The Hollow Girl (8 page)

“Last name?”

“Don’t know it, man.”

“But you have his number, right?”

He shook his head. “Not on me.”

I slid five twenties to him across the bar. “My cell number’s on my card. Text it to me. Did you ever go to his place?”

“Once, yeah. I needed the extra scratch, you know? He owns a brownstone in Hell’s Kitchen somewheres.”

“Text me the address too.”

After another drink, Anthony fed me the basics, the more mundane stuff that any doorman who wasn’t sleeping with one of his tenants would have known. The last time he’d seen Siobhan in either his capacity as a doorman or paid lover was at the very end of August.

“She was goin’ on one of her trips, you know, probably international because the cab I hailed for her was takin’ her to JFK, not LaGuardia or Newark.”

“Any idea where?”

“Nah, she didn’t discuss shit with me. When she saw me outside of the bedroom, she treated me like the hired help … worse, maybe. But she used to go on a lotta trips.”

“For how long?”

“Most of the time, a week, ten days maybe; two weeks max.”

“So she’s been gone a long time, then?”

He nodded. “Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, it’s been a while, you know?”

“How long has Millie been staying in Siobhan’s apartment?”

“A month maybe. She’d been around a lot lately.”

“When did Millie first start coming around?”

Anthony thought about that for a minute, rubbing his forehead as he did. “A couple of months. I think Siobhan introduced me to her in May. Told me Millie had keys and that I should let her in and to treat Millie the way I treated her.”

“How long have you had your little arrangement with Siobhan?”

“A year, maybe. We’d do it about once a month, like when she needed it bad, but since Millie showed up, I been in 5E a lot, you know. Even after Siobhan split for wherever, I was up with Millie a few times. She was a generous bitch, man, and she could really fuck,” Anthony said, pumping his fist. “She was the best I ever had. Too bad about her, huh?”

I wasn’t sure if Rizzo was more upset by the loss of future income, or by the thought he was never going to sleep with Millie again.

“So if you’d been servicing her a lot, weren’t you curious when she stopped calling?”

“Hey, I ain’t a 7-Eleven, man. I don’t work there seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. I figured the bitch split, like Siobhan. People in that building come and go without telling me shit.” He looked at his watch. “Can I get outta here now?”

“Soon, Anthony. In a minute. Just one more question.”

“Fine.”

“Did you have any idea of who Siobhan and Millie were?”

“What the fuck does that mean, who they were? One was a hard-up bitch with a lot of money who liked to get fucked hard, for whatever reason. And the other was a drunken whore who loved cock and pussy more than anybody I ever met, you know?”

I handed him two more twenties, reminded him to text me Giorgio’s contact info, and told him I’d be in touch if I needed anything else. He didn’t look pleased for someone who’d just drank about eighty dollars’ worth of free vodka and who’d made almost two hundred bucks cash in the last hour and a half. I suppose he preferred making his money the old-fashioned way: hustling for it and working for tips. I guess I didn’t blame him for resenting me. No one likes having a hammer held over his head, and the hammer I was holding over Anthony’s was a heavy one. But leverage is a funny thing and much harder to use than people would expect. I learned that lesson a long time ago at the hands of Brighton Beach’s mob boss, a guy we called Tony Pizza. It was a lesson I have never forgotten.

I thought about killing time until I received Anthony Rizzo’s texts about the mysterious Giorgio, but chose to play a hunch instead. Giorgio, I figured, could wait until tomorrow. So when I walked out of Grogan’s, I turned north, then west. I’d decided to go sniff around Kid Charlemagne’s on 2nd Avenue and 7th Street. Kid Charlemagne’s, like Grogan’s Clover, was one of those Manhattan meta creations—a theme restaurant as Venus Flytrap—a place created by an elitist asshole so that he and his friends could laugh at the great unwashed masses who innocently wandered in for a burger and a beer. My bet was that Kid Charlemagne’s owner, a C-list artist and A-list junkie named Nathan Martyr, would be well acquainted with the likes of the Hollow Girl and Millicent McCumber.

I’d walked about a block when I noticed I was being followed, and not very skillfully so. My tail, a nondescript white guy in his mid-thirties wearing a pristine motorcycle jacket, Ralph Lauren jeans, and two hundred buck Nikes, had gotten a little too close when I left Grogan’s. Then, instead of just walking on by me, as he should have, he abruptly changed course and rushed to cross the street. I could see him paralleling me up Avenue C, and when I turned left to head west, he did the same, keeping to the other side of the street. He wasn’t a threat. His incompetence didn’t exactly breed fear in me. Still, I was wary all the same. He wasn’t a cop, that was for shit sure. The question was, if he wasn’t a cop, who was he and why the hell was he following me around the Lower East Side?

I ducked into a busy restaurant, allowing me to make sure I was in fact being followed and not simply succumbing to a bout of paranoia. My view out the eatery’s darkly tinted plate glass window reassured me that I wasn’t being paranoid. To say my tail wasn’t much of a pro was an understatement. When I entered the restaurant, he should have kept on going, then doubled back and hidden himself out of my line of sight. But no, there he was, directly across the street, pacing a rut in the sidewalk.

I waited for a group of people to leave the restaurant. When a party of five headed out, I tucked in behind them, kneeling below car top level—no easy task for an old man with bad knees—as I went through the front door. Working my way about ten car lengths back east, I popped my head up and looked through a car windshield.
Oy!
I almost felt sorry for this schmuck with the expensive jeans, because he was still across the street from the restaurant, craning his neck, waiting for me to exit. Confident of my tail’s inexperience, I crossed to his side of the street, hid in a doorway, and waited him out.

Ten minutes later, it must have clicked that he’d lost me. He went into the eatery to make certain. When he came out, he was so pissed he kicked a parking meter machine. If it hadn’t already been easy enough to follow him, his self-inflicted limp made it cake. Eventually, he worked his way back down toward Houston Street. He got into a sleek, metallic maroon BMW coupe with idiotic vanity plates that read P EYE 7. This clown was almost too much to bear. At least I now had a good sense of who he might be. I was confident he must have been Julian Cantor’s lead investigator.

The thing is that there are all kinds of PIs for all kinds of jobs. Some require a police background and some don’t. Some require a deep level of high-tech skill. Some require a bit of acting craft, while others require nothing more than patience and a strong bladder. When Carmella and I owned our security firm, we tried to have a mix of all kinds of skilled people. But when you were an investigator who worked almost exclusively on personal injury and malpractice suits, you basically had to be good at three things: taking photos of cracked sidewalks, taking statements, and understanding medical terminology. When you did it for a big firm like Cantor, Schreck, it also meant you could afford to be incompetent at street skills and could also afford a fancy BMW with vanity plates. At least now I wouldn’t feel conflicted about not calling Julian Cantor. He would find out about the late Millicent McCumber soon enough.

As I waited for P EYE 7 to pull out of his parking spot, my phone buzzed in my pocket. I’d gotten the texts from Anthony Rizzo with Giorgio’s info. I thought about forgetting Kid Charlemagne’s and heading to Hell’s Kitchen to chat with the mysterious Giorgio. I decided to skip both. I was beat, and a little shaky. I hadn’t been awash in alcohol for so long as to get the DTs. I didn’t black out or see rabbis dancing on pinheads, but I’d been at it long enough to know when I needed a drink and when to sleep. I found my car and aimed it at the Brooklyn Bridge.

One drink. That was all I had. Sleep came rather more easily than I expected. I guess working a case made me more tired than I’d expected. It had been a while. When I was sick and getting treated, I was tired all the time. Between the damned drugs and radiation, it was as if the doctors were busy trying to kill me and the cancer at the same time, and it was a toss-up to see which would outlast the other. Even after the cancer was gone, the exhaustion stayed with me as a reminder of my fragility. As if I needed reminding.

I hadn’t dreamed, that I could recall. In the immediate wake of Pam’s death I’d dreamed all the time, none of it very pleasant. Strangely, those dreams were rarely of Pam. I didn’t picture her being crushed beneath the wheels of Holly D’Angelo’s Jeep. Nothing like that. Mostly I dreamed of Katy, my first wife, Sarah’s mom. She was the only woman I think I’d ever loved to the point of stupidity, but we’d been doomed from the start. I would dream over and over and over again of the baby Katy had miscarried in the early ’80s. Imagining I had seen the baby’s face, that it had talked to me and wagged a tiny accusatory finger at me, I’d wake up in a sweat. Regardless of how hard I tried, I could never remember its face or what it had said or sounded like. I couldn’t even remember if the lost baby had been a boy or a girl. All that stayed with me when I awoke was the translucence of the skin on the baby’s tiny finger, how I could see the blood pulsing through it.

Showered, shaved, and coffeed up, I sat down to scan the papers. Millicent McCumber’s death wasn’t exactly front-page news. She was like a thousand actors before her—pretty, talented, full of promise and potential that came to nothing more than a footnote or afterthought. She had died not as a celebrity remembered, but as someone people
thought
they might’ve remembered. A chasm exists between those two things. There was a listing of her acting credits: a few Off-Broadway plays, Ophelia in a Shakespeare in the Park production of
Hamlet
—the role that got her noticed—plus two Broadway shows, six movies, and a five-episode run on a star-crossed prime time soap about a wealthy New England family that lost their money during the Depression.

Although there was no explicit mention of the cause of death, an NYPD spokesperson was quoted as saying, “There is no reason to suspect foul play.” I knew the ME had a working theory about a heart attack, but given what Nancy and Anthony Rizzo had told me about Millie’s wild and addictive nature, I wasn’t so sure. I was awfully curious to see what the toxicology report would say. My curiosity would no doubt fade in the six weeks it would probably take to get those reports back. Six weeks, as I had learned during my illness, could be a lifetime.

One thing that grabbed my attention was a statement from Millie’s agent, Giorgio Brahms. Poor Giorgio was heartsick at the loss: “We’d been through some very tough times together, but lately Millie was re-energized and we were excited to put her back out there.” It wasn’t the statement that so much caught my eye as the person who gave it. Old Giorgio didn’t know it yet, but he had an appointment with me that afternoon. There was at least one other person I wanted to see first, so I made a few phone calls as I waited for my computer to boot up.

* * *

Michael C. Dillman was happy to see me as long as he believed I had come to his offices at 7 Hanover Square down by Wall Street in order to enlist his assistance in diversifying my portfolio. Dillman was a fit and slender African-American man of thirty-one with a handsome face, close-cropped hair, and a well-trimmed mustache. Everything about Dillman was well trimmed and well appointed, including his clothing and his office. There were photos of his lovely wife holding their twin daughters. His Yale BS and Wharton MBA were proudly displayed on the wall to the left of his desk. It was all peaches and cream between us until I handed him my PI card and mentioned Sloane Cantor by name. Then the cream curdled, the peaches went bad, and his mood went severely sour.

“What kind of nonsense is this?” His voice was cold and he shook his head in anger. “Get out of my office or I’ll call security.” He picked up his phone to emphasize the point.

“Sloane’s missing,” I stated, as if it was a fact.

He twisted his mouth into a sneer. “And this should concern me because … .” Regardless of the sneer and bravado, he put the phone back in its cradle.

“Maybe it shouldn’t, but when it’s the cops who come looking for her and not a PI friend of the family, your office is going to be the first stop on their list.”

Dillman tried unsuccessfully to act unfazed. “Why would that be, Mr. Prager?”

“Because after five minutes even a blind detective will know all there is to know about the Hollow Girl and Lionel, her cruel, abusive boyfriend who made her watch as he fucked her friend Victoria. And then there was that order of protection thing she took out against you … .”

He shot out of his chair. “Fuck! I thought all this idiocy was behind me forever. God dammit! This is bullshit. I did none of those things. Lionel was as phony as the rest of Sloane’s Lost Girl routine.”

“Not the order of protection. That was real enough.”

“Look, Sloane and I were friends in high school. We were both in the Drama Club. For me, it was just something to do to break out of my shyness. For Sloane, Drama Club was her life. We had done all the school productions. It bonds people together in a way that’s difficult to explain. I thought I could trust Sloane with my life. How was I supposed to know when she asked if she could use my photograph for this project she was doing that it would turn into a nightmare? I have too many regrets in my life, Mr. Prager. I can’t undo any of them, but if I could undo one thing, it would be giving my permission to Sloane to use my picture. You have no idea how bad it got there for a little while.”

“I think you’d be surprised at the ideas I have. I take it you got a lot of hate mail.”