Hard Case Crime: Songs of Innocence (9 page)

And what of Jorge Ramos, the man on the receiving end of Julie’s home-run swing? His wallet gave us his name; his breathing, though uneven, told us he was alive when we left him. That’s all we knew or cared.

“I should never have agreed to meet you,” Julie said. “Di was right.”

“Look—”

“Not even by phone. When she sent me your e-mail address, I should have deleted it.”

“Ardo’s people might have come after you anyway.”

“They were done with me,” she said.

“Like they were done with Dorrie?”

“You don’t know that they had anything to do with her death.”

“No,” I said. “I also don’t know that they had anything to do with the man who chased us through the tunnels at gunpoint today, but I think it’s a reasonable guess.”

“How’d they even know I was coming to see you? What do they have, some way to read my e-mail?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “More likely just Jorge Ramos watching your building.”

“Why? Why would they follow me?”

“I don’t know, Julie. It’s got to be tied up with what happened to Dorrie. Do you have any idea why they might have gone after her?
She
didn’t take any customers from them, did she?”

“How could she?” Julie said. “She never worked for them. Before I hired her she was working at Spellbound—it’s a place on 51st and Second started by this woman from Brazil, and I know Dorrie didn’t take any clients from her, because she didn’t have any when she started with me.”

“What about when Dorrie left you?” I asked. “What did she do then?”

“You don’t know?” Julie said. “She didn’t tell you?”

I shook my head. She hadn’t told me about any of this. Not about the attack on Julie, nor about quitting her job out of fear of a long-fingered gunman with a sadistic streak. I couldn’t guess why, except maybe a desire not to worry me. Or maybe fear that I’d have insisted on doing something about it—which I would have.

“She went independent,” Julie said. “Complete solo act.”

“What does that mean?” I said.

“Outcall only. No apartment, no spa, no fixed location. No rent to pay, no agency booking you, no phone girl. Not even a phone number. You run an ad with just an anonymous e-mail address, you answer the e-mail yourself, and if the client sounds okay you meet at his place. Or at a hotel room if that’s what he prefers. I suppose most of them do.”

I had a vision of Dorrie walking alone down a poorly lit hallway in some seedy building toward an assignation with a stranger. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

“Can be. But not if you do it right. You never have to meet anyone you haven’t vetted first over e-mail, and you can usually tell which ones are the creeps. And you don’t have to accept too many new clients if you start with a base of regulars you already know well.”

“But Dorrie didn’t,” I said.

She didn’t say anything.

“How could she?” I said. “Didn’t she have to start over from scratch?”

Julie suddenly looked tired. “She got me in a weak moment, John. I was in the hospital, all doped up on Percocet, I was thinking I was probably going to have to shut down Sunset anyway. And she was so desperate to get away. And it was my fault that she had to. And anyway it made me feel good, you know, to show I’m not like that fucker Ardo. So I told her go ahead, any regulars you’ve got, take ‘em. She didn’t have many, maybe three or four, but that’s a start, right? I told her, if you ask them and they want to go with you, they’re yours. Not that big a deal for me, and it meant a lot to her. What? Why are you looking at me that way?”

“The regulars she took,” I said, “were any of them customers you originally took with you from Vivacia?”

“I don’t think so.” She considered the question. I waited. “No. I don’t think so.”

“No or you don’t think so?”

“Jesus, John, I just came from having my hand cut open and put back together like a fucking jigsaw puzzle—‘I don’t think so’ is the best I can do.”

“Will you think about it some more?”

“Sure,” she said. “Sure. I’ll think about it. But not tonight.”

There was more I wanted to ask her. Like: What’s a Hungarian doing running the best spa in Little Korea? But her eyelids were drooping; the medicine they’d given her after surgery was kicking in.

“One last thing, Julie. Julie?” She forced her eyes open. “If I wanted to find the ads Dorrie ran after she left Sunset—the ones from when she went independent—what name would I search for?”

“The same name,” Julie said. Her voice was muzzy. “Cassandra.”

“I already looked up all the Cassandras on Craigslist,” I said. “They all had phone numbers—none were just e-mail.”

She smiled. “You look under ‘Casual Encounters’?”

“No,” I said. “Why would I? That’s not pros, that’s just ordinary people looking to hook up.”

She closed her eyes again, sank back against the understuffed hospital pillow. “You’re so goddamn innocent,” she said.

Back on Carmine Street, I fired up my computer, navigated to Craigslist again. “Casual Encounters” was a whole different universe from “Erotic Services.” It didn’t
look
like these were pros—there were few photos, no requests for money, no explicit lists of the things the advertiser would do if money were offered. But there were signs, if you looked hard enough, that there were some ringers mixed in with the amateurs.

College co-ed, lonely, cute, seeks well-situated, established businessman for special relationship...

W4M, 31, sensuous, open-minded, w/expensive tastes looking for luxury-loving man to satisfy
all
her needs...

It’s Monday evening and I’m looking for a date to help take my mind off all the bills I’ve got piling up...

I wondered whether everyone who used the service understood the coded language, or whether there were awkward moments when one civilian looking to score with another accidentally responded to the ad of a pro. Probably. But that was presumably the sort of thing pros were good at catching at the e-mail stage. Certainly I had to think that before a pro headed over to someone’s apartment or hotel room she made sure that the subject of payment had been raised and resolved.

I typed “Cassandra” into the search box and got six results. They turned out to be six copies of the same ad, posted at the start of each of the previous six weeks:
Tall, model-beautiful, well-educated tantric masseuse seeks kind, giving gentleman for passionate evenings in. Not seeking long-term relationship, just mutually satisfying encounters of an hour or two at a time. Donations toward continuing massage training appreciated.
It was as close to an explicit request for money as any I’d seen in the Casual Encounters section; but then Dorrie hadn’t been an old hand at the game when she’d written it.

I clicked on the word “Reply” and typed “This is a test” into the blank message that popped up, then clicked the Send button to shoot it off into the ether. Dorrie was gone—but automated systems like this had a way of continuing in operation until you did something to turn them off. A little like Dorrie’s answering machine, which had continued recording my messages long after it was too late to do her any good.

Sure enough, after about fifteen seconds a chime sounded and an incoming e-mail appeared on my desktop. The sender was “[email protected].”

Thanks for responding to my ad! I offer an outstanding massage with a sensual finish that will leave you trembling. This is not full service so please don’t ask, but I promise you won’t be disappointed. My rates are $150 for the hour, $200 for a luxurious 90-minute session. Outcall only, anywhere within Manhattan. I’ve attached a photo so you can see what I look like. Before you book an appointment, I’ll need the same from you, along with your name and telephone number. (No blocked numbers, please.) I require this for my security
—
I only see a very small, select group of clients and need to feel comfortable with you before we meet. I’ll keep everything you send me strictly confidential, of course.

I hope to hear from you soon
—
and I look forward to giving you a sensual massage you’ll never forget!

Much love,

Cassandra

The photo was the one of her in the pink g-string and the hat. I wondered how many pictures of men she’d gotten in return. How many men would send a photo of themselves to a complete stranger over the Internet—and not just any complete stranger, but a “tantric masseuse”?

Well, with any luck, I’d be able to find out.

I went to Yahoo’s home page, clicked on “Mail.” When it asked for a Yahoo ID, I entered “Cassie 19934.” The next box asked for a password. The cursor blinked patiently, waiting for me to type something.

A few keystrokes—that’s how close I was to getting into Dorrie’s e-mail account and whatever information it might hold. Not just the photos, but correspondence with her clients and who knew what else.

But those few keystrokes were as formidable a barrier as the combination to a bank vault. What would she have chosen? I didn’t expect it to work, but I typed in “Dorrie” and clicked on the “Sign In” button. After a second, the message “Invalid ID or password” appeared on the screen in red letters. I tried “Cassie.” I tried “Burke.” I tried spelling each name backwards. I tried her birth date, forward and backward. Invalid, all of them.

Damn it, when the time had come for her to choose a password, what would have occurred to her? It could be anything, of course; even a random sequence of letters, in which case I’d never be able to guess it. But in that case she’d never have been able to remember it either. It had to be something she could remember easily.

I tried some more possibilities. Eva, her mother’s name. Douglas, her father’s. I looked at the teddy bear sitting on my shelf and tried “FAO.” I even tried my own name. Nothing.

There were too many possibilities. I couldn’t think of them all, and even if I could it would take forever to try them all. There had to be another way. Maybe she’d have written the password down somewhere? Maybe in some file on her computer, or...

Her computer.

It felt like too much to hope for. But I remembered the sparsely populated directories I’d found on Dorrie’s laptop. She’d been at best a casual computer user, and as such she might have been the sort to take advantage of shortcuts when they were offered. She might well have taken advantage of the one I’d just thought of.

I shut off my computer and headed across the street.

Before Michael Florio inherited it from his father, the Barking Boat was a neighborhood teahouse, an eight-table downtown hangout originally frequented by unemployed beatniks who liked to pay their tab by scrawling sketches and scraps of incoherent poetry on napkins. Florio
père
apparently let them get away with this, which left me wondering how he’d managed to stay in business for thirty years. Michael let me in on the secret: Out of the back room, his father had run a long-standing numbers operation, one blessed by the Genovese family. Those were the days when the people running organized crime would give their blessing to men with names like Vincent Florio. Today, the nod was more likely to go to a Dmitri or a Nguyen—or a Miklos.

Michael did away with the numbers business when he took the place over, renovated the kitchen and the seating area, and did his best to turn the Boat into a real restaurant. But that didn’t mean that honest business was the only business conducted under his roof. When he wasn’t cooking, Michael liked to describe himself as a go-between, a provider of liquidity. My old boss, Leo, an ex-cop from the days before the sort of sensitivity training they forced on James Mirsky, put it more succinctly, calling him a fence and a shylock. Michael would take things off your hands for a fraction of what they were worth, and he’d loan you money when you needed it badly enough that you were willing to pay more than it was worth. There was always an angle with him. When I’d needed a new place to live three years back, he’d told me about the building across the street and had leaned on the landlord to give me a good deal; the condition was that every once in a while, when he was holding something particularly hot, he could treat my closet as an extension of his storeroom. I could live with that. For the rent I was paying, I could live with a lot of things.

On weekends at brunch time, the line trailed out to the corner to get a taste of Michael’s Eggs Florentine, but right now it was a weekday evening in the dead time between the end of lunch and the start of dinner. The place was empty except for Michael’s one waitress, a 24-year-old whose longevity in the job probably had more to do with how she looked in a Barking Boat t-shirt than how good she was at waiting on tables. He trusted her and would discuss business in front of her, but I didn’t and wouldn’t. I pushed the swinging door to the storeroom open and gestured for him to follow me.

Floor-to-ceiling metal shelves held sacks and cans and bottles of various supplies: red mesh bags of onions and potatoes, five-gallon containers of extra virgin olive oil, jars of cored whole pineapples in syrup, cardboard boxes of produce. I went to the corner furthest from the door and reached behind a box with
Spoons
written on it in barely legible magic marker. My knapsack was still there. I pulled it out.

“What?” Michael said. “What do you want?”

I tugged open the pair of buckles holding the knapsack closed, shoved the plastic bag of shredded paper to one side and pulled out Dorrie’s laptop. “Where’s an outlet?” I said. Before he could answer, I spotted one and headed over to it. I plugged in the adaptor, turned the machine on. It whirred quietly to life.

“Listen, Michael,” I said, “I need to ask you something, and you can’t ask me why. Okay?”

He looked unsure about it. “Okay.”

“You ever hear of a man named Ardo?”

I watched his eyebrows ride up on his forehead. He’d been going bald long enough that you’d barely call what he had left a hairline, so they had plenty of forehead to ride.