The Hollow Girl (A Moe Prager Mystery)

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Except for the addition of computers, squad rooms hadn’t changed much in thirty-five years. There was more estrogen in them and less polyester than in my day, but they looked the same, felt the same, smelled the same. The thing was that they were less busy these days. There had been 1,557 homicides in New York City in 1977, the last year I was on the job. In 1990 there had been over 2,600. There were 414 in 2012. Maybe that’s why Frovarp and Shulze had spare time to fuck with me. Whatever the reason, I was about to find out.

  Frovarp had a scowl on her face even before she noticed me. When I got her attention she showed me her teeth.

  “Hey, Gary,” she shouted across the squad room to Shulze.

  “Yeah, Pat, what is it?”

  “Come and see what washed up out of the sewer.”

  Shulze turned around from the file cabinet he was resting his coffee on. He had that aw-shucks grin on his face. “The box?” he asked his partner.

  “Sounds good to me. Interrogation room one, Prager,” she said, pointing over my right shoulder.

  Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe I should reconsider procrastination as a viable option in the future. I didn’t bother protesting and headed straight to where Frovarp pointed. I sat down in the metal perp seat without needing to be told. I was smart like that. The two detectives followed me in and Shulze slammed the door behind him.

  Frovarp turned to her partner and said, “Cuff him.”

  I opened my mouth to say something, then thought better of it. Sometimes you just gotta let kids have their fun even if it comes at your expense. Shulze snapped one cuff around my left wrist and clicked the other cuff around the long, U-shaped metal bar bolted to the table. This wasn’t going to be good cop/bad cop. It was going to be bad cop/worse cop.

  “All right, asshole,” Frovarp started, “what the fuck was that bullshit the other day, you walking away from a crime scene?”

  “You heard the ME. I heard the ME. It wasn’t a crime scene. She had a heart attack.”

  “The ME doesn’t run the crime scene, shitbird. We do. There was a dead woman in that apartment and until things are all official-like, we treat it as a crime scene. You know that. What happened since you got off the job, you get stupid or something? Oh, that’s right, when you were on the job, they used smoke signals to communicate. You don’t ever walk away until we tell you to walk away.”

  “Okay. I get the point. I’m sorry. You’re right. I should’ve waited around.”

  “Where’d you go after you walked away?”

  That question surprised me. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “Read him his rights, Gary. I have no time for this bullshit.”

  “What the fuck? You’re arresting me on what charges?”

  “We’ll think of something.”

  I reached into my pocket with my right hand and pulled out my cell phone. I knew I shouldn’t have done it, but I was getting equal parts angry and worried. Frovarp was quick and slapped the phone out of my hand and sent it crashing against the wall.

  Frovarp shook her head at me. “You try something like that again, Prager, and it won’t be your phone smashing against the wall. Pretty fucking stupid of you to reach in your pocket like that.”

  As pissed off as I was, I didn’t want to bring up that I was currently the only armed person in the room. The two of them had neglected to pat me down and my old .38 was still holstered in the nook between my belt and the small of my back. I hadn’t thought about it until then and mentioning it now might actually get me arrested for real.

  “I went to my bank after leaving the Kremlin, the day I found Millicent McCumber’s body.”

  Shulze nodded. “That’s more like it. And what was so important at the bank that you had to leave a crime scene?”

  “Understand, I’m really trying not to be a smartass, but I didn’t know you were still treating it like a crime scene. I needed to get some cash because … well, I needed cash.”

  I could see that neither of them liked that answer much. Whether they liked it or not, I hadn’t left them much room to work with. Still, I didn’t figure they were just going to throw up their hands in frustration and let me walk out of there. Not yet, anyway. I was right.

  “Did you have contact with any employees from the Kremlin between the time you left the building and when you returned days later?”

  I considered lying, but the form of the question suggested they already knew the answer.

  “The doorman, Anthony Rizzo. We had a few conversations.”

  “About what?” Frovarp asked.

  I realized I was on the threshold of losing my patience soon and that I had to do something before I got to that point.

  “Okay, look, you guys are pissed at me. I get that. So why don’t we let’s stop going at this piecemeal. Gimme the big picture. Tell me what you want?”

  Frovarp and Shulze stared at each other like two cats deciding if they should keep playing with their prey or just eat it.

  Frovarp had tallied the silent vote and said, “Don’t bullshit us.”

  “I won’t. Scout’s honor.”

  “Uncuff him, Gary.”

  Shulze looked disappointed, but it was clear who the junior partner was in this team. He unlocked the handcuff. I rubbed my wrist.

  “Here’s our problem, Prager,” Frovarp began, her voice a belligerent whisper. “We got one has-been actress dead in an apartment one day. Then that same apartment is trashed. We—”

  “Yeah, the apartment’s a wreck,” I interrupted, “but it’s staged. It was all for show.”

  Shulze agreed. “Yep, Prager. We figured that out in about two seconds. We’re real detectives. We’ve got shields and guns and everything.”

  “Sorry.”

  Frovarp began again. “So, we got a stiff. The apartment gets tossed, but nothing is missing that we can tell. We try and contact the renter, Siobhan Bracken, and get nowhere. We call her phone, goes straight to voicemail. We send her e-mails, no reply. We text her, nothing. Then, lo and behold, she pops up on the fucking Internet last night. We wanna know what the fuck is going on here. We don’t like looking stupid, and we hate it even more when our CO thinks our looking stupid makes him look stupid.”

  There are times as a PI you really have to stick to your guns about privileged information and client confidentiality. This wasn’t one of those times. I explained about how I’d gotten involved in the case and how Nancy Lustig had been just as interested in locating her daughter as they were. I told them about the Lost Girl, the Hollow Girl, the name change, and pretty much everything else except about my sleeping with Nancy and the more titillating details of Siobhan’s relationships with Millie McCumber, Anthony Rizzo, and Giorgio Brahms. I didn’t see the point.

  “I figure the apartment was trashed to get a rise out of her parents, or it was an aborted attempt at whipping up publicity for her reappearance as the Hollow Girl. My best guess is that Siobhan did it herself or she paid someone to do it for her.”

  “Someone like Rizzo, you think?” Frovarp offered.

  “That’s exactly who I’m thinking. But I’m curious why you think it’s him?” I asked.

  Shulze looked at Frovarp for permission. She nodded. “Because there are some gaps in the surveillance records and the building management tells us the doormen have access to the video feeds. We checked, and the wiring’s been fucked with.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Well, go have a talk with Anthony. I have his address,” I said, nodding my chin at my smashed phone. “Well, I used to have it.”

  “Never mind. We know his address. Problem is, he didn’t go home last night and he’s not answering his phone. He didn’t show up at work this morning.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t in the mood to get reamed a new asshole or to get fired. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  “You don’t know where he is, Prager?” Shulze wanted to know.

  “Not a clue, and it’s not my concern anymore. Since Siobhan turned up, I don’
t have a case to work anymore. Can I go now?”

  Shulze picked the pieces of my phone off the floor and handed them to me. He didn’t bother apologizing for his partner. I doubted Frovarp was acquainted with the word sorry, so I didn’t hold my breath.

  “All right, Prager,” Frovarp said, leaning in toward me. “Here’s the deal. Siobhan Bracken shows up on your radar, your first call is to us. Not to her mommy or daddy. To us! You hear from this Rizzo asshole or you find him—”

  “I get it, but like I told you, there’s no case for me. The only thing I’m going to be looking for now is my bed.”

  Shulze was skeptical. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. That’s not an answer. Just remember what my partner said. We find out you—”

  “Can you two take it easy on the threats for five minutes? I find out how to get in touch with either Siobhan or Rizzo, I’ll call you.”

  “First!” Frovarp barked.

  “I’ll call you first.”

  “Okay, Prager, get the fuck outta here.” Shulze gestured with his arm. “And sorry about the phone.” That dumb hangdog smile on his face said otherwise.

  I didn’t wait to be told twice, and left the Fighting Ninth behind.

  As I drove home, a niggling thought crept into my head. I knew that Frovarp and Shulze were unfriendly, belligerent bastards. That they didn’t like looking stupid in front of their commanding officer. I wasn’t swallowing it. They were too hungry, too adamant about incidents that barely amounted to cases worthy of their time. Why the fuck should they care about finding Siobhan or Rizzo? It made me think I was missing something, but what?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Everybody needs to unwind after work. The world would be a better, less bloody place if everyone got an hour to decompress after punching the clock. But even if that was the case, there were certain jobs, adrenaline-fueled jobs, that required something beyond a passive, stress-free hour. Just ask any cop, nurse, or firefighter. My generation of cop did it the old-fashioned way—we drank ourselves blind. Me, I used to be the one to stop short of blindness, the one to drive the other guys home or to put them in cabs. I was no saint, mind you. It wasn’t like that. For me, drunkenness, especially public drunkenness, caused far more stress than it diminished. It caused me shame.

  Not that I grew up in a religious Jewish home—quite the opposite, really—but when it came to the consumption of alcohol, we became magically observant. In the Prager household, drinking as an activity outside of ritual was frowned upon. Between my father’s failures and my mother’s pessimism, frowning had been turned into high art. Public drunkenness was totally taboo. That’s for the goyim. Getting drunk was what gentiles did. I guess it was a means for us Jews to nurture a sense of superiority in lands that were never our own and in which we were always a tiny minority. Even peoples who lived with boots on their necks needed a way to feel empowered. So it was no small irony that Aaron and I should come to own a chain of wine shops. Still, shame at the thought of drunkenness, public or otherwise, had kept me in check for most of my life. I supposed it would have to again.

  That’s what I was thinking as I walked through the door of my condo. At that moment, it was probably the worst place I could have gone. Worse than a bar, much worse. It was really too bad that I had nowhere else to go, now that I had subjected myself to Frovarp and Shulze and that the Hollow Girl had punched the clock for me. My work was done, and it was time to unwind. It didn’t help that my place smelled like the inside of a fucking Dewar’s bottle. Whether that was in my head or actually in the air was beside the point. And if that wasn’t hard enough to cope with, it felt like a magnet was drawing me to the front window. That same magnet seemed bent on tilting my head down and to the right, my eyes focusing on the spot on the asphalt where Pam had been killed. Nothing like a little self-flagellation and guilt to get a thirst going. Less than twenty-four hours ago I’d been able to calmly sip Scotch on Nancy’s sofa without any compulsion to chug the bottle. Yet here I was in my condo, itching for bottle diving like a desperate rummy.

  I took another shower to get the stink of the 9th Precinct off me and out of my nostrils. Once, a lifetime ago, I had gone to identify a friend’s body at the now defunct Fountain Avenue dump. The body turned out not to be my friend’s, but the stench of the dump had stayed with me for hours. It did more than just stay with me. It filled me up, coated me, covered my skin like a film. I couldn’t help but wonder if our memories ever let us get clean. Forgetfulness was a skill I had never completely mastered, because though I could no longer smell the 9th Precinct on me, I could still smell the dump. I would until the day I died.

  After the shower, after dressing, my thirst was not quite as powerful as it had been when I first stepped through the apartment door. Nor did the living room seem as saturated with Scotch vapors as it had earlier. Even as my computer booted up, I studied the pieces of my cell phone and thought that maybe its loss was something short of tragedy. I recalled that once being free was freer than it was now. There were times when you were unreachable, unaccounted for, unconnected to a cyberlife. A time when your actual, living breathing life was more important, when the details of what you were saying and doing and thinking and feeling at any particular moment was all that there was of you. No more.

  The shower and the fresh clothes hadn’t washed away my curiosity. I still hadn’t been able to figure out just what it was that Frovarp and Shulze were so keen on. I’d tried to convince myself that they really were just such assholes and bulldogs that they couldn’t let anything go. That getting me into the interrogation room was payback for pissing them off. I was unconvinced. They had a hunch, and “interviewing” me was an attempt to test it out. Problem was I couldn’t reverse engineer what their hunch was from the questions they had asked me. So I sat at my computer and let Google do some walking for me. I read everything there was to read on the discovery of Millicent McCumber’s body. I watched all the TV reports, read all the entertainment news commentaries on her life and career.

  There was nothing latent there that I could see. Her story was a familiar one. Young, talented, beautiful—she had once been stunning—actress gets famous and full of herself. Then came the boyfriends and girlfriends, the drugs and the drinking, the DWIs and DUIs, the community service and the rehab, the late-night punch lines and jail time. The parts disappeared, as did she from the public consciousness. In fact, there was a five-year stretch, from 2008 until this year, when she’d seemed to have fallen off the face of the earth. Then in April, Millie’s name began popping up in online blogs and in some celebrity columns. Nothing big, just a two-line mention here and there about her wanting to get back in the game.

  The reincarnation of the Hollow Girl had, however, sparked more than a one-line mention here and there. Several online articles about Sloane Cantor/Siobhan Bracken’s comeback had appeared since 10:00 P.M. the night before. Most were recapitulations of the original Lost Girl/Hollow Girl phenomenon and the fallout from the infamous “suicide” posting. Michael C. Dillman wasn’t going to be pleased. That was for damn sure, because there in a photo array, next to an old photo of Siobhan and the more recent headshot of her that appeared on the website, was a photo of the teenage Michael Dillman. The caption read Michael C. Dillman, “Lionel.” His innocent consent to let a high school friend use his photo was about to blow his world up yet again. Once, only memories kept our bad choices alive. Now cyberspace had the power to grant them eternal life.

  There was also mention of Millicent McCumber’s body having been found in Siobhan Bracken’s apartment. Well, Millie might not have been able to get her own career going again, but her death had surely given a boost to the Hollow Girl’s comeback. Confidential sources had “implied” that Millie and Siobhan had been lovers and that there might be photos of orgies that had taken place in Siobhan’s apartment. Nothing like a few salacious details to get people’s attention. If those photos did exist, I had a pretty good idea of who had taken them. At least now I had a sense
of what Anthony Rizzo had gotten up to. He was a complete toad, but you had to admire his entrepreneurial instincts. In the end, though, it was Siobhan who had expertly pulled off this masterful manipulation. If the numbers on YouTube could be believed, Siobhan had made a smashing success of the Hollow Girl’s rebirth, and she had done it while embarrassing her mother to potentially devastating effect. But in the new millennium, it was more difficult to keep people’s attention than it once had been. Recalling what Siobhan had done in 1999, I got a chill thinking about what the Hollow Girl might be willing to do in order to grow her audience this time around.

  The house phone rang. Caller ID: Private Number. I let it ring until it went to the cable system’s voicemail. I didn’t have to be clairvoyant to know it was Nancy. When I got my cell phone replaced, I had no doubt there would be several messages from Nancy waiting for me. And when the current message had finished, I saw that the little red light on my cordless phone was madly blinking. I would have to talk to Nancy eventually, just not until I sorted out my own feelings about having slept with her. That was the thing about desperate, wounded sex: It may make falling into bed that much easier, but it makes the morning after that much more difficult. There was something else I knew I couldn’t do, and that was to stay where I was.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The Coney Island boardwalk at dusk could be a desolate place. Once fall opened its arms to the heartless Atlantic winds, the death of the season was at hand. When those cruel winds whistled through the salt-rusted bones of the dinosaur rides, when they picked at the flaked paint and plywood scabs of shuttered food stands, hope was exposed as folly. I suppose that deep within me I loved its desolation more than the mirage of hope that was Coney Island in summer. This, I thought, looking out over the guardrail at the empty beach and cold, blackening ocean beyond, is what lay ahead of us all. Not summer. Not crowded beaches and sun block and teenagers riding the waves wreathed in seaweed and children shrieking on rides. This.