Songs of Innocence

by the experience, well, they didn’t have to repeat it. I’m no crusader. I hadn’t tried to talk Dorrie into quitting the job.

But now I couldn’t help wondering, would it have made a difference if I had? Was it one of her customers who’d done this to her, some crafty sociopath observant enough to spot Final Exit on her shelf and mirtazapine in her medicine cabinet?

I shut down the word processor and opened a Web browser. Nothing stood out on her list of bookmarks, the Web pages she visited most often, except for Craigslist, the site where all the city’s sex workers ran the classified ads that drew in their customers. In the old days, brothels and massage parlors would advertise in broadsheet rags sold under the counter at newsstands—or if they were the classy, upscale sort, they’d advertise in coded language in the back pages of New York magazine. You still saw some of that, but this was the Internet age, when a DSL connection was as indispensable to the sex trade as a pack of condoms, and most of the business had migrated online. Craigslist was sort of the eBay of sex. Anything you wanted, you could find, more or less anytime you wanted it. Horny guys could try to find it for free first under “Personals—Casual Encounters,” and when that failed, they could find it for a price under “Services—Erotic.”

Which is where I went. There was a search box, and I typed into it the name Dorrie had told me she worked under: Cassandra. Fifteen links came up, quite possibly none of them hers. There was no shortage of Cassandras on Craigslist. All I could do was take them one at a time—

I heard it out of the corner of one ear first, the faint clickclick, clickclick of my busted doorbell.

My fingers hung over the keyboard. I didn’t move.

Clickclick.

Then the brisk rapping as a fistful of knuckles landed against the surface of the door.

“Mr. Blake?” It was a man’s voice, nasal and sharp. “We’d like to talk to you. This is Patrolman James Mirsky of the NYPD.”

Chapter 4

Mirsky looked like a cop, and it wasn’t just the uniform. On his day off, standing at a hibachi in shorts and a polo shirt, he’d still have looked like a cop, getting ready to interrogate the burgers.

The younger man with him was clearly a rookie, barely old enough to shave, it seemed. But old enough to carry the gun riding in a holster on his hip, apparently; and as for looking like a cop, he’d grow into it. They all did.

They both stood there, uniform caps in their hands, scanning the room thoroughly. That didn’t mean anything, of course. They taught you in the academy to scan rooms that way. You walk into a bathroom, you take it all in first, left and right, before you unzip.

They saw the bear and the bird and my bed and my desk, and my computer on my desk, but they didn’t see Dorrie’s computer or my suitcase. While Mirsky and the rookie were looking in either direction, I pushed it further under my bed with my heel.

“Mr. Blake, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you,” Mirsky said, the formality of the diction sitting uneasily in his mouth. They’d trained him to talk this way to grieving relatives; left to his own devices, he’d have talked like a teamster. “Wouldja care to sit down?”

“That’s okay,” I said, trying to decide how surprised I should act when he sprang the news on me. I’m a lousy actor. “What is it?”

“You know a woman named Dorothy Burke?”

“Sure, I know Dorrie.”

“Sit down, Mr. Blake, why doncha?”

“I don’t want to sit down. What’s going on with Dorrie? Has she done something?”

“Looks like it,” Mirsky said. He worried his hat between his fingers absently. He didn’t like this part of his job, standing in crowded, stuffy tenement apartments, telling people their loved ones were dead. “She was found earlier this morning. I’m afraid she’s deceased. Your phone number was the only one on her speed dial.”

Speed dial. I’d erased the answering machine and taken the cell phone, but hadn’t even thought to check the phone hanging on the wall.

I sat down. “How did she...?”

“We won’t know till we get the coroner’s report, but between you an’ me—” he shook his head at the pointlessness of it all “—it looks like the lady took her own life.”

I didn’t know what to say, how I ought to react, and then I decided that that was a perfectly good response in and of itself. People can be speechless when they get bad news.

Mirsky flipped open a spiral-bound notepad, thumbed a ballpoint out of the metal loops and uncapped it. “I’ve gotta ask you a few questions...”

Meanwhile, the rookie was padding softly around the room, peering at this and that. I saw him stop at my desk, lift the phone cable that had been plugged into the laptop when they came knocking. He laid his hand down flat on the desk surface, felt something, raised his hand, rubbed his fingers together. The heat. A laptop gets hot when you use it, and the desk must still have been warm.

“How well did you know Ms. Burke?”

“Reasonably well. We were friends.”

“Close friends?”

“You could say that.”

“Did she seem depressed to you?”

“Sometimes,” I said. “She had a therapist she saw. He prescribed some medication.”

“Yeah, we saw that. Did she ever talk about contemplating suicide?”

I shook my head and lied to his face. “No.”

“No? Like never, or like not very often? You understand, I mean no disrespect to the young lady, but it’s pretty clear what happened here. We’re just tryna wrap up some loose ends.”

“Maybe once or twice,” I said, “but everyone’s got their days.”

“Right, right,” Mirsky said. “Would you say she seemed depressed the last time you spoke to her? When was that, by the way?”

Actually she had. It was why I’d called her three times this morning, why I’d raced uptown when she didn’t answer. “I talked to her last night. She seemed a little down.”

“A little down.” He wrote in his book.

The rookie, meanwhile, had moved on to my closet. I felt like asking him if he wanted to show me a warrant, but I kept my mouth shut. He stepped carefully over the suitcase-worth of clothing strewn on the floor. I shifted so my feet were in front of the suitcase.

“Mr. Blake, I ran your name through the computer on the way downtown, and I see we’ve had you in the system, few years ago.”

“The charges were dropped.”

“That’s true. But if you don’t mind my asking, where were you this morning between, say, midnight and six AM? Just for completeness.”

“Just for completeness,” I said, “I was lying in bed.”

“By yourself?”

“Just for completeness,” I said, “yes.”

“That’s fine, that’s fine,” Mirsky said. “Gotta ask. You know how it is.”

I did, and I told him so.

“Between us, this one’s as cut-and-dried as I’ve seen,” Mirsky said. “Bottla pills, bag on her head, pardon me for being so frank. Book on the ground. Speakin’ a which, you ever seen this book?” He reached behind him and the rookie was there, silently handing him a transparent evidence bag containing my copy of Final Exit. They’d pull my prints off the glossy dust jacket if they hadn’t already.

“Sure, we both read it.”

“And yet you told me, where was it—” he flipped back a page or two in his notes “—that the young lady never