I was crying now and so was he. The hand holding the knife was trembling and I let it sink slowly.
“But Robert,” he said, “you’ve got to believe me, I didn’t kill her. I swear to god, when I read in the paper that she was dead, my heart broke. My only daughter, the only one left in the world that I cared about, and she was gone.”
I placed the tip of the knife against his chest, beneath the sternum, held it as steady as my shaking hand allowed.
“Robert, it’s the truth! I swear, I swear, I loved her, I would have given her anything. You have to believe me. I didn’t kill her.”
“No,” I said, and I was weeping as I said it. “I did.” And I shoved the knife into him.
It felt like slipping a playing card between the pages of a closed book.
His blood spilled out over my knuckles and my wrist, hot and sticky and it just kept coming. It spilled onto his lap and started spreading on the floor beneath him. The glass fell out of his hand, rolled along the carpet. His eyes got wide and he tried to speak, to say something, but no sound came out.
He died looking into my eyes. I forced myself not to look away. I couldn’t help thinking of Kurland bracing me at the train station, one hand on my chest, telling me I wasn’t a virgin anymore. It was a simple thing, crossing the line. Dorrie had done it, going from booking massage appointments to servicing them herself. Doug Harper had done it, some sunny morning in 1985, after glimpsing his daughter once too often in the yard. Now I’d done it. There was no thunder in the sky, no crash of cymbals, just blood all over my hands and a dead man in a chair. But there was a before and an after, and I was something different on either side of that line.
I found the bathroom and scrubbed my hands under the taps, turning the hot water on as high as it would go. I revolved the bar of soap between my hands till no trace of blood remained. Then I bent over the sink and threw up.
I couldn’t stop heaving. There was nothing inside me anymore, but I kept trying, choking from straining to expel something that wouldn’t come. I turned on the cold water, splashed some on my face, tried to swallow some. I couldn’t get any into my mouth, my hand was shaking so badly.
I had a headache suddenly, a full-on migraine, and I was shivering. I needed to sit down, to catch my breath, to get my racing heartbeat under control. But not here.
I exited by the front door after fumbling for a minute with the locks. On the way downstairs, I left my fingerprints everywhere—on the banister of the staircase, on the wall, on the glass of the front door.
I was less than a mile away from Carmine Street, from my home—from what had once been my home. But there would be policemen there, staking the place out, watching for me to return, waiting to take me into custody, to put me on trial. I turned east instead, started walking.
I found my way to a subway station, one of the system’s many unmanned platforms, and only once I reached the bottom of the stairs realized I had no money for a fare. There were some discarded MetroCards scattered on the ground and I picked them up one by one, slid them through the reader, hoping one might still have a single fare left on it. One did. I passed through the revolving gate and sank onto a wooden bench by the tracks.
She’d promised. We’d promised each other. If either of us ever became desperate enough to actually do the thing we’d sometimes talked about in whispers, we’d call each other. But when the time came, she hadn’t called. And then I’d found all her papers shredded, her phone bills, her photos—something she would have had no reason to do. Naturally my mind had jumped to murder. Because nothing else made sense to me.
But now—
I remembered our dinner Friday night. One week ago. We’d eaten at Shabu-Tatsu on Tenth Street. Dorrie had been excited—she was almost finished with her last chapter for Stu Kennedy. The last chapter of the family history he’d assigned her to write, her sister’s story, the one she’d written with next to no help from her mother and no help at all from her father. I’d done what I’d been able to; I’d found the man for her. If he wasn’t willing to talk to her, there was nothing else I could do.
Except send her my files.
For whatever little they might be worth.
Bits of extra color and information, bits she might want to use when writing her second draft, to bring the story to life a little more. Some genealogical information I’d tracked down about her mom. The name of the hospital where her sister had died. A description of the shoe store where her father worked. A description of the man himself—this man she’d never had the chance to meet, this man who’d left her when she was three years old. And, hell, why stop at a description? I had the photos of him that I’d taken the day I’d followed him home to get his address—easy enough to include those in the e-mail as well.
What must it have been like for her, I thought, to open that e-mail from me on Saturday morning and see Doug Harper’s unkempt, swarthy, bearded face staring out at her from her computer screen, and to know him, to recognize him as her long-time customer James Smith?
I was underground, but only one flight down, not the eighteen stories deep I’d been buried up at 191st Street, and my cell phone still showed a signal. A weak one, but a signal.
I redialed Eva Burke’s number.
I thought I might wake her again, but she answered immediately, as though she’d been waiting for my call. “Are you ready to tell me what this is all about, Blake?”
“No,” I said. “I just called to let you know that you should pick up a New York newspaper tomorrow. The man responsible for Dorrie’s death...you’ll see he died tonight. I don’t imagine this is much comfort to you, but I hope at least it’s some.”
“What are you talking about? Blake? Blake!”
I hung up on her, dug out my wallet. I found the compartment where I’d tucked James Mirsky’s business card, with its penciled-in cell phone number on the back.
I dialed the number, got voicemail.
At the beep, I told him where he could find Harper’s body.
I also told him I’d killed Miklos. What the hell. I’d promised Kurland I’d pay him back somehow. And he and Julie deserved every chance.
How desperately Dorrie must have wanted to keep me from knowing what I’d done. So she’d spent Saturday covering the traces. Any phone bill that might have shown Harper’s number—she couldn’t leave those for me to find. Any photos her clients had sent her—into the shredder wholesale, no time to sort through them one by one. All the e-mail “Cassie” had sent or received—erased. All future e-mail forwarded out of my reach. And then, just to be safe, she’d written me that letter, the one she’d left with Sharon. Just in case all the shredding and erasing turned out not to be enough to keep me off the trail. John Blake, the great detective—she’d made one last, desperate attempt to keep me from finding out.
She’d done all that, and then she’d pulled out our copy of
My cell phone rang. I saw on the readout that it was Susan calling.
I hesitated, then turned the phone off.
As I climbed down onto the tracks, I thought about Dorrie, about Jorge Ramos, about Candace Webb. All dead because of me. So was Douglas Harper, of course, and by my own hand. So was Miklos. So was Miranda, my Miranda. So were others—too many others.
No man should lose count of the number of people who have died because of him.
The tracks were well-lit, dry, cleaner than I’d have expected. A thrown-out soda cup, a few candy bar wrappers. Not too much worse than the platform itself. I sat down in the well between the two narrow rails, rested my head on one, draped my knees over the other.
I’m sorry, Dorrie, I whispered. I’m sorry.
I hadn’t meant to end up this way, counting the dead, apologizing to the ghosts of women I’d loved.
But here I was with apologies to make and so little time to make them.
