The Hollow Girl (A Moe Prager Mystery)

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Across Houston Street from the Kremlin was Katz’s, the world’s most famous Jewish deli. Opened in the 1880s, Katz’s was well known to all New Yorkers. But it became nationally famous during WWII when it adopted—some would say stole—the motto “Send a salami to your boy in the army” from a competing deli and made it its own. Stolen motto or not, Katz’s served the best pastrami and corned beef in the world. Besides being sent into a state of bliss by the aroma of cured meats, grilling hot dogs, sweet chicken soup, and the vinegary tang of sour pickles, stepping into Katz’s was another journey back in time. They did things the old-fashioned way here. There wasn’t a mechanical slicing machine in sight. The meats were all hand carved and piled in small mountains atop soft, fragrant rye bread.

  It was also a kind of sacred shrine, the place Israel Roth and I had always visited when he was up from Florida. It was corned beef for him, pastrami for me. Russian dressing for him, mustard for me. Dr. Brown’s cream soda for him, Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray for me. A round kasha knish for him, a square potato for me. We both preferred sour pickles to half sour. That last time, he hardly touched his food. He was very old then, and dying. He knew it. I knew it. He refused to discuss it, and I was happy to let him refuse. We’d sat mostly in silence … well, as much silence as was possible in Katz’s. The place was always busy and noisy with clattering dishes, clanging silverware, shouted orders, hundreds of half-spoken sentences in thirty different languages. But whatever tiny bits of food Mr. Roth ate that night—one bite of his corned beef, a forkful of knish, a few sips of his soda, half a pickle—he seemed to savor. He knew these flavors would have to last him an eternity.

  As I walked across Houston, I saw the doorman at the Kremlin unloading groceries from a cab for one of the tenants. I was a bit disappointed not to be able to speak with him. A cooperative doorman is a great resource. No one, except maybe the superintendent, knows the inside skinny like the doorman. It wasn’t a total loss, though. It wasn’t like the doorman wouldn’t be there when I came out. I didn’t even have to use the key to get into the lobby. A young Japanese couple with wildly spiked hair, dressed in matching lime green leather jumpsuits and white marshmallowy boots, came bursting through the lobby door without giving me a second thought. Ya gotta love the Lower East Side.

  Siobhan’s apartment was on the fifth floor. When I got out of the elevator, I followed the sign on the wall and turned left. It had been many, many years since I’d lived in a large apartment building, but I’d grown up in one. There was a kind of familiar comfort in the competing odors that filled the hallway. Whether it was a building of luxury flats in Manhattan or a tenement in Coney Island was beside the point. As I made my way to 5E along the zebra-patterned carpeting, my nose told me that someone in 5B was frying onions, garlic, and ginger. That the person in 5C was getting stoned; the earthy, burning-grass aroma of high-grade marijuana was intense. Think Allman Brothers, At Fillmore East, circa 1970. And then, as I passed 5D, I got gut punched by the scourge of apartment building life, the stench of overfried fish.

  For some bizarre reason, I was smiling. It was like remembering my mom’s coffee—horrifying and wonderful all at once. I was young again, a kid in Coney Island; my life just one long summer’s day of basketball, stickball, touch football, and friends; a life of the Cyclone, the boardwalk, and the beach; a life of first kisses. My smile vanished as quickly as it had come, because beneath the nostalgic stench of the fried fish my nose detected the dark grace notes of another sickening scent. This brought me back, too, but not to the Cyclone or to first kisses. I was twenty when death introduced itself to me. I recalled that night in more detail than the night I’d lost my virginity. It was February of 1967. That first whiff never leaves you, and as a uniformed cop I had breathed in its rancid glory a hundred other times.

  I forced myself to be calm. There was no reason for me to believe that death was calling from Siobhan’s apartment, or that it was even human death. Pets die, too. People go on vacation and their refrigerators break down. Meat rots. Flies lay eggs. I lied to myself that it was just as likely a broken fridge as anything else, but as I’d told Mr. Roth only moments before he passed, I wasn’t very good at self-deception. I’d smelled human death too many times, and I was too old to pretend. I couldn’t even manage to convince myself the odor wasn’t coming from beneath the white metal door marked 5E. As I got closer, the smell got stronger. And when I got to the door I knew.

  My right hand clenched so tightly that the edges of the keys dug into the skin of my palm. They hadn’t drawn blood, not yet, but my skin had been cut. I had decisions to make. There was no turning back, no phoning this in anonymously. Caller ID had kind of put an end to that trick. The doorman might not have seen me, but the Japanese leather twins had—even if they paid me no mind—and I had counted at least three security cameras that had followed my progress. No, the only decision I had to make was whether to call the cops now or wait until I’d had a look around the flat. The former choice would be easier and smarter; the latter, foolish and of questionable legality. I put the key in the lock, turned it, used the pinky side of my right hand to move the door handle, and stepped inside.

  Bang! The rank stench of death, of feces and urine, caught me full in the face. So much for the broken refrigerator theory. It was all I could do not to puke. I held my right hand tight against my mouth. It didn’t help. I knew there was never any getting used to the odor, but experience had taught me that if I held the nausea off for just a little bit longer, I could stop myself from being overwhelmed by it. So I stood there, taking slow, shallow breaths. As I did, I scanned the place. The apartment smelled nearly as powerfully of money as of death. The place looked like something out of a snooty-assed magazine or designer showcase. Everything was just so, and just so expensive. The one thing missing, from what I could see, was a body.

  Now I had another decision to make. Every step I took deeper into the apartment, every surface I touched, meant I was contaminating a possible crime scene. Still, I’d come this far, and if anyone was going to find Siobhan Bracken’s body, it felt right somehow that it should be me. Don’t ask me why, but I got the sense Nancy would find solace in that. Having buried so many people close to me, I didn’t want to rob Nancy of even an ounce of solace. As I stepped toward the bedroom, the odors got stronger, and then I saw long streaks of dried blood on the hardwood flooring in the passageway between bedroom and bathroom. That was enough. I called it in, but hung up on the 911 operator before she could ask me any particulars. The responding uniforms could get those in person.

  I knew I had about two minutes to find the body, and stopped tiptoeing about. It didn’t take me more than fifteen seconds to locate her. I found her in the bedroom, face-down in the carpet, left arm splayed, right arm outstretched as if reaching for the bed. There was blood here, too, a lot of it. She was nude, her clothes, bra, and panties, strewn along the side of the bed. She’d been dead for a while, bloated and in bad shape, gravity having forced her blood to pool in the parts of her body close to the floor. I didn’t step into the bedroom, nor did I step into the bathroom. I only saw what I could see from the hallway. That was plenty. Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t right. Yeah, I know. There was a dead woman, probably a murdered one, not ten feet from where I stood, but it wasn’t that. I turned and left the apartment to wait for the cops. By the time I closed the door behind me, I could already hear the sirens.

  CHAPTER NINE

  My old badge came in handy for once. It bought me some respect and a little less bullshit from the two 9th Precinct uniforms who responded to the scene. They didn’t treat me like a moron or a civilian even if, by their reckoning, I was as old as dirt. I explained to them who I was and what I was doing there, and they didn’t seem to give a crap about my having contaminated the crime scene. They left that part up to the pair of detectives who’d caught the case.

  “Fuck,” said one uniform to the other when he saw the detectives stepping out of the eleva
tor. “It’s Frovarp and Shulze.”

  “Yeah, you got the shit end of the stick, Prager,” the other uniform agreed. “Them two are real ball busters, especially Frovarp. Watch yourself with her.”

  Frovarp was a willowy woman in her mid-forties with short gray hair and a don’t-fuck-with-me demeanor. Shulze, tall and thin, had a kind of hangdog smile and an “aw shucks” manner about him. It wasn’t hard to figure out who played good cop and bad cop when they interviewed suspects. Neither of them seemed to like me very much. That made three of us, but they were pretty unpleasant about it.

  First they made me wait for over a half-hour before they even acknowledged my existence.

  “Him, he stays here until we’re ready for him, okay?” Shulze told the uniforms without making eye contact with me.

  I watched the Crime Scene Unit and the guy from the ME’s office go in while I sat in the hallway, waiting my turn with the Inquisition. I’d thought about calling Nancy, but I still couldn’t get a finger on the feeling that something wasn’t right about this whole situation. No matter. Siobhan wasn’t going anywhere. I wanted to make sure that when I called Nancy, I had as much information as possible. The last thing relatives of a victim want to hear is I don’t know. Relatives want answers, explanations. With murders, especially, they want to know as much as possible.

  “What the fuck, Prager? You could smell it out here like the vic was in front of the damned door. Why the fuck did you go in there and mess with the crime scene?” Frovarp barked at me when she came out of the apartment.

  “I didn’t know the smell was coming from her apartment. I’m not a fucking beagle.”

  “C’mon, man. That’s bullshit and you know it,” said Shulze.

  “Thing is, I had keys. I went in hoping the smell wasn’t from inside the apartment. When I found the body, I called it in. I was careful not to mess up the crime scene.”

  Frovarp didn’t buy it. “You wanna merit badge for that, Boy Scout?”

  “No, I’d like you two to tell me what’s going on so I can call my client.”

  “You’re not calling anybody about anything until we go over the preliminary statement you gave the responding officers,” Shulze said, looking down at his notes. “You say the vic is Siobhan Bracken, aged thirty-one. That she—”

  “Sorry, Detective Shulze, but that’s wrong,” interrupted the ME, a guy named Dougherty, popping his head through the open door. “You’ve either got the wrong vic or the wrong age. That woman in there is forty-five if she’s a day. And to add to your headaches, she’s not a vic … at least not of a crime.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Frovarp screamed loud enough to be heard at Katz’s. “There’s blood all over the fucking place.”

  “We won’t know for sure until we do the autopsy,” said the ME, “but my guess is myocardial infarction is the COD.”

  “A heart attack?” Frovarp liked that less than she liked me. “Bullshit on that.”

  Dougherty shrugged. “Or possibly an aneurism, but I’d bet on heart attack. Maybe the fall killed her.”

  Frovarp was skeptical. “The fall?”

  “And the blood?” Shulze wanted to know. “Last time I looked, none of that shit you’re talking about comes with external bleeding. Unless I’m seeing things, there’s a lot of blood in that apartment.”

  “Almost all of it came from a gash on her forehead and wounds on her face. I’ll show you.”

  The ME turned and walked back into 5E. Frovarp and Shulze were so pissed that they didn’t notice I followed them into the apartment. We huddled in the passageway between the bathroom and bedroom.

  “Here’s what your CSU guy and I think must have happened,” Dougherty said when he saw we were there with him. “The victim undresses to take a bath or a shower, or just to get ready for bed. She starts heading into the bathroom, but the MI or the aneurism seizes her before she makes it fully inside, and she falls headfirst onto the tile floor. You can check with CSU. They say there’s a cracked tile under that large area of dried blood. If you look carefully, you can see it.”

  “Okay, keep going,” Frovarp said.

  “She’s stunned or unconscious, which is why there’s such a large amount of blood in that one area. She wasn’t moving. Head and facial wounds tend to bleed very intensely. She finally rouses. Realizing she’s got to call for help, she crawls back into the bedroom to find her cell phone. That accounts for these streaks of blood on the floor here and leading into the bedroom. Unfortunately, she expires before she can find the phone or use it.”

  “So if that’s not Siobhan Bracken, who is it?” I heard myself say.

  “Get the fuck outta here, Prager,” Frovarp groused. “Go wait in the hall.”

  “Hey, this is one less case to close,” I said. “What’s eating you?”

  Shulze gave me a less than gentle shove. “Outside, Prager. Wait outside!”

  I went outside all right, but I didn’t wait. Those two asshole detectives weren’t going to give me any information or make my job any easier, so I didn’t see why I should make their charming lives any easier. And there was no doubt they were the types to give me a hard time simply because they could. No, thanks. I wasn’t in the mood. I hadn’t committed any crime. Well, I guess, technically I had, but it wasn’t the type of thing people got prosecuted for. The uniforms who had first responded were long gone, and the guys who had replaced them didn’t know who I was. They just let me walk right onto the elevator and go.

  I didn’t figure I’d have much time to chat with the doorman after Frovarp and Shulze realized I hadn’t stuck around. So as I left the building, I handed the doorman my card and a couple of twenty-dollar bills. “What time you get off your shift?”

  He didn’t bother looking in his hand. “Six, but you know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking maybe I might be busy tonight, you know?” he said with a familiar Bronx Italian inflection.

  “There’s more where that came from, so make sure you’re not busy, okay? I’ll meet you at Grogan’s Clover on Avenue C at 6:15. You know it?”

  He was a dark, good-looking man with a tough guy attitude. “I’ll find it. Is everything okay with Siobhan—I mean, Miss Bracken? She’s real nice to me. I would hate it if like somethin’ happened to her, you know?” he asked, his hard exterior cracking slightly.

  “I’m not sure, but there’s a dead woman in her apartment that’s not her. You got any ideas?”

  “A few, maybe, yeah. Depends, you know?”

  “Don’t push me, wiseass. Gimme a first name or you can buy your own fucking drinks.”

  “Millie.”

  I wasn’t going to dig harder just then because I got the sense my time was running out. “Later.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The call I made to Nancy Lustig was your classic good news, bad news kind of deal: The bad news is there’s a dead woman in your daughter’s apartment. The good news is that the body isn’t your daughter’s. I didn’t begin the call that way, but I also didn’t spend twenty minutes discussing the weather or the spot price of sweet Texas crude oil, either. When I told Nancy about the dead woman, there was a moment of stunned silence.

  “Do you know who the dead woman is?” Nancy asked.

  “By now I’m sure the cops have searched the place more thoroughly, and they’ve probably got a preliminary ID.”

  “What do you mean, by now? Where are you? Why aren’t you still at the—” She was screaming into her phone. Panic does that to people.

  “Breathe, Nancy. Breathe. I’m not at the apartment because the cops weren’t happy I was there in the first place. They weren’t gonna tell me anything, and they were likely to arrest me just to break my balls. I can’t find Siobhan if—”

  “Sloane,” she interrupted, still shouting. “Her name is Sloane!”

  “Have it your way. I can’t find Sloane if I’m having a pissing contest with the cops or if I’m spending the night in a holding cell at the 9th Precinct.”

 
Nancy was calmer now. “I’m sorry, Moe. You’re right, of course. But do you have any idea who the dead woman is in the apartment?”

  “I was hoping you could help me with that.”

  “How?”

  “I’ve got a first name: Millie.”

  “Was she pretty, blue-eyed, forty-ish, light brown hair?”

  “She wasn’t very pretty to look at when I saw her. She was in really rough shape, but I guess that’s a fairly good description. Who was she?”

  Nancy ignored that last part. “What do you mean, she was in rough shape? Oh, my God, was she murdered?”

  “Relax. The medical examiner doesn’t think it’s a homicide. He thinks it was probably a heart attack. Then she fell and cracked her head open. So at first glance it looked like murder to the cops. It looked that way to me also. Who was she?” I asked again.

  “It sounds like it must be Millicent McCumber.”

  “Millicent McCumber, the actress?”

  Nancy laughed an odd, staccato laugh. “Millie McCumber,” she repeated. There was pity in her voice, but it was also full of sharp, angry teeth. “She was a has-been who hadn’t been for a long time. She hasn’t done more than a bit part in fifteen years. Christ, she couldn’t even get hired on Law & Order and that franchise has cycled three times through every New York actor still blessed with a pulse.”

  “Why wasn’t she working? She was good. I remember them calling her the next Meryl Streep.”

  There was that machine gun laugh again. “The next W.C. Fields, more likely. She drank so much, she should have had gills instead of lungs. Millie was also a diva extraordinaire. Even though she hadn’t had a meaningful role in a movie since the second Clinton administration, she was harder to tame than Medusa’s hair.”