The Hollow Girl (19 page)

Julian Cantor’s house looked more gothic than ugly under the overcast skies. I couldn’t imagine how a thunderstorm might further enhance its appearance. Not unexpectedly, Vincent Brock’s BMW was parked where it had been the last time I visited. But as my arrival was unexpected, Alexandra hadn’t come out to greet me. I knew that in spite of the calm exterior, things would not be nearly so calm inside the house. It was tough to do damage control when your own daughter was your accuser. I knew a little something about that. And whether she was telling the truth about her father or not was almost beside the point. People would believe her because, in our culture, the worst of someone was always easier to believe.

What the Hollow Girl had done to Cantor was different than what she’d done to Nancy. I’m not saying that what she had done to Nancy wasn’t cruel. It
was
cruel, and hurtful and largely pointless to my way of thinking. But I imagine that many of the people who viewed the posts about Nancy came away feeling some level of mixed feelings for her. Maybe a measure of empathy, possibly sympathy, even admiration for recreating herself. After having some time to digest the content and tenor of the posts about her mother, I think it was Siobhan, not Nancy, who came off as the ogre. That wouldn’t be the case with Julian Cantor. No one was going to be feeling sorry for him except Alexandra, and I’m not sure even that was a lock.

I rapped my knuckles on the front door. It took a moment for someone to answer and that someone was Vincent “P EYE 7” Brock. He looked mighty unhappy. No doubt Cantor had made Vincent’s life a misery since last night’s Hollow Girl post. Men like Cantor needed whipping boys. I’d recognized that in him the minute we’d met. As Vincent had now discovered, being the teacher’s pet didn’t make you bulletproof. It didn’t protect you from people like Cantor. I had known many ambitious men in my life and, while they weren’t all the same, they shared certain common traits. For them, loyalty was a two-way street only to a point. They expected you to stand by them straight down the line. Their obligation to you, on the other hand, was situational and subject to change. Loyalty for them was a calculation, not a commitment.

“I wouldn’t wanna trade places with you today,” I said to Vincent, stepping inside the house. “Your boss must be a real pleasure to be around.”

We stepped into the great room.

“Yeah, Prager, a real joy. Think Hitler’s last days in the bunker.”

“That bad?”

“Worse. He’s been fielding some pretty nasty phone calls from all sides—angry husbands, POed ex-mistresses, and his law partners.”

“Where’s the wife?”

Brock looked at his watch. “Probably halfway to Sydney by now. After last night, the boss thought it would be a good idea for everybody if Mrs. Cantor got far out of Dodge until things settled down some.”

“Yesterday couldn’t have been too much fun around here either.”

“It didn’t help that you were nowhere to be found.”

“Look, Vincent, I understand you’re under a lot of pressure, but try to remember that I don’t work for Cantor. You called me an asshole this morning. Okay, I get that. I get that he’s giving you all the shit you can handle, but don’t push me.”

But Vincent had had enough and push me is exactly what he did. He clapped his right hand on my left shoulder and shoved. “Listen, you old prick. You may think you’re smarter than the average bear and that I can’t … what was it you said this morning, that I couldn’t find my own dick in the dark?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“Well, if you say another word to me, I’ll put my hands around your scrawny-assed old neck and snap it like a chicken bone.”

“Get your hand off me, Vincent. Get it off me right now,” I said, cool as could be. I wasn’t the one spoiling for a fight.

“And what if I don’t?”

I guess I could have just answered him. Instead, I decided that showing was better than telling. I clasped my right hand on his wrist to lock it in place, swung my left arm over his right, and stepped forward. When he tumbled to the floor, I locked up his thumb so that he was on his knees in front of me. His face turned a bright red and spit flew out of his mouth as he cursed in pain. I reached under my jacket, grabbed my .38, and pressed the muzzle to the tip of Vincent’s nose.

“Now, I’ve been threatened enough for one day. You call me old, or insult me or threaten me again, and I’ll snap your thumb off your fucking hand. You understand me?”

He hissed something through his clenched teeth that sounded a lot like, “Fuck you!”

That was when I clicked back the hammer on the .38. If nothing else I’d said or done had gotten Vincent’s attention, that sure did. He got the shakes bad. His eyes grew big and scared.

“Okay, okay, okay. I get it,” he said.

“What the fuck is this?” Cantor screamed as he came stomping into the great room, his eyes pouched and puffy, face creased with stress.

I pointed the gun away from Vincent and let his thumb go before he pissed his pants or worse. He fell back, grabbing his hand and wrist, trying to rub out the pain. I uncocked the .38 and holstered it.

“You didn’t answer me, Prager,” Cantor shouted again.

“Look, Mr. Cantor, I’ll tell you what I told Vincent here before he decided he was gonna act like a tough guy and threaten a card-carrying member of AARP. I don’t work for you. I don’t even technically work for your ex anymore, either,” I said, pulling a check out of my inside jacket pocket. “This is a refund of most of her retainer. I’m here out of courtesy, and because I’m worried.”

“Worried about what?” he asked.

“Not about you or your reputation, if that’s what you’re thinking. Like I explained to Vincent this morning, this thing with Rizzo … I don’t like it. The whole way here I tried to talk myself into believing that there’s no connection between what your daughter’s doing and Rizzo getting murdered.”

Cantor snickered. “And how did that work for you?”

“It didn’t.”

“Maybe you needed a good lawyer to argue the case.”

“Do you know one?” I said.

“Very funny, Prager, but—”

“Like I said, Mr. Cantor, I’m here as a courtesy. I think there’s some stuff I know about Rizzo and your daughter that maybe you and Vincent need to hear.”

“Such as?”

“Yeah, like what?” Vincent echoed his boss.

“It’s not pretty. I think maybe you’ll want a drink to help wash it down.”

“Maybe I do.” The lawyer nodded. “You want one?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m good.”

“Vincent, go pour me a bourbon and get back in here.”

But Vincent stayed down on the floor. He didn’t seem so keen on getting ordered around like a houseboy in a ’30s black-and-white movie.

“Did Prager break your legs when he wounded your pride?” Cantor barked.

Vincent looked about ready to blow again, but held it together this time. I think maybe he realized making payments on his fancy BMW wouldn’t be quite so easy without a job. He stood up, glared at me as he walked past, then turned to his boss. “On the rocks?”

“Neat,” Cantor said dismissively, then waved at the sofa. “Sit, Prager. Sit.”

I sat. As Vincent left to get his master’s drink, the phone rang. Cantor didn’t move.

“Aren’t you going to get that?” I asked.

He raised his voice to be heard over the ringing. “I’ve been doing that all day long, answering the fucking phone. I’ve had a bellyful of phony, indignant bitching and whining, thank you very much. The husbands are the worst, so fucking hypocritical. I know most of them are banging women at the office or waitresses at the club. They’re all rubbing their hands together because they think they can use me as their get-out-of-marriage-free card. But all they’ve got is my daughter’s angry rantings and a bunch of photographs. I mean, for chrissakes, there are a million disclaimers before and after her posts about the shit Sloane says just being performance art.”

“Doesn’t mean she’s lying,” I reminded him.

He snickered again. “Well, good thing you need more than that in court.”

That’s when Vincent came back into the room, handing a tall pour of bourbon to Julian Cantor. I smiled, wondering if Brock had spit in his boss’s drink. What’s the old restaurant rule?
Never piss off the waiter before he serves the food
. Cantor either didn’t have similar reservations or didn’t care. He gunned down the Kentucky honey in a gulp.

“Okay, Prager, now tell me.”

He was a man who enjoyed giving orders and the more he gave the more I wanted to get this over with and get going.

“Your daughter had an arrangement with Rizzo. She used to pay him two hundred bucks a throw to service her. His words, not mine. He told me this was going on for about a year, and that they had averaged about one encounter a month. When Millie McCumber came back into the picture, the frequency increased. Your daughter would pay him to be the third, and sometimes there was a fourth involved, an agent named Giorgio Brahms.”

The expression that flashed across Cantor’s weary face was difficult to describe. It was a jumble of disappointment, defeat, disgust, but largely guilt. I knew that look. I’d seen it in the mirror a lot over the last few months. It seemed as if hearing about the arrangement between the doorman and his daughter wasn’t so much a surprise to Cantor as a confirmation of his worst fears. I could almost hear him thinking:
What else could I have expected from my daughter? I have no moral compass, so how could she?
The look on Vincent Brock’s face was much less complicated, much easier to read. He was angry and jealous.

“Get the fuck outta here!” Brock screamed in spite of himself. “She wouldn’t have anything to do with that piece of shit.”

Cantor jerked his head around toward his investigator, apparently taken aback by the vehemence of Brock’s reaction. Maybe he was a little upset with himself for not coming to his daughter’s defense, or maybe he understood what Vincent’s reaction might have meant. Or maybe he was just surprised to see Vincent grow a pair of balls before his eyes.

“I’m only telling you what Rizzo told me,” I said. “The guy was an obnoxious, conceited prick and I bet there wasn’t much he wouldn’t have done for a few hundred bucks. It’s easy enough to confirm with bank records. Believe me, I know Rizzo was a total skell, but he also had no reason to bullshit me.”

“He had the best reason: money.” Vincent jumped to the defense again.

“What about it? Just because the guy took money from me doesn’t mean he was lying and you know it, Brock. This is one area of the business you know as well as me, maybe better. You depose people in personal injury cases all the time. You know the sound of bullshit when you hear it. Plus he gave me info, like about this Giorgio guy, that didn’t exactly make him look good, and it checked out. I’m not saying that Rizzo wouldn’t’ve lied if there was money in it for him. What I’m saying is that just because he was a scumbag didn’t mean everything he said was crap.”

Now Cantor, whose eyes had turned inward for a moment, rejoined the fray. “Let us suppose that what you’re saying is true, Prager, that this piece of shit Rizzo was involved with my girl. Why do you think there’s a connection between his murder and what’s going on with Sloane?”

“I don’t know that there is for sure. There’s just a lot of little things. Too many incidents, too much coincidence. First your daughter falls off the radar screen for a month so that your ex comes to me. I find Millie dead in Siobhan’s apartment. Two days later, her apartment is trashed and it’s trashed in a silly, theatrical way. When does it happen? The trashing takes place conveniently between the time the cops take down the crime scene notice and when I show up. Rizzo walks away from the Kremlin before I get back downstairs from Siobhan’s apartment. Then that night, voilà, the Hollow Girl reappears after a fourteen-year hiatus. A few days later Rizzo turns up in the trunk of his car on Long Island with his head caved in. I just have a feeling, is all. Call it instinct.”

“I call it bullshit,” Vincent was shouting again. “I don’t know what this guy is up to, Mr. Cantor, but—”

“Hear the man out, Vincent,” Cantor said. “There’s no harm in that.”

“There’s only one more thing I have to say and then I’ll be out of your hair for good. Why hasn’t anyone heard from Siobhan? I don’t mean the posts from the Hollow Girl. I mean a phone call, an e-mail, a text, something.”

Vincent answered, “Because she knows how hurt and angry her parents will be at what she’s doing.”

Cantor agreed. “He makes a good point, Prager.”

“Maybe. If not you or Nancy, why hasn’t she gotten in touch with her friends, or you, Vincent?”

Vincent had an answer for that, too. “Maybe she has been in touch with her friends and we just don’t know about it.”

“Maybe,” I conceded. “I don’t know her friends, but you guys do. Do some checking and see what you find.”

The lawyer waved his empty glass at Vincent. “Another. Prager, you sure you don’t want—”

“No, thanks.”

Vincent grabbed the empty glass and headed for the study. When he was out of earshot, Cantor whispered, “Look, Prager, I know that Vincent and my daughter have been … together. I’m not certain that he is aware that I am aware. I’ve been okay with it as long as I felt it made Sloane happy. Do you think that Vincent is in any way mixed up in this? That is, if there is a
this
.”

“Like I said, I’m not sure there is anything here more than a hunch. Besides, Vincent is clearly in love with your daughter. I don’t think he’d do anything to hurt her or risk his job. So the short answer is no.”

“Prager, have you discussed any of this with Nancy?”

“Not yet, no. I’m not sure I will, at least not as starkly as I have with you and Vincent.”

Cantor snickered that increasingly annoying snicker of his. Suddenly, the puffy eyes and the stress lines seemed to vanish from his face completely. He smiled as if he was a cat that had just eaten a sizeable and most delicious canary. “I knew it. You’ve fucked her. I told you she’d fuck you, didn’t I? That’s one more thing she can mark off on her checklist.”

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.