don’t think so’ is the best I can do.”
“Will you think about it some more?”
“Sure,” she said. “Sure. I’ll think about it. But not tonight.”
There was more I wanted to ask her. Like: What’s a Hungarian doing running the best spa in Little Korea? But her eyelids were drooping; the medicine they’d given her after surgery was kicking in.
“One last thing, Julie. Julie?” She forced her eyes open. “If I wanted to find the ads Dorrie ran after she left Sunset—the ones from when she went independent—what name would I search for?”
“The same name,” Julie said. Her voice was muzzy. “Cassandra.”
“I already looked up all the Cassandras on Craigslist,” I said. “They all had phone numbers—none were just e-mail.”
She smiled. “You look under ‘Casual Encounters’?”
“No,” I said. “Why would I? That’s not pros, that’s just ordinary people looking to hook up.”
She closed her eyes again, sank back against the understuffed hospital pillow. “You’re so goddamn innocent,” she said.
Back on Carmine Street, I fired up my computer, navigated to Craigslist again. “Casual Encounters” was a whole different universe from “Erotic Services.” It didn’t
I wondered whether everyone who used the service understood the coded language, or whether there were awkward moments when one civilian looking to score with another accidentally responded to the ad of a pro. Probably. But that was presumably the sort of thing pros were good at catching at the e-mail stage. Certainly I had to think that before a pro headed over to someone’s apartment or hotel room she made sure that the subject of payment had been raised and resolved.
I typed “Cassandra” into the search box and got six results. They turned out to be six copies of the same ad, posted at the start of each of the previous six weeks:
I clicked on the word “Reply” and typed “This is a test” into the blank message that popped up, then clicked the Send button to shoot it off into the ether. Dorrie was gone—but automated systems like this had a way of continuing in operation until you did something to turn them off. A little like Dorrie’s answering machine, which had continued recording my messages long after it was too late to do her any good.
Sure enough, after about fifteen seconds a chime sounded and an incoming e-mail appeared on my desktop. The sender was “[email protected].”
The photo was the one of her in the pink g-string and the hat. I wondered how many pictures of men she’d gotten in return. How many men would send a photo of themselves to a complete stranger over the Internet—and not just any complete stranger, but a “tantric masseuse”?
Well, with any luck, I’d be able to find out.
I went to Yahoo’s home page, clicked on “Mail.” When it asked for a Yahoo ID, I entered “Cassie 19934.” The next box asked for a password. The cursor blinked patiently, waiting for me to type something.
A few keystrokes—that’s how close I was to getting into Dorrie’s e-mail account and whatever information it might hold. Not just the photos, but correspondence with her clients and who knew what else.
But those few keystrokes were as formidable a barrier as the combination to a bank vault. What would she have chosen? I didn’t expect it to work, but I typed in “Dorrie” and clicked on the “Sign In” button. After a second, the message “Invalid ID or password” appeared on the screen in red letters. I tried “Cassie.” I tried “Burke.” I tried spelling each name backwards. I tried her birth date, forward and backward. Invalid, all of them.
Damn it, when the time had come for her to choose a password, what would have occurred to her? It could be anything, of course; even a random sequence of letters, in which case I’d never be able to guess it. But in that case she’d never have been able to remember it either. It had to be something she could remember easily.
I tried some more possibilities. Eva, her mother’s name. Douglas, her father’s. I looked at the teddy bear sitting on my shelf and tried “FAO.” I even tried my own name. Nothing.
There were too many possibilities. I couldn’t think of them all, and even if I could it would take forever to try them all. There had to be another way. Maybe she’d have written the password down somewhere? Maybe in some file on her computer, or...
Her computer.
It felt like too much to hope for. But I remembered the sparsely populated directories I’d found on Dorrie’s laptop. She’d been at best a casual computer user, and as such she might have been the sort to take advantage of shortcuts when they were offered. She might well have taken advantage of the one I’d just thought of.
I shut off my computer and headed across the street.
Before Michael Florio inherited it from his father, the Barking Boat was a neighborhood teahouse, an eight- table downtown hangout originally frequented by unemployed beatniks who liked to pay their tab by scrawling sketches and scraps of incoherent poetry on napkins. Florio
Michael did away with the numbers business when he took the place over, renovated the kitchen and the seating area, and did his best to turn the Boat into a real restaurant. But that didn’t mean that honest business was the only business conducted under his roof. When he wasn’t cooking, Michael liked to describe himself as a go- between, a provider of liquidity. My old boss, Leo, an ex-cop from the days before the sort of sensitivity training they forced on James Mirsky, put it more succinctly, calling him a fence and a shylock. Michael would take things off your hands for a fraction of what they were worth, and he’d loan you money when you needed it badly enough that you were willing to pay more than it was worth. There was always an angle with him. When I’d needed a new place to live three years back, he’d told me about the building across the street and had leaned on the landlord to give me a good deal; the condition was that every once in a while, when he was holding something particularly hot, he could treat my closet as an extension of his storeroom. I could live with that. For the rent I was paying, I could live with a
