than once when Stu couldn’t find or had forgotten his key. Old buildings, old doorframes, old doors. I told myself it wasn’t breaking and entering because I knew the man, which is the kind of logic that only makes sense when you badly need it to. I eased the door shut behind me, made sure the latch caught, then went to Stu’s apartment at the back of the first-floor hallway. I found his spare key where he always stashed it, under the umbrella stand in the corner. Let myself in, turned on the lights.

He was in bed, asleep, breathing heavily through his nose. A bottle of Bushmills stood half empty and uncapped on the table. Beside it, a 1970s-vintage tape recorder, a fist-sized microphone attached to it by a frayed cable. Some handwritten notes on yellow ruled paper, the line of his writing shaky and weak. He had a comforter pulled up to his chin, which was dotted with the beginnings of white stubble. I fought the momentary urge to cover his face with the extra pillow beside him, this man I’d called my friend, this man with his
importunate illjudgd attentions.

“Get up,” I said. “Up.
Up.”
I shook him by the shoulder. His eyes popped open and I saw as recognition slowly settled into them.

“John?” His voice was thick, from sleep and drink. “What are you doing here? What happened to your hair?”

“When was the last time you saw Dorrie, Stu?”

He sat up in bed, his arms thin and pale, his chest hollow beneath his yellowed undershirt. He rubbed a palm across his cheek, eyed the whiskey bottle behind me on the table. He made a motion toward it with his head.

“Will you join me, John?”

“When did you see her last?”

He stood, unsteadily, walked to the table, tilted the bottle toward the tumbler beside it. I saw his arm shake as he raised the glass to his mouth. He wasn’t facing me when he spoke.

“You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t already know,” he said.

“It was on Saturday, wasn’t it?”

“No. No, it was on Thursday. Thursday night.”

“But not in the classroom.”

“No,” he said, “most definitely not in the classroom. How did you find out, John?”

“It wasn’t hard with you sending e-mails to every address she had.”

“Ah,” he said. He pulled out a chair at the table, sat. Put the glass down. “I suppose that was unwise. One forgets that these things are not the ephemera they appear to be.”

“What happened, Stu? What did you do to her?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I did nothing to her. And yet I did too much.”

I felt pressure building up in my chest, in my arms. I could feel my fingers trembling. “Start talking, Stu, or god help me, I’m going to hurt you. I’ve had enough. I’ve had too much. I can’t take any more.”

“John. Please calm down.”

“Did you kill her, you son of a bitch? Did you kill her?”

He creased his eyes shut. When he spoke, it was in a low murmur. “I’ve asked myself that question a thousand times. I don’t think so, John. I don’t think so.”

“What does that mean?”

He paused before answering, as if collecting his thoughts. “You know what Dorrie did for a living, John?”

“Yes.”

“Yes. Of course. How could you not, you two were so close.” He sipped at his drink, for courage. “Well, I didn’t. I just saw an advert on the machine from a young woman who sounded like good company for an old bachelor on a cold night. I pecked out an e-mail in reply—carefully, carefully, one little letter at a time. Oh, it took me forever. But these women won’t respond to a message that looks ragged or in any way distressing. They’re quite choosy—as, I suppose, they need to be.”

I pictured Stu on his computer in the office, scanning through the ads on Craigslist, finding himself tempted by several and finally responding to Dorrie’s. Was it the phrase “well educated” that had attracted him? I couldn’t see him being drawn in by “tantric masseuse.” Though who the hell could say. Before this, I wouldn’t have pictured this man hiring a massage girl at all.

“When I came to the door, she was startled to see me. And so she should have been. But no more startled than I was to see her. In her photo...she’d covered her face with a hat, John, how could I have known?”

“And
your
photo, Stu? What did you cover your face with?”

“Time.” He leaned over the table to where a bookcase stood against one wall. With one finger he tugged a slim volume off the shelf.
Anatomy of a Youth Misspent.
His second book, out of print since the year it came out. The back cover showed a young man in ascot and shades and a sleek Vandyke, trying to look awfully continental and chic in the style of the day. It had been taken before I’d been born.

“For Christ’s sake,” I said.

“It’s the best photo I have of myself.”

“It looks nothing like you!”

“Thus does vanity blunt the sharpened edge of truth,” he said. “In the words of a better writer than I.”

“Fine,” I said. “She placed an ad, you answered the ad, you met at the door, you were both mortified. What happened?”

“I invited her in, just to sit, to talk. To take the edge of the shock off. I was there in my robe, she in what I suppose were her working clothes, rather daringly cut under her coat. There was no way to disguise what we had each intended. We might have cried or laughed; she seemed willing, thank heaven, to laugh.

“We took a drink. I asked her about her work, about why she’d never used it in her writing—what a fascinating set of stories she must have had to tell. At which point, I recall, she asked me how I would feel if she told this particular story, the story of meeting me, and I allowed that I’d prefer if she didn’t.