The Hollow Girl (A Moe Prager Mystery)

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Then there was Pam. I’d been able to think of her again just lately without wanting to light a match to my guilt and burst into flames. For the past two months, all I pictured of her during my waking hours was her body protruding from under the front end of Holly D’Angelo’s Jeep. That or Pam in her coffin, cold, eyes forever closed, her face utterly neutral and damning. But since the day Aaron shook me out of my stupor and lost his patience with me, I’d been able to remember Pam apart from my culpability in her death. It was a relief to have Pam restored to me as something other than a source of pain. I suppose I had Nancy to thank for that, too.

  As if on cue, she came down the stairs dressed much like Alexandra Cantor had been dressed earlier in the day—only there was so much more calculation in Nancy’s choices. The neckline of her white sweater fairly swooped down and her slacks looked painted on rather than slipped into. Everything about her was now just so: her crushed herb perfume evident, but not overwhelming, her hair shining, falling perfectly on either side of her shoulders. Even her decision to come down in bare feet seemed like something she’d taken time to debate. I pictured her in front of a mirror with ten pairs of shoes, trying each pair on, considering which would have the desired effect. When she said she had to put herself together, she wasn’t being figurative. Though I knew that not even a woman as breathtakingly beautiful as Alexandra simply fell out of bed looking like an airbrushed goddess, she had fewer steps to take than a woman who had constructed her appearance. I wondered if Nancy still thought all the effort was worth it. I wasn’t complaining.

  She sat down on the sofa and fiddled with the controller, picked up her drink, and took a sip. She turned, wearing her smile as a mask. Nancy was trying very hard to hold herself together, but there were cracks in her veneer. She was hoping those cracks wouldn’t turn into fissures after watching whatever it was her daughter had gotten up to. Nancy hit the refresh button on the controller when the satellite box indicated it was 10:00. Nothing.

  “I called Julian to let him know,” she said, voice strained. “He’d already gotten calls about it.”

  “He have any ideas about what’s going on?”

  “No, he’s as nervous as I am.”

  She hit the refresh again. A black rectangle appeared center screen with Siobhan’s now familiar headshot. It was a fairly recent photo and while she hadn’t suddenly blossomed into Alexandra, she was indeed much more attractive than Nancy had been when she was younger. Still not pretty, per se, but her face had thinned out some and it made up nicely. Not nicely enough to get a lead role, apparently. Nancy enlarged the box to full screen and pressed the play arrow. When she did, the disclaimer that was on the website appeared, superimposed over Siobhan’s headshot. Then, after enough time elapsed for viewers to have read the disclaimer, someone did a voice-over of it.

  “That’s Sloane. That’s her voice,” Nancy fairly shouted, happy and relieved to hear her daughter’s voice.

  As Siobhan read it, each word on the screen changed from black to yellow to black again. The screen faded to black. Five seconds later, the void was replaced by Siobhan. Not her headshot, by her.

  She was wearing an outfit not unlike what she had worn in the “Suicide Posting” on Valentine’s Day, 1999: a plain white T-shirt, ripped jeans. For all I knew, it might’ve been the same outfit. She’d lost some weight and the clothes hung loosely on her. There were dark stains on the tee over where the fake stitches that closed the false, self-inflicted stab wound had been. She seemed to be sitting on the same stool she had sat on all those years ago. The room and backdrop looked exactly the same, though I knew that wasn’t possible. Siobhan—Sloane then—had done the posts from her bedroom and the basement of a house that no longer existed. I was sitting in the house that had been built where the old one had stood.

  The shock was evident on Nancy’s face. I could see her asking herself: How can that be?

  Siobhan stretched her neck and waggled her arms as if to shake the tension out of her body. Then she spoke:

  I’m Siobhan Bracken. My name used to be Sloane Cantor, but most of you viewing this know me or knew me as the Hollow Girl or, at the beginning, as the Lost Girl. For those of you who knew me then, this place should look familiar and [Lifting shirt to reveal perfect replicas of the blood and stitches that had been there on Valentine’s Day fourteen years earlier.] so should these. All that stuff back then, they were just an ugly girl’s lies spun out of her anger and her fantasies. I was an angry, hurt, confused little girl who loved acting more than anything in the world. I hurt a lot of people back then and I’m very sorry for it, but, like I said, I was a little girl who didn’t understand that other people could hurt like I could hurt.

  I’m a woman now, though not much less ugly than I was when I was in high school. The world isn’t a very nice place for ugly girls and fat boys, is it? So, okay, no more bullshit personas for me. It’s all lies and make-believe. What I tell you here, what I’ll show you here every day will be false. It will be art, but maybe it will speak to you now that I’m telling you the truth that it’s all lies. I’ve lied to myself since I could think. How about you? How many lies do you tell yourself in a single day? It’s how I’ve gotten through every day of my life.

  Tomorrow, we’re going to talk about where the lies began. [Reaches below camera view. Comes back into view holding two white rectangles.] Here’s a hint. [Turns rectangles around. Photos of Nancy Lustig: one taken sometime in the late ’70s, the other recent.] She’s where the lies began.

  Till tomorrow.

  The screen faded to black. The disclaimer came back up, followed by something about all posts being archived and then available on YouTube, and asking viewers to “Like” The Hollow Girl on Facebook and follow @TheHollowGirl on Twitter.

  And that was that. Nancy sat frozen in place. Her mouth moved, but nothing came out of it. Her phone began vibrating within a second of the post ending. Her arm moved, as if disconnected from her body, reached for the iPhone on the couch next to her and shut it off. I didn’t move or say a word. I can’t think what I would have said that wouldn’t have just made it all worse. After another minute, Nancy reached for her Scotch and drained it. I poured her another and she drained that one, too.

  She finally turned to me as if coming back into her own body, black, mascara-fucked tears flooding over her cheeks. Her mouth moved some more, but still nothing would come out. I didn’t need to hear the words. I knew what they would have been, so I took her by the hand and led her upstairs into her bedroom. There was nothing I could do for Pam any longer, but someone needed my help just then, and it was help I could give.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  No one had to say the words, This wasn’t how I’d pictured it. The darkness fairly screamed it. But there is something liberating about desperate, wounded sex. Even an old man can recall how it is to succumb to pain and hunger. How it removes the specters of expectation and disappointment from the equation. And Nancy, by her own account, had thirty-five years’ worth of fantasies and expectations about what had just happened between us. Thank God that wasn’t the baggage I’d carried up the stairs and through the bedroom door. When I’d taken her to bed, I thought it had been all about Nancy and her freshly opened scars. I was wrong, of course. Siobhan’s scalpel cut her mother deep, yet Nancy’s distress was a portal through which I eagerly swam. I had a lifetime full of my own disasters, great and small. A life full of small victories and guilty defeats. Wounds, desperation, and sex make a potent, explosive cocktail. I hoped this one wouldn’t blow up in our faces. Tick … tick … tick ….

  There was no tenderness, no gentle embraces in the wake of the breathlessness and clawing. The sighs, screams, and moaning that filled up the room had been replaced by a chasm across the bed and an aching, uncomfortable silence. It got so that the sounds of a passing car along 107 felt like a reprieve from the governor. I couldn’t begin to speculate at all the bad places Nancy might be going to in her head. I didn’t know her well enoug
h, frankly. One bit of relief for me was that I no longer wasted time on judging my performance in bed. At my age, unaided by modern pharmacology, I was glad to have been able to perform at all, thank you very much. I was a little saddened that our lovemaking had closed the door on the distant kind of love I had clung to for ugly-beautiful old Nancy. That kind of love breeds only in a vacuum, not the bedroom.

  Eventually, we both inched our ways to the middle of the bed and Nancy quietly nestled under my left arm, resting her right cheek on my chest. Still silent, she traced the scar on my abdomen with her index finger.

  “Did it hurt?” she whispered, finally.

  I took a second to consider if she was asking only about the surgery or if it was a broader question. I decided it was about the scar.

  “I was unconscious,” I said.

  She rose up and punched me in the arm. “Idiot! I know you were unconscious when they operated.” There was a smile in her voice. I was glad to hear it. I felt like I could finally exhale.

  “You know, that whole year’s a bit of a blur, Nancy. I went through so much. They weren’t going to do surgery at first, but the tumor started bleeding and they had to go in. That’s what I got for delaying treatment until after Sarah’s wedding.”

  “Is she happy … Sarah?”

  “Happy, what’s that? I never know how to answer those kinds of questions. Is anyone happy?”

  “Talk about not answering a question.”

  “She has a busy practice, a husband who loves her, a new son, and a father who disappoints her.”

  Nancy kissed me softly on the lips. “You didn’t disappoint me. I knew you wouldn’t,” she whispered, sliding her mouth down along my skinny old body.

  I wasn’t going to pick a fight with her, not then.

  * * *

  When I woke up, the dark foreboding of the house at night was gone, Nancy with it. Sun streamed in, but I could tell that autumn had taken back its rightful place on the calendar. The warmth of the previous days had vanished. At first, after the chemo and radiation, my body’s thermostat had gone haywire. There seemed to be no relationship between the ambient temperature and my sensation of heat or cold. I could sweat through my shirt in mid-February on the boardwalk or be bone cold in the sauna at the gym. But in recent months I’d been transformed into a human weather station. I could just feel that it would be crisp outside before ever stepping outdoors. I could smell the chill, though the air in the bedroom was still redolent with the scents of Nancy and me.

  Nancy had told me she was going to play tennis. Good for her, I thought. What the hell was she supposed to do, sit around the house all day fielding gossipy phone calls? Was she supposed to eat her guts out, waiting for Siobhan to drop the next bomb on her head? I also had selfish motives for being glad she was gone.

  There was a note in the kitchen, thanking me for last night, and telling me to help myself to anything I wanted for breakfast. She hadn’t come right out with it, but I got the sense she expected or at least hoped that I’d be there when she got back. That wasn’t going to happen. Pleased as I was about what had gone on between us last night in the wake of the Hollow Girl’s reemergence, I wasn’t vaguely ready to set up shop. In some ways, Nancy and I falling into bed out of circumstance gave us license to enjoy the experience. It saved us both the strain of circling and circling each other. I wasn’t about to push the limits beyond that. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Sometimes, one night together is all that’s meant to be.

  Out of the shower and dressed in yesterday’s clothes, I went to check my phone messages before heading back into the city. Only then did I remember that I’d shut the phone off on my way over. It didn’t quite light up like a Christmas tree, but I had lots of messages. I didn’t check them, not then. I wanted, needed, to get out of there before Nancy returned. Any “morning after” scenario comes with its share of potential awkwardness. When your morning after is three and a half decades in the making, awkwardness is the least of it. There were land mines everywhere, and I wasn’t up for eggshell-walking. I jotted down a quick note of my own beneath the note Nancy had left me. The note itself was quick. The thinking about it wasn’t. I didn’t have all the words to express what I felt—whatever that was—and decided that less was definitely more. “Will call later. Moe,” was the best I could do. I hoped I’d come up with something better than that by the time I actually called.

  When I got to the front seat of my car, I listened to the messages. Not unexpectedly, two were from Frovarp and were of the Fuck-you-Prager-I’m-gonna-fry-your-ass-for-hangin’-up-on-me variety. The rest of the messages were from Vincent Brock, two from the night before and one that morning. In all the previous evening’s turmoil, I’d forgotten about Vincent and the task I’d assigned him. Given that Siobhan had resurfaced, I wasn’t all that curious about what had happened between him and Anthony Rizzo. I listened to the messages anyway and when I did, I wished I hadn’t.

  I got Vincent on the phone as I pulled out of Nancy’s driveway and headed down to the Long Island Expressway.

  “What do you mean, Rizzo split?” I asked.

  “Yeah, and good morning to you, Prager.”

  “Sorry I hurt your feelings. Good morning. So ….”

  “It means what it means. The doorman is in the wind. When I went to talk to your pal Anthony, I found Jesus Chavez there instead. Chavez is one of the other two doormen at the building. He was pretty pissed off because he got called in early. Seems Rizzo called the cops, then just walked off his post without notifying anyone he was leaving. You know how touchy people in the city get about paying those ridiculous rents and not having the doorman around. So I tried Rizzo’s phone a few times. No luck. Straight to voicemail. Then I took a drive up to the Bronx to have a little visit with him, but he wasn’t there, either. I staked out his place all night. He never showed.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Doesn’t matter anyway,” he said. “The boss’s daughter is back.”

  “Your boss, not mine.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I still don’t like it.”

  “Look, Prager, I get that you think I don’t know my ass from my elbow.”

  “Colorfully phrased, but accurate enough.”

  Vincent shrugged it off. “But Rizzo splitting makes sense. Obviously, Siobhan—I mean, Mr. Cantor’s daughter paid the guy off to trash the apartment. He realized he was going to get exposed, probably shitcanned, and maybe even arrested. So he splits until things calm down a little. The cops might be hot to arrest him now, but a few weeks from now no one will care. A few days from now, no one will care. No one cares about anything for very long anymore.”

  “Pretty philosophical for a guy who rides around in a red BMW with vanity plates, but maybe you’re right.”

  “No maybe about it. Rizzo’s out of here. You don’t think he just decided to use his back vacation time, do you?”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “So you keep saying. What is it with you? You think you’re like Sherlock fucking Holmes?”

  “No, Brock, but you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t swallow shit whole and smile about it just because someone says it’s veal.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. Forget it. I’m just cranky. It’s one of the great privileges and pleasures of old age.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  He clicked off.

  I was cranky. That much was true. And I really didn’t like the fact that Rizzo had so conveniently vanished. But my crankiness had nothing to do with Anthony Rizzo or Vincent or Frovarp and Shulze. It probably didn’t even have much to do with Nancy and me sleeping together. My crankiness had to do with what lay ahead of me. Searching for Siobhan Bracken had given me back something I’d needed: a sense of purpose. Purpose had given me a reason not to drink and not to pray at the altar of my own guilt. The new incarnation of the Hollow Girl had pretty much pulled the rug out from under all of that. I didn’t want to
think about how long it would take for the prayers and drinking to resume.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The 9th Precinct was on East 5th Street, not too far from Grogan’s. Inside the NYPD, it was known as the Fighting Ninth. Perfect, I thought, given the ornery natures of Detectives Frovarp and Shulze. They had no doubt begged to be assigned there. I hadn’t been to the 9th since the old shithole had been knocked down and rebuilt. Though the truth is that after a few years, a station house, no matter how brightly painted or designed, turns bleak. It grows dreary and takes on a distinct odor. It’s more than simply the institutional tang of ammonia or chemical pine cleaners. It’s also part sweat sock and vomit, part too-sweet perfume and cigarette smoke. Doesn’t matter that smoking is verboten. It’s as if the tar rides in on the backs of the skells the way fog comes in on little cat feet.

  I asked for the squad room and told the uniform manning the desk that I was there to see Detectives Frovarp and Shulze. He smirked, shook his head, and buzzed me through.

  “Good luck with that,” he said as I walked on.

  I’d decided on my way in from Nancy’s house that I wanted to get this confrontation out of the way. The longer I put it off, the worse it would get. That’s why I didn’t usually procrastinate. Putting shit off almost never improves the situation. I’d also abandoned the idea of trying to do this outside the precinct house. The way I figured it was that even if Frovarp and Shulze had a legitimate gripe with me—which, I suppose, they did—the reappearance of the Hollow Girl worked in my favor. Assholes though they might be, they were still detectives and would have a hard time denying that there really wasn’t much substance here. I’d left the Kremlin the day I discovered Millie McCumber’s body. And Siobhan’s flat had been trashed as a gimmick. They couldn’t very well break my horns for not calling in a B and E if no one actually broke in. Nor could they toss my ass in jail for screwing up a crime scene if there was no crime. I also realized that I was taking rationalization to new heights.