The Hollow Girl (A Moe Prager Mystery)

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “Yeah,” I whispered.

  “Did you hear?”

  “I heard. Listen to me, Nancy. Tell Griggs I’m at the Johns’s old house in Farmington Falls. He’ll know what to do. Thanks again.”

  I clicked off and shut off the phone. Didn’t want it buzzing at the wrong moment.

  Outside the car, there was that eerie quiet of falling snow. The wind whipped up and then fell back into a harmony of silence with the snow and the dark. I expected that it never got too loud in Farmington Falls to begin with. A diffuse pinkish light, the source of which I could not divine, fell across the blanket of snow that already covered the ground. I eased the car door closed behind me, checked my watch, and took in what I could from where I had parked. I’d made sure to drive past the house and not stop directly in front of it. The Johns’s house was on a low hill with old trees placed strategically about the property to provide shade and privacy. Not quite buried in the silence, I could just about make out the snow-muffled trickle of running water from the wide stream that ran through the area. I had crossed over a quaint wooden bridge that spanned the stream a block east of the Johns’s house. And there were suddenly other noises emerging from the pinkish dark: the putter and hum of a generator.

  I did not look for lights in the upper floors of the house, as I was confident where this last act of the drama was meant to be played out. I needed to find the basement door, and quickly. As I hurried through the snow, I heard the ticking in my head that had played during last evening’s Hollow Girl post. I was lucky that the snow that had fallen over the early sleet was powdery and did not crunch under my weight. On the other hand, it got pretty treacherous when my shoes hit the slick layer of ice beneath the fluff and I fell on my face.

  “Fuck!” I whispered as I reached the padlocked steel bulkhead doors leading directly into the basement. At one time, these doors would have been made from wood. Now there was no hope of me gaining access this way. I had been pretty stealthy in my approach, fearing that Burton Johns would rather hang Siobhan than be stopped, even if it meant adjusting his timetable. When I heard the wail of sirens in the distance, it seemed to me that continued stealth was moot. I found the back door, put my elbow through the glass à la Mike Bursaw, and broke into the house. I switched my cell phone back on and used it as a flashlight.

  I heard feet—no, paws—scratching on the wooden floor. I pulled my gun down, but something knocked my cell away. A sharp, searing pain shot up my left arm. I was down, a thick-bodied dog, a Rottweiler, trying to tear my wrist off my arm and my arm off my body. Drool dripped down onto my face from the dog’s mouth as he shook his head side to side, my wrist in his jaws. I fought hard not to panic, no mean feat in the midst of the most primal of experiences. I suppose I could have just shot him in the side and been done with it, but I had seen too much innocent blood spilled in my life. So instead I put my gun to the dog’s left hind quarter and fired. It yelped in pain and let go of my wrist. I scrambled to my feet, banged around in the dark as I lumbered away. Behind me, the dog struggled to get to its feet and chase after me, but couldn’t manage it.

  I found what I thought must be the basement door. Locked. I checked my watch. It was 10:13. If Johns hadn’t already hanged the Hollow Girl and left her dangling at the end of the rope for the audience to see, he would soon enough. I didn’t bother shouldering the door. I shot holes in the lock and the hinges, using all my remaining ammo to do so. Then I shouldered the door. It gave way more easily than I’d anticipated, and I toppled headfirst down a long flight of wooden stairs. It was a miracle I didn’t snap my neck along the way. I lay breathless and stunned in a twisted heap of myself at the basement landing.

  Siobhan’s bound body was now propped up on the plywood and concrete block platform. She was on her knees, the noose around her neck, straining against her windpipe. She seemed to be unconscious. There was a camera on a tripod placed about ten feet in front of her, and Burton Wentworth Johns was standing just behind the camera. When I could breathe again, I gagged at the ammonia stink of urine and nauseating sewer pipe odor of old feces. As I forced myself to my feet, Johns calmly stepped away from the camera, walked over to the platform and kicked the concrete blocks out from beneath it. Siobhan’s body unfolded like an Olympic diver’s falling into the pool below, but she never quite made it to the water.

  Johns had miscalculated. He hadn’t anticipated that the makeshift gallows he’d built would create a pile of debris beneath Siobhan, preventing her falling with enough momentum to snap her neck. Her feet caught on the pile. I ran to her, wrapping my arms around her bound body, lifting her up, holding her as best I could. A fresh kind of pain rudely introduced itself to me, a pain so burning hot and powerful that it knocked me sideways and filled my body with fire. It happened so fast that I only heard the shot in retrospect. But I knew I could not let the Hollow Girl go. I had let too many people down in my life, their names and faces scrolling by in an instant. Then there was more pain. More noise. There was lots of noise, a world full of thunder and flame. Then darkness as quiet and profound as snowfall.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  When I opened my eyes, the pain had me wishing for that profound darkness. I was getting jolted pretty good. There was a mask over my face. I was cold and wet and on fire. I saw tubes and plastic bags. My head fell to my left. There was a woman next to me. There was a mask on her face, too. There were plastic tubes sticking out of her arm. There were blurry men between us talking real loud and too fast, saying things I couldn’t understand. Numbers. I remember they were speaking numbers.

  * * *

  Sarah was sitting next to me, asleep in a chair. The lighting in the room was dim, but I knew my daughter. I had watched her being born, her red curls preceding her into the world. It was still a feeling unmatched in my life, the moment of my daughter’s birth. I knew I was in a hospital, knew it before I had even opened my eyes. Hospitals have that smell. I wanted to stop smelling it as soon as I could. Then I never wanted to smell it again.

  * * *

  The room was full of people, most of whom I was thrilled to see. Sarah, Paul, and Ruben were there. Aaron and Cindy, too. My little sister Miriam was there. Klaus. Fuqua. Bursaw. Marina Conseco and Carmella. What? Ferguson May, Rico and Katy. Bobby Friedman and Mr. Roth. No, no. Wait. Ferguson May, the Plato of the Six-O, had been stabbed through the eye during a domestic dispute thirty years ago. And wait, these others … I squeezed my eyes shut and made the dream go away. When I opened my eyes, I was alone. I stared up at the ceiling for the rest of the night and was happy to hear the whirring and beeping of machines.

  * * *

  The next time I opened my eyes, a doctor was standing over me. Dr. Whitaker, he said his name was.

  “You’re a lucky man, Mr. Prager.”

  Why do doctors always say that? If I was a lucky man, I wouldn’t have gotten shot or had stomach cancer in the first place.

  “You were shot through your left shoulder. The wound was a through and through that missed your heart by about this much.” He held his index finger and thumb two inches apart. “The other shot is the one that did more damage, I’m afraid. It hit your right kidney and that slowed the bullet up so that it decided to plow around inside you. We’ve sewn you up pretty well, and we think we’ll be able to save your kidney, but you have to take it easy. We’ve kept you pretty drugged up to this point, but now you have to begin your recovery in earnest. I’ll be in to see you tomorrow.” He shook my hand. “I’ve never saved a hero’s life before.”

  “I’m nobody’s hero, Doc. No such thing as a hero.”

  “There’s someone here to see you who might disagree.”

  When he left the room, a woman walked in past him. I hardly recognized her without her ropes and with her eyes open. We didn’t really talk. What was there to say? She just wanted to hold my hand, and I let her.

  EPILOGUE

  Vermont, April 2014

  Brooklyn would live only in my memory now that Sarah had sol
d my condo in Sheepshead Bay and I had settled into my life as grandpa in semi-residence in Vermont. I would go back—had gone back—but it was different. Although it had taken almost two-thirds of a century to do it, I’d finally cut the umbilical cord that had kept me tied to Coney Island.

  A wise man once said that a place, anyplace, stops existing once you’ve left it. He was wise, but wrong. Brooklyn would live inside me. I would be able to breathe in the salt smell of the ocean breezes that blew along the boardwalk until I shut my eyes for the last time. And carried on those breezes would be the coconut scent of summer girls covered in suntan lotion, and the raw perfume of boiling oil from Nathan’s. I would hear the thud, thud, thud, thud of bicycle tires and clickety-clack of women’s sandals on the weathered planks of the old boardwalk. The shrieks and screams of kids on the Cyclone would always ring in my ears. Some of those shrieks were mine. On quiet days in my new house I could call up the sound of balls bouncing off the concrete walls at the West 5th Street handball courts. I would be able to taste the oniony potato knishes from Hirsch’s. And the fireworks … there would always be fireworks on Tuesday nights on the boardwalk in my mind.

  It had taken months for me to recover from the gunshots, but it was cake compared to the cancer. The dog I’d shot recovered in less time. I was glad of that, and that I’d chosen not to just kill him. Burton Wentworth Johns had not recovered from his wounds, which was just as well. According to papers they found after the shootout, Johns hadn’t intended to live much longer anyway. I’d been right about him, just not right enough. He was guilt-stricken over his sister’s suicide because he had been a driving force behind it. It came out that he had sexually abused Emma one way or another since they were eight years old. Love, I thought, had as many ugly permutations as beautiful ones. No wonder Emma could relate to the Hollow Girl.

  As I suspected, Johns had slipped back into the United States from Mexico through Arizona. Johns had been willing to go further than I’d imagined in order to avenge Emma. Not only had he enlisted Millicent McCumber and Anthony Rizzo’s help, but he’d also been wise enough to use Robert Allen Kaufman as a kind of insurance policy, a hedge in case the wheels started to come off the original plan. Kaufman, so blinded by his own hate and thirst for revenge, had no idea what Johns ultimately had in mind. It had been Burton Johns himself who’d called in the anonymous tip to the FBI about Kaufman. And when they checked Kaufman out, the FBI found everything Johns had left for them to find. But the real genius of the plan was how he had lured Siobhan Bracken so willingly into it.

  He had set up a TV production company, but meant to focus on the emerging Internet TV market and not the traditional ones. He’d even had some mediocre reality shows produced and aired. Old world, new world, it didn’t matter: money talked. He’d tried to approach Siobhan through Anna Carey. No dice. And, as Brahms had told me, also through him. That hadn’t worked either. But Millie McCumber had worked her considerable charms: She convinced Siobhan to meet with Johns in the Hamptons after returning from Ireland. Johns then persuaded Siobhan that the Hollow Girl could be used as a means to the career she so craved.

  “He was very persuasive, Mr. Prager,” Siobhan told me when we met for lunch at her mother’s house last month. “He knew what I so desperately wanted. I could write the shows, act in them, make it a showcase for my talents. I would have free rein, but the Hollow Girl had to be the starting point. I hesitated. I didn’t want to do it at first, but he wore me down. And Millie was always in my ear. I had a real weakness for Millie.

  “During that week in the Hamptons, we would drive to the building he’d set up as a studio in Westbury and record some things I thought we were just trying out. He said he didn’t drive, so he had me rent the car and promised to reimburse me. He had me write some monologues and record them. It was really kinda fun and liberating. I guess he knew it would be, revisiting the Hollow Girl. That had all ended so badly.”

  Once he had her committed to the project, the rest fell into place. He drugged her drink one night after they had shot her monologue, and held her captive. The remainder of his fourteen-years-in-the-making revenge fantasy was out there for the world to see. He had planned it all so carefully. And I had to admit that if Millie McCumber hadn’t died of a heart attack, it all might’ve worked just as Johns had hoped. But me finding Millie dead in Siobhan’s apartment set in motion a series of missteps that eventually ruined Johns’s dream. He panicked and paid Anthony Rizzo to ransack the apartment as a diversion. Of course it backfired, and when Rizzo saw it as an opportunity to blackmail Johns … au revoir Anthony. It’s still unclear if it was Johns himself or Kaufman who killed the doorman. And we’ll never know which one of them shot at me and Giorgio Brahms. We do know it was Johns who blew Kaufman’s brains out and left him to be found by the FBI.

  I did extract one thing from Nancy and Siobhan that day I went for lunch. They had done no interviews since the rescue. That, I told them, was about to change. I handed Siobhan Ian Kern’s card.

  “I kept my promise to your mother,” I said. “Now you’re going to keep my promise to him.”

  Aaron and I have dissolved Irving Prager and Sons, Inc. We had named the partnership after our dad. It was the only way to do it. I needed to cut that tie, too, like I had with Brooklyn. I needed to be completely out of it, and not at the fringes. I was okay with just letting go, but my big brother insisted I be bought out, some in cash and some on a note. I knew better than to argue with him. I didn’t need the money. I had all the money I was ever going to need. The one demand I made was that Aaron keep Brian and Devo on as security. That, of all things, my brother grumbled about.

  “I don’t know about those guys,” he said. “The bills for the last few months have been a little high.”

  I managed not to laugh.

  Bursaw had come up to Connecticut to see me, as had Vincent Brock. Julian Cantor couldn’t be bothered. Bursaw didn’t get a bump, but had managed to hold onto his shield for the time being. He told me that the Suffolk cops, as a courtesy, had shared what was on Dillman’s suicide tape. The return of the Hollow Girl had been the last straw. He didn’t think he could deal with the bad publicity again, not after the divorce. When I saw Siobhan at Nancy’s house, I’d been tempted to tell her about the Hollow Girl’s part in Dillman’s suicide, but I realized the pain and guilt had to stop somewhere. Dillman’s was over with, and I decided not to be a conduit for more. Vincent thanked me for saving Siobhan. I think I appreciated his coming to see me more than anyone else beside my family, because I knew he didn’t much like me. He had no other agenda. He just wanted to say thanks and shake my hand. When he had done those two things, he got back in his sparkly maroon BMW with the stupid vanity plates and drove two hours back home to Long Island.

  When we were clearing out my drawers to make the move up to Vermont, Sarah came across a piece of my past that I had assumed had just vanished with time. She found the replica detective’s shield Katy had had made for me decades ago, in lieu of the one I’d never gotten from the NYPD. Over the years I had come to realize that not getting my real shield was probably the single best thing that had ever happened—or, to be precise, not happened—to me. Not getting it had made me a husband, father, and ultimately a grandfather. Not getting it had introduced me to Mr. Roth and Klaus, and made me a success in business, if a reluctant one. Not getting the shield had helped me help get a measure of justice for people from whom it had been stolen or delayed, and it helped me help save people’s lives. What else could a man do better with his own life than those two things? We never did find my PI license, but that was okay. I was never going to need it again.

  Nancy came up to visit me last week. I’d tried to get her not to come, but she insisted. I don’t know, maybe it was that I felt uncomfortable having her in Pam’s old house. Maybe it was that I was afraid she would try to rekindle that brief flame we had shared over the course of a few weeks last September and October. Maybe I was just afraid. I needn’t have bee
n.

  We shared lunch at a local diner, neither of us ordering a drink and both of us managing to be civil to the waitress. She had simply come up to say thank you and to wish me well. She said that her brief time with me had woken her up, and that maybe she would try and do some good in the world instead of trying to improve her tennis game. It was good of her to say, though she was as impeccably put together as ever and still smelled fantastic.

  “There is one more thing,” she said as she stood to go.

  Uh oh. “Yeah.”

  “I know you won’t take more money from me, but I want to give you something. Nothing extravagant. Let’s call it a gesture between old friends and lovers.”

  “A gesture like what?”

  “A trip anywhere you want to go. I know you can afford to do it yourself and you can go anywhere you’d like for as long as you’d like, but I think I know you a little bit now. You won’t do it yourself. So let me do it for you.”

  “Israel,” I blurted, though I could scarcely believe it.

  There were a thousand reasons that it made no sense. For one thing, I wasn’t so much a lapsed Jew as a collapsed Jew. That and I didn’t believe in God, second chances notwithstanding. I also didn’t care much for the hawkish nature of current Israeli politics. I had sent my daughter there and the rest of my family had gone, Aaron several times.

  Nancy looked nearly as surprised as I felt. “Why Israel?”

  All I said was, “It’s about time.”

  We hugged long and hard, and I watched Nancy Lustig walk away. The tickets arrived yesterday.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Paula Schwartz, MD, Suffolk County ADA Ming Liu Parson, and Karen Olson. I want to express my appreciation to Ben LeRoy and David Hale Smith for helping to revive and sustain Moe. To Sara J. Henry, Peter Spiegelman, and Ellen W. Schare. As always, to Judy Bobalik. And a special nod to Dylan T. Coleman for helping with the cover design for this novel.