The Hollow Girl (A Moe Prager Mystery)

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  But I was several sheets to the wind by then and not in the mood for a lecture. “Don’t tell me how to grieve, kiddo.”

  “Grieving. Is that what this is? Seems more like wallowing to me.”

  “You’re just pissed off because I didn’t go this far down the rabbit hole when your mother was killed.”

  The expression of horror on my daughter’s face would have cracked glass. She looked up at me, tears streaming down her cheeks like when she was a little girl and she’d scraped the skin off both knees.

  “I know you’re hurt, Dad,” she said, struggling against the sobs, “and you blame yourself for what happened to Pam. I know you’re a grown man whose life is his own. I will always love you, but I don’t like you this way and I won’t have Ruben around you when you’re like this.”

  I didn’t blame her. I didn’t blame anyone for their anger at me. No one was angrier at or more disappointed in me than I was. No one. I had called to apologize, but it was no good. I hadn’t stopped drinking or beating myself to a pulp. After our last call, I’d given the self-immolation a rest for a few days because Sarah invoked the Prager family holiest of holies.

  “What would Mr. Roth think of what you’re doing, Dad?” she’d asked.

  I hadn’t answered. The truth was that Israel Roth would have understood. As someone who’d avoided the showers and ovens at Auschwitz, while the rest of his family had not, no one understood survivor’s guilt like he did. What he wouldn’t have approved of was my pretense of trying to get numb, of playing at making the pain go away.

  “There is no magic trick, Mr. Moe. No presto change-o, no abracadabra,” he would have said. “There is no making it go away, only living with it. So stop already with pretending and make a friend of your guilt. What choice have you got? What choice do any of us have?”

  So as a nod to his memory, I’d stopped drinking for a week. But then I saw something in the paper about a girl killed in a traffic accident, or I heard it on the radio. I can’t recall. Whichever it was, it was enough to get me going again.

  Now I had another ghost to face. One that had, in her way, haunted me for many more years than either Pam or Mr. Roth. One who had the potential to pry the lid off a piece of my past, a piece I would just as soon forget.

  I opened the door that led from the vestibule into the dining area and spotted her sitting at a booth. She sat hunched over a cup of coffee, staring into it as if into a well. I’d first met her in January of 1978, thirty-five years ago, during my early days in purgatory. Fresh from getting put out to pasture by the NYPD, wracked with pain from yet another negligibly successful knee surgery, it was like being a kid at Brooklyn College all over again: aimless, with no career and no prospects. What I had was my brother Aaron pestering me to come up with the last ten thousand dollars we needed to buy into our first wine shop. Talk about mixed feelings.

  I loved my big brother, though we were essentially different people. He used to joke that I had been adopted from the space orphanage. There were times I wasn’t so sure he was kidding. He was an anchor and I was anchorless. His dream had always been to go into the wine business and have me for a partner. Me, I neither had dreams nor cared much about wine. I had the business sense of a housefly, and the only partners I ever had or ever wanted wore blue uniforms and badges. Still, I wasn’t stupid. There wasn’t much else out there for me. When you don’t have dreams of your own, the next best thing is to hitch your wagon to someone else’s, right? Then my best cop buddy from the Six-O Precinct, Rico Tripoli, threw me what I thought was a lifeline.

  There was this college kid, Patrick Michael Maloney, the son of some political mover and shaker from upstate New York who’d gone missing in Manhattan that December. The cops had gotten nowhere on the case nor had the PIs hired by the Maloneys or the hundreds of volunteers who came down to the city from the kid’s hometown to search for him and hang posters. Rico was related to the Maloneys through his wife and he had convinced the kid’s old man that I was magic. That I had a sixth sense about missing persons. That I would find his son. I wasn’t magic. I hadn’t even made detective before getting retired. What I was was lucky, and then, only once.

  “Been a long time,” I said, sliding into the booth across from the woman who’d hunted me down.

  She nodded in agreement. “It has, a very long time. Thank you for coming.”

  The Nancy Lustig I’d met thirty-five years before was a poor little rich girl. Lucky, too, in some ways. In others, not so much. Lucky, because … well, she was rich. She had lived in Old Brookville on Long Island in a mansion the size of a jumbo jet hangar. Little, because then she was young, an underclassman at Hofstra University. Poor, because she was ugly, not hideous, certainly, but not pretty enough to be called plain either. Unlucky, because she had had the misfortune of getting romantically involved with Patrick Michael Maloney. Before disappearing, he’d gotten her pregnant and nearly strangled her.

  I’d liked her back then, liked her a lot. She was brave and brutally honest about her missteps, her desires, her jealousies, her foibles, and, above all, her appearance. I think—no, I know—that I’d fallen a little bit in love with her. After only a few minutes with her, I’d stopped seeing her looks or stopped caring about them. It wasn’t a romantic love. I didn’t want her. It was the love of spirit, the kind of thing the poets I’d wasted my time studying before I became a cop would have understood. Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage … . That kind of love. But not even the love of spirit endures.

  I flagged down the waitress. “Irish coffee. Heavy on the Irish. No whipped cream.”

  “Irish coffee?” Nancy said, still staring into the well. “You never struck me as a drinker.”

  “And you never struck me as a woman who would turn into one of those vain, self-obsessed women from Long Island who divide their time between shopping on the Miracle Mile, playing tennis, and studying the next great innovation in plastic surgery.”

  “Ouch!” she said, smiling. “You’ve become quite the diplomat in your dotage, Moe.”

  “Surviving stomach cancer and grief, they kinda give you license to speak your mind.”

  I‘d seen Nancy Lustig only once again in those thirty-five years. By then she had transformed herself into everything the old Nancy wasn’t. She’d had a lot of “work” done on her nose, her teeth, her breasts, her body. Her Coke-bottle glasses were gone, as were thirty-plus pounds. When I stopped by her house in 2000, she was impeccably put together: the hair, the nails, the tan, the achingly blue contact lenses. But I didn’t resent her wanting to be pretty. Who doesn’t want to be pretty? It was that she had seemed to have turned ugly inside in direct proportion to her newly crafted attractiveness.

  The woman who sat across from me had aged well and appeared to still be the woman I’d met that second time, although she had traded the blue contact lenses for rich brown ones more suited to her eyes’ actual coloring. Her hair, now a darker blonde with perfect highlights, was parted down the middle and fell past her shoulders. Her redone nose and cheekbones and thickened lips were beautifully made up with products that came from Orléans and the Orient. Her skin was taut and tanned. The neckline of her camel-colored cashmere sweater plunged to reveal more than a hint of cleavage between her gravity-defying breasts. There was some age on her hands, though she tried hard—too hard—to keep them young. That was what the French nail job and the five pounds of jewelry were for. The diamonds, emeralds, and gold she wore in the form of rings and bracelets were as much about distraction as attraction.

  “So what’s this about?”

  “My daughter.”

  “Your daughter?”

  “Yes,” she said, finally looking up from her coffee cup to meet my gaze. “My daughter, the Hollow Girl.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  After the waitress served my very Irish coffee and I took half of it in a swallow, Nancy pulled an iPad from her Prada bag. She tapped the screen, her sculpted nails click-clicking as she worked
. Then, when she had what she wanted, she made a stand of the iPad’s beautifully tooled custom tan leather cover, and placed it in front of me.

  There, frozen on the screen, was a girl about the same age Nancy had been the first time we met. She was obviously Nancy Lustig’s daughter. Not the Nancy Lustig who sat across from me, not the bionic woman who had reshaped herself with her will and her checkbook, but ugly-beautiful Nancy. Although this girl was thinner, a bit prettier than her mother had been, she had not reached escape velocity from the gravity of her mother’s double-helix. This girl had lovely blue eyes—probably from her dad’s side of the family—and a less bulbous nose. Still, the dumpiness, the thin lips, the weak chin had all been passed on from mother to daughter. Her bare, pale arms were tattooed, if not ridiculously so, and she wore a diamond nose stud. She was dressed in a plain white men’s T-shirt, loose-fitting faded jeans. Her feet were uncovered, and she sat on a barstool in front of a white wall.

  “What’s her name?” I asked.

  Nancy chose to answer a question I hadn’t asked. “I can read your mind, Moe. You’re thinking it’s too bad plastic surgery can’t be passed down from mother to daughter.”

  I didn’t deny it, since I was thinking something along those lines, if not exactly in those words. “What was it you called your daughter before, a hollow girl? What’s that about?”

  “The Hollow Girl,” Nancy corrected. “I’m surprised you’ve never heard of her. The Hollow Girl is an Internet legend. Go ahead, press play.”

  I tapped the screen and the frozen image came to life. The girl spoke in a whisper, her expression sullen.

  February 14, 1999, Valentine’s Day, the blackest day of my life. A lot of you will be getting roses today, chocolates, gold lockets, diamond rings. I’ll get nothing. I was on the phone with Lionel all last night, begging him to take me back. Begging! Do you know what it’s like to beg? Do you have any idea what it’s like to really beg? I mean, we say it all the time, but we don’t know. You don’t know. I do. Now I know what it is to make an idiot of myself, to completely demean myself, to plead and plead and plead until there isn’t a single ounce of pride left.

  And when he said he wouldn’t have me back because he was tired of having an ugly white bitch like me at his side and hung up the phone on me the last time, you know what I did? I ran across campus to his dorm room and rang his bell till he came to the door. When he came to the door he wasn’t wearing anything at all. “Okay, bitch,” he said, “y’all couldn’t make this easy and jus’ go away. So now you here, c’mon, we gonna do this the hard way.”

  He pushed me into his bedroom, and there in the bed was Victoria. You know Victoria. I told you about her, beautiful, perfect Victoria who I used to dream about kissing. Beautiful, perfect Victoria who I used to masturbate thinking about until I was sore. Victoria, who got drunk at our end-of-term party our freshman year and made out with me. Beautiful, perfect Victoria, who was so embarrassed she had let me touch her that way that she dropped me as a roommate. That Victoria, she was in Lionel’s bed, and when she saw me she laughed. “Make her watch, Li. Make her watch. I want her to watch.” He didn’t have to make me. I would have stayed no matter what, because, like I said, I had no pride left. I wanted to see how low I was willing to sink. So I sat at the edge of the bed and watched them fuck. I listened to them sigh and grunt.

  Then, when they were finished, when the room smelled so much of them I almost fainted, you know what I did? [Sobbing.] I … I stabbed myself. I stabbed myself. [Lifting T-shirt to expose bandage.] I stabbed myself. I let the blood … I let … I let it run onto my hand and I wiped it all over Victoria’s perfect, beautiful face. [Lifting bandage to reveal stitches, raw red skin] And Victoria started yelling and clutching at her face.

  “You crazy, bitch! You crazy!” Lionel screamed, grabbing me by the hair and throwing me out of his dorm.

  Now I know what I have to do. This wound would heal, but I’ll never heal. My hurt won’t ever go away. [Steps out of frame. Returns carrying a full glass of red wine and a white plastic pharmaceutical bottle. Uncaps bottle.] I know what I have to do. I was right. I have nothing left inside of me. I’m just the hollow girl. [Alternates swallowing pills and drinking.] Goodbye. [Thirty seconds later, glass falls to floor. Wine splatters. Glass shatters. A few seconds later, she collapses out of chair.] Help! Help me, please. Help me … .

  But when I looked up, Nancy Lustig was smiling with her great white teeth and plush, red lips. To say I was confused was profound understatement.

  “When that got posted in ’99, there were a record number of 911 calls in several cities across the world. You should hear some of the tapes. People were panicked. ‘You have to help her. She’s killed herself. You have to help the hollow girl.’ But no one knew who she really was, or where to find her. The 911 tapes are available. You should listen to them. It’s kind of pathetic, really.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. But I don’t get it. Was she okay?”

  “What don’t you get, Moe? It was theater. Of course she was fine. Clearly the people who watched her didn’t know that. They thought she was some poor, homely girl away at college, in way over her head. Until that post you just watched, people called her Lost Girl. Lost Girl had thousands and thousands of online followers. There were chat rooms devoted to Lost Girl. She had fan clubs. Some university psych classes made watching Lost Girl’s daily posts required homework. But after the night of the ‘suicide’—” Nancy drew quotation marks in the air around the word suicide “—everything changed. She became the Hollow Girl. She caused quite a stir. Hollow Girl went viral before the term was in common usage.”

  “But what was the point?”

  Nancy tilted her head at me like a confused puppy. “The point? It was performance art. Would you ask Van Gogh the point of Starry Night? She had been going for acting lessons since she was ten. Performing is all she ever wanted to do. She even did stints at Juilliard and Yale Drama, but she was only seventeen and still in high school when she came up with the idea of this video blog about a nameless character she created out of herself. Amazing, isn’t it?”

  “That isn’t the word that comes immediately to mind, no.”

  “Don’t be silly, Moe. My daughter grasped the power of the Internet and became one of its first real stars.”

  Finishing my drink, I made eye contact with the waitress, and made the universal sign for another round. She nodded. Message received. “Okay, Nancy. This was fourteen years ago. She’s what, thirty, thirty-one now? You said she was missing.”

  “She is. She has been … for a month. I want you to find her.”

  “Telling me her name might be a good place to start.”

  Nancy shrugged her shoulders. “If you insist. Sloane.”

  “And what did I do to earn the honor of finding Sloane?”

  The waitress delivering my coffee prevented Nancy from answering. And before the waitress left, I ordered another round, only this time without the coffee.

  “Rude of you not to ask me if I’d like something, Moe.” Nancy turned to the waitress. “Any single malt Scotch?”

  “We got Glen something or other.”

  “Glenlivet?” I suggested.

  “I think so.”

  Nancy frowned. “Nothing else?”

  I snapped at her. “This ain’t the Gold Coast. It’s a diner in Sheepshead Bay. You think they’re gonna carry Lagavulin and Talisker? Take what they have and run with it.”

  “A double of that Glen something or other. Neat.”

  “Forget the Irish,” I said. “I’ll have what she’s having.”

  The waitress smiled at me but left sneering at the back of Nancy’s head.

  “So you were about to explain to me why you think I’ll be able to find your daughter.”

  “Because the cops can’t be bothered and the other firms I’ve hired can’t seem to make any headway, or don’t seem to want to.”

  “Always heartwarming to be told you’re s
omebody’s Plan C.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t have been if I could have reached you.”

  “Touché. Okay, so you found me. The cops probably think it’s none of your business. And maybe the PIs can’t find her because she doesn’t want to be found. Is she married?”

  “For about five minutes, four years ago.”

  “Boyfriends? Girlfriends?”

  “Both, I think, but it’s not like we have a Hallmark Channel relationship. We don’t do girls’ nights. We don’t put on our flannel jammies and watch Steel Magnolias and have a good cry. We don’t meet in the city for lunch and the museum. We never have.”

  The drinks arrived. I gave the waitress a twenty. “That’s for you. Thanks.”

  Nancy seemed offended by the tip. “What was that for?”

  “So she doesn’t spit in the food I order after you leave.”

  “Am I leaving?”

  “After your drink, yeah.” I raised my glass to her. She touched her glass to mine and we drank.

  “You’ll take the case?”

  “Such as it is.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I ignored the question. “You still live in Old Brookville in the same house?”

  “Same address, very different house. But yes, I live there.”

  “I’ll be there tomorrow morning.” I drank some more. She drank the rest of hers. “I’ll want the name of the cops you spoke with, the contact information for the PIs you hired. I’ll want her address. The keys to her apartment, if you have them. I want a current picture of your daughter. Names and addresses of friends, et cetera. Are you married?”

  “Not for many years,” she said, staring into her freshly emptied glass.

  “Does Sloane use your ex’s last name or yours?”

  “Neither. After the stir the Hollow Girl affair caused, she had her name legally changed to Siobhan Bracken.”

  “I’ll want all the info on your ex. Any siblings?”