The Hollow Girl (A Moe Prager Mystery)

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “You’re worried about me.”

  “Of course I’m worried about you. You’re my little brother. It’s my job to worry about you.”

  I shook my head at him. “No, shithead. That stopped being your job a long time ago. But you don’t need to worry. I’m not sick, and I’m not drinking the way I was.”

  “Then what?”

  “I’m done with this, with the stores. You were right about that, too, Aaron. I came to appreciate the wine itself, even came to love it, but I have never liked the business.”

  He was crestfallen, slumping down in his chair. “Not any of it.”

  “The business part, no, big brother, not any of it. But being around you, seeing you shine and be such a big success, that made it worth it. Hanging around with Klaus and Kosta and all the people who we gave jobs to. And I never would’ve met John Lennon, or all the other famous and not-so-famous customers who came through our doors. I liked the money well enough, and I have you to thank for that. Dad would’ve been so proud of you.”

  “Us! Dad would’ve been proud of us, Moe.”

  “Okay. Us.” I smiled at my brother. “You know, I think I’m a little offended that you haven’t tried to talk me out of it. You didn’t say, ‘We can’t do it without you.’ Or, ‘What am I gonna do without you?’”

  “Well, little brother, we’ve kind of done it without you for the last few months.”

  “I know that, you prick, but you’re not supposed to say it.”

  Aaron stood up from his desk and gave me a big hug. When we both let go, I saw that he was crying. I didn’t say anything about the tears for fear it would get me going, too.

  He sat back down behind the desk. “So, what are you gonna do, move down to Boca and investigate the thefts of scooters, canes, and hearing aids?”

  “Was that an attempt at humor from my big brother?”

  “Fuck you, Moe.”

  “No, I’m thinking of maybe moving up to Vermont to be close to the kids. I’d live in Pam’s house so that I wouldn’t be underfoot.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “No, but I’m gonna do it anyway. I had my stint as a PI with Carm, and I’m getting too old for that stuff anyway. Besides, I’ve wasted too much time in my life already. I wish I’d realized sooner that we don’t have any to waste, not even a minute.”

  “How do you want to handle things, business-wise? Do you want me to buy you out?”

  “I trust you, Aaron. I always have. You’re an honorable man. However you wanna do it is good with me.”

  “You sure about that, little brother?”

  “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life,” I said, turning to go. “I’ll call you in a few days and you can tell me what you’ve figured out.”

  Then I walked out of the office, out of that store, and didn’t look back.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  That Sunday evening at 10:00 P.M., the world wobbled on its axis. Yet in the intervening days between the time I left Aaron sitting at the desk and 9:59 P.M. on Sunday, life had kind of settled into a nice rhythm with few hints of what might be coming. I’d taken Nancy out to dinner and a play—The Book of Mormon—in the city. We’d established that we got along better than fine in the bedroom, but we needed to find out if there was something more between us than sex and a long history of yearning. We needed to expose our relationship to the open air and to the light. Things were less smooth and easy for us out in public, though by the time the play let out the discomfort seemed to have faded away with the laughter. We went for a drink and then back to my condo.

  My guilt and Pam’s lingering presence there made things a bit awkward. Sensing the problem, Nancy took a photo off the wall and asked me to tell her about Pam. Talking about Pam, telling Nancy about how Pam and I had met, about how we’d grown into love, about how she’d willed me to survive, didn’t quite exorcise her ghost. I don’t suppose I really wanted it to be exorcised, not completely. Somehow, Nancy had the trick of helping to bring Pam back to me, not of pushing her away. If nothing else came of us, I would be grateful for that.

  When I drove Nancy home the following morning, there was another voicemail message from Siobhan. It was similar to the first one, sweet and reassuring. Everything was fine. Everything would be revealed. Everything would be explained. In fact, there were messages like it every day including Sunday. They made Nancy happy. Apparently these voicemails were the most civil and kind words her daughter had spoken to her in many years. Even the Hollow Girl’s posts had taken a sharp turn away from parent-bashing territory. She had instead taken aim at casting directors and the cruelty of life in theater, film, and television. The savagery of these posts made her stuff about her parents seem almost like puff pieces. Her audience ate it up. Her numbers appeared to be growing exponentially, surpassing her original Hollow Girl audience by a hundred thousand.

  Aaron had wasted no time in setting up appointments for us with our lawyer and accountant. To an outsider it might have looked like he couldn’t shed me as a partner fast enough. That wasn’t it at all. He knew that once I’d decided to get out I wasn’t going to change my mind about the business. He was shocked I’d lasted as long as I had. I’d also heard back from Jean Jacques Fuqua. According to him, there were no rumors or whispers around the 9th Precinct indicating that Detectives Frovarp and Shulze were up to anything suspicious. Their particular distaste for me seemed to simply be a matter of bad chemistry: They were both malevolent pricks and I just got under their skins.

  I got a few calls from Mike Bursaw. Every time I hung up with him, I got a familiar knot in my gut or, as my bubbeh—my Yiddish-speaking grandmother—might have said, in my kishkas. Over the years I had come to think of that knot in my kishkas as the physical manifestation of my mother’s pervasive, cloying pessimism. I hated to admit it, but that knot had saved lives, my own and others, on more than once occasion. I’d found that to ignore it was to do so at my own peril. Problem this time around was that the knot wasn’t linked to anything concrete, nothing specific. In fact, most of what Bursaw had to say was encouraging.

  “Yeah, Moe, the detectives working the case are looking at these two mobbed-up Russian brothers from the Bronx who deal ’roids to juicers at gyms all over the city. Seems like Rizzo used to do some distributing for them and they had a falling out. Someone must’ve tipped the Russians off because the comrade brothers have split to parts unknown. So it doesn’t look like I’m gonna need to go to them about Siobhan,” he said, his voice tinged with disappointment.

  I didn’t hold his disappointment against him. “I’m glad for that, but it’s too bad I couldn’t help you out on this. I guess my hunches failed you this time. Sorry about that.”

  “Hey, what can you do? Maybe next time.” His voice trailed off.

  “Yeah, Mike, next time.”

  But even as I said “next time” to Bursaw, I knew that this time wasn’t over yet. That knot in my gut was tightening. I should have been happy about where things were. I just wasn’t. When I thought about it, I realized Siobhan’s messages bothered me. They bothered me a lot. Somehow she never managed to catch Nancy at home. To me it felt like Siobhan knew when her mother would be out so she might slyly avoid having a real conversation with Nancy. Then there was the similarity between the messages. They were sweet and hopeful, but there was very little actual substance to them. Siobhan didn’t say where she was, or why she was doing what she was doing, or why she had gone about doing it the way she had. She always promised answers were coming without supplying any. And lastly, she never left a call-back number or indicated that she’d like Nancy to call back.

  On Thursday, I’d asked Nancy why she hadn’t tried to return any of her daughter’s calls.

  “Please, Moe, I’m done pushing her. This is the most respect and conviviality Sloane has shown me in ten years. Why would I want to mess it up? For this one time, I’m going to let her come halfway home to me. When she gets there, I’ll go the other half.”
>
  Although I understood her reluctance to rock the boat, I found myself wishing she would have displayed more of the impatient, demanding, narcissistic Nancy I’d encountered back in 2000. That Nancy would have been a bulldog. She would have been pushing for answers.

  I guess the other thing that tightened the knot was the incredible emphasis on the disclaimers both before and following the Hollow Girl’s posts. I knew it was a craziness, but I couldn’t help feeling that the posts themselves seemed more like vehicles for the disclaimers than the other way around. It was like all disclaimers all the time. They appeared to be preparing viewers, inuring us. In spite of the pleasant rhythm of the days, that knot in my kishkas got to feeling Shakespearean. Something wicked this way was coming. I just didn’t know what.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  At 10:00 P.M. the form of the current evil revealed itself to Nancy and me, and to the several hundred thousand viewers who watched the Hollow Girl’s Sunday post. I have little doubt many of them gasped in horror the way Nancy Lustig had, but only Nancy was the Hollow Girl’s mother.

  Siobhan, naked as far as I could tell, had her back to a steel lally column. She was tied to the column with heavy, straw-colored rope, wound tightly from her ankles, her legs, her body, her arms, to her neck. She was bound so tightly that it seemed she could barely breathe, let alone wriggle. The rope was coarse and bit hard into her skin, so hard that it appeared to chafe and cut her. Rivulets of something that looked a lot like blood dripped down the rope toward the floor. A piece of gray duct tape was wrapped around her forehead so that it held the back of her head to the steel pole. She had a black leather and orange plastic ball gag in her mouth. Her face looked puffy and there were dark purple bags under her eyes.

  As bad as seeing her bound, gagged, and seeming to bleed was, it wasn’t the worst of it. The utter stillness of the camera, never panning in or pulling out, the unblinking, unflinching focus of the lens on the Hollow Girl as she wiggled against the ropes was excruciating to watch. Harder to take were the sounds she made: her gasping for breath, her gurgling, her desperate struggle to speak with the plastic ball pressing against her tongue. If Siobhan’s intent had been to create compelling viewing, she’d done it. Bravo! But at what cost, I wondered, at what cost?

  Propped up against her bare feet and roped shins was a framed photograph, an eight-by-eleven color headshot of a woman or a girl. It might even have been a photograph of the Hollow Girl, but it was difficult to tell. First, because the camera shot of Siobhan was a wide-angle view, and the photo was only one small element in the composition. The second thing that made identifying the person in the photo impossible was the lines of shiny black electrical tape plastered across the subject’s face. Across her eyes, her nose, her mouth, her chin, jawline, and forehead. The tape was strung across her face at odd angles, so that it looked like a piece of Warholian art. It almost seemed to be more about the tape than the face of the woman or girl beneath it.

  That was it. Fifteen minutes of that one wide shot of the Hollow Girl, bound, gagged, bleeding, a photo at her feet. But it wasn’t real. I wasn’t much of an artist, my only attempt at art consisting of one high school poem of unrequited love. My previous experience in the art world had taught me little. I admired artists, yet I couldn’t begin to understand what made them do the things they did. When I was working to find Sashi Bluntstone, I felt like I was swimming through a sewer pipe. The charisma of the artist and how much patrons and collectors were willing to pay mattered more than the art. The art seemed almost secondary. And now with Siobhan, it was impossible not to wonder what she was trying to say.

  My cell phone, Nancy’s cell, Nancy’s house phone were vibrating and ringing not a minute into the post. Listening to Nancy’s “Time of the Season” ring tone made me think she’d picked the wrong Zombies song. “She’s Not There” now seemed the more appropriate choice. I kept that thought to myself, as the phones didn’t stop ringing until we shut our cells off and took the house phone off the hook.

  “Look at the fear in her eyes, Moe?” Nancy repeated over and over again as we stared, transfixed by the image on the screen. “Look at the fear in her eyes.”

  “Everybody says she’s such a good actress: you, her agent, everybody,” I said, holding Nancy close to me, stroking her hair.

  “I know. I know, but look at her eyes.”

  She was right and she was wrong. The fear in the Hollow Girl’s eyes seemed real enough to me. I had seen real fear in people’s eyes up close as a cop and PI, and Siobhan’s eyes had the same look, but so too did the eyes of the victims in the B-movies I watched on Netflix when I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t tell them apart. I wasn’t going to argue the point too hard.

  “That lally column she was tied to, did you have one of those in your—”

  “Yes, a few. It was an older house,” Nancy said, glad I wasn’t trying to talk her out of her fears. “I always thought they were ugly.”

  “Ugly but necessary. Did you recognize the woman in the photograph at Siobhan’s feet?”

  “It wasn’t Sloane. I could tell that. A mother knows that.”

  “But did you recognize who she is?”

  “No. Why, do you think it means something?” Nancy asked, grasping at straws.

  “It means something, but I’m not sure what. It might be symbolic, some artistic statement Siobhan’s making about appearances or your surgeries. It’s hard to know. Or it might mean something very different.”

  “Different how?”

  “If she really is in danger—”

  Nancy blurted, “What do you mean, if? Didn’t you just see that? Didn’t you just see her tied up and bleeding, for chrissakes?”

  “The disclaimers, Nancy. You’re forgetting the disclaimers and her history and her talent. She knew people would react the way you’re reacting … well, maybe not quite the way you are, but close to it. Look, I’m going to find her whether she’s really in danger or if this is just bullshit. I promise. So don’t worry about that.”

  She kissed me on the cheek. “I don’t think you can understand how much better that makes me feel. After we first met, even thinking about you used to make me feel safe. Just knowing you were out in the world somewhere … I don’t know how to explain it.”

  I put my finger across her lips. “Then don’t try.”

  “I’m sorry, you were talking about the photograph.”

  “Right. Like I was saying, if she is in danger, the photo wasn’t put there by her. And if it wasn’t put there by her, it has meaning to whoever has her.”

  “Has her! Oh my God, Moe. I—”

  “Calm down, calm down. It’s my job to think this way, not yours. I’m just thinking out loud. One thing is pretty clear, though. Your daughter isn’t alone. The gag she could have put in her mouth herself, but she couldn’t have done the rest of it alone. She couldn’t have tied herself up like that, certainly not so tightly. She couldn’t have placed the photo by her feet after she was tied up. Someone else had to do that. What I have to find out is whether this other person did it for her, or to her.”

  Nancy reached into the pocket of her jeans, pulled out her phone, and switched it back on.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Calling the cops,” she said.

  I stopped her. “Not yet, Nancy. Not yet. Trust me, in spite of the disclaimers, the cops’ll be getting plenty of calls tonight. It’s just the way people are. They don’t read instructions and they ignore warnings. You don’t want your voice lost in all of it. You also don’t wanna be accused of crying wolf. When we call the cops, we want them to listen.”

  She put the phone down. I could tell she wasn’t happy to do it. If I’d thought Sarah or Ruben were in danger, I wouldn’t’ve been happy to do it either, no matter what was said or who said it. But Nancy had yet to be so overwhelmed by fear that she’d lost touch with her rational self. Then there was hope. Hope was often a person’s worst enemy. The persistence of hope, only second to love, c
aused people to make terrible decisions, or worse, it stopped them from making decisions at all. This time, hope worked in my favor. As long as Nancy clung to even the slightest hope that this really was just some elaborate charade, it stopped her from doing something counterproductive. I laughed at myself because I found I was hoping I was right to stop Nancy from calling the cops. If I was wrong and things turned out badly, I wasn’t sure I could withstand another prolonged bout of guilt.

  “Pack a bag,” I said. “You’re coming to stay with me.”

  “What? No. What if—”

  “This place is going to be inundated by the press. The phones won’t stop ringing. The paparazzi will be climbing the walls. Satellite news vans will be lined up across 107 and news helicopters will be flying overhead. Believe me, I know how it works. I’ve seen it destroy people. Do you really want to deal with all that now? You’ll be harder to find at my place.”

  “I’ll follow you in my car. I need to be mobile. I don’t want to be trapped in Sheepshead Bay if Sloane needs me.”

  “Okay, as long as we get out of here soon.”

  A half-hour later I was heading south on Glen Cove Road toward the Long Island Expressway, a red Porsche Cayman trailing close behind.

  Newsday

  Monday, October 7, 2013

  DANGEROUS STUNT REDUX

  Media Columnist Linda Brown

  Last evening marked another bizarre twist in the tale of the Internet phenomenon known as the Hollow Girl. The fifteen-minute single shot of the semi-naked Hollow Girl bound to a pole with rope, an orange ball gag in her mouth, and covered in fake blood is testament to the extent people desperate to breathe life into flagging careers are willing to go. Given her history of this sort of outrageous stunt, one would have hoped that this now-grown woman would have learned her lesson. But the obviously phony panic in her cynical blue eyes showed only a continuing pattern of condescension and contempt for the viewers who, since her return, have been flocking to watch her posts.