Hard Case Crime: Songs of Innocence (5 page)

“Sit down, Mr. Blake, why doncha?”

“I don’t want to sit down. What’s going on with Dorrie? Has she done something?”

“Looks like it,” Mirsky said. He worried his hat between his fingers absently. He didn’t like this part of his job, standing in crowded, stuffy tenement apartments, telling people their loved ones were dead. “She was found earlier this morning. I’m afraid she’s deceased. Your phone number was the only one on her speed dial.”

Speed dial. I’d erased the answering machine and taken the cell phone, but hadn’t even thought to check the phone hanging on the wall.

I sat down. “How did she...?”

“We won’t know till we get the coroner’s report, but between you an’ me—” he shook his head at the pointlessness of it all “—it looks like the lady took her own life.”

I didn’t know what to say, how I ought to react, and then I decided that that was a perfectly good response in and of itself. People can be speechless when they get bad news.

Mirsky flipped open a spiral-bound notepad, thumbed a ballpoint out of the metal loops and uncapped it. “I’ve gotta ask you a few questions...”

Meanwhile, the rookie was padding softly around the room, peering at this and that. I saw him stop at my desk, lift the phone cable that had been plugged into the laptop when they came knocking. He laid his hand down flat on the desk surface, felt something, raised his hand, rubbed his fingers together. The heat. A laptop gets hot when you use it, and the desk must still have been warm.

“How well did you know Ms. Burke?”

“Reasonably well. We were friends.”

“Close friends?”

“You could say that.”

“Did she seem depressed to you?”

“Sometimes,” I said. “She had a therapist she saw. He prescribed some medication.”

“Yeah, we saw that. Did she ever talk about contemplating suicide?”

I shook my head and lied to his face. “No.”

“No? Like never, or like not very often? You understand, I mean no disrespect to the young lady, but it’s pretty clear what happened here. We’re just tryna wrap up some loose ends.”

“Maybe once or twice,” I said, “but everyone’s got their days.”

“Right, right,” Mirsky said. “Would you say she seemed depressed the last time you spoke to her? When was that, by the way?”

Actually she had. It was why I’d called her three times this morning, why I’d raced uptown when she didn’t answer. “I talked to her last night. She seemed a little down.”

“A little down.” He wrote in his book.

The rookie, meanwhile, had moved on to my closet. I felt like asking him if he wanted to show me a warrant, but I kept my mouth shut. He stepped carefully over the suitcase-worth of clothing strewn on the floor. I shifted so my feet were in front of the suitcase.

“Mr. Blake, I ran your name through the computer on the way downtown, and I see we’ve had you in the system, few years ago.”

“The charges were dropped.”

“That’s true. But if you don’t mind my asking, where were you this morning between, say, midnight and six
AM
? Just for completeness.”

“Just for completeness,” I said, “I was lying in bed.”

“By yourself?”

“Just for completeness,” I said, “yes.”

“That’s fine, that’s fine,” Mirsky said. “Gotta ask. You know how it is.”

I did, and I told him so.

“Between us, this one’s as cut-and-dried as I’ve seen,” Mirsky said. “Bottla pills, bag on her head, pardon me for being so frank. Book on the ground. Speakin’ a which, you ever seen this book?” He reached behind him and the rookie was there, silently handing him a transparent evidence bag containing my copy of
Final Exit.
They’d pull my prints off the glossy dust jacket if they hadn’t already.

“Sure, we both read it.”

“And yet you told me, where was it—” he flipped back a page or two in his notes “—that the young lady never talked about contemplating suicide. And here’s this book that’s all about how to commit suicide.” He spread his hands.

“She also read
The Art of War,”
I said. “That doesn’t mean she was contemplating raising an army in China.”

The good-natured veneer dropped away, leaving a suspicious stare in its place. The rookie was wearing one, too. He was learning.

“Don’t smart off, Blake. If this wasn’t so cut-and-dried we’d be looking at you for it.”

I put my hands up, palms out. “I’m sorry. It’s just...it’s a lot to take in.”

Mirsky’s eyelids drooped again. It took more effort than he cared to put into it to be a hardass for long. “We’re gonna need to contact the deceased’s next of kin. You know who that would be?”

“Her mother,” I said. “She lives in Philadelphia. Her name’s Eva.”

“She doesn’t have anyone in New York?”

There was her father, but I knew how she’d have felt about that. “No. Not that I know of.”

Mirsky closed his notebook. The rookie tucked
Final Exit
back into the satchel hanging from his shoulder.

“All right, Mr. Blake,” Mirsky said. “We’re sorry to disturb your Sunday morning and we offer our condolences. If you think of anything we oughta know, please call this number.” He extended a business card to me. I took it. A cell phone number was written on the back in pencil. “Have a good day.” And, on his way out: “You’ll want to get that doorbell fixed.” He poked it with a stubby forefinger.
Clickclick.

The rookie was standing behind him, staring back into the apartment, past my shoulder. I glanced back. You could just see the handle of the suitcase under the bed.

“I’ll do that,” I said. “Thank you.”

They walked off and I listened to them pounding down the stairs in their regulation shoes and their thirty pounds of gear. They didn’t have an easy job. But I could only drum up so much sympathy.

I returned to my bed, pulled the suitcase out from under it, and opened it. Maybe I was being paranoid. But just to be safe, I emptied the suitcase and repacked all its contents into a canvas knapsack. I grabbed a handful of shirts from the back of the closet, things the rookie might not have seen, refilled the suitcase with them, and shoved it back where it had been under the bed. Just in case they came back with a warrant. Realistically they probably wouldn’t; realistically Dorrie’s death probably did look cut-and-dried to them and they’d drop it gladly and move on to their next case. But wouldn’t it be just wonderful if they decided it was murder after all, and then tried to pin it on me?

I hefted the knapsack. This could stay safe in the back room of the Barking Boat across the street, tucked behind an industrial-size can of tomatoes or sack of rice. Michael would hold it for me. He’d probably think it was a stash of pot or something like that, but he’d hold it. I’d held worse for him.

I looked out the window and craned to see as far up and down Carmine Street as I could. They didn’t seem to be waiting and watching, either on foot or in a car. But I’d give it a few minutes just to make sure.

I pulled up Craigslist on my own computer, re-ran the search under “Services—Erotic” and clicked one by one on all the Cassandra links. Two of them were for places in Long Island, one was a woman in Queens, one down on Wall Street. One started “Sweet black sistah will do it all...” The rest were in midtown, which is where Dorrie had worked, and half of them had photos. Those I could eliminate: none of the women looked anything like Dorrie. That left the five without photos, and I copied down their phone numbers.

At the bottom, one of the ads said, “Check out my
reviews
at The Erotic Review!” I clicked on the underlined word ‘reviews.’ A new window opened on the screen. The Web site that came up looked for all the world like a page from an online card catalog for a library, with dozens of little taxonomical entries describing something in put-you-to-sleep fine print. But the thing that was being described was a woman. “Build,” “Ethnicity,” “Age,” “Hair Color”—and that was just the start. “Piercings: None.” “Transsexual: No.” Breast Size, Breast Cup, Breast Implants, Breast Appearance. Tattoos.

And that was just the start, too. Because the next section examined in loving detail just what this woman, this one of the city’s fifteen Cassandras, would do for a buck. “Massage,” “Sex,” “S&M,” “Anal.” And coyly tucked in the middle of the list: “Kiss.” I think it was that “Kiss” that broke my heart.

I remembered Dorrie talking about her work; she didn’t talk about it often and I didn’t push her to, but one evening she was especially tense and as I kneaded her shoulders and neck she said, quietly, “Why do they always want whatever it is you’re not willing to sell?”

I worked my thumbs against the knotted muscles. “Bad client?”

She nodded. “If you just offer regular massage, they want a handjob. If you offer topless, they want bottomless. If you give handjobs, they want oral. Wherever you draw the line, they want whatever’s on the other side of it.”

“Human nature,” I said. “We all want what we can’t have.”

“It’s not about human nature,” she said. “It’s about power. It’s like what gets them off is knowing they made you do something you didn’t want to do.”

“I think you just defined human nature,” I said.

She’d reached back then and put her hand over mine. “You know what this guy wanted today? He wanted me to piss on him.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“I told him I couldn’t, I didn’t need to go. He’d brought a bottle of water. He said he’d wait.” She shook her head slowly. “And if I’d said yes, I do golden showers, I’m sure he’d have come up with something else he wanted. They always do. Always something else.”

She slept over at my apartment that night; we spent it lying silently in each other’s arms. I watched her in the faint moonlight filtering in between my blinds, lay awake while her breathing became deeper and slower, her head a reassuring weight on my chest. I felt an overwhelming desire to protect her, to keep her from harm. But then the morning came and with it the recollection of what a lousy protector I was, and I was glad I hadn’t said anything to her in the night, hadn’t sworn to keep her safe the way I’d promised other women who were now dead.

This particular Cassandra wasn’t the right one. In the “Appearance” section of the Erotic Review page about her it said, among many, many other things, “Age: 31-35” and “Hair Length: Super-Short.” A quick search on the site showed that eight other Cassandras had been measured and weighed by the Erotic Review’s dutiful members. I went through them all, from the most recent entry to one dated several months back.

The last one was Dorrie.

She’d been rated a ‘9’ overall for appearance and an ‘8’ for performance and was described in enough detail that it was pretty clear it was her. Height: 5’9”-5’11”. Hair Color: Brown. Tattoos: None. And so on.

If there was any doubt, it was gone when I clicked on the link at the top of the page. The link took me to her Web site, which turned out to be a page shared by four women working from a single midtown location: Cassandra, Julie, Rodeo, and Belle. (Rodeo?) I clicked on “Cassandra,” and there she was.

In the largest of the three photos Dorrie had on a wide-brimmed hat, angled down to cover all of her face but her lips and chin. She was standing against a wall with her arms outstretched to either side, fingers splayed. Her long, long legs were crossed at the ankles and she wore a pair of patent-leather stiletto heels with narrow straps that crisscrossed up her shins. She also wore a pink g-string, but that was the only concession to modesty. Her breasts were bare, her nipples hard, her acres of exposed skin pale and delicate.

The other two photos were close-ups, blurred so her face wouldn’t show. In one she was lying on her side in bed, curled around a pillow, while in the other she was straddling a barstool.

Beneath the photos, an animated image of a phone number revolved in slow circles. It was one of the five on my list. I crossed off the other four and picked up the phone.

The subway let me out at 28th Street and I walked east to Madison. This was a business neighborhood full of old office buildings with filthy windows and on a Sunday afternoon it was almost completely deserted. In one bar I passed I heard cheering when some athlete on TV did something good, but other than that I might as well have been in one of those old
Twilight Zone
episodes where a guy wakes up and discovers that everyone in town has vanished. You don’t think of New York City ever being empty, not even for one block, but it can be; and an empty street with shuttered storefronts can be as desolate here as in as any Western ghost town.

There was a pair of pay phones at the corner of Madison and I dialed the phone number again. The woman who answered sounded young and bored, though she was probably trying to sound sultry. “Hi, honey. Who is this?”

“This is John,” I said. “I called you earlier. You said I should call again when I got to the corner of 28th and Madison.”

“Sure, honey. Are you ready to come up?”

I said I was.

“The building is number 44. Ring the bell for the fourth floor, okay?”

“Forty-four, fourth floor,” I said. “That’s pretty easy to remember.”