didn’t think Michael’s line would go over so well here. But I didn’t need to say it for her to know what I was thinking.
“I’m just saying, John. I’ve known these women. Strippers, massage parlor girls, they’re not always the most rational.”
“Dorrie wasn’t your typical massage parlor girl.”
“No, of course not. But that doesn’t mean—”
“She didn’t kill herself,” I said. “You’re got to trust me on this one.”
“All right,” Susan said. “Then who killed her?”
I dropped the address book sheets with the circled names on the couch between us. “Take your pick.”
We looked through the list together, and I explained how I’d picked out the ones I had.
“You think one of them’s the killer?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s possible.”
“How were you going to approach them?”
“E-mail. I figured I’d call this one,” I said, pointing to Brian Vincent’s phone number.
“Sure,” Susan said. “But what are you going to say? Why would they answer you? If I were Brian Vincent, I’d just hang up on you.”
“If you were the killer, you’re saying.”
“No, regardless. Some stranger calls out of the blue, says he knows you used to see this dead hooker—no offense—I’d get off the phone as fast as I could.”
“So what would you suggest?”
She thought for a while. “What if we sent them e-mail from the address Dorrie used? So it looked like it was coming from her.”
“You’re forgetting, someone has access to her e-mail account. We’d never get the responses.”
“Fine, so we take the same address on another service, Cassie at hotmail.com, or juno.com, one of those. And we write a message that sounds like her. We can look up her ads, imitate the style. We say we want to meet. If we get a name and address, we’re golden. If one of them asks to meet at a hotel, we wait till he shows up, follow him home, get his name and address that way.”
“Why would the killer agree to meet someone he knows is dead?”
“He wants to know who’s writing to him under her name.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Okay, then how about this,” Susan said. “We send e-mail saying I’m Cassie’s long-time partner, now that she’s dead I’m taking over her clients, I have duplicate copies of all her records; you, Mister Smith, appear prominently in those records and I think it’s in both our interests to meet.”
“And...?”
“And we set up an appointment, like I said.”
I nodded. “And if it’s at a hotel, I’m waiting when they show up and I follow them.”
“Basically,” Susan said. “Only you don’t follow them, I do.”
“You? No. Like hell you do.”
“I can take care of myself,” Susan said. “You do realize that, don’t you?”
“I realize you think you can. All it takes is one gunshot to prove you wrong.”
“Same’s true of you, John.”
“Yes,” I said, “but it’s my bullet to take.”
“Your bullet? What does that even mean?”
“It means you’re not getting yourself killed over a woman you didn’t even know.”
“Tomorrow that woman’s mother is going to show up in my office and write a check to my employer. At that point it’ll be my job to find her killer. Not yours. Mine.”
“Your job, Susan, is to keep her out of my hair.”
“No, that’s what you
I’d never seen her like this. It was a little frightening. But I won’t say there wasn’t a part of me that was proud of her. “All right,” I said. “I understand. But you’ve got to tell me what’s going on every step of the way.”
“Of course.” She got up. “Now show me those ads.”
Susan’s computer was on a desk beside her bed. She sat in the chair in front of it and powered the machine up while I sat on the bed. It was the only other place to sit.
“Cassandra?” she said, and I nodded. She brought up the Cassandra ads on Craigslist, the ones under Erotic Services. I directed her to the right one. The headline said “Sensual Massage from Curvy, Tall College Student— W4M—21.”
“How old did you say she was?” Susan said.
“Twenty-four.”
“I’m surprised she didn’t claim to be eighteen. In her ads, I mean.”
“She didn’t look eighteen.”
“This is the Internet, John. You have forty-year-olds saying they’re eighteen.”
She read through the text of Dorrie’s ad a few times, then started typing out a draft of an e-mail. She took a few stabs, erased what she had, started again. I watched over her shoulder, put in my two cents from time to time. When I leaned close to see the screen, I tried to ignore the faint smell of her shampoo, a fruity smell that brought back memories of other evenings, other apartments. I tried to ignore the shadow of a bra showing through that Ann Taylor blouse.
A few times she glanced away from the screen and caught me looking at her. I didn’t flinch or look away, and neither did she, but each time we went back to work without saying anything about it. It was strange for me, being here with her again, and I imagined it was strange for her, too. We’d loved each other once. We’d been together for almost a year. I’d been with her at the hospital, all through her recovery, and she’d been with me in turn when my mother died, fighting to make herself understood after the stroke had robbed her of all but the rudiments of speech. Susan had been an important part of my life and I of hers. But then it had ended. We were good for each other, but only to a point; and when we reached that point she’d moved on. She’d moved here, specifically; and I’d gone into a sort of seclusion, my life reduced to the room on Carmine Street, the desk on 116th, and the long subway ride in between. There hadn’t been other women. Until Dorrie, there hadn’t been much at all.
Susan finished a draft of the e-mail and I read it over. It was fine. I thought it stood a good chance of tempting Dorrie’s clients into at least writing back.
We sat looking at it, then looking at each other.
“I’m sorry, John,” she said.
“What for?”
“All the women in your life...you have an incredible talent for finding these birds with broken wings. Miranda. Dorrie. Me.”
“You turned out okay.”
“I did,” she said. “We didn’t.”
“You didn’t need me anymore,” I said.
“I didn’t need your
I didn’t know what to say.
She raised her hand and stroked the side of my face. I wanted to lean in and kiss her. I wanted it terribly. I didn’t do it.
She said, “The problem with a broken wing is it either gets better or worse. It doesn’t stay the way it is. I’ve always thought there’s part of you that wishes it could.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t wish that.”
“But we all end up leaving you,” she said. “One way or the other.”
I lifted her hand off my face, laid it down on the table. “Send the e-mail,” I said.
