The Hollow Girl (A Moe Prager Mystery)

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Carmella Melendez—my second ex-wife and former business partner—once said that this was where I should be buried or where my ashes should be spread. She was right, of course. I had left it in my will for Sarah to spread my ashes here. Not in the ocean or on the beach, but on the boardwalk near the Cyclone in the fall at dusk. I wasn’t sure why it should have mattered to me as I believed in death more strongly than I ever believed in God. Dead was dead. I would be beyond caring or knowing. I’d understood why Mr. Roth had wanted his ashes spread at Auschwitz. Because although he had survived the camps and lived a long life, he had never really been set free. He’d been a prisoner there his whole life. The strange thing is, he’d never been explicit in his instructions. He’d never once mentioned Auschwitz by name. He said that when the time came, I would know where to place him. The only other thing he’d ever said on the subject was that he didn’t want to be cold in the ground. “Kaddish and ashes, Mr. Moe. Kaddish and ashes.” And so it would be for me, the mourner’s prayer optional. But Coney Island for me was not so much prison as womb.

  The boardwalk was not desolate, exactly. Starting in the mid ’70s, Russian and Ukrainian Jews had resettled this area of Brooklyn. They were a hearty, stubborn bunch. They had to be. The older émigrés, the ones who had had rough lives back home, viewed New York City’s climate kind of like how they viewed American prisons. Is nothing. Like country club. So yeah, these days when the Atlantic winds came in with fall, there were plenty of old Russians strolling the boardwalk. There was someone else coming onto the boardwalk, too, someone I’d asked to be there.

  Detective Jean Jacques Fuqua’s handsome black face was making a feeble attempt at a smile as he came up the Stillwell Avenue steps to greet me, the smell of Nathan’s Famous french fries bubbling in oil overwhelming the sea air. We shook hands, and walked to the guardrail on the beach side of the boardwalk, Fuqua rubbing his palms together, cupping them, blowing warm breath into them as he went.

  “How do you cope with this weather, ami?” he asked, only a hint of Port-au-Prince in his voice. “I have lived here for many many years, but I find the cold unbearable.”

  “Ask one of the ninety-year-old Russian ladies for a transfusion.”

  “You are an amusing fellow, Moses, but most of all amusing, I think, to yourself.”

  “May well be,” I said. “May well be.”

  He turned away from the beach and took a long look at me. I tried not to stare him down. We’d met a few years back under very unusual circumstances. Soon after I received my cancer diagnosis and only a few weeks before Sarah’s wedding, Carmella had come to me in desperation. She asked me to look into the murder of her estranged sister, Alta, who had been stabbed to death in Gravesend. It was an ugly affair all around and Jean Jacques Fuqua was the unlucky detective who’d caught the case. We’d worked together to get to the truth of things, taking some pretty unethical risks in the process. When the smoke cleared, he’d gotten the bump to detective first. But Fuqua, a proud, up-by-the-bootstraps Haitian immigrant, had never gotten over the ethical compromises he’d made in order to solve the case. I guess I was past caring about compromises and pride. So although I’d helped get him his promotion, he regarded me with strong mixed feelings. In spite of his calling me ami, I knew the appellation came with reservations. Maybe that’s why I trusted him to tell me the truth.

  “You are not looking so well, ami, non?”

  “You are quite the charmer, Jean Jacques. You’re looking good.”

  “Are you ill again, Moses?”

  I laughed. “No, it’s nothing like that.”

  “Then what?”

  Alcohol. I could not bring myself to say it. The shame was still there. Maybe not as strong as guilt, it was still plenty strong. “I’m just tired.”

  “I do not believe you, but I am too cold to argue. Why did you call me here?”

  “You worked in the 9th Precinct before you got transferred to Brooklyn South Homicide, right?”

  “I did, yes.”

  “Did you know Frovarp and Shulze?”

  That seemed to fully get his attention. He stood erect. Only then did I remember what an imposing figure Fuqua cut. He had shoulders like a linebacker dressed in his pads and he had a body builder’s torso. “Why do you ask?”

  “I’m working a case, and let’s just say I have been forced to cross paths with Frovarp and Shulze.”

  “I thought you were not working cases any longer. You said you were going to enjoy your life and your grandchild.”

  “I wasn’t lying when I said it.”

  “You are being evasive today, Moses.”

  “If it will make you feel better, think of me as doing God’s work.”

  “God’s work? Have you turned in your wine stores for angel wings?”

  I was getting tired of avoiding Fuqua’s questions, so I explained about the Hollow Girl and Nancy and my involvement in the case. Though much younger and way more tech savvy than myself, he hadn’t ever heard of the Hollow Girl in either her old or new incarnation. I detected a kind of revulsion in him—if not revulsion, then a cross between bewilderment and condescension. It was something like I felt about it. I was going to say as much when he beat me to it.

  “It is why the world hates us, non? Our obsession with ourselves; the inflation of our small lives into objects of public fascination. It is not our bombs or our constant flag waving in their faces that they so much detest, I think, as our petty obsessions. The world wants our country to care about important things, but instead we care about Dancing with the Stars. We know the bra size of Lady Gaga and we have TV shows that sexualize little girls as beauty queens, but how many of us can name even a single country in West Africa, or know who is the president of Russia? Our lack of perspective is what makes us hated.

  “I am a proud American, Moses, but I am also Haitian. I can see us in a way that maybe you cannot, but that your grandparents might have. Like your grandparents, who had a homeland to look back to and remember the hardships and the struggles, I can see my new country with such eyes as theirs. Haiti was destroyed by an earthquake not so long ago. There has been famine and disease. As you are aware, there has always been political turmoil. The United States has done very much to help Haiti, but is it not very difficult to reconcile Port-au-Prince in ruins and Honey Boo Boo?”

  “Christ, Fuqua, the Hollow Girl is just a gimmick, the product of a talented and complicated woman, not the benchmark for the decline of Western civilization.”

  “I am not so sure of that as you, but what is it that you wish of me?”

  “You still have people you’re close to at the 9th, people who talk to you?”

  “Naturally, I have many friends who are there.”

  “Do me a favor, have those friends of yours keep an eye out for Frovarp and Shulze.”

  “How so, Moses?”

  I gave a shrug. “I don’t know. See if they are acting edgier than normal? Do they seem obsessed with any one case? If so, which case? Are they putting in a lot of overtime? Stuff like that.”

  “I will see what can be done.”

  I held out my hand to him. “Merci beaucoup, Jean Jacques.”

  He shook it. “De rien. I repay my debts.”

  “Forget the bump. You would have made detective first without me.”

  “But not so quickly.” He was fast to react.

  “Maybe not, but I am asking you to do this thing for me as a favor to a friend, not as repayment. I want to be clear on this. If you think you owe me some debt for what happened with Alta’s murder and the blackmailing, forget it. You don’t owe me anything, nor do you have to fear that I would share any details of what we had to do.”

  “Very well, Moses, as you say, a favor for a friend.”

  “And a case of that Bordeaux you like.”

  That got a smile from him, at last. “That, ami, is a reason I can embrace.”

  “I’ll hear from you, then?”

  “Yes.” I let go of his hand
and made to step away, but he would not release my hand. And his hand was far stronger than my will. He stared directly into my eyes. “As a friend, Moses, take some advice. Go away for a few days, please. You do not look well. Brooklyn will still be here when you return. I am sure of it.”

  And with that he let go of me, retreating back down the Stillwell Avenue steps. I watched him get smaller and smaller as he walked toward Surf Avenue. I checked my watch and saw that I still had time to get to the phone store. I needed to get that done with, because I meant to take Jean Jacques Fuqua’s advice.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I stopped by the phone store and told the young woman to salvage the data as best she could.

  “Don’t you want your new phone? It’ll only take a few minutes for us to transfer the—”

  “No,” I said. “I really don’t. I’ll pick it up in a couple of days.”

  It was to laugh, the expression on her face. She seemed to view the very concept of removing one’s self from the world of Angry Birds and Yelp and Google Maps as a cross between heresy and psychosis. Maybe she was right. Maybe I’d go home and make a bonfire of my Kindle, iPod, Roku box, flat screen, DVR, and computer. After that I’d move to a cave in the woods and bay at the moon. OW-OW-OWOOOOO! OW-OW-OWOOOOO!

  Untethering myself from the world that way was a small gesture, I know, barely more than a nod or a wink in the scheme of things. I’d never been a fan of the grand gesture. Those things seemed like façade and artifice, brightly colored balloons—bloated, pretty objects meant to distract, to capture your attention, but ultimately empty and quickly forgotten. In my life, it had always been the little things that stayed with me. My memory wasn’t full with fancy gold watch moments or the fanfare of trumpets. My memory was filled up with the little things. The things, good and bad, that occurred by chance, by serendipity and happenstance, not by plan. The sun filtering through Andrea Cotter’s hair on the boardwalk. Bobby Friedman’s smile. Rico Tripoli’s ’70s polyester leisure suits. The unexpected kiss. The panicked dream. The first wisps of Sarah’s red hair as she was born.

  Before getting on the road, I went home to throw a few things in a bag. When the house phone rang, I almost regretted not making that bonfire. I was confident it was Nancy even before I checked caller ID. And when I noticed it was 9:55, all doubt was erased. Given that we’d slept together and that I had deposited her five thousand dollar check, I owed it to her to pick up. More than that, I owed it to myself.

  “Hey.”

  “Were you ever going to call?” Her voice was cracked and brittle.

  I confessed, “Not tonight. I wanted to give it a few days.”

  “For what? To forget? Was it that bad, fucking me?”

  “No, it was that good,” I heard someone say in my voice, not quite believing I’d admitted it to her, let alone to myself.

  “Then why—”

  “Because I was afraid it was more about the circumstances than the players. I’m still not sure that wasn’t the case.”

  “In English, please, Moe.”

  “I think you understand. Last night was kind of a perfect storm.”

  “I guess it was,” she said.

  “I just wanted to give it a few days and I realized there are some things I need to take care of.”

  “What things?”

  “Things that don’t concern you, Nancy. Things that I haven’t been up to facing until now. I will be out of touch for a few days.”

  “I’ve waited for you since I was nineteen years old. I can wait a little—Wait … Sloane’s coming on. Are you watching?”

  “No, I was about to leave and my computer isn’t booted up.”

  “I wonder how badly she’s going to slam me tonight.”

  “Maybe it won’t be as bad as you imagine it will be. Who knows, maybe she’ll turn on her dad,” I said without much conviction.

  “Maybe. Go do what you have to do.”

  I wasn’t going to argue with her. I had a long drive ahead of me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  I had been as surprised as anyone that Pam had willed me her Vermont house. Until the moment I walked through the door, I had, with the help of Dewar’s, avoided dealing with what owning it entailed. The place smelled of must and sorrow, not of death. There were no bodies here, just memories, and only some of them mine. Pam and I had grown into love as opposed to falling into it. Falling is so much more exciting than growing. Falling is all about the manic blur of obsession, the ache of separation, the joy in the exclusion of everything else but love as so much noise. Even at my age, the thought of falling could still make me dizzy. But gravity dictates that falling is always followed by a crash. Gravity is funny that way. Sometimes, like with my first wife, Katy, the crash could be twenty years in coming: inexorable and inevitable.

  Pam and I had done it in reverse. We literally started with a crash; the front end of her car meeting the back end of mine in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. It made me laugh to remember that we had done many things in reverse. For not only did our love begin with a crash, it began with lies. Mary Lambert, an IT consultant from Boston, is who Pam claimed to be when I got out of my car to confront the idiot driver who’d rear-ended me. None of it was true. Even the accident was a convenient lie meant to catch me off guard. She was actually Pamela Osteen, a Vermont-based PI sent to investigate a paternity issue involving my old precinct mate, the long-dead Rico Tripoli. Eventually I got past the lies. I think the fact that she once saved my life kind of helped cut through the bullshit and endeared her to me. Besides, who was I to be indignant about lies? I had lied to Katy about her brother’s disappearance for twenty years. I had spent so much of my life lying to protect secrets—my own, yes, but mostly other people’s—that I feared losing the ability to sort out the truth. For some reason, the truth had become increasingly important to me the closer I got to the grave.

  I switched on a light and noticed that my footsteps had kicked up a panic of dust, motes swirling madly in the shaft of light. Everything I touched was covered in a downy gray layer of dust. But instead of brushing it away, I found I was smiling at the notion that bits of Pam and I were mingled together in the dust. That even the most thorough cleaning in the world wouldn’t get rid of all of it, not ever. That even after I sold the place, we would remain here together forever. Forever, that was another thing Pam and I had done ass backwards. Having both taken wrong turns up the aisle, we’d pretty much started our relationship by declaring open warfare on marriage. Yet when I asked her to marry me, she couldn’t say yes fast enough. I rubbed my fingers in the dust. I didn’t believe in heaven, but I believed in dust. I could hear Mr. Roth tsk-tsking me, pictured him wagging his finger at me. Oy, Mr. Moe. Are you ever gonna learn? I looked up at the dark ceiling and said aloud, “I guess not, Izzy. In the end, ashes and dust aren’t all that different.”

  I turned on some more lights and my eyes went immediately to the wall of framed photos above the sofa. There were photos of us together, of me taken by Pam, and of Pam taken by me. I took one off the wall, one I’d taken of her only a month before she was killed. She was seated on the deck, her head thrown back against an Adirondack chair, her left hand shielding her eyes from the setting sun, a glass of red wine in her right hand. I was shocked to see that she had let her hair go gray. Funny, I hadn’t noticed. She’d never seemed to have aged, to me. I guess you stop seeing things after a while. When we first met, her hair was mostly black with only a strand of gray here and there. I wondered if it was me who’d turned her hair gray? Had my sickness aged us both? No, she was happy. I believed that just as much as I believed in dust. And I wasn’t going to beat myself up over this. I had done enough of that.

  There were other pictures, too: Sarah and Paul, the newborn Ruben. But like I said, there were memories here that weren’t mine, but were now my responsibility. Memories that were wholly Pam’s. I knew that in a cabinet somewhere there was a first wedding album, and high school photo albums with picture
s of old friends long forgotten. There were knickknacks and mementos, awards and certificates, old love letters and jewelry, an attic full of things I had never seen. There were a thousand stories here that would remain untold. That was the true robbery, the cheat in death. Not the things shared, but the stories left untold, the unshared details that had been someone’s life. What else do we amount to but what we leave of ourselves with others?

  Unshared details. Suddenly I remembered a detail of my life I had vowed to share with Sarah that had somehow fallen through the cracks. It was perfectly understandable how it would have gotten lost in the joy over Ruben’s birth and the turmoil in the wake of Pam’s death. When Sarah was pregnant and had driven down to New York to take me to Bobby Friedman’s funeral, she had asked me to tell her the story of how I’d become a cop in the first place. It’d taken the better part of a night to explain how and why I’d made the leap from the Brooklyn College campus to the police academy in the course of only a very few months. And in the telling there had been one thing she had seemed desperate to want to know, as I had been desperate to know myself many years earlier. I patted my pocket for my cell phone. Shit! It was in pieces in a phone store in Brooklyn. Maybe the woman behind the counter had been right to think me psychotic for willingly taking myself off the grid.

  I picked up the phone in Pam’s kitchen. Nothing, not even a dial tone. Apparently the local cable company was a little bit more diligent about cutting off service than the local electric utility. I actually took a few steps back toward the door, thinking that Sarah and Paul’s house wasn’t more than a half-hour drive away. Then I looked at my watch and noticed it was near two in the morning. It dawned on me that if Sarah had waited this long to hear that one detail of my life, she could probably wait a few hours longer. In the meantime, I got busy building a fire.