The Hollow Girl (A Moe Prager Mystery)

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  He dug one out of a black plastic case in his jacket pocket. “Here.”

  “Okay, thanks. Go on.”

  The kid must have had a good nose for trouble because he hesitated before starting for the restaurant. As he finally walked away, I pretended to stretch my muscles and scanned some more. It was only when I turned back to the Impala that I spotted the blue Camry. Shit! I’d been made. I’d gotten caught in my own trap. The Camry was parked a third of a block north of where I’d cut off the kid. There didn’t seem to be anyone behind the wheel. No one was standing near the car. My eyes darted to the right. I saw a blur of a man and that’s when the world jerked and tilted slightly to the left.

  I saw the smoke, heard the wind-muted bang. It seemed that at the very instant I was hearing the bang, a crease appeared in the roof of the gray Honda Accord parked in front of the Impala. Another bang. Then a hole appeared in the Honda’s windshield, its driver’s side window shattered. Another bang. Something whistled by my right ear. I threw myself to the ground. I went down so hard, it knocked the wind out of me. I was gasping for air as I sidled under the Impala. Another bang. Another and another. To my left, the pavement spit out sparks where the bullets hit and skimmed like stones off the water. More sparks. Something exploded—a tire. Brakes screeched. Tires squealed past me. A car hit the low center divider and came to rest. My breath came back to me. The world jerked again, leveling to the right.

  When I got out from under the Impala and stood up, I saw that a white Mercedes sedan had come to rest across both northbound lanes, blocking traffic. Its front right tire was shredded. The driver, a guy in his fifties, was cursing up a storm as he got out of the car. The blue Camry was disappearing around a corner when I turned to look. The time for me to be gone had come as well. I didn’t need to spend another second more with the cops than I had the night before, and I wasn’t in the mood to make any more deals with Ian. I’d already made too many promises that I wasn’t sure I could keep.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  One thing was finally for sure: Siobhan Bracken was in trouble. I got Bursaw on the phone, not that he was thrilled to hear from me after the previous night’s misadventure. He was downright cynical about my certainty this time.

  “Yeah, Moe, that’s what you said last night.”

  “No one was shooting at me last night.”

  “Shooting at you? Where?”

  “Broadway in Hicksville.”

  “Broadway in Hicksville in the middle of the day? Get the fuck outta here!”

  “I don’t have time to argue with you now,” I said. “You keep your eyes and ears open. You’ll be getting a report of shots fired soon enough. When you hear the report, call me and we’ll talk then.”

  I raced back to Nancy’s house and waited for her to return from her tennis game. Brian Doyle was there. I told him what had happened. He understood the implications immediately.

  “He’ll be nervous now that he missed killing you. Maybe he’s gonna have to speed up his clock. That can’t be so good for this Siobhan chick.”

  “I know, Brian. I know. But his shooting at me tells us something else.”

  “What’s that, Boss?”

  “He’s an amateur. What I mean to say is that he has killed, but he’s not who you would describe as a killer. If this is the same guy who killed the doorman, Rizzo—and I think it is the same guy—it says something. He tried to kill me for the same reason he killed Rizzo. It’s the same reason he’s been playing these stupid phone messages. He’s trying to buy time.”

  Doyle asked, “For what? He’s basically holding all the cards. He’s got the girl, doesn’t he? Why don’t he just kill her, be done with it, and split?”

  “Because it’s not enough for him to just kill her. He wants to punish her and her parents first, and he wants us to know why. He wants us to watch it. There’s a price to be paid. To just kill her without an audience would cheapen it, I think. This isn’t something he thought of on the spur of the moment. No, Brian, he’s been thinking about this, brooding over it for a long time. Believe me, I know the type. The guy who killed Katy, he was the same. He wanted her to suffer, and me to watch her suffer, and he wanted me to know why.

  “This guy has a timetable, one he feels he has to stick to no matter what, even if it means killing people who get in the way. That’s why I don’t think he means to escape. Escaping isn’t as important as following through. This took a lot of planning. The thing I have to figure out is why now? Why not last March or next February? What set him off? Once I figure out why he chose now to act, I’ll be able to figure out who. The more I think about it, the more I’m sure this has to be connected to the Hollow Girl’s old posts. Get back to your office and tell Devo to drop everything else except the fallout from the Hollow Girl’s suicide post. It’s got to be that. I’ll pay you guys whatever it takes, but do it.”

  Brian Doyle didn’t exactly hop to. “Boss, could you do me a favor?”

  “What?”

  “Help me over the back wall. I wasn’t kiddin’ about the fall I took before.”

  We found a ladder in the shed that made Doyle’s return climb less traumatic. When I got back inside, my phone was at it again. It was Bursaw. The report had come in. At first the guy who owned the gray Accord couldn’t figure out what had happened to the car’s roof, his windshield and side window. But when a cop pulled up to see what the deal was with the Mercedes in the middle of the road, the owner of the Accord waved him over.

  “Shit, Moe, this guy’s serious. The initial report is he must’ve fired six or seven rounds at you.”

  “Then I’m lucky he can’t shoot for shit.”

  Detective Bursaw could taste a promotion. “What do you want me to do?”

  “For now, sit tight. I haven’t told the mother yet.”

  “That time’s pretty much come, don’t you think?”

  Just then I saw Nancy coming into the house. “Just sit tight for now, Mike. Gotta go.”

  Nancy walked in, looking as finely put together as always. And it was getting so that just the smell of her knocked me a bit off balance. The tennis seemed to have done her some good, but one look at me undid all that and then some. I was going to beg her for one more day without getting the cops involved and I wasn’t sure she would give it to me. If I had been her, I wouldn’t have. I told her all the things I’d told Doyle about the guy who had Siobhan having a timetable and needing to play this out at his own pace.

  “You’re contradicting yourself, Moe,” she said, her face a map of worry. “First you say he has killed in order to keep on a certain schedule to hurt Sloane, and that he won’t kill her until he’s ready to. But in the next breath you say getting the cops involved might cause him to kill her. I don’t understand.”

  “I know, Nancy. I know. And I know it’s a lot to ask you to risk your daughter’s life on a feeling I have about a stranger who just tried to kill me.”

  “You’re asking me more than a lot. You’re asking me for everything.”

  “He killed Rizzo and tried to kill me to buy time. That’s what those stupid phone messages are about, too, and the disclaimers. All to buy time. It seems to me his only goal is to publicly punish and humiliate your daughter before finally killing her. He wants to tell us why, but he’s not ready to. I think that’s almost as important to him as the act of killing Sloane. That’s what the framed photograph at the Hollow Girl’s feet is all about. I’m sure of it. That girl or woman in that photo is the reason. But if we call in the cavalry now and there’s some massive manhunt, he might feel forced to make a choice between killing Sloane according to his schedule, or killing Sloane before he gets caught. I’m afraid if it comes to that, he’ll—”

  “God, Moe, stop. I don’t want to hear you say it again. Give me something more than all this conjecture.”

  “Okay. If I’m right, tonight’s post will be more of the same or some variation of the same. The photograph will still be at her feet, but with one less strip of
tape on the face. If I’m wrong, if it’s much worse or really different, we’ll call the cops immediately.”

  “But if you’re wrong, Moe, we’re giving this sick bastard six free hours to kill my daughter and get away.”

  “I have no right to ask, but I’m asking,” I said, handing her the phone. “If you feel you have to call now, I will do everything I can to help the cops and no matter what happens, I won’t ever second-guess your decision.”

  She took the phone. “What would you do if it was Sarah?”

  “I guess I would call.”

  She handed the phone back to me.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  I’d never been so relieved to be right, relieved but not happy. One look at the condition of the Hollow Girl removed happiness from the equation. She was terribly pale, and it seemed the ropes were so tight that she could barely breathe. Her eyes remained closed. I couldn’t help but wonder if I had missed something about the ropes. Were they meant to be metaphorical? Was there a message in this about lack of mobility, or the inability to breathe? I could almost taste the answer, but being close was no good. The photograph was, as I suspected it would be, still at her feet, with one less strip of tape across the face. Now we could see the eyebrows, jawline, and nose of the girl in the picture. That much was clear from what had been revealed: She was a girl, not yet a woman. Surely, this had to be enough for Devo’s software to get me an answer.

  Then, about halfway through the post, my eyes drifted away from the center of the frame, away from the Hollow Girl and toward the blank white wall behind her. Staring at Siobhan, at her shallow, labored breaths, was gut-wrenching, hypnotic, and horrifying. Somehow, shifting focus to the wall behind her seemed like the most important thing in the world to me. Things came to me all at once: Anthony Rizzo’s timeline, Nancy’s timeline, the brief mentions of Millie McCumber in the press, Giorgio Brahms’s sour expression. Giorgio Brahms and his fucking kitchen walls. I was sick of him living in my head, him and his petty bullshit. Then I remembered his parlor. Suddenly, I was on my feet, standing between Nancy and her TV, screaming.

  “When did you say Millie McCumber came back into Siob—Sloane’s life?”

  “What does that have to—”

  “When?” I shouted. “When?”

  “Four, maybe five months ago.”

  “That’s it! That’s it, Nancy.”

  “That’s what?”

  “The key.”

  “To what?”

  “Maybe everything. Stay here. I’ll call you later. Just stay here.”

  * * *

  The main floor of Brahms’s brownstone was dark, but there was light coming from the second floor of his place, shadows, too. The problem was he didn’t seem disposed to answer his front door, no matter how often I pounded on it. Nor did he answer his phone when I called from the stoop. So I did the next best thing: I threw a rock through his front window. When he didn’t respond immediately to the sound of breaking glass, I got another rock, and another. That third rock was the charm.

  “What the fuck!” he screamed, yanking his front door open. His feet were bare. He was shirtless, wet with sweat, and his gym shorts were untied. “I’m calling the cops.”

  “Please do,” I said, pushing past him. “Get in here and shut the door.”

  “Who the fuck are you to order me around in my own house?” he ranted, shutting the front door and following me just the same.

  I showed him my .38 and pointed it at him. “You wanna ask me that again?”

  “Georgie, c’mon, Mama’s waiting for you. I was so fucking close,” a raspy-voiced woman called down from the top of the stairs. It was a voice with some mileage on it.

  I whispered to Brahms, “Tell Mama you’ll be up in five minutes.”

  “Me, too, honey. I was close, too. I’ll be up in five minutes. Have another drink, honey,” he called up.

  I heard bare feet padding away. I nodded for Giorgio to follow me into the kitchen. He was good at following instructions, at least from a man with a gun.

  “What’s this about?” he whispered when we stopped.

  “These walls,” I said pointing the short barrel of my .38 at them. “When I was here, you couldn’t take your eyes off them. You were muttering to yourself.”

  “You’re holding a gun on me because my kitchen walls are unfinished? And they say theater people are crazy.”

  “The first time we met, you gave an earnest little speech about Millie McCumber and how you were so upset over her death because her family would take her money and exploit her, but that’s not why you were upset, was it, Giorgio?”

  He didn’t answer, his face pinching up tight.

  “Giorgio!” I growled, pointing the revolver at him once again. “I don’t have time for this shit.”

  “Yes and no,” he relented, and waved at me. “Will you put that damned thing away? You’ve made your point.” He moved to the stove. “Tea?”

  I put the .38 away. “No, thanks. What about Mama? Won’t she get impatient?”

  “Trust me, Mr. Prager, Mama will wait. But you’re wrong about Millie. I did love her. I think I’m the only person who ever did. She didn’t make it easy to love her, trust me.”

  “But she was paying you for something, Giorgio. She was paying you a lot of money.”

  “Some, not as much as you think, but some, in dribs and drabs.”

  “Then she died between a drib and a drab and left you and your walls high and dry. But why was she paying you? And please, don’t make me pull it out of you, Giorgio. Just tell me, and tell me the truth because Siobhan’s life depends on it. And if what you tell me isn’t the truth and something happens to her because you lied to me, your life won’t be worth shit.”

  He picked up the kettle and banged it on the stove. “Stop threatening me.”

  “Start talking.”

  “It had been a year since I’d seen Millie. She was staying with me here back then, because she had nowhere else to go and because she was as low as she’d ever been. That was saying something. There were no parts for her, and the drugs and booze had gotten completely out of hand. She was so desperate, she’d even tried to land work as an escort. A perfect job for her, one would have thought. That woman loved to fuck, and acting is acting, right? So you can imagine how crushing it was when they turned her down for that, too. One of the services told her that she was too old, and that only steak houses were interested in dry aged beef.

  “She was ragged and one step away from living on the streets. One day, I left here to do some shopping, and she just split. But not before relieving me of all the cash I had in the house and most of my jewelry. I also had a collection of signed photographs and theater paraphernalia worth tens of thousands of dollars. She took all that as well. When she showed back up here in March, I nearly shit myself. I couldn’t believe she had the chutzpah, but I remembered this was Millicent McCumber. She had no shame.”

  “Does this story have a point?”

  The kettle whistled. He fussed with a mug, tea bag, and honey. “You’re the one who threatened me not to leave things out.”

  “Okay.”

  “She strutted in here like she’d done nothing wrong. She acted as if robbing the most valuable possessions from her only friend, agent, and sometimes lover was perfectly normal. I couldn’t speak, but I noticed that she looked fabulous: healthy, tanned, and dressed in several thousand dollars’ worth of haute couture and fur. Before I could open my mouth, she handed me a check for thirty thousand dollars and promised there was more to come. She didn’t apologize or ask after me. All she said was, ‘Can you get me a bottle of water, George? Shopping is such thirsty work.’ And when I came back with her water, she had spread herself out on my couch and commented on how dingy my place was. ‘We have to do something about that immediately,’ she said. When I asked about the clothes and the check and the water drinking, she said she’d sort of hit the lottery.”

  “Sort of?”

  “A man, o
f course. A rich one,” Giorgio said. “He’d come looking for her and had a proposition. He claimed to be a large shareholder in several media companies and had an idea for a project. The project was based on the whole Hollow Girl phenomenon of the late ’90s and there would be a big part in it for her, but he needed access to Siobhan Bracken. He told Millie that his attempts to approach Siobhan directly or through that dried-up old bitch, Anna Carey, had been rebuffed. So he offered Millie a lot of money if she could insinuate herself back into Siobhan’s life. He told her to spend all the money she needed and to get whatever help she needed to get close to Siobhan.”

  “Georgie!” Mama called from the top of the stairs, stomping her feet. “I need you, baby.”

  “He’ll be up in a few minutes,” I shouted to her. I turned back to Brahms. “Did you ever meet this money man?”

  “Never had to.”

  “Did you believe there really was a project?”

  “I believed his money.”

  “So what was your part in all this?”

  “After Millie had worked her way back into Siobhan’s good graces and her bed, I was invited in. After we’d all been together a few times, my job was to try and lure Siobhan away from Anna and to become my client. That way I’d be able to facilitate this guy getting together with Siobhan to discuss the Hollow Girl project. I told you the last time you were here that I’d tried to get her to be my client. When she refused to dump Anna, Millie told me it would be okay, that she would handle it and that I’d still get my money. But I knew it was too good to be true. Millie started using and drinking again. Then the payments slowed down. Then they stopped alto—” There was a knock at the door. “Holy shit! When did I become the most popular guy in town? Excuse me. I’ll be right back.”

  Brahms got up from the kitchen table and walked to the front door. His hand was on the knob when I screamed for him to get down. He didn’t get down, but turned sideways back towards the kitchen, his hand still on the knob. “What?”