She giggled. “Vincent is a bit of a clod, but he’s sweet.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“I should also warn you that Julian is in a cross mood.”
“I appreciate the heads-up. I kinda figured he would be. Daughters do that to their fathers.”
She smiled coyly. “Yes, we do. It is in the nature of fathers and daughters.”
“And mothers.”
“But in a different way. I know that Siobhan and Nancy have a very problematic relationship. It is not so different with my mother.”
“Alexandra, somehow I doubt that beauty was at the center of the battles between you and your mother.”
“You would be surprised, Mr. Prager, what can come between mothers and daughters.”
The interior of the house wasn’t nearly as unrelenting as the outside. I supposed visitors had Alexandra to thank for that. While I wouldn’t exactly call the interior design feminine, it was softer and more welcoming than the hard-nosed exterior. Although it was an Indian summer day, there was a fire going in the stone fireplace. Burning logs, the universal symbol of welcome.
“Julian’s study is through the great room, up the half flight of steps, and then to the left. I will leave you men to your business.”
And with that, Alexandra Cantor headed in the other direction. I had manners enough not to watch her as she walked away. Manners, and more than a little willpower.
Julian’s study was something out of Dickens. Two of the walls were dedicated to built-in shelves lined with leather-bound books, and another wall was devoted to fox hunting scenes and landscapes. His desk was massive, as if honed out of a hunk of sequoia. There were green leather wing chairs, plush green carpeting, an oversized globe to one side of the grand desk, and a brass armillary with a rather threatening-looking arrow sticking out of it to the other side. It seemed a perfect place for the poor to come begging alms. A perfect place for them to be thrown out of. Cantor was seated behind his desk. Vincent, P EYE 7, was pacing about, a drink in hand.
“Prager, this is—”
“Vincent, your chief investigator,” I interrupted the lawyer. With men like Julian Cantor, you had to dissuade them from bullying you right up front or they’d never stop.
Cantor shook his head. “As I was saying, this is Vincent Brock. And as you’ve surmised, he works for me. I take it you two have met.”
“Sort of.” I gave Brock’s hand a perfunctory shake. He was about as thrilled with me as I was with him, which was to say not at all.
“That was real cute, that thing you pulled with the cop at Hanover Square,” Vincent said, angry and spoiling for revenge. He’d been embarrassed. Men detest being embarrassed almost more than anything else. I didn’t much care for it myself, but cancer treatment is a pretty humbling experience. If you can’t get over the embarrassment of it, it will kill you before the disease. Because, let me tell you, a whole lot of embarrassing situations came with my treatments. Hair loss and constant nausea being the least of it.
“Yeah, well, you shoulda just introduced yourself that night at Grogan’s instead of trying to play James Bond.”
Vincent’s face turned red. Uh oh, I’d done it again, embarrassed him in front of his employer. Apparently, he hadn’t told Cantor about how he had tried to tail me the night I met Anthony Rizzo at the bar.
Cantor barked at his investigator, “What’s Prager going on about?”
I figured I’d better save Vincent’s tush before he got embarrassed enough to shoot me. “Nothing, Mr. Cantor. It’s nothing, just a little stuff between professionals.”
Vincent looked relieved, almost thankful, but Cantor didn’t look especially happy.
“Well, I’m glad you gentlemen have had your fun, but what about my daughter? Nancy told me you think this is all some sort of charade. Is that right, Prager?”
“I take it you’ve seen the photos and Vincent here has told you what a mess the apartment was?”
“I have seen your photos and his,” the lawyer said. “To me it looks like Hiroshima the day after, not like a charade.”
“That’s the idea. Somebody wanted to get a rise out of you and they did. Your ex reacted the same way, the way you were meant to react.”
“And you think this somebody is my daughter?” Cantor asked. He knew the answer.
Why did people do that, ask questions they already knew the answers to? It made me nuts, but I kept calm and repeated what I had told Nancy about my cop-sense, about how nothing seemed to have been stolen, about how a key had been used on the front door. “Look, Mr. Cantor, whoever did that to Siobhan’s apartment was good at destroying things, but not at recreating a real crime scene. If you’d been to as many crime scenes as me, you’d understand.”
Cantor turned to his man. “What do you think?”
“Maybe I don’t agree that it was your girl who did it, but Prager’s got a point. The door wasn’t jimmied and the place was a mess, but a kind of pointless mess. I guess it did feel kind of staged.”
The lawyer stood and pounded his fists on top of the desk. “So where the fuck is my daughter?”
I turned my palms up. “That I can’t tell you, Mr. Cantor. But Nancy didn’t tell me to stop digging, so I won’t.”
“Vincent, give Prager your card. You help Prager any way you can.”
“But—”
Cantor didn’t have to say a word because the look on his face said it all. Vincent stopped his protest in order to save his job. He handed me a card. I handed him one of mine. Except for the bowing, it was like a Japanese business meeting. I didn’t think we were going to be friends, but I also didn’t need animosity screwing things up. It wasn’t karma. It was much simpler than that. A PI’s job was hard enough without having people actively working against him. Detectives Frovarp and Shulze were probably already looking for an excuse to fuck with me, and I didn’t need or want Vincent working to queer things. I had enough blood on my hands because of embarrassment and acting out of a stupid sense of pride. The focus here needed to be on Siobhan, and not on some snit between Vincent and me.
“I’ve gotta go talk to the detectives at the 9th Precinct,” I said. “But I also need to have a talk with Anthony Rizzo—”
“One of the doormen at your daughter’s building,” Vincent finished my sentence. Good, I thought, at least this guy wasn’t totally incompetent. I’d thrown him a softball and he’d hit it out of the park in front of his boss.
“Yeah, he and Siobhan were friends.” I didn’t explain further. “I think he knows more about all of this than he’s saying. So when I go talk to the cops, maybe Vincent can have a friendly chat with Rizzo.”
But Vincent suddenly didn’t look so good. I think he’d misunderstood what I meant by a friendly chat. Vincent wasn’t a muscle work kind of guy. Like I said, he probably spent his days investigating sidewalk cracks and interviewing people whose wrong leg had been amputated. So I came to his aid again.
“It’ll be easy,” I said. “Rizzo’s vain and he’s addicted to cash. Just bring a pocket full of twenties with you and treat him like Pavlov’s dog. You’ll have him salivating at the sound of the bell in no time.”
“What?”
“You weren’t a psych major, huh?”
“Never mind.” Cantor stomped around his desk. He pointed at Vincent. “You do what Prager says. Prager, you find what my daughter’s up to.”
I didn’t think the timing was right to remind Julian Cantor that I wasn’t working for him, so I nodded to Vincent that we should leave together. As my father might have said, Vincent was dumb, but he wasn’t stupid. He got my hint and followed me out of Cantor’s study. Alexandra wasn’t there to bid us adieu, which was just as well. The fewer distractions, the better.
“Look, Vincent,” I said, “we got off on the wrong foot here. Mainly that’s on me. Cantor’s a pain, but he’s right, Siobhan is what we both need to be thinking about.”
“Yeah, I know. You really think she fucked up
her apartment like that?”
“Her or a friend. Think about it, she’s got her parents jumping through hoops. Some kids grow older, but never grow up. They spend their lives trying to get the love and attention they felt robbed of as children. You ever meet Siobhan?”
Vincent flushed deep red and cleared his throat. “A few times, yeah.”
He’d slept with her. That was pretty obvious.
I opened the door for him to step through if he so chose. “And ….”
“She was kind of sad and lonely, I guess.”
“Sad how?”
“Not sad, really. More like empty, maybe. She acted like she needed to fill herself up with stuff to do or somebody to be.”
Amazingly, I understood just what he meant. It seemed to jibe with the things I’d heard from Rizzo, Giorgio Brahms, Anna Carey, and Michael Dillman. The Hollow Girl, indeed.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I called ahead to the precinct in the hopes that Frovarp and Shulze had packed it in for the day. Though I was no procrastinator, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to this particular unpleasantness. Most cops gave retired cops a break, while others seemed to enjoy busting the balls of their former brethren. It was hard to figure. No one expected cops to look the other way if an ex-cop was involved in something serious—DWI, assault, spousal abuse, at least not anymore—but there were little things, small matters of courtesy that it was reasonable to expect for time served on the job. Since getting put out to pasture in ’77, I’d had plenty of run-ins with members of the NYPD. Most of the time, even after a rocky start, we’d manage to find ways to work together. I’d even developed friendships with some of the cops and detectives I’d initially butted heads with. That wasn’t going to happen with Frovarp and Shulze. Frovarp especially looked born to spread misery wherever she went.
Unfortunately I’d caught them on their way out the door, but they were willing to wait for me to arrive. They’d gotten a call about the destruction of Siobhan’s apartment, Frovarp said, and they’d gone over enough of the Kremlin video to take note of my visit. Not my lucky day. Not a day to stop to buy scratch-off lottery tickets or bet on a horse. Frovarp’s cold, gravelly monotone set my teeth on edge, so I decided that maybe strolling into the 9th Precinct wasn’t in my best interests. Much easier for them to fuck with me in the precinct house than in public. I was in the middle of explaining how it would be much more to my liking if I met them on neutral turf—Grogan’s or Kid Charlemagne’s—than at the precinct house when my Bluetooth connection informed me that I was getting a call from Nancy Lustig. I put Frovarp on hold, no doubt endearing myself to her more than I already had.
“What’s up?”
“Please come back. Hurry?” Her voice was strange, breathy and desperate.
“Nancy, I can’t do this dance right now. I’m on the phone with—”
“It’s not about the kiss. It’s not about us.”
“What then?”
“Sloane. It’s Sloane.”
“What about her?”
“I can’t explain right now. Just come back.”
She clicked off.
I almost returned to Frovarp’s call, but decided that telling her I wasn’t coming in after all was probably not going to improve my abysmal standing in her eyes. And this way I’d at least be able to get beyond the border of Queens before she could do something peevish like having me arrested. I killed my Bluetooth connection and shut off the phone.
* * *
Nancy Lustig’s house was somewhat more ominous looking at night. Although the in-ground lights along the driveway and walk were lit, the house itself was almost completely dark. How odd, I thought, that a place seemingly constructed on the principle of blurring the distinction between inside and out should feel so foreboding. Or maybe the foreboding was just in my head and not in the house, because I knew the hammer would fall on me when I got around to finally seeing the cops. I’d never been good with that, with waiting for bad news. If it was really bad, like when I was sick, I just wanted to face it and be done with it or have it be done with me. I wasn’t good at waiting. In the Prager family we believed that bad news was always better than no news. Always.
Nancy had her front door open before I’d gotten one leg out of my car and she didn’t stop there. She came running up to me, not so much to greet me as … I wasn’t quite sure what, exactly. Obviously, something about Siobhan had been weighing on her. For the first time since the diner in Sheepshead Bay, she hadn’t fancied herself up for me. The makeup wasn’t perfect. The clothes weren’t tight or revealing. There was only the vaguest hint of that perfume of hers. Her breath had that acidic stomach tang to it. For her to present herself to me this way, to anyone this way, meant that whatever it was, was serious. Nancy’s kind of vanity, a vanity born of inferiority and self-loathing, wasn’t a casual thing. It was more an occupation. I was beginning to understand that maybe it was Nancy’s obsession with her appearance that had caused some of the fracturing between mother and daughter.
Nancy grabbed me by the arm and tugged me toward the house, but it wasn’t like before. This wasn’t about us. She wasn’t a little drunk and this had nothing to do with desire. She almost seemed incapable of speech. I followed her upstairs to the master bedroom, into the walk-in closet, into her office. She pointed at the big-assed computer monitor. I didn’t get it. It just looked like a Facebook page to me, not that I had been on Facebook all that much lately. Pam, in her wisdom, had made me join during my treatment.
“It’ll let me message you when we can’t talk,” Pam had said. “It’ll also give you something to do other than lying on the couch all day feeling sorry for yourself. And you might be surprised at how many people you’ll find who’ll support you, people who’ve been through the same or similar things.”
She’d been right about all of it, of course. I was reluctant at first, like I always was about anything technology based, but it worked. It helped stop me from feeling so isolated. I’d rekindled a few old acquaintances and made some new friends. The irony was that my guilt over Pam’s death had made me withdraw in a way that not even the cancer did, and that no amount of friend support on Facebook would heal.
“Okay, Nancy, it’s a Facebook page. So what?”
“Look!” she screamed, pointing at a small ad on the right side of the screen. “Look.”
There, under the blue Sponsored line with the megaphone icon, stuck in between ads for new method tennis instruction and nonsurgical facelifts, was what Nancy wanted me to see. It was another ad, this one featuring an inch-by-inch headshot of Siobhan Bracken. Above the headshot, in dark blue print, were the words: The Hollow Girl Returns Tonight at 10:00. In smaller black print below the headshot was a clickable link. I clicked on it. I was redirected to a site called “The Hollow Girl Returns.” It featured a larger version of the same headshot that had appeared on the ad. Above the headshot were site destinations: History, Biography, Lost Girl/Hollow Girl Videos, Shop, Contact Me. Under the headshot in bold black print were the words: Whatever became of the Hollow Girl? Find out tonight and every night at 10:00. Below that, a disclaimer:
This is performance art and is not intended for any other purpose than to entertain and to stimulate discussion. No one is under any real duress of a physical or psychological nature. All effects in these posts are the result of makeup and digital manipulation. Do not, I repeat, do not seek to assist me in any way, shape, or form. This is a performance and should be treated as such. I accept no liability for any actions taken by the audience.
I moved the mouse to the site navigation listings, but Nancy told me not to bother.
“I’ve done all of that already,” she said. “It’s all very accurate and official looking. You were right, Moe. She set us up. She even has goddamned Hollow Girl T-shirts, sweatshirts, and baseball caps for sale.”
“At least we know what she was doing and why and that she’s okay. How did you find out? You don’t strike me as a Facebook kinda gal.”
“I did.”
“She’s god-awful beautiful, isn’t she?”
“Otherworldly, yeah.”
“I wish she wasn’t so fucking nice, though. It makes it hard to hate her as much as I want to.”
“Why hate her at all? She’s stuck with your ex,” I said.
“Good point.” She nodded toward the office door and walked through it. I followed. “We’ve got some time before my daughter plunges me back into a new mess. Pour yourself a drink downstairs. I’ve got Internet on the big flat screen down there.” She stopped by the door to the master bath. “I’m going to go put myself back together. I’ll be down in a little while.”
“Okay.”
“And, Moe ….”
“What is it?”
“I’m glad you came back … even if it wasn’t what I wanted you to come back for. It makes me feel better about what Sloane’s doing, having you here.”
“Happy to do it.”
Oddly enough, I was.
CHAPTER TWENTY
It was 9:50, and I had settled in on the white leather sofa in front of the flat screen. I’m not sure “settled in” is the right way to describe it, because in spite of the sofa being a stylish objet d’art, the thing wasn’t quite as comfortable as stainless steel. I’d taken Nancy’s suggestion, pouring myself an inch of fancy Scotch in an equally fancy crystal tumbler. I’d done likewise for her, although she had yet to make an appearance. I was a rotten alcoholic. Just a few cycles off the day-long benders I had been indulging in for weeks, and I was barely shaky. I could casually take a sip here and there without sucking at the bottle like a starving baby. I guess I had Nancy to thank for that. Unintended consequences make the world go ’round.
The Hollow Girl (A Moe Prager Mystery) Page 10
