The Hollow Girl (10 page)

“I’m missing something here. If she could have the work—”

“She doesn’t want it. Whereas the rest of my clients would kill to get a second reading for a five-second, one-word bit in a local cable TV spot, Siobhan turned down juicy roles on TV, in movies, on Broadway.”

“Why?”

Anna Carey finished her drink and lit up another cigarette. After a few drags, she was laughing again. “They’re never the starring roles, Prager. This is a pretty girl’s business. No, wait, let me amend that. This is a somewhat talented, beautiful, young, anorexic girl’s business. That sound like Siobhan to you?”

“Not really.”

“So, yes, she could have played the plain-faced nurse or the understanding but chubby best friend, or the dull sister, or the—”

“I get your point.”

“Maybe half of it you get,” she said. “The strange thing is that I do understand, completely, even if she doesn’t put a nickel in my threadbare pocket. Have you ever been great at anything, Prager? I don’t mean just good, or really very good. I mean great.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“Well, about a million years ago I was on the stage. I was pretty good, maybe very good, but I never quite got the lead. I came to think of myself as Understudy Anna.”

“What happened?”

“Resentment happened. Do you know what it’s like to be out on a stage, any stage, and to know you’re so much better than everyone else around you? What it’s like to have a minor role when you are better than the star, co-star, and the entire company? It got so bad that I could taste it, and I wasn’t half the actor Siobhan Bracken is. At least I was a pretty girl, pretty enough for back then. Can you understand?”

I hadn’t lied to her. I was never great at anything, but I understood resentment on a molecular level. In the spring of 1972, a little girl named Marina Conseco, the daughter of a city fireman, had gone missing in Coney Island. Several days had passed and the search shifted silently away from finding the girl to finding her remains. I was part of a search team that was covering ground that had been covered, and recovered and re-recovered over and over again, in the days since Marina had disappeared. But for some reason—I think it was exhaustion—I looked up, and when I did I saw one of those water towers on the roof of a building. It occurred to me that we hadn’t searched those. We found her in the fourth or fifth one we looked in. She was near frozen, broken, and barely alive, but she lived.

I had seen other cops get gold detective shields for much less. I had been around to witness gold shields handed out as political candy, as favors, as rewards for writing a consistently high volume of traffic and parking summonses, for longevity. All I got for saving Marina Conseco’s life was a slap on the back, an “atta boy” from my captain, a medal, and a commendation for my file. For years it ate at me, and then, after injuring my knee and getting retired, the resentment nearly consumed me whole. When I first became a PI, people who knew about my bitter resentment used it to manipulate me. So, yeah, I understood about Siobhan.

Anna Carey saw the answer in my eyes and didn’t press me to put it to words. I asked her for a list of people she thought I might want to talk to about Siobhan’s whereabouts. She gave me a few names and their contact info. When I left her office, Anna was smoking another cigarette and pouring a third glass of bourbon. When I hit the street, I realized I’d only had one sip of my drink. I looked at my hands. They didn’t seem to be shaking too badly. That was progress of a sort.

Having heard the ME’s theory and having read the police spokesperson’s quote in the morning paper, my supposition was that Millicent McCumber’s death was going to be declared the result of a heart attack or an accident. If that were so, then Siobhan’s apartment would no longer be treated as a crime scene and I would be free to take a second look around. All I’d been able to do during my first visit was assess the quality of the interior design and try not to get blood on my shoes. It hadn’t actually been possible for me to search for evidence concerning Siobhan’s whereabouts.

My return visit to the Kremlin, I decided, would have to wait a day. I’d made a good start in getting a sense of Siobhan Bracken, but that wasn’t nearly enough. I still had no idea whether or not she was actually missing. On the one hand, her taking off unannounced for parts unknown was apparently a feature of the punch-counterpunch dynamic Siobhan and Nancy seemed unable or unwilling to escape from. On the other, it was unusual for Siobhan to be gone for more than two weeks without contacting anyone. Yeah, before I did more stumbling from person to person, I needed some concrete beneath me in the form of answers.

Houston Street was thick with horn-blaring traffic in both directions. There was a long line out the front door of Katz’s Deli. Tourists, hipsters, and neighborhood denizens zombie-marched the sidewalks. Life on the Lower East Side went on as if Millie McCumber were still alive. It went on as if she had never been born. It went on whether Siobhan Bracken was missing or simply soaking up the sun on some sandy beach. That is one of the great comforts and great horrors of New York City—it stops for no one. In my lifetime, I could recall only four times the city had even held its breath: the blackout in ’65, the Summer of Sam, 9/11, and Hurricane Sandy. And still, during each of those times, the city refused to shut down. In spite of having spent my whole life here, I couldn’t say whether it was the nature of my fellow citizens or something about the place itself. Maybe it was the water. Why not, right? I mean, the water’s why our bagels and pizza are so good.

At least now when I approached the Kremlin I would do so armed with some notion of what Siobhan Bracken had been up to over the last month. After leaving Anna Carey’s office, I’d gone home and spent most of the evening on the phone and on the computer. Between my limited Internet skills, my less limited skill at fudging the truth, my contacts in the credit card world—there were some benefits to owning a chain of wine stores—plus a long conversation with Nancy Lustig, and a favor from a friend who worked for the TSA, I had been able to patch together a rough idea of Siobhan’s movements.

Rizzo, the Kremlin doorman, had been both right and wrong the other night at Grogan’s Clover. Siobhan Bracken had taken an international flight—to Ireland, as it happened—but his recollection was off about when she left. Siobhan hadn’t left at the very end of August. On August 23, a week earlier than Rizzo remembered, she had boarded an Aer Lingus flight to Dublin from JFK. Who knows why; maybe she liked Guinness on tap, or she’d taken her new identity to heart. Siobhan was a name, after all, with both Hebrew and Gaelic origins. As my mother had been proud to tell us, Dublin once had a Jewish mayor. But why Siobhan went or what she did there was beside the point, because she landed back at JFK on September 6. There’d also been a post-Ireland, post-Labor-Day week spent in the Hamptons at a chic motel. Yes, only in the Hamptons could a motel be chic. So I could account for her movements from late August to mid-September, but after that … nothing.

Anthony Rizzo didn’t click up his heels at the sight of me. I hadn’t imagined he would. In fact, he looked downright miserable to see me and seemed a little jumpy. I spoke to him long enough to find out if the cops had taken the tape off 5E. He said someone had been by yesterday afternoon and removed the seal and notice from the door. Entering a sealed scene was a serious offense and no matter how curious I was, I wasn’t going to risk real jail time. I told him to ring my cell if the cops or anyone else came sniffing around while I was in Siobhan’s apartment. He didn’t click up his heels about that either, but that was just too bad for him. I handed him a twenty anyway. I was nice like that, and I wasn’t stupid. Just because it was understood that I could get his ass fired didn’t mean he would ask how high when I said jump. A wise man never underestimates the power of goodwill.

This time as I got closer to 5E, it wasn’t the smells of cooking nor the fainter but still present smell of death that got my attention. It was that the door to 5E was slightly ajar. The gap between jamb and door wasn’t large. It didn’t allow me a view of the apartment. It was as if someone had carefully closed the door without letting the locks catch. I doubted the door had been left open by the cop who’d come to remove the seal. Look, I’m the last guy on earth to give the cops a pass. Having been one, I knew how sloppy and careless they could sometimes be. A cop, even an incompetent one, would know that leaving a door unlocked like this could get him jammed up pretty bad. And this didn’t have the feel of a fuck-up.

I reached under my jacket for my .38. Until my alcoholic fallout over Pam, I’d had it holstered to me every day for four-plus decades. I’d worn it to my weddings, had it on me in the delivery room when Sarah was born, and was reluctant to remove it in the hospital during chemo. It had once been part of who I was, a fifth limb. I hadn’t quite felt naked without it—it was more like feeling I’d left my house and forgotten to put on one of my shoes. But when I reached for it, the old .38 was there. I slowly pulled it out of its holster, pointing the barrel at the hall ceiling. I flattened my back to the wall, willing my heart to steady and trying to calm my breathing so I could hear. For a twenty-year-old building, the Kremlin was pretty quiet and there was very little ambient street or apartment noise in the hallway. That worked for and against me. I concentrated as best I could.

I stepped to the hinge side of the threshold and very carefully pushed the door open just enough to allow me a peek inside. Even with my limited view I saw that the living room had undergone a redesign by tornado. As I legged the door open and stepped inside, I saw that the place had been totally trashed. There wasn’t a chair or sofa that hadn’t been cut and slashed. Foam stuffing, cotton batting, and feathers were everywhere. Every drawer was open and dumped on the floor. All the books had been wiped off the shelves, many ripped apart, pages scattered. The prints, paintings, and photos had been taken off the walls, pulled out of their frames, and hacked and torn to pieces. An antique mirror in an oak stand had been broken to bits, beads and shards of glass surrounding its wheeled feet.

I carefully made my way through the entire apartment. There didn’t seem to be a thing in the place that hadn’t been damaged or disturbed. The bed and carpeting, even the clothing in the closet had been sliced to shreds. The medicine vials had been opened and emptied. The endless array of hair care products, makeup, powders, potions, tonics, and toners had been dumped or poured out all over the bathroom tiles. And since I didn’t know the place, I had no idea if anything was actually missing or if the place had simply been destroyed. Still, I had a look around to see if there was anything that might give me an idea about Siobhan’s whereabouts.

It was a waste of time, but a few things were pretty obvious to a trained eye. The destruction wasn’t done by a pro. A second-story man knows what he’s looking for. He gets in, takes what he wants, and gets out. He doesn’t stay a second longer than he has to. Nor was it done by a tweaker, junky, or crackhead. The things that druggies snatch for quick sale, like jewelry and electronics, still seemed to be there, if a little worse for wear. Druggies did tend to be messy, but Siobhan’s apartment was several notches up from messy. For me, that left two possibilities, neither of which I liked very much. One was that there was a person out there who hated Siobhan Bracken beyond all reason, and had done this to her property because her person was unavailable. As frightening and unsettling as that thought was, the other possibility was, in a way, even more disturbing.

From the moment I had stepped into Siobhan’s flat and surveyed the damage, I’d been bothered by the totality of the damage. Something wasn’t kosher. Frankly, the scene seemed staged for maximum shock value, as if whoever had trashed the place wanted you to gasp at the sight of it. And there was something else, or rather the lack of something else. There was no sign of forced entry. Although the flat was on the fifth floor, I’d checked all the windows, the terrace door, and the front door. The perpetrator had used a key and had left the door open on purpose. Why leave the door open? Who would do that? When I reached what I felt was the most reasonable conclusion, I didn’t care much for it, not very much at all.

I thought about calling it in, but was in no mood for a reunion with the detectives from the 9th Precinct. Our first meeting hadn’t gone so swimmingly that I was anxious to repeat the experience. Instead, I took a minute and used my cell phone camera to document the wreck that was now the interior of Siobhan’s flat. Exiting the apartment, I left the door to 5E ajar as I’d found it. I stopped by the lobby desk, but the doorman was nowhere in sight. I didn’t find that particularly curious. Doormen have to answer the call of nature, too. As I walked to my car, I left a message on Rizzo’s phone and described what I’d found upstairs in Siobhan’s apartment. I suggested he phone it in. It wasn’t like I would escape the cops’ scrutiny for very long. The surveillance cameras guaranteed my presence would not go unnoticed. Once the cops saw the shambles the apartment was in, they would be going over every digitized pixel those cameras had captured. There was just something I had to attend to before facing Detectives Frovarp and Shulze again.

The drive out to Nancy Lustig’s glass and concrete house took me ninety minutes. Half of that time was spent escaping from Manhattan. Oh, the joys of New York City traffic are legion. Once I managed to get through the Midtown Tunnel, it was an easy ride east along the Long Island Expressway.

The bright sun told the truth today as September fought hard to claw its way back to summer and not surrender to the calendar. It was good to ride with the windows rolled down and to let myself be fooled by the warm breeze that summer could return. In spite of the sun, the trees along the sides of the expressway denied the heat of the day and knew better than to pretend. They were still green enough, even very green, but there was a kind of exhausted yearning in the downward aspect of their leaves. I knew that downward tilt well. My shoulders had been slumped like that in surrender during the cancer.