The Hollow Girl (A Moe Prager Mystery)

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “So you knew her.”

  “I had the displeasure, yes. Some people have pets, others have causes. The Ancient Mariner had an albatross. Sloane had Millie. She kind of made her a reclamation project because Millie had once been beautiful.”

  “You sound angry. Maybe even a little jealous.”

  “I am—I was,” she confessed. “Sloane is so talented and could have really been somebody. She still could be somebody, but instead she chose to weigh herself down with that human skirt of rocks.”

  “Were they lovers?”

  “At first, I guess maybe they were, but not for a long time. In fact, for a few years, Sloane had seemed to shed Millie. Then a few months ago, they started hanging around together again. Probably because Sloane knew it would irk me.”

  The more I listened to Nancy talk about her daughter, the more I gave credence to what Julian Cantor had said about the relationship between mother and daughter. It really did seem as if their lives were bound together in very unhealthy ways, but I hadn’t taken this on to do family counseling.

  “Did Millie live with Siob—with Sloane?”

  “No, but she had keys to the apartment, and Sloane let her use it when she was away.”

  “So that’s good. It means that Sloane’s away and not missing.”

  “You find a dead woman in my daughter’s apartment and that should make me feel better?”

  “Well, when you put it like that … . But if Sloane only let Millie use her apartment when she was away, it might mean—”

  “Might,” she said. “Might.”

  “Don’t worry, Nancy. I’m not trying to get off the case. I’ve already got someone lined up to talk to. I just wanted to let you know that there are other scenarios than the worst one.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just—”

  “You don’t have to apologize. If it was my daughter, I’d be crazed, too. I’ll keep you posted.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Grogan’s Clover was a bullshit joint, a hipsterish papier-mâché version of a New York Irish bar. See, here’s what people don’t get about New York City: Manhattan isn’t like the outer boroughs. Not only is it like a different city, it’s like another planet. Only in Manhattan would somebody dream up a scheme to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars to recreate something that is perfectly fine as is. There must have been a few hundred authentic Irish pubs spread throughout the city, reasonably friendly places that served beer, liquor, and edible food without requiring you to sign over your firstborn for payment. Maybe the TVs weren’t flat screens the size of solar panels, but they showed the same games and were equally distracting. And maybe their jukeboxes didn’t always play downloads from bands with names like Grizzly Bear or Das Racist, but music came out of them nonetheless.

  Sadly, the vampires who feed the appetites of scruffy hipster ghouls were busy turning parts of my beloved Brooklyn into Manhattan. No, thanks. The Brooklyn I love likes itself a half-step behind and a few years out of date. It likes its yearning. The yearning where making it means somewhere across the river, not across Bushwick Avenue. My Brooklyn doesn’t consider its decay ironic or a statement about something bigger. My Brooklyn is what it is, and says that’s enough because it has to be. That’s all there is. Brooklyn is necessarily a place that used to be, not a place that’s happening. God, please, let it happen somewhere else. Anywhere else.

  My breath stuck in my throat with an audible gasp when I caught a flash of the bartender’s profile. She looked so much like Holly D’Angelo, the girl who’d hit Pam, that all the pain of late June came flooding back into me. With her practiced Manhattan callousness, she hadn’t noticed my reaction or, if she had, she sure hadn’t let it show. What she showed me instead was a vague hint of a smile that itself seemed like a Herculean bit of theater. I guess I should have thanked her because if she had shown me even an ounce of genuine humanity at that moment, I would have ordered a double Dewar’s and not looked back. But because her chilly tattooed veneer so pissed me off, I refused to go diving into the whiskey abyss.

  “Club soda and lime,” I said.

  It must have sounded like Go fuck yourself. She tilted her head at me, as if wondering what she’d done to earn my contempt. She didn’t waste much time in contemplation, putting my drink up on a coaster and moving on down the bar.

  The doorman from the Kremlin came bouncing into Grogan’s at 6:37. Out of his ridiculous gray visored felt cap and matching tunic with shiny brass buttons and wide red piping, he looked young and hungry. He was definitely a workout rat, and his civilian clothes were meant to show off his V-shaped torso. When he strutted into a place, he wanted everyone to notice him, expected them to notice him. But this was Alphabet City, not Arthur Avenue. Around here, his Bronx outer-borough charms were lost on the locals. He didn’t like that, not even a little bit.

  “Whatta dump,” he said, sitting on the stool next to me. “Yo, honey, gimme a Ketel One on the rocks, and put it on grandpa’s tab, huh.”

  “You’re late.”

  “Chill out, gramps. I’m here, ain’t I? The freakin’ cops kept me around askin’ me questions, you know.”

  “Fair enough.”

  The bartender put the doorman’s drink down in front of him and gave me a refill on the club soda. We didn’t bother toasting. The doorman polished it off in a quick swig.

  “No offense, pops, but I don’t like this place and you ain’t exactly my idea of a wing man. Show me some money or I’m gone. You know what I’m sayin’?”

  He gave me the opening and I waltzed through it. “Well, if I didn’t already know about Millicent McCumber and Siobhan Bracken’s arrangement, I might be tempted to show you some more money. But since I do know about them—all about them—you’re gonna have to sing for your supper and earn your money, junior.”

  “Fuck you!” is what came out of his mouth, though his face showed disappointment. In his head he’d already spent the money he was now risking with his bluster.

  I offered him a second chance. “We’ll start easy with a simple question. What’s your name?”

  “Nah, I ain’t playin’ this game. Keep your fuckin’ money.” He got up from the stool, but hesitated, waiting for me to make him an offer to stay.

  I played a different card based on a not-so-wild guess. “Suit yourself, junior, but my guess is the management company that runs the Kremlin won’t be pleased to find out you were fucking one of their tenants. Not only will they fire your ass, but you won’t be able to get a job cleaning toilets in a city housing project. Now sit the fuck back down and talk to me.”

  He puffed out his chest, leaning into me like he was going to prove me wrong by smacking the shit out of me. Something he no doubt could have done, and would happily have done. The thing is, he knew I was right. Of course, I was only guessing at his relationship with Siobhan, but I wasn’t born stupid. Although I was basically a stumbler as a PI, I was good at picking up on the little things. I had known Nancy as a young woman, and I suspected Siobhan, like her mother before her, would have been incredibly susceptible to a handsome, well put-together guy like the doorman.

  “C’mon, c’mon.” I patted the stool next to mine. “Sit back down and tell me your name.” I said it as friendly as I could manage, and ordered him another drink.

  He sat. After his second, then third, vodka, he finally told me his name was Anthony Rizzo and that he and Siobhan had a deal of sorts. For two hundred bucks a throw, he’d service her.

  “She wasn’t bad for her looks, you know. She liked a little kink. Liked me to her call bad things and fuck her really hard. Sometimes it was both Siobhan and the older broad, Millie. That bitch was freakin’ wild, man.” After two more drinks, Anthony started to confess something else. “Sometimes for a few hundred extra—” He stopped, clearing his throat, his face turning deep red. “Sometimes … .”

  “So,” I said in a neutral voice, “there was another guy involved, too. What was his name, Anthony, the other guy?”

&n
bsp; He was cowed, hanging his head. “Giorgio,” he whispered. “He was one of Millie’s friends.”

  “Last name?”

  “Don’t know it, man.”

  “But you have his number, right?”

  He shook his head. “Not on me.”

  I slid five twenties to him across the bar. “My cell number’s on my card. Text it to me. Did you ever go to his place?”

  “Once, yeah. I needed the extra scratch, you know? He owns a brownstone in Hell’s Kitchen somewheres.”

  “Text me the address too.”

  After another drink, Anthony fed me the basics, the more mundane stuff that any doorman who wasn’t sleeping with one of his tenants would have known. The last time he’d seen Siobhan in either his capacity as a doorman or paid lover was at the very end of August.

  “She was goin’ on one of her trips, you know, probably international because the cab I hailed for her was takin’ her to JFK, not LaGuardia or Newark.”

  “Any idea where?”

  “Nah, she didn’t discuss shit with me. When she saw me outside of the bedroom, she treated me like the hired help … worse, maybe. But she used to go on a lotta trips.”

  “For how long?”

  “Most of the time, a week, ten days maybe; two weeks max.”

  “So she’s been gone a long time, then?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, it’s been a while, you know?”

  “How long has Millie been staying in Siobhan’s apartment?”

  “A month maybe. She’d been around a lot lately.”

  “When did Millie first start coming around?”

  Anthony thought about that for a minute, rubbing his forehead as he did. “A couple of months. I think Siobhan introduced me to her in May. Told me Millie had keys and that I should let her in and to treat Millie the way I treated her.”

  “How long have you had your little arrangement with Siobhan?”

  “A year, maybe. We’d do it about once a month, like when she needed it bad, but since Millie showed up, I been in 5E a lot, you know. Even after Siobhan split for wherever, I was up with Millie a few times. She was a generous bitch, man, and she could really fuck,” Anthony said, pumping his fist. “She was the best I ever had. Too bad about her, huh?”

  I wasn’t sure if Rizzo was more upset by the loss of future income, or by the thought he was never going to sleep with Millie again.

  “So if you’d been servicing her a lot, weren’t you curious when she stopped calling?”

  “Hey, I ain’t a 7-Eleven, man. I don’t work there seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. I figured the bitch split, like Siobhan. People in that building come and go without telling me shit.” He looked at his watch. “Can I get outta here now?”

  “Soon, Anthony. In a minute. Just one more question.”

  “Fine.”

  “Did you have any idea of who Siobhan and Millie were?”

  “What the fuck does that mean, who they were? One was a hard-up bitch with a lot of money who liked to get fucked hard, for whatever reason. And the other was a drunken whore who loved cock and pussy more than anybody I ever met, you know?”

  I handed him two more twenties, reminded him to text me Giorgio’s contact info, and told him I’d be in touch if I needed anything else. He didn’t look pleased for someone who’d just drank about eighty dollars’ worth of free vodka and who’d made almost two hundred bucks cash in the last hour and a half. I suppose he preferred making his money the old-fashioned way: hustling for it and working for tips. I guess I didn’t blame him for resenting me. No one likes having a hammer held over his head, and the hammer I was holding over Anthony’s was a heavy one. But leverage is a funny thing and much harder to use than people would expect. I learned that lesson a long time ago at the hands of Brighton Beach’s mob boss, a guy we called Tony Pizza. It was a lesson I have never forgotten.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I thought about killing time until I received Anthony Rizzo’s texts about the mysterious Giorgio, but chose to play a hunch instead. Giorgio, I figured, could wait until tomorrow. So when I walked out of Grogan’s, I turned north, then west. I’d decided to go sniff around Kid Charlemagne’s on 2nd Avenue and 7th Street. Kid Charlemagne’s, like Grogan’s Clover, was one of those Manhattan meta creations—a theme restaurant as Venus Flytrap—a place created by an elitist asshole so that he and his friends could laugh at the great unwashed masses who innocently wandered in for a burger and a beer. My bet was that Kid Charlemagne’s owner, a C-list artist and A-list junkie named Nathan Martyr, would be well acquainted with the likes of the Hollow Girl and Millicent McCumber.

  I’d walked about a block when I noticed I was being followed, and not very skillfully so. My tail, a nondescript white guy in his mid-thirties wearing a pristine motorcycle jacket, Ralph Lauren jeans, and two hundred buck Nikes, had gotten a little too close when I left Grogan’s. Then, instead of just walking on by me, as he should have, he abruptly changed course and rushed to cross the street. I could see him paralleling me up Avenue C, and when I turned left to head west, he did the same, keeping to the other side of the street. He wasn’t a threat. His incompetence didn’t exactly breed fear in me. Still, I was wary all the same. He wasn’t a cop, that was for shit sure. The question was, if he wasn’t a cop, who was he and why the hell was he following me around the Lower East Side?

  I ducked into a busy restaurant, allowing me to make sure I was in fact being followed and not simply succumbing to a bout of paranoia. My view out the eatery’s darkly tinted plate glass window reassured me that I wasn’t being paranoid. To say my tail wasn’t much of a pro was an understatement. When I entered the restaurant, he should have kept on going, then doubled back and hidden himself out of my line of sight. But no, there he was, directly across the street, pacing a rut in the sidewalk.

  I waited for a group of people to leave the restaurant. When a party of five headed out, I tucked in behind them, kneeling below car top level—no easy task for an old man with bad knees—as I went through the front door. Working my way about ten car lengths back east, I popped my head up and looked through a car windshield. Oy! I almost felt sorry for this schmuck with the expensive jeans, because he was still across the street from the restaurant, craning his neck, waiting for me to exit. Confident of my tail’s inexperience, I crossed to his side of the street, hid in a doorway, and waited him out.

  Ten minutes later, it must have clicked that he’d lost me. He went into the eatery to make certain. When he came out, he was so pissed he kicked a parking meter machine. If it hadn’t already been easy enough to follow him, his self-inflicted limp made it cake. Eventually, he worked his way back down toward Houston Street. He got into a sleek, metallic maroon BMW coupe with idiotic vanity plates that read P EYE 7. This clown was almost too much to bear. At least I now had a good sense of who he might be. I was confident he must have been Julian Cantor’s lead investigator.

  The thing is that there are all kinds of PIs for all kinds of jobs. Some require a police background and some don’t. Some require a deep level of high-tech skill. Some require a bit of acting craft, while others require nothing more than patience and a strong bladder. When Carmella and I owned our security firm, we tried to have a mix of all kinds of skilled people. But when you were an investigator who worked almost exclusively on personal injury and malpractice suits, you basically had to be good at three things: taking photos of cracked sidewalks, taking statements, and understanding medical terminology. When you did it for a big firm like Cantor, Schreck, it also meant you could afford to be incompetent at street skills and could also afford a fancy BMW with vanity plates. At least now I wouldn’t feel conflicted about not calling Julian Cantor. He would find out about the late Millicent McCumber soon enough.

  As I waited for P EYE 7 to pull out of his parking spot, my phone buzzed in my pocket. I’d gotten the texts from Anthony Rizzo with Giorgio’s info. I thought about forgetting Kid Charlemagne’s and heading to Hell’s Ki
tchen to chat with the mysterious Giorgio. I decided to skip both. I was beat, and a little shaky. I hadn’t been awash in alcohol for so long as to get the DTs. I didn’t black out or see rabbis dancing on pinheads, but I’d been at it long enough to know when I needed a drink and when to sleep. I found my car and aimed it at the Brooklyn Bridge.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  One drink. That was all I had. Sleep came rather more easily than I expected. I guess working a case made me more tired than I’d expected. It had been a while. When I was sick and getting treated, I was tired all the time. Between the damned drugs and radiation, it was as if the doctors were busy trying to kill me and the cancer at the same time, and it was a toss-up to see which would outlast the other. Even after the cancer was gone, the exhaustion stayed with me as a reminder of my fragility. As if I needed reminding.

  I hadn’t dreamed, that I could recall. In the immediate wake of Pam’s death I’d dreamed all the time, none of it very pleasant. Strangely, those dreams were rarely of Pam. I didn’t picture her being crushed beneath the wheels of Holly D’Angelo’s Jeep. Nothing like that. Mostly I dreamed of Katy, my first wife, Sarah’s mom. She was the only woman I think I’d ever loved to the point of stupidity, but we’d been doomed from the start. I would dream over and over and over again of the baby Katy had miscarried in the early ’80s. Imagining I had seen the baby’s face, that it had talked to me and wagged a tiny accusatory finger at me, I’d wake up in a sweat. Regardless of how hard I tried, I could never remember its face or what it had said or sounded like. I couldn’t even remember if the lost baby had been a boy or a girl. All that stayed with me when I awoke was the translucence of the skin on the baby’s tiny finger, how I could see the blood pulsing through it.