March/April 2011

CHAPTER 1

I was a private investigator once.  But then we’ve all been things we aren’t anymore. 

Our most promising playwright had been a cab driver once, and before that a lab assistant for one of the big pharmaceutical companies in Jersey, washing out beakers for three dollars an hour.  We had a short-story writer who’d once worked for NBC, selling commercial time to Ford and Gillette, and a handsome young screenwriter who still lived off the checks he got from the fashion designer he’d briefly been married to.  She’d been three times his age when they’d gotten married.  It hadn’t lasted.

We had a recovering agoraphobe.  We had an ex-con.

And then there was Dorrie.

There was a picture of Dorrie taped to the window, a group photo, showing her with her arms around three or four of the other people who were here tonight, Adam Rosenthal and Alison Bell and Michael, Michael…Jesus, what was his last name? 

I wasn’t in the photo.  I was the one who’d taken it.

Michael was standing in the corner of the room by the bulletin board, sipping from a plastic cup of white wine, looking at the announcements, many of them long out of date, from Columbia’s various literary magazines.  They all wanted submissions; some of them were holding events to raise money; a few had famous alumni coming back to give readings or seminars.  He seemed engrossed in these useless, useless posters until you looked at his eyes and realized they weren’t moving at all, that he was staring into the middle distance, seeing nothing.

Contini.  Michael Contini.  You’d think I’d remember; I’d processed his application.  But I’d processed a lot of applications, learned a lot of names, and tonight my mind was on other things.

Lane Glazier was the only person in the room with a glass made of glass rather than plastic, and he tapped its side with a metal letter opener.  He said “Everybody…everybody…” and the room quieted.

“Thank you for coming,” he said.  He had a round, soft face that generally looked beleaguered and sympathetic, and it looked both of those things now.  “All of you knew Dorrie.  Some of you knew her better than others, but we all knew her.  She was our friend, she was our student—” he nodded toward Stu Kennedy, seated on the sofa “—she was our family.”  Heads turned toward the one person in the room none of us knew, except by name.  I’d encouraged Lane to invite her and regretted it when she showed up looking less mournful than furious, as though we were all to blame for her daughter’s death. 

“We’re here tonight to remember Dorrie, to remember her the way we knew her; she was a special person—”

“Her name was Dorothy,” the mother said.  Her voice could have cut steel.  Lane stopped speaking, the rest of his sentence suspended halfway out of his mouth.  “Dorothy.  Not Dorrie.  Dorothy Louise Burke.”  She glared at us, her head swiveling to the left and then to the right.  “At least call her by her fucking name.”

None of us spoke.  What could you say?  We were all embarrassed for her, wishing she wasn’t there or that we weren’t, that this woman could be alone with her grief and leave us to ours.

Finally Lane said, “Dorothy.  I’m sorry.  Dorothy was a special person.  Dorothy Louise Burke, your daughter, was a special person and we all miss her very much.”  His soft face and spaniel eyes begged for acknowledgment, a gesture of sympathy, something.  But the mother just kept staring, her eyes like coals in a snowbank.

#

Eva Burke was a short woman but not a small one.  She had the build of a weightlifter, broad shoulders and hips and tree trunk legs.  You couldn’t see her daughter in her, or at least I couldn’t.  Which might lead you to think that Dorrie took after her father, but that wasn’t true either.  In a fruitless attempt to help her with the seminar assignment she was working on for Stu Kennedy, I’d tracked her father down for her, and he turned out to be a short, wiry, swarthy, sweaty, hairy man, while Dorrie had had long, graceful limbs and delicate features.  Of course, I didn’t look much like my parents myself.

I’d thought about inviting the father, too, but Dorrie hadn’t seen him in years and I remembered what she’d told me about her parents’ break-up – putting those two in the same room would not have been a good idea.  Not that inviting just the mother had been such a great one.

The lounge was empty now except for me and Mrs. Burke.  I was cleaning up, throwing out used cups and paper plates and bagging the unused ones, moving gingerly because of my bandaged chest; so far I was only a bit more than a day into the six weeks the doctor had told me it would take to heal, and I’d been through a rough night on top of it.  Mrs. Burke was standing in the center of the room, more or less where she’d stood throughout the evening.  I was covering a plate of cheese with plastic wrap when she spoke.

“You’re Blake?” 

I put the plate down, came over to her.  “Yes.”

“I want you to do something for me.”

“Of course,” I said.  “What would you like?”

“I want you to find the man who murdered my daughter.”

It took me aback.  I’d thought she was going to ask me for a glass of wine or some cheese.  “Mrs. Burke,” I said, “I’m not—I don’t know what Dorrie told you about me, but I haven’t—”

“Dorothy told me one of the men she was taking classes with was a detective.  John Blake.  That’s you?”

“It’s me,” I said, “but I quit that job years ago, almost three years now.”

“You used to do it.  You can do it again.”  I shook my head, and she shook hers right back at me.  “Yes, you can.  You knew her.  You’ve got a better chance than some stranger of finding the son of a bitch who killed her.”  She unsnapped the clasp of her purse, reached in, and pulled out a checkbook and pen.  “I don’t care what it costs.  You tell me.  A thousand dollars?  Is that enough?  Two thousand?  What?”

I took the pen out of her hand, dropped it back in her purse.  “I know you’re upset, Mrs. Burke—”

She slapped my hand away from her.  “Don’t patronize me.  Someone killed my daughter and the police aren’t doing anything about it.  That means I’ve got to.  All I want you to tell me is, how much is it going to cost?”

I thought carefully about how to say what I wanted to say.  “Mrs. Burke, there’s a reason the police aren’t doing anything.  No, listen to me.  There’s a reason.  They found her in her bathtub with a copy of Final Exit on the floor and a plastic bag over her head.”  I took her hand, held onto it even when she tried to shake me loose.  “They found sedatives in her system, the newspapers said at least twenty pills.  Nobody forced her to take those pills.  Nobody put her in that bathtub.  Nobody made her read that book.”

That wasn’t entirely true, of course.  She’d found the book on the table next to my bed. 

“Mrs. Burke,” I said, “I know you don’t want to hear this, but Dorrie’s death – Dorothy’s death – probably was what it looked like.”

Her hand leapt out of mine.  The index finger jabbed at my face while the rest of the fingers coiled into a fist.  “That’s bullshit, young man, and you know it.  She did not kill herself.  My daughter would never do that.  You should be ashamed of yourself.” 

I didn’t say anything.

“What’s wrong with you?”  She didn’t wait for an answer, which was just as well because I didn’t have one to give her.  “I’ll find someone,” she said.  “If you won’t help me, I’m going to find someone else who will.  But if, because you didn’t help, the person who did this to my daughter gets away with it, if my daughter’s killer gets away because of you, I want to know how you’ll live with yourself.”  She was practically shouting now, and the sound had brought Lane to the doorway from his office across the hall.  He stood there in his suit jacket and his loosened necktie looking desperately unhappy.

“Mrs. Burke?  Please, John has work he needs to finish up tonight.” 

Dorrie’s mother stood between us, looking at each of us in turn the way a bull might look at a pair of picadors.  Then she gathered herself and shoved past Lane, walking in silence down the hall to the elevator.  “Let her go,” he said, but I followed her.

“I’m not finished,” she said as she waited for the elevator to arrive.  The building is only five stories tall, but the writing department is on the fifth and the elevator takes forever to drag itself to the top.

Something in my face must have made her think I doubted her.  “I’m not,” she said.

I didn’t doubt her.  I wished I did.

“Listen,” I said.  I grabbed a piece of paper someone had scotch-taped to the wall (“Submit to Quarto!”), turned it over, and took a pen out of my pocket.  “I’ll give you the name of someone I know who can help you.”  I wrote a name and phone number on the back of the piece of paper.  “She’s very good at what she does.  Better than I ever was.”

The indicator next to the elevator door lit up and the door sluggishly slid open.  A maintenance man got out, pulling a cart of cleaning supplies behind him.

Mrs. Burke took the paper from me.  For a second I thought she was going to say something.  But instead she just folded the sheet of paper and tucked it away in her purse.  The elevator door closed behind her without another word being spoken.

#

When I got back to my desk, I called Susan.  She sounded hoarse, like I’d just woken her up from a deep sleep after a long night’s binge on cigarettes and boilermakers.  I hadn’t.  That’s just what her voice sounded like, what it had sounded like ever since she got out of the hospital three years earlier with one lung fewer than she’d had going in.  Someone I’d known had stabbed her five times in the chest and left her for dead.  Someone I’d thought I’d known.

“Hold on a second,” she said, “let me turn this off.”  I heard the TV go off in the background, then footsteps approaching the phone.  “I was watching the news.  I don’t know why I watch it.  It just makes me upset.  Do you know they’re talking about passing a law in South Carolina banning the sale of sex toys?  Five years in jail.  You can sell guns all you want, but god forbid you should sell a woman a vibrator.  So how are you, John?”

“I’m sorry I haven’t called,” I said.

“That’s okay, I didn’t expect you to.  You’re busy, doing…what is it you’re doing again?”

“I’m working up at Columbia, in the writing program.  I’m the administrative assistant.”

“Yeah, well,” she said.  “That can keep you busy I’m sure.”

“Susan, I’m sorry.  Really.  I didn’t mean to—”

“Yeah,” she said.  “I know.”

“You seeing anyone?” I asked.

“Let’s just say I’m glad I don’t live in South Carolina.  Why’d you call, John?”

I glanced around the office.  No one else was left.  Lane was back behind his closed door.  I lowered my voice anyway.

“I need to ask you a favor,” I said.

“Okay.”  She sounded wary.

“There’s a woman who’s going to call you tomorrow, Eva Burke.  I gave her your name.  Her daughter was Dorrie Burke.  You may have seen it in the papers, she was the Columbia student they found dead in her apartment up on Tiemann Place—”

“Sure.  That was the suicide, right?”

“That’s what the police say, but the mother doesn’t believe it.  She wants to hire a detective.  She asked me.”

“And you didn’t take the job because being an administrative assistant pays so well you just wouldn’t know what to do with the extra money.”

“I knew the daughter, Susan.”

She was silent for a moment.  “Jesus, John,” she said, “I’m sorry.”

“There are things I promised her, things about her life she didn’t want her mother to know.”

“Things like what?”

“Like how she paid her rent.”

“Was it anything like how I used to pay mine?”  Susan worked for Serner, probably the biggest detective agency in the city and certainly the best known.  But she hadn’t always.  When I first met her, she’d been working as a stripper. 

“More or less.”

“Which is it?  More?  Or less?”

“More,” I said.

“She was hooking?”

“Close enough.”

“Look,” Susan said.  “I’m not going to tell you it’s the right thing to do, but under the circumstances I don’t see why you have to tell the mother anything.  You know?  Just take her money, sit on it for a few weeks, then type up a report saying I’m sorry, ma’am, but it really was suicide.  You know how it’s done, John.  You taught me.”

“Well, I’m asking you to do it this time.”

“Why?”

“Because it’ll keep her occupied while I finish doing what I have to do.”

“And what’s that?”

I felt the broken rib aching in my chest.  “I’m going to find the man who murdered her daughter,” I said.

#

CHAPTER 2

Dorrie Burke was taller than I was, not quite six feet in flats but pretty damn close, and she entered a classroom as if there was a curtain at one end and a row of photographers popping flashbulbs at the other.  It wasn’t something she did deliberately, but she did it nonetheless, and the rest of us all turned and watched as she found her way to an empty chair, slid her shoulder-slung messenger bag to the floor, and sat down.  You got the sense she was used to this reaction and that it embarrassed her, like a fat girl used to hearing boys snicker behind her back.

She was beautiful in a way you’re accustomed to seeing on movie posters or the pages of a magazine but not in real life.  Something about the shape of her face, the arrangement of her features; you did a double-take when you saw her for the first time and then found yourself staring when you didn’t mean to.  I met a woman once who’d been in an automobile accident, a bad crash that tore up one side of her face.  The plastic surgeons had done the best job they could, and for the most part they’d succeeded in giving her back a normal face, but there was something just a little bit off about it, and you couldn’t stop looking at her.  It was similar with Dorrie.  You couldn’t stop looking.

I’d been at Columbia a year by then, working in the writing program office less for the salary it paid than because as an employee of the university I got to take classes for free.  I didn’t know what I wanted to do with myself and taking courses seemed as good a way to find out as any.  My first thought was that my years as an investigator would set me up well for a career in investigative journalism – but the journalism school didn’t accept me and I somehow ended up drifting into the writing program, which felt a little like flunking medical school and ending up a mortician.  Since I was a decade past college age, the courses I took were in the euphemistically named “School of General Studies,” the division Columbia reserves for middle-managers taking economics classes at night and empty-nesters looking to fill their afternoons with something more satisfying than Oprah.  But some of the students in GS weren’t that far removed from their college years – they’d dropped out of college a few credits shy of graduating and after bumming around for a year or two were now ready to finish up.  Dorrie was in this category.  And in a room where the average age was pushing forty, she stood out even more starkly.

“Ms. Burke, I presume,” Stu Kennedy said, leaning across the seminar table on his bony forearms.  His hands trembled, a combination of early-stage Parkinson’s and late-stage alcoholism.  He could no longer type, he’d told me over a drink at the West End, and had started dictating his novels into a tape recorder. 

Dorrie swept her hair out of her face, nodded. 

“Then we are all here and can begin.”  He leaned back in his chair, tented his fingers.  “The name of the course is ‘Creative Nonfiction.’  What does this mean?  It means telling the truth through judicious lying.”  His voice was tremulous but very deliberate, like a Royal Shakespeare Company actor gone to seed.  “And why are we here?  I am here because the university sees fit to pay me a meager stipend on account of some generous reviews my books received round about the time you lot were being conceived.  You, on the other hand, are here for a greater purpose: to become better writers.  To help each other become better writers.”  He turned to the man next to me, a muscular downtown type in a knit cap and two t-shirts, one worn over the other.  Stubble on his chin, crude tattoos up and down his forearms in dark blue ink.  “What do you wish to get out of this class, Mr. Wessels?”

I remembered the guy’s essay on his application.  He was our ex-con, Kurland Wessels; he’d served three years for armed robbery and aggravated assault before his sentence was vacated and he was released.  Second chances, all of us. 

“I want to finish my book,” he said, in a tense voice that still carried, I thought, the echoes of cell doors clanging shut. 

“And you,” Professor Kennedy said, turning to face Dorrie, “Ms. Burke: what do you hope to gain?”

She shrugged, looked around the room uncomfortably. 

“Let me tell you what you can gain from one another.  Stories.”  He coughed wetly, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.  “Young writers – and you’re not all so young, but you are all young writers – love nothing more than to write about themselves.  That won’t do.  You need to broaden your palette.  Each of you needs fresh material, and as it happens each of you has fresh material to give.  Your life is intensely familiar to you, but to someone else?  It’s an unfamiliar, untold story.  So.  I want you to pair up and learn each other’s stories, and then tell them.  That is your assignment.  Do it credit.”  He looked down at the class roster on the table and began rattling off pairings in no apparent order, marking each name with a penciled ‘X’ in the margin as he went.  “Ms. Waithaka, Ms. Gross.  Ms. Fenner, Mr. Reynolds.  Mr. Wessels, Mr. Breen.”  And so on, through eight pairs until at last I was the only one left on my side of the table and Dorrie Burke was the only one left on hers.  “Mr. Blake, Ms. Burke.”  The professor slapped his palm down on the table.  “That is all.”

Some nights later, when we were in our back booth at the West End, sipping our drinks as the clock crawled toward closing time, I asked him about his method and he smiled at me.  “Ah, John, John.  Who else was I going to give her to?  Kurland?  That would be like giving a steak to a Doberman.  No, you, my friend, will treat her kindly; and perhaps, if we are fortunate, she will do the same to you.”

#

We sat down over dinner at Restaurant Dan, a 24-hour tempura shop on Broadway and 69th.  She was as shy with me as she had been in the classroom and to fill the silences I found myself throwing questions at her as if I’d never left my old job: Where was she born?  Philadelphia.  How old was she?  Twenty-three.  Parents?  Divorced.  The answers came a syllable at a time, at first.  But I persisted, gently, and bit by bit she started to open up.  Any brothers or sisters?  One sister, but she’d died when Dorrie was three.  How had she died?  Some sort of leukemia, apparently; Dorrie’s mother had never been willing to talk much about it.  But her mother had somehow blamed her father for it, and that was when their marriage had started to come apart.

Where’d she gone to school?  A semester at Moore College of Art and Design back home followed by two years at Hunter College in New York.  Why had she come to New York?  She’d wanted to work in fashion; fashion was in New York.  Ergo.  Did she still want to work in fashion?  She blushed before answering this one, looked down at her plate and picked the batter off a fat slice of carrot with the point of her chopstick. 

“You know what the closest I’ve come to working in fashion is?  In five years?” 

“What?” I said.

She shook her head and the slender smile that had crept onto her face faded.  “It was at FAO Schwarz,” she said.  “The toy store on Fifth Avenue?  I worked as their fairy princess, greeting people as they came in.  The costume – it was a Bob Mackie original, they hired Bob Mackie to design it for them.  A gown and satin shoes and a tiara, and a wand; I even had a wand.  Little girls would come in and they’d see me there and their little faces would light up, and sometimes they’d be scared to come near me.  It was like I was the most beautiful thing they’d ever seen.”  When she looked up, I saw that there was a film of tears in her eyes.  “And then three o’clock would come and I’d take it off and change back into my jeans and walk out through the store, and on the way out I’d pass the afternoon princess wearing it and all the little girls would be looking at her like she was the most beautiful thing they’d ever seen.”

She dabbed at her eyes with a paper napkin, balled it up and tossed it on her plate. 

“I’m sorry,” I said. 

“What for?  Because I didn’t magically rise to the top of the fashion world on luck and looks alone?  I never won the lottery either.  Want to apologize for that?”

“No,” I said. 

She shook her head.  “Sorry.”  And after the silence between us had stretched on for a bit she said, “I just don’t like talking about myself, I guess.”

“That’s going to make this assignment hard.”

“Well, half of it, anyway,” she said, and for the second time that evening she smiled.  “So what did you do before you ended up working at Columbia?  Let me guess.  You were a talk radio host.”

“No.”

“Therapist?”

“No.”

“A priest?”  We both smiled at this, and she leaned forward, closer to me.  “You’re a good listener, John.”

“Want to guess some more?” I said.

“No,” she said.  “I give up.”

“Well,” I said, “I was a detective.  A private detective.   It’s a good job if you want to learn how to listen to people.”

“A detective.”

“That’s right.”

“That sounds exciting.”

“It wasn’t very.  A lot of time spent on the computer.”

“And listening to people.”

“Yes.”

“Did you help a lot of people?”

“Some.”  Now I was the one doling out the one-word answers.  

“Why’d you stop being a detective?” she said.

“Why’d you stop being a fairy princess?”

“I asked you first.”

I thought about it for a while.  Finally I said, “A woman I’d loved died because of me, and another almost died.  I couldn’t do it anymore.”

There was something in her face then, something sympathetic, something hurt in her that recognized the same in me.  She looked in my eyes and held them and didn’t say anything and neither did I. 

“Want to tell me about it?” she said.

I found that I did.  But there are things you don’t say in a restaurant with bored waitresses standing around pretending not to listen.  We paid the check, collected our coats, and started back toward the campus. 

It was close to midnight, and we walked alone in the dark up Broadway.  It was strangely silent, so that what few sounds there were – a single taxi whispering by on the street, a grocer at an all-night bodega scraping carrots for tomorrow’s salads – seemed like the ghosts of sounds, a lulling threnody. 

I found myself telling her about Miranda, my girlfriend from high school, and the murder on the roof of the strip club.  I told her about Susan and how she’d almost been killed, and I told her how it had ended, with both women’s blood on my hands.  I told her more than I’d ever told anyone.  I hadn’t realized how badly I wanted to tell it.

I felt tears start to come and I remember feeling grateful that in the darkness she couldn’t see them, this beautiful woman by my side, this stranger I was telling my secrets.  But she must have heard it in my voice, because she stopped me and I felt her fingertips on my cheeks, and then I was in her arms and we were both crying for what we’d lost, what we’d been and were no longer.

“John,” she whispered in my ear, “I’ll tell you why I stopped being a fairy princess.”

“You don’t have to,” I said.

But she did.  She told me why she’d stopped, and she told me what she’d become instead.

#

Dorrie died on a Sunday morning, some hours before dawn.  Her landlord didn’t have a key to her top lock, so when the police came they had to break the door down.  They found an apartment that was immaculate, as though it had been put in order for the benefit of visitors. Nothing was out of place: not a dish in the sink, not a piece of clothing on the carpet.  There were some things missing, but they had no way of knowing that.

The police found the apartment this way because that’s the way I left it.  I did have a key to her top lock, had had one for months. 

I found her in the bathtub, the bathroom door open, the water still and cool.  The plastic bag was taped tightly around her neck with gray duct tape and it was still slightly inflated with her final exhalations.  Her eyes were closed.

The empty pill bottle was on the edge of the sink, its cap by its side.  There was some water left in the bottom of her toothbrushing cup. 

I stood there for I don’t know how long, looking at her, knowing that it wasn’t what it looked like, that it couldn’t be.  Knowing that I’d have to find the person responsible.  But first I did what I’d promised I’d do if this day ever came, what I’d hoped I’d never have to do.  I found her laptop and her cell phone, packed them away in my bag; I found the bottles and tubes in her bedside drawer, a dozen of them; I found the sheer outfits folded neatly in her dresser, the g-string panties and mesh underwire teddies and the one long leopard-print chemise she’d told me a client had given her and liked her to wear.  I took them all, together with what few papers I found intact on the shelf in her closet.  In the bottom of her garbage can, beneath the blades of the crosscut shredder she’d bought herself at Staples, I found a pile of confetti that looked like it had once been phone bills, bank statements, photographs.  I got a plastic grocery bag from under her sink and packed the shreds into it, taking care not to leave any fragments behind. 

On her bed, leaning against one of the pillows, was a large blue teddy bear, stubby arms spread wide as though asking for a hug.  Across the bottom of one of its feet were the letters “FAO,” embroidered in gold thread.  She’d bought the bear, she told me, with her first week’s pay as a fairy princess; even with the employee discount, it had consumed the better part of her paycheck.  But it was plush and special and expensive, and for a two-time college dropout from Philly living in a one-room walk-up apartment in a bad part of town, owning one thing that was plush and special and expensive felt very important.  Another woman might have bought an art print and framed it, or a nice dress.  Dorrie bought the bear.

In the kitchen there was one mug in the sink and one plate, and I washed them, dried them, and put them away.  There were three messages on her answering machine; I’d left them earlier that morning, and now I erased them.  I thought about fingerprints, but I knew it was useless to wipe the place down; I’d visited often and my fingerprints were all over.  I also thought about the penalty for tampering with a crime scene.  But I didn’t think about it for long.  The police wouldn’t recognize it as a crime scene, because they didn’t know what I knew.  They wouldn’t investigate, with or without the things I was taking away.  All I’d accomplish by leaving them would be to reveal Dorrie’s other life, providing a sordid footnote that would make newspaper readers nod knowingly over their coffee, certain they’d identified the reason why a beautiful young woman would take her own life.  And that’s what I’d promised I wouldn’t let happen.

I hesitated at the front door, one hand on the light switch.  Then I went back into the bedroom and returned with the bear under one arm.

From a payphone a few blocks away I called 911.  I told them I was a neighbor across the street, that I’d seen something through the window that frightened me, a woman taping a plastic bag over her head.  I gave them the address, hung up when they asked for my name.

I waited till I heard a siren approaching, then climbed the stairs to the subway platform at 125th Street.  There was only one other person in the subway car with me when I got on, a gray-haired man in a khaki jumpsuit, like a maintenance man’s uniform.  He pointed at the bear.  “For your daughter?” he said.

I hesitated, then nodded.

“Oh, she’s gonna love it,” he said.  “Big bear like that.  Gonna make her very happy.  Very happy.  She’s one lucky girl.”

Then the car plunged into its tunnel and the squeal of its wheels against the track mercifully drowned out whatever more he had to say about happiness and luck.

#