Hard Case Crime: Songs of Innocence (27 page)

Silence.

“She didn’t have a tumor,” I said. “And she didn’t have something like a tumor. Did she.” No response.
“Did she.”

“Don’t you dare raise your voice to me,” Eva Burke said.

“Then tell me the truth.”

“The truth? She was fourteen years old, Blake. Fourteen goddamn years old. It
was
like a tumor. The kind that just keeps growing and growing. And it had to come out.”

We spoke for another minute, then I gently closed the phone, pocketed it. The stone in my gut was turning to water. Very softly I said to Susan, “Go home. Go home. Tomorrow I’ll turn myself in.”

“What did she say to you?”

I took hold of her by the shoulders, leaned close and kissed her on the forehead. The smell of her shampoo was strong. I inhaled deeply. “Go home,” I whispered. “We’ll deal with it tomorrow.”

“I’m not leaving till you tell me.”

I stepped out into the street, into the path of an oncoming taxi. It screeched to a halt inches away from me. Mr. Lucky.

I pulled the rear door open, got inside, waited for Susan to join me. “Two stops,” I told the driver when she did. “First is 60th and Madison, then we’ll go uptown to the park.” He turned the meter on and drove off.

“I’ll need to ask you to pay for this, Susan,” I said. “I have no money. I’m sorry.”

“That’s fine, John,” she said, digging out her wallet. She pressed a handful of bills on me. I took a twenty, made her take the rest back. “But tell me what Mrs. Burke said.”

“She didn’t say anything. Nothing at all.”

“That’s not true,” Susan said.

“I’ll tell you tomorrow,” I said. “Please, Susan. Trust me. It’ll keep overnight.”

She looked into my eyes and either saw something there or didn’t. Anyway, she gave in. I wasn’t giving her much choice.

At her building, she slammed the door shut and then leaned on the half-open window. “You’re not going to do anything foolish, are you, John? You’re going back to the park and you’ll wait for me, right?”

“That’s right,” I said.

She seemed reluctant to go. But the meter was ticking and the driver honked. She stepped back.

I pressed my hand to the glass, and she waved back. I smiled. How had Harper put it? It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

“So now we’re going up to the park?” the driver said as we pulled away.

“No,” I said. “Now we’re going down to the Bowery.”

We turned in on Fifth Avenue at 61st Street. Three blocks later, we passed FAO Schwarz, closed for the night but all lit up by the ten thousand tiny lights that dot the ceiling there. The thing can be programmed to show constellations like the night sky, or an undulating rainbow, or a flood of blue and white like a crashing surf; but tonight it was frozen on a single color, ten thousand dots of red blazing silently in the night like pinpricks or jewels or tears.

I thought of Dorrie standing beneath that jeweled sky with her satin shoes on and her tiara and her wand, dispensing fairy dust to girls too young to die shivering and sweating in a hospital bed the way Catherine Burke had.

I was a fairy princess once,
she’d said, and I’d asked her,
Why’d you stop?
And she’d told me, she’d told me.

The driver didn’t speak to me on the way downtown and didn’t play the radio, didn’t honk his horn. We met no traffic on the way, just coasted silently beneath the ranks of glowing traffic lights and past a thousand shuttered storefronts. If the ancient Greeks had lived today, I imagined this would have been their Charon, a silent taxi driver ferrying souls along a concrete Styx.

I found myself wishing it could continue, that I could keep riding this taxi to the edge of the river and beyond, could coast endlessly through the night. But at Eighth Street we turned east, and then there wasn’t much ride left at all.

I gave the driver Susan’s twenty, didn’t ask for any change in return. He pulled away from the curb and left me in darkness.

The building was five stories tall. A craggy relic from perhaps 1870, maybe earlier, its windows decorated with the fancy stonework that even tenements boasted back then. The fire escape bolted across its face was a later addition, a sop to building codes and regulations effected after good Father Demo took his stand.

I had to hunt halfway down the block before finding a trash can I could upend and climb on to reach the lowest rung, and when I pulled myself up I could feel the edges of the cut in my back pull apart beneath the sodden bandage. It hurt enough to bring tears to my eyes, but I kept climbing.

At the second floor, I knelt by the windows and looked in. One opened on a narrow kitchen, the other on a parlor. There were no lights on, but at the far end of the parlor I could make out a closed bedroom door.

The parlor window was locked, but the kitchen window wasn’t, and with some effort I was able to lift it. I climbed inside and pulled it shut behind me.

There were dishes stacked neatly in the sink and on the drainboard, and beside the garbage can a row of empty bottles stood sentry—Skyy, Beefeater, Kahlua, Glenmorrangie, Baccardi, Baileys. The refuse of an equal-opportunity drunk.

I pulled open a drawer by the kitchen door and sorted through a tray of cutlery until I found a heavy wood-handled steak knife. Nothing like the camp knife Kurland had wielded, but weapon enough.

I crossed the tiny passage that connected the kitchen to the parlor, then stopped by the bedroom door. I couldn’t hear any sounds from the other side, and realized there was some chance he wasn’t home—he could, for instance, be drying out again in the hands of Cornerstone or one of the city’s other rehab clinics. But, no: the dishes in the sink had still been wet. He ought to be inside.

I turned the knob and swung the door open.

He was sitting in an armchair with a glass in his hands and he raised it to me as I entered. He was wearing the same shirt and pants he’d been in before, at the cemetery. I saw the tweed cap lying on a writing table off to one side.

“Robert,” he said.

“Doug.”

“Should I call you that, or do you prefer John?”

“Either way,” I said.

“I thought you might come,” he said. His voice was thick. “That woman today, the one who wrote to me, then never showed up—she was one of yours, I assume? That’s how you found me?”

“I found you months ago, Doug. I did it for Dorrie, so she could send you her letter. The one you refused.”

He nodded slowly. “Then that woman today—ah, never mind. It doesn’t matter. Would you like a drink?”

“No,” I said.

“Have a seat?”

I shook my head.

“Why are you here?”

“I want to hear the truth,” I said.

“And then...?”

“That depends on what you tell me,” I said.

“I see. And what exactly do you want to know?”

“Was a handjob from your younger daughter enough, or did you make her fuck you like her sister?”

He winced. Took a sip from his glass. “Don’t be crude, Robert.”

“Answer the question,” I said.

“I suppose you’ve been talking to my ex-wife,” he said.

I stepped closer, raised the knife. He didn’t react, just looked from me to it and back again. “You’re not going to use that,” he said. “You told me yourself. You’re no killer.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

“I understand,” he said. “You’re angry at me, you want to hurt me. But you’re not going to do it. Because you’ve got one thing I’ve never had.”

“What’s that?”

“Self-restraint,” he said. “Most people have it. You’re lucky if you do. In rehab you meet all the people who don’t, and not a one of them’s happy.”

He was slurring his words slightly. I wondered how many of the bottles on the kitchen floor he’d emptied since returning from Philadelphia.

“I can’t want something and not have it, Robert. It’s just how I’m made. When I’m hungry I eat.” He held up the glass. “When I need a drink, I drink. I try not to, but the craving builds and builds and eventually... You never met my older daughter, Catherine. You’d have only been nine or ten, I guess, when she died. But if you had met her—my god, you’d have felt, well...I’m guessing the way you felt about Dorrie. You’d have fallen in love. Now imagine having that under your roof every night, the adorable little girl becoming an entirely different species, a grown woman, and not just any grown woman, but the most beautiful you’ve ever seen. You catch a glimpse of her in the bath or playing in the front yard in her swimsuit and you say to yourself, my god, where did that come from?

“But Robert, if you’d been her father, that’s where it would have stopped. You’d have admired her, loved her, maybe imagined the man that would one day win her heart—maybe even, in the dead of night, admitted to yourself how that glimpse of her had made your heart race—but you would never have done more than that.”

“No,” I said.

“ ‘No.’ You say it so easily. It was not so easy. I couldn’t do it.”

“Was it your child she aborted?” I asked. “In the clinic you took her to?”

“Probably. No way to be sure, is there? But I don’t think she was sexually active. Outside the home, I mean.”

I wanted to put that knife through his chest, pin him to the back of the chair with it like an insect. I could feel it in my arm, the wanting. My palm was sweating, aching. I didn’t do it.

“How did you find out what Dorrie did for a living?” I asked.

“I told you, I went to her apartment—to her building, I should say. I didn’t ring the bell, I think I told you that too. But I didn’t leave. I waited for her. I couldn’t talk to her, I couldn’t face her. But how could I leave without seeing her?

“She came out and, Robert, I don’t have to tell you what one look at her did to me. I couldn’t let her go, couldn’t let her out of my sight. I walked behind her to the subway, got on the same car as she did, rode it to the same stop. When she got out, I got out with her, thinking at every moment, ‘Now I’ll speak to her,’ and ‘Now,’ and ‘Now’...but I never did, I just followed her till she got to where she was going and went inside.”

“Sunset?”

He nodded. “I waited outside. Why, I don’t know. Some instinct maybe. Or more likely just the thought that if I waited long enough she’d come out again. And she didn’t—but one man after another did, arriving and leaving a half hour later, or an hour, and eventually I stopped one of them and asked what that place was. In retrospect, I was lucky he didn’t beat me up, or call the cops, or think I
was
a cop. But he didn’t. He was a fat little guy, about my age, and he was glad to tell me, glad to let me in on his little secret, man to man. He gave me their phone number, told me to ask for Samantha, who was his favorite.”

“But you didn’t ask for Samantha, did you?”

“I didn’t do anything! Robert, I went home, I tore up the phone number, I threw it out, I got stinking drunk. I told myself to let it drop, to forget I ever saw her. But I couldn’t. How could I? She was so very beautiful. And this was no 13-year-old girl, Robert, no virgin not to be touched—she was taking money every day, five, six times a day, from little fat men old enough to be her father—”

“But they
weren’t
her father.”

“And so what if one of them was?” he said. He looked at me with longing in his eyes. “What possible difference could it make? She didn’t know what I looked like—she’d told me in her letter about Eva cutting me out of all their photographs. I wasn’t going to tell her. And I would be the perfect customer, on my best behavior, I’d tip generously, every dollar I could save would go to her...

“It did, you know. Whatever I didn’t spend on food and drink and rent, it went to her. I haven’t bought anything for myself in six months. I have no savings anymore. And I felt good about it. I was paying her tuition, I was helping her get ahead. Finally doing something good for her.”

“You were fucking your daughter!”

“We never had sex,” he said, with great dignity. “I’ll have you know. I asked—but she wouldn’t. She drew the line.”

I touched the knife to his throat. “Where?” I said. “Where did she draw the line?”

“Why ask me that?” he said. “You don’t want to know the answer.”

“I need to know it.”

“Please,” he said.

“Where?” I roared.

“Oral,” he said quietly. “She drew the line there.”

“You son of a bitch.”

“I never meant for her to know—”

“You bought blowjobs from your own daughter,” I said.

“So did dozens of other men—”

“They weren’t her father!”

“No,” he said.

I was crying now and so was he. The hand holding the knife was trembling and I let it sink slowly.

“But Robert,” he said, “you’ve got to believe me, I didn’t kill her. I swear to god, when I read in the paper that she was dead, my heart broke. My only daughter, the only one left in the world that I cared about, and she was gone.”

I placed the tip of the knife against his chest, beneath the sternum, held it as steady as my shaking hand allowed.

“Robert, it’s the truth! I swear, I swear, I loved her, I would have given her anything. You have to believe me. I didn’t kill her.”