Songs of Innocence

How much had I been able to find out about Catherine Marie Burke? Very little.

I’d tried—Dorrie had decided to write about her for Stu Kennedy’s assignment, and I’d decided she needed help. She hadn’t asked me to help; I’d offered, and when she’d been reluctant, I’d insisted. It was a sort of atavistic machismo: If I’d been a carpenter I’d have insisted at some point on making her a cabinet; if I’d been a plumber maybe I’d have put in new pipes over her protests. But I didn’t know how to do those things. What I knew how to do was find people and information. And when I saw her frustrated by her mother’s unwillingness to talk to her about her sister, I’d gone to work. What’s the use of sharing your bed with a former private investigator if you couldn’t lean on him for something like this?

Except that I’d come up empty. The girl was fourteen when she died—not a taxpayer yet, not married, not eligible for jury duty, had never been sued or dunned or garnisheed or subpoenaed. She’d died before making a permanent mark in any of the places our society records such things. There were a few school photos I found, some chicken scratch from doctors on her hospital charts, a death certificate; precious little else.

So I’d decided to change the rules. I’d taken it on myself to track down her father, on the theory that maybe he’d be willing to tell Dorrie what her mother wouldn’t. But he hadn’t been willing to talk to her at all, and his pointed rebuff had left her more miserable than she’d been before.

I’d stopped searching then, and I could tell she was relieved that I had. To make progress on her assignment she’d resorted to making things up—judicious lying, if you will. She’d given her sister a rare form of bone cancer and her absent father a case of crippling insomnia, and who the hell knew whether either of these things were true, and it really didn’t matter.

But it was too late. Things had been set in motion. Things I might have understood sooner if I’d known how Catherine Marie Burke had died.

“She’d had a procedure,” Eva Burke said. “My husband took her to a private clinic. And she got an infection.”

“What sort of procedure?”

“She needed to have something removed,” Eva Burke said. “Like a tumor.”

“Like a tumor,” I said. “What’s like a tumor?”

Silence.

“She didn’t have a tumor,” I said. “And she didn’t have something like a tumor. Did she.” No response. “Did she.”

“Don’t you dare raise your voice to me,” Eva Burke said.

“Then tell me the truth.”

“The truth? She was fourteen years old, Blake. Fourteen goddamn years old. It was like a tumor. The kind that just keeps growing and growing. And it had to come out.”

We spoke for another minute, then I gently closed the phone, pocketed it. The stone in my gut was turning to water. Very softly I said to Susan, “Go home. Go home. Tomorrow I’ll turn myself in.”

“What did she say to you?”

I took hold of her by the shoulders, leaned close and kissed her on the forehead. The smell of her shampoo was strong. I inhaled deeply. “Go home,” I whispered. “We’ll deal with it tomorrow.”

“I’m not leaving till you tell me.”

I stepped out into the street, into the path of an oncoming taxi. It screeched to a halt inches away from me. Mr. Lucky.

I pulled the rear door open, got inside, waited for Susan to join me. “Two stops,” I told the driver when she did. “First is 60th and Madison, then we’ll go uptown to the park.” He turned the meter on and drove off.

“I’ll need to ask you to pay for this, Susan,” I said. “I have no money. I’m sorry.”

“That’s fine, John,” she said, digging out her wallet. She pressed a handful of bills on me. I took a twenty, made her take the rest back. “But tell me what Mrs. Burke said.”

“She didn’t say anything. Nothing at all.”

“That’s not true,” Susan said.

“I’ll tell you tomorrow,” I said. “Please, Susan. Trust me. It’ll keep overnight.”

She looked into my eyes and either saw something there or didn’t. Anyway, she gave in. I wasn’t giving her much choice.

At her building, she slammed the door shut and then leaned on the half-open window. “You’re not going to do anything foolish, are you, John? You’re going back to the park and you’ll wait for me, right?”

“That’s right,” I said.

She seemed reluctant to go. But the meter was ticking and the driver honked. She stepped back.

I pressed my hand to the glass, and she waved back. I smiled. How had Harper put it? It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

“So now we’re going up to the park?” the driver said as we pulled away.

“No,” I said. “Now we’re going down to the Bowery.”

Chapter 29

We turned in on Fifth Avenue at 61st Street. Three blocks later, we passed FAO Schwarz, closed for the night but all lit up by the ten thousand tiny lights that dot the ceiling there. The thing can be programmed to show constellations like the night sky, or an undulating rainbow, or a flood of blue and white like a crashing surf; but tonight it was frozen on a single color, ten thousand dots of red blazing silently in the night like pinpricks or jewels or tears.

I thought of Dorrie standing beneath that jeweled sky with her satin shoes on and her tiara and her wand, dispensing fairy dust to girls too young to die shivering and sweating in a hospital bed the way Catherine Burke had.

I was a fairy princess once, she’d said, and I’d asked her, Why’d you stop? And she’d told me, she’d told me.

The driver didn’t speak to me on the way downtown and didn’t play the radio, didn’t honk his horn. We met no traffic on the way, just coasted silently beneath the ranks of glowing traffic lights and past a thousand shuttered storefronts. If the ancient Greeks had lived today, I imagined this would have been their Charon, a silent taxi driver ferrying souls along a concrete Styx.

I found myself wishing it could continue, that I could keep riding this taxi to the edge of the river and beyond, could coast endlessly through the night. But at Eighth Street we turned east, and then there wasn’t much ride left at all.

I gave the driver Susan’s twenty, didn’t ask for any change in return. He pulled away from the curb and left me in darkness.

The building was five stories tall. A craggy relic from perhaps 1870, maybe earlier, its windows decorated with the fancy stonework that even tenements boasted back then. The fire escape bolted across its face was a later addition, a sop to building codes and regulations effected after good Father Demo took his stand.

I had to hunt halfway down the block before finding a trash can I could upend and climb on to reach the lowest rung, and when I pulled myself up I could feel the edges of the cut in my back pull apart beneath the sodden bandage. It hurt enough to bring tears to my eyes, but I kept climbing.

At the second floor, I knelt by the windows and looked in. One opened on a narrow kitchen, the other on a parlor. There were no lights on, but at the far end of the parlor I could make out a closed bedroom door.

The parlor window was locked, but the kitchen window wasn’t, and with some effort I was able to lift it. I climbed inside and pulled it shut behind me.

There were dishes stacked neatly in the sink and on the drainboard, and beside the garbage can a row of empty bottles stood sentry—Skyy, Beefeater, Kahlua, Glenmorrangie, Baccardi, Baileys. The refuse of an equal- opportunity drunk.

I pulled open a drawer by the kitchen door and sorted through a tray of cutlery until I found a heavy wood- handled steak knife. Nothing like the camp knife Kurland had wielded, but weapon enough.

I crossed the tiny passage that connected the kitchen to the parlor, then stopped by the bedroom door. I