Hard Case Crime: Songs of Innocence (23 page)

I didn’t dare to watch openly, but I stole glances, watched out of the corner of my eye. I saw two workmen wheel the coffin up to the grave, move it from its gurney to the straps of the machine, then stand back to let the mourners come. I recognized Eva Burke, in a heavy black coat and hat, stocky and low to the ground. There was a tall man with white hair carrying a little book with a black cover—a bible, I supposed. He put his hand on Mrs. Burke’s back, and she shook it off roughly. Two younger men stood behind them, several paces back, looking uncomfortable in their Sunday suits. Relatives, maybe, or childhood friends. And one more woman, leaning on a cane. A teacher? An aunt? God knows.

When it blew toward me, the wind carried with it the sound of the service, soft words solemnly intoned. First the man spoke, his book open in his hands, then they all spoke, repeating together some useless, ancient formula.

I looked around. The place was almost empty—other than the mourners, the workmen, and me, I only saw one other man, perhaps another forty yards away in the opposite direction, pacing slowly beside a mausoleum, looking this way from time to time and then away again. The second time he did this—looked over at me and then, when he saw me watching, turned aside—my heart leaped and I considered making a hasty exit. Could the New York cops have found out where I was, radioed ahead to have someone pick me up here? But I told myself I was being paranoid. He stayed where he was and I stayed where I was, and between us the service droned to completion.

I heard it when the minister closed his bible, a crisp and final snap that rang in the still air. Then they filed off toward the main building, Eva Burke in the lead, the two young men bringing up the rear.

I walked up to the grave, hands in my pockets. The workmen stood aside as I approached, shovels in their hands, ready to start filling in the hole, eager to move on to the other tasks of the day. Their expressions held none of the phony sympathy you see in funeral home employees. This was their job, digging holes and then filling them in again, and it was cold and they wanted to get on with it. But they knew their place and waited for me to be done.

I stood at the foot of the trench they’d dug, looking down on the slightly bowed surface of the coffin, a simple cross carved into the wood. I’ve never known what to do at a graveside. You stand, you look. You don’t want to leave. I touched my fingers to my lips and held them out over the edge. Goodbye, I said. Goodbye.

I heard footsteps behind me. When I looked over, a man was standing next to me, wearing a tweed cap and a green windbreaker, his hands in the pockets as mine were. Under the cap, his black hair was starting to get a few sprinkles of salt to go with the pepper. He had an unkempt goatee and heavy sideburns and stood a full head shorter than me. He was the one who had been pacing by the mausoleum. At that distance I hadn’t recognized him, but now I did. I was a little surprised to see him here.

He said, “How did you know her?”

“We went to school together,” I said.

“Here in Philadelphia?”

“No. In New York.”

“Ah,” he said. Then: “I came in from New York, too.”

It was an odd comment, an awkward one. There was an uncomfortable invitation to intimacy in it, as if he was dying to unburden himself, to a stranger if necessary. I asked him the question I had a feeling he was waiting for me to ask. “How did
you
know her?”

I asked it even though I knew damn well he hadn’t known her, had never so much as held a single conversation with her, and not for lack of trying on her part either. One of the last times he’d even seen her had probably been a day like this one, twenty years before, when the grave yawning open and waiting to be filled by impatient workmen had been Catherine’s.

But he wanted so badly to be asked. So I did.

A pained smile slid onto his face. “I’m her father,” he said.

He stuck out his hand and shook firmly when I took it. “Doug Harper,” he said.

“Robert Lee.” It was the first name that came to mind.

“You’re probably wondering why the different last name,” he said. “And why I was standing way the hell over there.” He nodded toward the distant crypt. “Her mother and I...we had a falling out. Many years ago. Many, many years.”

His eyes filled with tears then. It was the first time I’d noticed any resemblance to his daughter at all. I’d seen the man several times before, through the plate glass window at Fiorucci’s where he sold overpriced Oxfords and wingtips, walking down the street on his way home, sitting out on the fire escape of his second floor apartment with a paperback and a beer. I’d even snapped a few photos of him, though all Dorrie had needed was his address; old habits die hard. But for all that, this was the first time that I’d seen him up close, in person. And his eyes...I could definitely see her in his eyes.

Not in his narrow, lined face, not in his slight build, his lank, flat hair. He was dark where she’d been pale, wiry where she’d been voluptuous. But his eyes were soft and deep, like Dorrie’s, and troubled and sad like hers, too.

“Robert,” he said, and stopped. He turned to face me, looked up at me with a mixture of embarrassment and defiance. “Twenty-one years ago, Robert, I lost my other daughter, my older daughter. Catherine.” He nodded toward the other grave. “A short time after that I lost my wife, my family. After that, my job. Now I’ve lost my younger daughter. And there’s not a person on earth I can talk to about it.” He smiled at me apologetically. He had bad teeth. “Would you come have a drink with me, Robert? If you don’t mind listening to an old man whine about how unfair life is?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll have a drink with you.”

We followed the gentle curve of the walkway down to the cemetery’s front gate. Doug led me slowly down Front Street and then along West Wingohocking. That’s how you know you’re not in New York City anymore—the streets have names like “West Wingohocking.” He made an abrupt turn onto North Bodine and climbed the four steps it took to reach the front door of a pub whose only sign said
PUB
.

The windows were dirty, and the light filtering through them cast pale brownish shadows on the walls and the high-backed chairs at the bar. Doug pulled one of the chairs out, climbed up into it, and ordered a rum and coke. I took the seat next to his, asked the bartender to get me a beer.

“What kind?” the bartender said, and I almost replied,
Dreher. Sumting Hongeiryen.

“Whatever you’ve got,” I said, and watched him pop the cap off a bottle of Budweiser.

Doug took a long drink, swallowing till the glass was drained and the ice clicked against his teeth. “Give me another,” he told the bartender.

Off to one side a small television set was showing CNN, the crawl at the bottom of the screen telling us something about troop escalations in the Middle East. The sound was turned down but you could still hear them chattering.

“When was the last time you saw Dorrie?” I asked. I wasn’t deliberately being cruel, or anyway that’s what I told myself. It’s a question a stranger would have asked.

He shrugged, didn’t answer. “That’s what she called herself? Dorrie?”

“Yes.”

“She wrote to me once,” he said. “Maybe six months ago. A long letter. What she’d been doing, how she’d been taking classes at Columbia. Even included a picture of herself. My god, she was...lovely. It was like seeing Catherine, only grown up.” He took a mouthful of his drink, held it, swallowed. “She signed the letter ‘Your daughter, Dorothy.’ I guess she thought I wouldn’t know who it was if she’d signed it ‘Dorrie.’ ”

“You opened it?” I said. “The letter?”

He looked at me strangely. “Of course I did. Why?”

“She showed me that letter. It came back unread.”

He closed his eyes. “No. No. Not unread.”

“It said ‘refused.’ ”

“Right. Refused,” he said. “I did refuse it. But I opened it first. ‘Dorothy Burke’ on the envelope, how could I not open it? Burke’s her mother’s name. She took it back when she got rid of me.”

“But if you opened the letter—”

“I did it carefully, so I could seal it up again, drop it back in the mailbox.”

“Why? Why would you do that?”

He seemed at a loss for an answer—his mouth opened, but nothing came out. Finally he said, “I’d ruined her sister’s life, her mother’s life, my own. I didn’t want to ruin hers.”

“Do you understand how that made her feel?” I said. “Her own father, she finally finds you after all this time, sends you a letter, and not only won’t you meet her or talk to her, you send her letter back—”

“I couldn’t meet her. I couldn’t. Sending that photo back was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But I, I...” He wound down, came slowly to a halt. “I’m not a good father. She was better off without me.”

“Probably,” I said, thinking maybe I’d stepped over the line to deliberate cruelty now. Dorrie wouldn’t have wanted that. I stopped talking, drank my beer.

“I went to her apartment once,” he said. “Went to the address that had been on the envelope, all the way uptown. I got as far as standing outside the building. I was going to push the button, say,
Hello, it’s your father.
I had my thumb on the button. But I couldn’t do it.”

“Why the hell not?”

“After twenty years? After all the things I’m sure Eva must have told her about me? I couldn’t face her. Not like that.”

“You should have.”

“Maybe,” he said.

His glass was empty again and the bartender filled it without being asked. On the TV, some talking heads were going on about urban violence. Hell of a topic.

“You want to hear something terrible?” he said. “I was at Cornerstone all weekend. Drying out. Too much of this stuff.” He raised his glass. “Then I walk out on Monday morning, head across Sixth Avenue to Universal News, pick up the paper, and what’s the first thing I see?” He rotated the glass slowly between his fingers, like a jeweler examining a stone for a flaw. He didn’t seem to find one.

“My daughter’s dead. There’s two days of sobriety out the window.”

I was learning more about him than I really wanted to know. So he was a drunk, and a coward, and yes, a lousy father. Dorrie had deserved better. Didn’t we all.

I took another swallow of my beer, pushed the bottle away, got to my feet. “Sorry I can’t stay, Doug. I have to get back to the city.”

He didn’t answer, and I realized that he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking past me at the TV screen. I followed his gaze.

The banner on the screen said “
MANHUNT
.” Above it there were two faces, the newsreader’s and, in a little box over the newsreader’s shoulder, mine. With hair. But it didn’t matter.

“The search continues,” came the low voice from the TV, “for suspected murderer John Blake, in whose Manhattan apartment police found the body of 27-year-old Jorge Garcia Ramos. The police report that Blake is now wanted in connection with a second killing as well, that of Ramos’ girlfriend, 25-year-old Candace Webb, who was found strangled to death early this morning on West 32nd Street.”

I looked over. Doug Harper glanced nervously at me and then back at the screen.

Over the newsreader’s shoulder, the photo of me had been replaced by a photo labeled “
WEBB
.”

It was a photo of Di.

I felt my throat constrict, my heart start to pound. Di. Strangled—and on West 32nd Street. I remembered her repeating like a mantra, the last time I’d seen her,
I’m going to kill them, I’m going to kill them both.
Why the hell had she actually tried to do it? I pictured her facing Miklos, his enormous hands reaching out toward her throat. She’d told me if I went up against him I’d better have a gun. Well, if she’d had one, it hadn’t been enough.

Another dead woman, I thought. Another funeral. And for what? For what?

I groped in my pocket, dropped some small bills on the bar. “That’s awful,” I said, my voice sounding weak and strange in my ears. “Someone like that on the loose.”

Doug just looked at me. I didn’t see fear in his face, or anger. Just a troubled expression, as though he didn’t know what to think.

“What?” I said, and when he didn’t answer, “What? You want to ask me something, Doug?”

He shook his head.

There was a payphone on the wall and I figured he’d be dialing the police the instant the door closed behind me. My own damn fault. I should never have talked to him, should never have come out for a drink.

“Listen,” I said, leaning close and lowering my voice. “I didn’t kill either of them.”

“I don’t need to—”

“Listen.” He shut up. “I didn’t kill them. You need to know, this is all about Dorrie. The police don’t understand that. I’ve been looking into her death, I made some people angry at me, and things have gone horribly wrong, but I didn’t kill anyone. If you call the police—listen to me.”

“I’m listening,” he said.

“If you call the police, they’ll put me in jail and I’ll never find out what happened to Dorrie.
You’ll
never find out. Do you understand?”

“What do you mean you’ve been ‘looking into’ her death?”

“I’m a private investigator,” I said.

“I thought you went to school with her.”

“I did.”

“And you’re trying to find out...what? How she died? I thought they knew how she died.”

“I’m trying to find out
why
she died,” I said. “There was something bad going on in her life, and I’m going to find out what it was. But only if you don’t turn me in.”

It was pointless. His face had paled and he was having trouble meeting my eyes. I knew he was going to do it.

“Fine,” I said. “Do what you want. But for once in your goddamn life, maybe you could think of your daughter first.”

I walked out.

Through the filthy window, I saw him head straight for the payphone.

I felt like the last pawn on a chessboard, rooks and knights and bishops closing in on every side. I was inching toward the far side of the board and I wasn’t going to make it.

The return ticket in my pocket was useless now—they’d be watching the train station. You could fly from Philadelphia to New York in theory, but I couldn’t in practice. They’d be looking for me there, too, now that Dorrie’s father had tipped them off.