Hard Case Crime: Songs of Innocence (6 page)

She laughed and hung up.

The building could charitably have been called a brownstone, except that there were no stones, just flat slab walls of poured concrete. It looked like the sort of thing a particularly unimaginative child would build with a construction toy: four walls, four floors, two windows per floor. I rang the bell. A buzzer buzzed and I pushed the door open.

A freight-style elevator with a sliding metal gate inside the door carried me up to the fourth floor. When it grumbled to a stop, I slid the gate, pushed the door, and found myself in a dim hallway with a sign on the wall that said “Sunset Entertainment.” There was just one door. The sign looked slick and professional, as though this were an indie movie studio or a casting agency or something, but that pretense ended as soon as the door opened. There was nothing in the front room other than an armchair with a gray cat sleeping on the seat.

The woman who’d opened the door was standing behind it, and I didn’t see her till she swung it shut behind me. “Hi—John?”

She was about my height and slender, with blonde hair and a row of silver rings running up one earlobe, five or six of them. On one shoulder she had a tattoo of a Celtic knot, which I could see because she was wearing a halter top. A wraparound skirt and step-in heels completed the outfit. She stood with her shoulders thrown back to put her modest bosom on display and smiled. It was a brittle smile.

She extended a hand and led me down a short hallway. There were two doors further down and one door here, which she opened. Inside, the lights were low. There was a padded massage table at waist height, a boombox on the floor playing Enya, and a metal shelf with a roll of paper towels, a few jars, a spray bottle, and a fat candle. It smelled like vanilla.

Which one was she, I wondered—Julie, Belle, or Rodeo?

“Samantha,” she said when I asked her name.

“You’re not on the Web site.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, the site hasn’t been updated in, like, forever. Cassie hasn’t been here for months, and Julie...”

“What?”

The smile had flickered for a moment, but it was back. “Nothing. I’m sure she’ll get the site updated one of these days. Meanwhile—” She raised her hands and dropped them to her side. “I’m here, you’re here, so...” She nodded at a folding chair in the corner. “You want to put your things there?”

I took out a handful of twenties I’d gotten at an ATM on the way uptown. “Samantha,” I said, “there’s something—”

She shook her head. “Undress first.”

“I’m not—”

She put an index finger against my lips. “I can’t talk to you till you’ve undressed, sweetie.”

Because I might be a cop wearing a wire. It was a reasonable precaution before taking money for a sex act. But that’s not what I was here for.

I pressed the money into her hand, closed her fingers around it. “I’m not here for a massage, Samantha. Or for anything sexual, or for anything that will get you in trouble. I’m also not a cop. I’m a friend of Cassandra’s. Something bad’s happened to her and I need your help.”

Her eyes went wide and her hand jumped to her mouth, taking my money with it. “Is she okay?”

“No.”

“Oh my god. Oh my god.” Samantha opened the door of the room. “Di?” she called. “Come in here!”

One of the other doors opened and a black woman in jeans and a Nike t-shirt came running. “What? What is it?” She was looking fiercely at me. I recognized her voice from the phone. She didn’t sound bored anymore. “You trying something, asshole?”

“No, no, it’s Cassie,” Samantha said, “he said something’s happened.”

Di reached into the back pocket of her jeans and swung up at me with a slim black canister, her thumb on top, ready to squeeze down and launch a spray of something painful into my face. “You get the
fuck
out of here, mister, or I swear to god I will cut your balls off and feed them to you.”

“Di!” Samantha put her hand up in front of the nozzle. “He says he’s a friend of Cassie’s.”

“And you fucking believe him?” She pushed Samantha’s hand down. “I’m going to count to three and you’d better be out of here before I’m done. One—”

I sat down on the massage table, put my hands out to either side, kept the palms showing. No one had ever told me I look dangerous—quite the opposite—but under the circumstances I wanted to be extra sure. “I’m sorry if I scared you. I just need to talk to you for a few minutes and then I’ll go.”

“Two,” Di said. She took a step closer to me, extending the canister toward my face. “Get up.”

“Listen to me, please,” I said. “Cassandra is dead. The police found her body this morning. In her apartment.” Di’s hand was shaking, and Samantha had started to cry. “They came to me because my number was programmed into her phone. She was a friend of mine. That’s the truth.”

“Yeah?” Di said. “Then what’s her real name?”

“Dorrie. Dorrie Burke. We took classes together at Columbia. That’s where I know her from.”

“How’d you get this number?”

“Craigslist,” I said. “She told me what name she worked under.”

Samantha looked from Di to me and back again. Di’s hand slowly came down.

“What’s
your
real name?” she said.

“It’s John,” I said. “John Blake. I didn’t lie to you.”

Samantha wiped one eye with the heel of her hand. “What—what happened to Cassie?”

“They don’t know yet. They say it looked like suicide. I think someone got into her apartment and knocked her out, made it look that way. It looks like they made her swallow some pills.”

“She OD’d?” Di said.

I shook my head. “She was in the bathtub. Suffocated.” I described the scene to them. I hated to do it. I watched Samantha’s face go pale and both of them seemed to retreat into themselves. As bold as Di was, she was frightened, too. And why shouldn’t she be? If it was one of their customers who did it, it might as easily have been Di found dead in her bathtub instead.

“You said that Dorrie hasn’t worked here for months,” I said. “How many months?”

Samantha said, “Two? Three?” She looked over at Di.

“Two,” Di said.

“Why’d she leave?”

They exchanged another look. “It was after what happened to Julie,” Samantha said.

I waited.

“There’s this guy,” Di said. “Man probably a foot taller than you, skinny, but with big hands, really long fingers. The girls called him E.T.” She stuck out an index finger:
Phone home.
“He was a regular, would come once a month, sometimes twice. Sam had him a few times.” Samantha shivered, nodded.

“He liked to brag about how he was connected and all that,” Di said, “talk about the guys he did jobs for—they were like Russians or Slavs or something. But he never got nasty with anyone here. And he tipped well.”

“He grabbed me once,” Samantha said. She indicated one of her wrists. “I had a bruise for a week.”

“When you say he’s
connected,”
I said, “do you mean—”

“What do you think I mean?” Di said.

“Fine. So what happened?”

“The man calls up for an appointment,” Di said. “He wants to come over at five and I say, you can see Cassie then, but he says no, he wants Julie. He’d never asked for her before. I told him okay, but she won’t be here until six. He says he’ll wait.”

I looked over to one side. Samantha had her arms wrapped around herself and she was crying again.

“So he shows up at quarter to six. I put him in here, this room. When Julie shows up, I tell her he’s here, waiting for her. She drops off her stuff in the back, changes, and goes in. Cassie’s with me in the back. We’re watching some game show, shooting the shit.

“Then maybe five minutes later, we hear the door slam. And suddenly Julie’s screaming. I don’t mean screaming like she’s yelling
at
someone, I mean just screaming, at the top of her lungs. Like...” She shook her head. “I don’t know what it was like. I’d never heard anything like that. Then we hear the door slam again—
bam.
Real loud.”

Samantha sobbed.

“So we run out. And he’s standing here, inside the room, with one hand on the doorknob. Julie’s on the floor.” She stepped over to the doorway, next to the light switch. “Right here. Face down. He’s got one of her wrists in his right hand and he’s holding her arm up, like this. And her hand’s bloody. The wall, too. The door. His shirt.”

“What did you do?” I said.

“What did I do? I stood there. And he looked me in the face, and Cassie behind me, and he slammed the door again. He held Julie’s arm up and stuck her hand here—” she touched the doorframe “—and he slammed the door on it. You could hear the bones break.”

She waited for me to say something. I said, “That’s horrible.”

“Yeah. It is. When the door swung open again, he’d dropped her arm and had a gun out, pointing at us. I remember Cassie saying ‘Why?’ and he said, ‘She knows why.’ ”

“You let him go?” I said.

“The man had a fucking gun! I had pepper spray!”

“You call the police?”

“The fuck do you think the police care if a girl at a massage parlor gets her hand broken? No we didn’t call the police. We grabbed a cab and took her to the emergency room.”

“And then Cassie quit?”

Di shook her head. “It’s not like that. This isn’t Proctor and Gamble. You don’t quit. She just stopped coming. And we stopped expecting her.”

“You
didn’t stop coming.”

“No I didn’t,” Di said. “The electric company wasn’t going to quit sending me bills. The A&P wasn’t going to quit charging me for baby food. I’ve got two jobs and I don’t have the luxury of quitting either of them.”

“But you also didn’t step up into Cassie’s place. Isn’t that what normally happens in this business? It’s more money.”

“Not for me,” Di said, and shot an apologetic look toward Samantha. “I’ve got to hold my daughter with these hands.”

In a broken voice Samantha said, “What are you going to do?” It wasn’t a rhetorical question. She was asking me.

I got up off the table. “I’m going to find out who killed Dorrie. I’m going to make sure he never hurts another woman.”

“If it’s E.T.,” Di said, “you better have a gun yourself.”

“I don’t like guns,” I said.

“You like living?”

“Some days,” I said.

Monday morning it was in the papers. Up at Columbia, everyone was talking about it. The News 7 van and the Channel 2 van were parked on the cobblestones where FDR once walked. Two-man camera crews were doing stand-up interviews in front of the statue of Alma Mater, students saying how surprised they were, how sad it was. They hadn’t known Dorrie, had nothing useful to say, but weren’t about to miss a chance to get their face on television.

I told Lane what the police had told me, and he told the rest of the writing program staff. Over the course of the morning it filtered out to the students in the program and one by one they came by my desk in the center of the main area on the fifth floor to tell me how sorry they were. I thanked them. They went away.

This being September, work was light—the incoming class had been admitted, grades for the summer session had been filed, and it was early enough in the semester that midterms and course drops were still months away. There were phone calls to answer and mail to open, but not a ton of either and it was just as well. I couldn’t have kept my mind on it if there had been. There were classes I was supposed to attend, but they’d go on fine without me.

Each time I closed my eyes, and sometimes when I didn’t, I saw Dorrie lying in the bathtub. And though I hadn’t seen it, I imagined the scene Di had described, Julie’s hand viciously getting crushed in the door, presumably as some sort of punishment. Was there a connection? It seemed likely. Dorrie had witnessed the attack on Julie, and now she was dead. But Di had witnessed it, too. Did that mean she was next on the killer’s list?

It was a hard conclusion to avoid. But that didn’t mean it was right. Certainly Di was banking on it not being right, since she’d told me she planned to keep showing up for work at Sunset Entertainment and pocketing the tax-free nine dollars an hour they paid her. At least, she’d told me, she rarely had to see the customers—she got to do her job over the phone, behind a closed door. But a closed door wouldn’t stop the man who had mangled Julie’s hand. And even a locked door hadn’t kept Dorrie’s killer out of her apartment.

At eleven, when his first class let out, Stu Kennedy stopped by my desk and slowly let himself down into my guest chair. His movements were exaggeratedly careful these days, like a drunk picking his way down a flight of stairs. Sometimes in the evenings it was because he was, in fact, drunk, but not at eleven in the morning, and never in the office. He seemed to be exerting enormous effort just to sit still.

“My boy,” he whispered, inching his hand unsteadily across the desk toward me. “I heard.”

I reached out and pressed his hand, which trembled under mine.

“John,” he said, “I very much hope you don’t blame yourself. I believe you did her quite a lot of good. That she decided to do this, to end her life, it...it isn’t your fault.”

“No,” I said. “I know that.”

“She had come awfully far, you know. Some of the work she was writing for me now was quite fine.”

He pulled his hand away, rummaged in the accordion-file portfolio he always carried with him. He took two manuscripts out and laid them down in front of me. “I thought you might like to see her most recent chapters,” he said. “We hadn’t gone over these yet, but I thought...well, I thought you would appreciate seeing them.”

Each of the manuscripts was perhaps a dozen pages long. I knew what they were, though I hadn’t read them; she’d told me about the assignment when he’d given it to her in January, and I’d done what I could to help her with it. You only had to look at his own books about growing up in Bristol to know that family history was one of Stu’s favorite topics, but it had been a difficult one for Dorrie. Her relationship with her mother was strained at best, and my suggestion that she write about her father instead had worked out about as well as she’d predicted it would. She’d ended up writing about her sister, who of course she’d never known, and since her mother wouldn’t tell her much, she’d been reduced to inventing everything from whole cloth. That was fine with Stu—it just meant a little less truth and a little more judicious lying—but I know it frustrated her.