The Hollow Girl (7 page)

The ME turned and walked back into 5E. Frovarp and Shulze were so pissed that they didn’t notice I followed them into the apartment. We huddled in the passageway between the bathroom and bedroom.

“Here’s what your CSU guy and I think must have happened,” Dougherty said when he saw we were there with him. “The victim undresses to take a bath or a shower, or just to get ready for bed. She starts heading into the bathroom, but the MI or the aneurism seizes her before she makes it fully inside, and she falls headfirst onto the tile floor. You can check with CSU. They say there’s a cracked tile under that large area of dried blood. If you look carefully, you can see it.”

“Okay, keep going,” Frovarp said.

“She’s stunned or unconscious, which is why there’s such a large amount of blood in that one area. She wasn’t moving. Head and facial wounds tend to bleed very intensely. She finally rouses. Realizing she’s got to call for help, she crawls back into the bedroom to find her cell phone. That accounts for these streaks of blood on the floor here and leading into the bedroom. Unfortunately, she expires before she can find the phone or use it.”

“So if that’s not Siobhan Bracken, who is it?” I heard myself say.

“Get the fuck outta here, Prager,” Frovarp groused. “Go wait in the hall.”

“Hey, this is one less case to close,” I said. “What’s eating you?”

Shulze gave me a less than gentle shove. “Outside, Prager. Wait outside!”

I went outside all right, but I didn’t wait. Those two asshole detectives weren’t going to give me any information or make my job any easier, so I didn’t see why I should make their charming lives any easier. And there was no doubt they were the types to give me a hard time simply because they could.
No, thanks
. I wasn’t in the mood. I hadn’t committed any crime. Well, I guess, technically I had, but it wasn’t the type of thing people got prosecuted for. The uniforms who had first responded were long gone, and the guys who had replaced them didn’t know who I was. They just let me walk right onto the elevator and go.

I didn’t figure I’d have much time to chat with the doorman after Frovarp and Shulze realized I hadn’t stuck around. So as I left the building, I handed the doorman my card and a couple of twenty-dollar bills. “What time you get off your shift?”

He didn’t bother looking in his hand. “Six, but you know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking maybe I might be busy tonight, you know?” he said with a familiar Bronx Italian inflection.

“There’s more where that came from, so make sure you’re not busy, okay? I’ll meet you at Grogan’s Clover on Avenue C at 6:15. You know it?”

He was a dark, good-looking man with a tough guy attitude. “I’ll find it. Is everything okay with Siobhan—I mean, Miss Bracken? She’s real nice to me. I would hate it if like somethin’ happened to her, you know?” he asked, his hard exterior cracking slightly.

“I’m not sure, but there’s a dead woman in her apartment that’s not her. You got any ideas?”

“A few, maybe, yeah. Depends, you know?”

“Don’t push me, wiseass. Gimme a first name or you can buy your own fucking drinks.”

“Millie.”

I wasn’t going to dig harder just then because I got the sense my time was running out. “Later.”

The call I made to Nancy Lustig was your classic good news, bad news kind of deal: The bad news is there’s a dead woman in your daughter’s apartment. The good news is that the body isn’t your daughter’s. I didn’t begin the call that way, but I also didn’t spend twenty minutes discussing the weather or the spot price of sweet Texas crude oil, either. When I told Nancy about the dead woman, there was a moment of stunned silence.

“Do you know who the dead woman is?” Nancy asked.

“By now I’m sure the cops have searched the place more thoroughly, and they’ve probably got a preliminary ID.”

“What do you mean, by now? Where are you? Why aren’t you still at the—” She was screaming into her phone. Panic does that to people.

“Breathe, Nancy. Breathe. I’m not at the apartment because the cops weren’t happy I was there in the first place. They weren’t gonna tell me anything, and they were likely to arrest me just to break my balls. I can’t find Siobhan if—”

“Sloane,” she interrupted, still shouting. “Her name is Sloane!”

“Have it your way. I can’t find Sloane if I’m having a pissing contest with the cops or if I’m spending the night in a holding cell at the 9th Precinct.”

Nancy was calmer now. “I’m sorry, Moe. You’re right, of course. But do you have any idea who the dead woman is in the apartment?”

“I was hoping you could help me with that.”

“How?”

“I’ve got a first name: Millie.”

“Was she pretty, blue-eyed, forty-ish, light brown hair?”

“She wasn’t very pretty to look at when I saw her. She was in really rough shape, but I guess that’s a fairly good description. Who was she?”

Nancy ignored that last part. “What do you mean, she was in rough shape? Oh, my God, was she murdered?”

“Relax. The medical examiner doesn’t think it’s a homicide. He thinks it was probably a heart attack. Then she fell and cracked her head open. So at first glance it looked like murder to the cops. It looked that way to me also. Who was she?” I asked again.

“It sounds like it must be Millicent McCumber.”

“Millicent McCumber, the actress?”

Nancy laughed an odd, staccato laugh. “Millie McCumber,” she repeated. There was pity in her voice, but it was also full of sharp, angry teeth. “She was a has-been who hadn’t been for a long time. She hasn’t done more than a bit part in fifteen years. Christ, she couldn’t even get hired on
Law & Order
and that franchise has cycled three times through every New York actor still blessed with a pulse.”

“Why wasn’t she working? She was good. I remember them calling her the next Meryl Streep.”

There was that machine gun laugh again. “The next W.C. Fields, more likely. She drank so much, she should have had gills instead of lungs. Millie was also a diva extraordinaire. Even though she hadn’t had a meaningful role in a movie since the second Clinton administration, she was harder to tame than Medusa’s hair.”

“So you knew her.”

“I had the displeasure, yes. Some people have pets, others have causes. The Ancient Mariner had an albatross. Sloane had Millie. She kind of made her a reclamation project because Millie had once been beautiful.”

“You sound angry. Maybe even a little jealous.”

“I am—I was,” she confessed. “Sloane is so talented and could have really been somebody. She still could be somebody, but instead she chose to weigh herself down with that human skirt of rocks.”

“Were they lovers?”

“At first, I guess maybe they were, but not for a long time. In fact, for a few years, Sloane had seemed to shed Millie. Then a few months ago, they started hanging around together again. Probably because Sloane knew it would irk me.”

The more I listened to Nancy talk about her daughter, the more I gave credence to what Julian Cantor had said about the relationship between mother and daughter. It really did seem as if their lives were bound together in very unhealthy ways, but I hadn’t taken this on to do family counseling.

“Did Millie live with Siob—with Sloane?”

“No, but she had keys to the apartment, and Sloane let her use it when she was away.”

“So that’s good. It means that Sloane’s away and not missing.”

“You find a dead woman in my daughter’s apartment and that should make me feel better?”

“Well, when you put it like that … . But if Sloane only let Millie use her apartment when she was away, it might mean—”

“Might,” she said. “Might.”

“Don’t worry, Nancy. I’m not trying to get off the case. I’ve already got someone lined up to talk to. I just wanted to let you know that there are other scenarios than the worst one.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just—”

“You don’t have to apologize. If it was my daughter, I’d be crazed, too. I’ll keep you posted.”

Grogan’s Clover was a bullshit joint, a hipsterish papier-mâché version of a New York Irish bar. See, here’s what people don’t get about New York City: Manhattan isn’t like the outer boroughs. Not only is it like a different city, it’s like another planet. Only in Manhattan would somebody dream up a scheme to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars to recreate something that is perfectly fine as is. There must have been a few hundred authentic Irish pubs spread throughout the city, reasonably friendly places that served beer, liquor, and edible food without requiring you to sign over your firstborn for payment. Maybe the TVs weren’t flat screens the size of solar panels, but they showed the same games and were equally distracting. And maybe their jukeboxes didn’t always play downloads from bands with names like Grizzly Bear or Das Racist, but music came out of them nonetheless.

Sadly, the vampires who feed the appetites of scruffy hipster ghouls were busy turning parts of my beloved Brooklyn into Manhattan.
No, thanks
. The Brooklyn I love likes itself a half-step behind and a few years out of date. It likes its yearning. The yearning where making it means somewhere across the river, not across Bushwick Avenue. My Brooklyn doesn’t consider its decay ironic or a statement about something bigger. My Brooklyn is what it is, and says that’s enough because it has to be. That’s all there is. Brooklyn is necessarily a place that used to be, not a place that’s happening. God, please, let it happen somewhere else. Anywhere else.

My breath stuck in my throat with an audible gasp when I caught a flash of the bartender’s profile. She looked so much like Holly D’Angelo, the girl who’d hit Pam, that all the pain of late June came flooding back into me. With her practiced Manhattan callousness, she hadn’t noticed my reaction or, if she had, she sure hadn’t let it show. What she showed me instead was a vague hint of a smile that itself seemed like a Herculean bit of theater. I guess I should have thanked her because if she had shown me even an ounce of genuine humanity at that moment, I would have ordered a double Dewar’s and not looked back. But because her chilly tattooed veneer so pissed me off, I refused to go diving into the whiskey abyss.

“Club soda and lime,” I said.

It must have sounded like
Go fuck yourself
. She tilted her head at me, as if wondering what she’d done to earn my contempt. She didn’t waste much time in contemplation, putting my drink up on a coaster and moving on down the bar.

The doorman from the Kremlin came bouncing into Grogan’s at 6:37. Out of his ridiculous gray visored felt cap and matching tunic with shiny brass buttons and wide red piping, he looked young and hungry. He was definitely a workout rat, and his civilian clothes were meant to show off his V-shaped torso. When he strutted into a place, he wanted everyone to notice him, expected them to notice him. But this was Alphabet City, not Arthur Avenue. Around here, his Bronx outer-borough charms were lost on the locals. He didn’t like that, not even a little bit.

“Whatta dump,” he said, sitting on the stool next to me. “Yo, honey, gimme a Ketel One on the rocks, and put it on grandpa’s tab, huh.”

“You’re late.”

“Chill out, gramps. I’m here, ain’t I? The freakin’ cops kept me around askin’ me questions, you know.”

“Fair enough.”

The bartender put the doorman’s drink down in front of him and gave me a refill on the club soda. We didn’t bother toasting. The doorman polished it off in a quick swig.

“No offense, pops, but I don’t like this place and you ain’t exactly my idea of a wing man. Show me some money or I’m gone. You know what I’m sayin’?”

He gave me the opening and I waltzed through it. “Well, if I didn’t already know about Millicent McCumber and Siobhan Bracken’s arrangement, I might be tempted to show you some more money. But since I do know about them—
all
about them—you’re gonna have to sing for your supper and earn your money, junior.”

“Fuck you!” is what came out of his mouth, though his face showed disappointment. In his head he’d already spent the money he was now risking with his bluster.

I offered him a second chance. “We’ll start easy with a simple question. What’s your name?”

“Nah, I ain’t playin’ this game. Keep your fuckin’ money.” He got up from the stool, but hesitated, waiting for me to make him an offer to stay.

I played a different card based on a not-so-wild guess. “Suit yourself, junior, but my guess is the management company that runs the Kremlin won’t be pleased to find out you were fucking one of their tenants. Not only will they fire your ass, but you won’t be able to get a job cleaning toilets in a city housing project. Now sit the fuck back down and talk to me.”

He puffed out his chest, leaning into me like he was going to prove me wrong by smacking the shit out of me. Something he no doubt could have done, and would happily have done. The thing is, he knew I was right. Of course, I was only guessing at his relationship with Siobhan, but I wasn’t born stupid. Although I was basically a stumbler as a PI, I was good at picking up on the little things. I had known Nancy as a young woman, and I suspected Siobhan, like her mother before her, would have been incredibly susceptible to a handsome, well put-together guy like the doorman.

“C’mon, c’mon.” I patted the stool next to mine. “Sit back down and tell me your name.” I said it as friendly as I could manage, and ordered him another drink.

He sat. After his second, then third, vodka, he finally told me his name was Anthony Rizzo and that he and Siobhan had a deal of sorts. For two hundred bucks a throw, he’d service her.

“She wasn’t bad for her looks, you know. She liked a little kink. Liked me to her call bad things and fuck her really hard. Sometimes it was both Siobhan and the older broad, Millie. That bitch was freakin’ wild, man.” After two more drinks, Anthony started to confess something else. “Sometimes for a few hundred extra—” He stopped, clearing his throat, his face turning deep red. “Sometimes … .”

“So,” I said in a neutral voice, “there was another guy involved, too. What was his name, Anthony, the other guy?”

He was cowed, hanging his head. “Giorgio,” he whispered. “He was one of Millie’s friends.”