I’d been in the crowd, getting myself thrown out by the manager for asking too many questions. But it hadn’t been till later that night that we’d actually met, and that had been at a little pub down the block. Keegan had sold the place since then and the new owners had spiffed it up, adding a video trivia game at one end of the bar and some new track lighting. They’d kept the old name, though, I guess for fear of scaring off the old clientele. They needn’t have worried. The girls from the Sin Factory had nowhere else to go after their late-night shift ended, and the neighborhood drunks would’ve shown up no matter what you called the place.
I stayed outside now, across the street, crouched beneath the front steps of a brownstone whose side gate I’d found unlatched. The building’s windows were dark and I figured the people inside were asleep. They wouldn’t begrudge me the use of their shadows.
It took almost half an hour for Susan to show up in a cab. I waited while she paid and the car rolled off, its roof light glowing hopefully. Susan pulled the front door open and I watched through the windows as she looked for me, scanning the place table by table. Suddenly she stopped and pawed at her handbag, opened it, dug for her cell phone, got it up to her ear. I spoke into mine: “Across the street.” Then I turned mine off again.
She headed out the front door, darted across the empty street, turned this way and that, trying to spot me. It didn’t look like she’d been followed. I came out from behind the big Rubbermaid garbage can that had been concealing me. I winced as I stood.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, keeping my voice low. “It’s just my back.”
I started walking, pulled her along with me. I didn’t feel comfortable standing in one place anymore.
“What’s happening, John? Why’d you get me down here?”
“Miklos is dead,” I said.
“How?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters. Did you do it?”
“No,” I said. “But I was there when it happened.”
“John, you
“Maybe you don’t want to stand so close, then,” I said.
“It’s nothing to joke about.”
“I’m not.”
“So what do you want me to do, John? Other than stand further away.”
It was a good question. But how could I give her the honest answer—that I was desperate, that my bag of tricks was empty, that Kurland’s words had rattled me:
“I was hoping...I don’t know, Susan. I was just hoping you’d found something since I saw you last. Anything.”
“I didn’t,” she said. “I didn’t, John, I’m sorry. I heard back from one of the guys whose names you found— Smith. But I saw him and he’s just this random guy, completely ordinary, certainly no killer vibe. And Adams I’ve heard nothing from at all. His e-mail address seems to be working since I’m not getting bounces, but he’s not answering no matter what I send him. And believe me, I’ve sent him pictures of the biggest tits I could find.” She smiled at me, tried to coax a smile in response. I didn’t have one in me.
“Smith,” I said, grasping at straws. “Tell me about him.”
“There’s nothing to tell. He’s about 55, 56, lives downtown. I got a picture for you and an address, but John, what the hell are you going to do with it? You can’t go around questioning people when you’re wanted by the police for three murders yourself.”
“Let me see.”
She opened her bag, pulled out a folded sheet of paper, handed it to me. I carried it over to a streetlamp.
“Please, John,” she said, “let me arrange something, a way for you to get yourself into police custody. I can make sure they treat you properly, that you’ve got the best representation...” She kept talking, saying something, but I wasn’t hearing a word of it. Because I’d unfolded the paper and seen the photograph on it, the picture of James Smith.
“Oh, no,” I said.
I’ve felt colder in my life, and I’ve felt weaker, but not often; and I don’t think I’ve ever felt worse. I could feel my guts hardening, turning to stone inside me. The knife wound in my back burned like there was acid in it. I felt rancid.
I crumpled the photograph and stuffed it in my pocket. My hands were shaking.
“Susan,” I whispered, “what’s Eva Burke’s phone number? Her home number?”
“Why?”
“Just give it to me.”
She opened her phone, read it off. I keyed it into mine.
“Why?” she said again.
I didn’t answer. I could hear the phone ringing on the other end. It was one in the morning; she would be asleep. Well, that was too bad.
“What’s wrong?” Susan said. “Do you recognize him? Who is he?”
A sleepy voice picked up. I didn’t wait for her to finish her sluggish hello. “Mrs. Burke, this is John Blake. John Blake. Yes. I’m here with Susan. I need to ask you a question.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. She was awake now—she just wasn’t saying anything. She was waiting for the question, the way aristocrats during the Terror waited for the guillotine blade.
“Mrs. Burke,” I said, “how did your other daughter die?”
In college I was an English major. I’d never considered working as a detective. Who would? But Leo had posted a job in the NYU Career Development office and I’d seen it and we’d met over coffee to discuss it.
“You want to know what it’s like?” Leo had said to me, clearly hoping to scare me off if I was considering the job for the wrong reasons. He’d had one assistant before me and it hadn’t worked out. “It’s like this. You work like a bastard for days and days and nothing makes any sense. You’re lost, you’re confused, you’ve got no answers and you’re wasting your client’s money. You’re a fraud, you’ve always been a fraud, and no one in his right mind would hire you to find Times Square on a map or add two plus two. Then one day, you think of something. Or you see something. Or someone tells you something. And suddenly, everything that didn’t make sense does. Only here’s the thing: nine times out of ten, you wish it didn’t. You wish you were a fraud again. Because the things people hire us to figure out are the ugliest fucking things in the world.”
I’d nodded, kept my mouth shut, and taken the job. I’d needed the money.
But Leo had been right, and more than once I’d wished I’d listened to him and walked away while I could.
Until finally I did walk away.
But obviously I hadn’t walked far enough.
“Mrs. Burke?”
“What is this?” she said. “What does this have to do with Dorothy?”
“Just answer the question: How did Catherine die?”
The words came slowly. “She was very sick. We took her to the hospital and they said she had...I don’t know, some long Latin name, I couldn’t tell you what it was. But she got worse. They put her on antibiotics, said it would help, and then two days later, she was dead. They said it was sepsis that killed her.”
“Did they say what caused the sepsis?”
There was a long silence.
“We knew what caused the sepsis,” Eva Burke said.
