The Hollow Girl (A Moe Prager Mystery)

by Reed Farrel Coleman

I wasn’t sure whether to kick him in the groin or to congratulate him on his powers of prediction. Vincent prevented me from having to make the choice by coming back into the room, bourbon in hand. As he did, the phone rang again. Cantor was too preoccupied with the glory of being right to notice that Vincent had grabbed the receiver.

  “Hello, Cantor resi—” Vincent’s face went blank as he listened, then he, too, was smiling. “Sorry, Nancy, I think he must have been on another call. What’s that? That’s great news. Great news! Yeah, I’ll tell him. Okay, Nancy, it was good to speak to you, too.” He put the receiver back in its cradle.

  Everybody was smiling except me and I was beginning to feel left out.

  “What was that about?” Cantor asked.

  “It was about the genius detective here getting his instincts and hunches and having them shoved up his ass. That was your ex. She just heard from your daughter and she’s fine.”

  Now I was smiling, too, sort of. Unlike Cantor and his ersatz son-in-law, I would need some more details before I broke out the party balloons and confetti. When I excused myself and left the house, I’m not sure either one of them noticed or cared. Not that I blamed them.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  My heart beat pretty hard at the sight of Nancy, and I was glad of it. She really was something to look at and when she came close to me, the smell of her raw, crushed herb perfume—which, I’d discovered, was a perfect match to her natural scent and taste—was intoxicating. And when she dispensed with a formal greeting, placing her hands on my cheeks and pulling my lips toward hers, I surrendered to the moment. We kissed there in front of her house for five minutes, maybe more, and when we were done, she was cradled in my arms. She felt good there, pressed against me. Still, I wasn’t prepared to take a knee and declare everlasting love. I was just relieved to not feel a kind of awkward dread at seeing her again. With Nancy and me, there was so much baggage. Circumstance had let us postpone dealing with it for a little while, but that delay was probably at an end. She took me by the hand and led me into the house. She didn’t let go of my hand until we fell into bed together.

  I must have fallen asleep because when I woke up, the room was dark. This time, Nancy was still there with me. We weren’t tangled together, but I could see her naked back, hear her breathing. I reached out, pulled her close, wrapping my arms around her. She made sleepy, satisfied sounds. It was still an odd thing, being close to her like this. For a brief moment I wondered what it was like for her, then got that out of my head. I’d learned a long time ago not to go there.

  “Sorry I fell asleep,” I whispered. “I’ve had a long day with lots of driving.”

  She spun around and reached her fingers up to my lips to shush me. “Don’t worry about it. You did your manly duties well enough,” she said with a hint of a laugh, her voice raspy and thick from sleep. “And you seem to have tired me out as well. I don’t want to talk anymore.” She kissed my neck.

  I stopped her and gently forced her to look up at me. “We need to talk.”

  “Don’t ruin it, Moe, please. I don’t want to talk about why we’re here. Isn’t it enough that it’s so good?”

  “Not about that. Not about us.”

  I felt her tense in my arms. “Then what?”

  “I was at Julian’s when you called about Siobhan.”

  “So? I gave you permission to—”

  “I know, but it wasn’t strictly ethical, me going to him first with my concerns about your daughter.”

  “God, please, I’ve had enough of Sloane for now. Can you please just kiss me?”

  I obliged her and myself, and we forgot all about the Hollow Girl.

  Afterwards, we showered. I went down to the kitchen to cook omelets while Nancy did herself up for presentation. I didn’t know that I would ever get used to her need to show herself to me only as her perfectly made-up self. I didn’t know that I would have the chance, or if I wanted the chance. I only knew that it felt good to breathe again and to feel I wasn’t living a guilty betrayal. I was determined to do a very rare thing for me, to take things as they came with Nancy.

  Barefooted and wrapped in white terry cloth, she made her entrance into the kitchen. We didn’t talk. She sat at the black soapstone island and watched me make asparagus, red pepper, and cheddar omelets. I served them with a bottle of Pinot Noir I found in her wine rack.

  “This is great,” she said, taking a big forkful.

  “The trick is to keep moving the pan while you’re making the omelet. It cooks the eggs through without browning them or making them hard.”

  “Ummm. A man who can fuck and cook.”

  I didn’t go anywhere near that line. “I left a check for most of the retainer by your other papers.”

  “That wasn’t necessary.”

  “It’s absolutely necessary.”

  She stopped eating and put her hand on mine. “Moe, I know I was the one who didn’t want to talk about this, but now I feel like I have to. Do you feel it’s wrong?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Us. This. Being here together. Please don’t be mad at me for saying this, but Pam is only dead a few months. Are you going to get all guilty and—”

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen two minutes from now, so I can’t answer about that. But what I can say is that Pam would want me to be happy. A year and a half ago, I was pretty close to dead, and that taught me a few lessons. Life is too short and then you’re dead forever. I’ve spent way too much of my life keeping score of my sins and keeping secrets. If we can make each other happy, even for a few minutes, we should do it. Now, can we please finish eating?”

  She didn’t answer, but simply took another bite of her omelet. When we were done eating and after Nancy cleaned up, I finally got around to asking her about the conversation she’d had with her daughter.

  “It wasn’t a conversation. It was a message. It was on voicemail when I got back from tennis. She just said that she was fine and that she didn’t mean to worry me or make me angry. She just needed to get stuff out of her system and behind her. And she promised that it would all make sense soon enough.”

  Nancy must have seen the look on my face, because her relief morphed into a reflection of my concern. I didn’t try to pretend that I was anything less than thrilled that her daughter’s “all clear” had come as a phone message and not as a conversation. It was too late to pretend, anyway.

  “A message, huh?”

  She popped out of her seat, grabbed the house phone, tapped in her message code, and pressed a button on the base unit. “Here. Listen to it.”

  Nancy had very accurately described what I heard coming out of the speaker. First thing I was encouraged to hear was that it was definitely Siobhan Bracken on the message. She had a resonant, distinctive voice with an accent that still showed faint traces of upscale Long Island. The second thing was that her tone was upbeat and unstressed. The words flowed smoothly, but not too smoothly. She was conversational and she didn’t seem to be doing a recitation from a script. I also liked that she sounded genuine in her sentiments. Of course, there were aspects I didn’t much care for. I wasn’t happy that she hadn’t mentioned anything about where she actually was. Nor did I love the fact that she was less than specific about the “stuff” she needed to get out of her system or about how “it” would all make sense soon. But I was willing to let it go for the night and I smiled up at Nancy.

  “You must have clicked your tennis shoes together when you got this.”

  “Pretty much. When this Hollow Girl stuff is sorted out, I want to make things right with her. Having you here makes me think I can do it. I guess that’s silly.”

  “No, making things right with your daughter isn’t silly at all. I speak from experience. It’s almost ten,” I said. “Do you wan—”

  “No. Not tonight. All I want to do tonight is to go upstairs and put my head against your chest.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  An hour later, sh
e was asleep and curled up on the other side of the bed. Me, I was setting the alarm clock on my phone for 5:45 and worrying about the things Siobhan Bracken hadn’t said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Barb and Rob’s Pantry was a local institution. Aaron and I used to interview our applicants there as it was only about five minutes away from Red, White, and You. It was only ten minutes away from Nancy’s house. They did breakfast right. If you liked New York–style breakfast, with bagels and bialys, they had those brought in fresh from the city every morning. If you liked your breakfast Southern style, they actually did grits and biscuits with gravy. Rob used to say he was from the South … the South Bronx. Barb was a Southerner, too—from the South Side of Chicago. And it goes without saying that they did eggs, bacon, hash, sausage, ham, pancakes, waffles, et al. quite well.

  Detective Bursaw was already seated at a two-top, drinking a cup of coffee, when I walked in. It took me a few minutes to get to his table because both Barb and Rob made it a point to harangue me for not having darkened their door in a very long time. They didn’t seem to care that I hadn’t worked out of Red, White, and You for many, many years. They weren’t interested in excuses, just hugs, handshakes, and chop-busting.

  Bursaw was a tall man with thinning hair, wire-rim glasses, a disarming smile, and too much Old Spice for so early in the morning. He stood to greet me, giving my hand the death grip and patting my left bicep like an old friend.

  “Mystery Mike, how you doin’?”

  He let go of my hand and said, “I stopped calling myself that when I gave up alcohol. Man, that stuff used to make me think I was Superman. Only in my own head, though, only in my own head. These days I’m just Mike.”

  “Just Mike it is.”

  We sat. Barb came over and took our orders. Bursaw and I made some small talk about family and the job. Then we got to business.

  “You know, Moe, this isn’t my case, but if you think you’ve got something that will help the department ….”

  “I’m not sure I’ve got anything solid. In fact, I know I don’t.”

  “Then what do you have?”

  “A bad feeling.”

  He laughed. “Shit, if bad feelings made you powerful, I’d rule the world.”

  “A hunch, then.”

  “Now you’re talking,” he said. “Your hunches worked out good for that Bluntstone kid and my partner. So, tell me.”

  I had the presentation pretty well prepared before I got out of Nancy’s bed that morning. When I gave it voice, however, it didn’t sound quite as convincing as it had in my head. But it didn’t sound ridiculous either. I laid out the history of the Hollow Girl and my history with her mother. I explained about why Nancy had come to me, explained the various connections between Siobhan and Rizzo, between them and the late Millicent McCumber. I explained about the trashed apartment, and my less than amicable relationship with Frovarp and Shulze. I confessed that my suspicion, linking Siobhan’s disappearance and the subsequent reappearance as the Hollow Girl to Anthony Rizzo’s homicide, was somewhere between tenuous and amorphous.

  He took it all in, straight-faced and quiet. When I was done, he rubbed his cheek with his right hand, weighing his options. He took his hand away from his cheek, reached under his chair, and came up with an unmarked folder. He placed it on the table and slid it across to me. “Have a look.”

  Vincent Brock must have had his own good sources inside the Nassau County PD because his description of the late Anthony Rizzo’s head as looking like a grapefruit dropped off the Empire State Building was spot on. The human skull can withstand a lot of force, but once it cracks …. Although the photos before me showed me a body I knew to be Anthony Rizzo’s, his face and head had been remade into something only Picasso’s mother could have loved. I didn’t envy the mortician who had to try to piece the doorman’s head back together.

  “Jesus, Mike, talk about a candidate for a closed coffin … somebody was really angry at this guy here,” I said. “This wasn’t one mistaken blow with a blunt object. Whoever killed him had rage in him, a lot of rage.”

  “No shit,” Bursaw agreed. “Looks like the Yankees took batting practice on him.”

  “Well, he was from the Bronx.”

  Bursaw was laughing again. “If it had been the Mets, he probably would’ve walked away without a scratch.”

  Now it was my turn to laugh. “Spoken like a true Mets fan.”

  “Penance for my past drinking.”

  “God just doesn’t like me. He made me a Jets, Mets, Knicks, and Rangers fan so he could enjoy my pain.”

  Cop humor, you gotta love it. Here we were looking at photos of a man’s head so crushed that it was barely recognizable as human, yet we were laughing. When you get on the job, you either adopt laughter as a defense mechanism, or you get off the job. And once you learn it, the reflex never leaves you. I put the photos away before Barb served breakfast.

  “There’s not much blood in the trunk, so he must’ve been killed outside the car,” I said.

  “He was. There was splatter on the rear fender and trunk, but none on the ground around where the uniforms came upon the car.”

  “So Rizzo was killed elsewhere, dumped in the trunk, and moved. Means the killer had an accomplice or felt comfortable enough to walk back to wherever.”

  “Shit, Prager, you almost sound like you know what you’re doing.”

  “Don’t be fooled. Did you find his cell phone on him?”

  “Everything but: wallet, jewelry, some coke. No phone.”

  “Maybe the killer thought Rizzo wasn’t dead enough, or that someone would think to track him down by GPS.”

  “Fair assumption. We’ll get the phone records anyway.”

  I took out my cell phone, a pen, and wrote some stuff down on a napkin for Bursaw. “That’s the cell number I had for Rizzo. That other number and address is for a guy named Giorgio Brahms. I doubt he had anything to do with the murder, but he was intimate with all the actors in this little passion play.”

  Bursaw raised his eyebrows at that. “Intimate?”

  “Yeah, Anthony Rizzo would do just about anything for a few bucks and he was a vain bastard. He enjoyed being wanted, from what I could tell, anyway. And he was a kid from the boroughs. You know how it is. He was impressed by people with brains and taste. So, Mike, not for nothing, but why are you being generous with a case file that’s not yours to be generous with?”

  “Honestly, Moe?”

  “Probably a good idea to tell me the truth.”

  “I dug some deep holes for myself with my drinking and got jammed up a few times too many. I’m just sort of hanging onto my shield by the skin of my ass. I could use a little magic to pull my bee-hind out of the fire.”

  “Hey, enlightened self-interest makes the world go around. But let’s be clear on this, my self-interest is important here, too. So I will share with you as long as you share with me. I get something about Rizzo, you’re gonna hear it. You hear anything about the case, anything, I wanna hear about it.”

  He put his hand out to me. “Sounds fair.”

  We got done handshaking just as Barbara showed up with breakfast.

  After he’d taken a few bites of his omelet, he asked me the question I knew was on his mind. It was on my mind, too.

  “Moe, I gotta ask. Do you think this Siobhan Bracken coulda been angry enough with Rizzo to have done that to him? She calls him up to meet her. She catches him with one swing of an aluminum baseball bat and he’s down and helpless. Then when he’s down she beats his brains out.”

  “I don’t know her. My instinct is no, but that’s based more on hope than anything else. I only knew about their relationship from him. When it comes to sex and money, anything is possible.”

  “You know if the detectives don’t come up with anything soon, I’m gonna have to—”

  “I know, Mike, you’ll have to point them toward Siobhan. Just do me a favor, give it a few days before you go that route, okay? Try l
etting the catching detective get there on his own, if you can. Besides, I have no clue where she is. I swear.”

  He looked skeptical, but promised to give it a few days as I asked.

  Detective Bursaw left first. I stayed, savoring my bialy, slowly sipping at my third cup of coffee. I loved Barb and Rob’s. Truthfully, though, I wasn’t exactly anxious to rush to my next appointment.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Aaron eyed me suspiciously as I walked into the small office in the back of Red, White, and You. I didn’t blame him given our last encounter, but it pissed me off just the same. I would never get used to my big brother’s judgmental nature. My whole life, I’d felt like Aaron had a red pencil and a report card with my name on it in his pocket. He always made me feel as if I was only as good as my last fuck-up. Just lately, I had to admit, I’d pretty much earned that red F Aaron seemed determined to someday give me. I hadn’t spoken to him since the morning this all began, when he let himself into my condo and shook me out of my drunken stupor.

  “You look clear-eyed and sober. You look good,” he said from his seat behind the desk. But he quickly followed it up with, “Did you close the front door behind you?”

  “Shit, Aaron, I used to run this store.” I sat in a folding chair opposite him. “I’ve been your partner going on thirty-five years. I’d think you would trust me to shut the front door before store hours.”

  “These days, I don’t trust you to do much of anything except get shitfaced.”

  “I guess I deserved that.”

  “I guess you did.” He was only too happy to agree, but he didn’t go for the red pencil. “So, you’re here, I’m here. Now what?”

  “You were right last week. I hated it, but you were right. What you said about you being the responsible one. You were the one who did the right thing, the responsible thing. If it wasn’t for you, I don’t know what would’ve become of me after I hurt my knee.”

  Aaron’s face turned from his defensive smugness to worry. “You’re sick again. You made yourself sick again with the drinking.”