No way. And I told her I had to, that Dorrie was my responsibility, not hers, that I couldn’t bear to put her in harm’s way again, and Susan said, did you hear me, John? I said no way.
I was so grateful I started to cry.
WILLIAM BLAKE,
THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL
Susan lived on East 60th Street, in a mammoth white brick co-op that could have swallowed my little tenement building five times over. The doorman wore a naval cap and gold braid on his shoulders and watched with a tight smile as I walked through his carpeted lobby in my blood-smeared shirt and stubble. These days you can’t tell. Millionaires walk through the lobby in filthy shirts and stubble.
The elevator was fast and silent and ticked off 27 floors on its digital readout before coming softly to a stop. I wasn’t sure which direction to turn when I got out till I saw Susan standing in a doorway at the end of the hall.
She watched me come and I watched her watch. Neither of us said a word. The first time I’d seen her, on stage at the Sin Factory, stripping down to a g-string for a screaming, drunken crowd, she’d struck me as beautiful in a conventional way.
But standing in her hallway three years later, leaning her face against the side of her door, she was beautiful in a whole other way and it broke my heart. She had a sadness in her eyes, a loneliness, and it was my fault. A whole series of faults, all of them mine. Starting with the attack that had almost killed her, and then the recovery, and then the distant, uncomfortable months that followed. I’d tried to protect her. It wasn’t what she’d wanted from me.
I stumbled once, put out a hand to catch myself against the wall. I saw her eyes go to my exposed wrist, the red, raw flesh where the ropes had bound me. But she didn’t move, didn’t come out to help me, and I was grateful.
I reached the door under my own power, stood a hand’s breadth away from her, felt her eyes on me. She reached out, touched my cheek with her fingertips. We still hadn’t said anything. I didn’t know what to say.
“Why didn’t you call me sooner, John?” Her voice was like the whisper of a rasp against soft wood.
“It was my problem to handle,” I said. “I couldn’t ask—”
“No,” she said, “you never could.”
I saw the lines at the corners of her eyes, fine lines; I saw the creases deepen at either side of her mouth as she smiled gently. She was younger than me but had led a harder life, dancing on the east coast circuit as “Rachel Firestone,” four sets a night, six nights a week. Not to mention what had happened after. But now she lived in a tony high-rise, earning six figures tracing ex-husbands and doing CEO background checks, the stuff of any professional investigator’s life. She was a natural on the phone, and when I’d gotten her the job, I’d asked them never to put her on the street, to keep her in the office instead, where she’d be safe. I’d also asked them not to tell her I’d made this request. They broke both promises, and she never forgave me.
“You could’ve been killed,” Susan said.
“Better me than you.”
“Better neither of us, John.”
“Sure. Better none of us. But that’s not the way the world works.”
She stepped back from the door, made room for me to enter. I squeezed past her into the entryway, a six- by-six foyer with African masks hanging on the walls.
She spoke to my back. “Were you in love with her?”
I turned around.
“I looked up the articles online,” she said. “She was very beautiful. Dorrie.”
We stood there for a while, looking in each other’s eyes.
“No,” I said finally. “I wasn’t in love with her.”
Susan considered this for a bit, then nodded. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “But it’s sweet of you to lie.”
The apartment was an alcove studio, neatly furnished. There was no place in the apartment where you could sit and not see the bed, looming in its dark corner. We both avoided looking at it.
Susan made coffee in one of those French press machines you see at Brookstone or Williams-Sonoma, the sort no one needs but that seem to come with the lease when you live on the 27th floor of a Manhattan apartment building. Susan’s shirt and skirt were Ann Taylor and her straight black hair looked straighter and sleeker than I remembered, no doubt the work of some fancy salon treatment. I didn’t begrudge her any of it. She was a rising star at Serner and she’d earned it. It’s just that sitting on her suede couch, drinking from her Mikasa cup, I felt grubbier even than when the doorman had given me the once-over.
“You’re telling me,” Susan said, after I’d walked her through the highlights of the story again, “that you were this woman’s porn buddy, basically.” I must have been staring blankly. “You know—when two guys agree that if anything happens to one of them, the other will come over and clear out his buddy’s stash of porn before the guy’s parents or girlfriend can stumble onto it. You never heard the term?”
“No.”
She smiled. “I forget sometimes how vanilla you are.”
“Vanilla.”
“That’s right.”
I took a long swallow of her coffee. “Fine,” I said. “I was her ‘porn buddy.’ Only what I was supposed to get rid of wasn’t porn, it was evidence of her work as a massage parlor girl. And when I got there, all her records were already shredded.”
“But her outfits were still there, you said. And the massage oil.”
“Right.”
“And you’re thinking either she’d have gotten rid of everything or nothing.”
“I’m thinking someone broke in, shredded anything that might have had his name or picture on it, and killed her. Not in that order.”
“How’d he get in?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he talked his way in. Maybe he picked the lock.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“Okay, fine, it’s a Medeco, he didn’t pick the lock. Maybe he climbed down from the floor above, came in through the window.”
“Is there a fire escape?”
“No.”
“So you’re saying he rappelled down, like a mountain climber, on a rope.”
“Maybe he got a copy of her key somehow.”
“Maybe.”
“What’s your point?” I said.
“Have you considered that maybe it’s what it looked like?” Susan said. “Maybe she killed herself. Maybe she got rid of some stuff and not the rest because she wasn’t in her right mind, and paper shreds while lingerie doesn’t.”