Songs of Innocence hcc-33 Read online

  Songs of Innocence

  ( Hard Case Crime - 33 )

  Richard Aleas

  LITTLE GIRL…FOUND.

  Three years ago, detective John Blake solved a mystery that changed his life forever – and left a woman he loved dead. Now Blake is back, to investigate the apparent suicide of Dorothy Louise Burke, a beautiful college student with a double life. The secrets Blake uncovers could blow the lid off New York City’s sex trade…if they don’t kill him first.

  Richard Aleas’ first novel, LITTLE GIRL LOST, was among the most celebrated crime novels of the year, receiving nominations for both the Edgar Allan Poe Award and the Shamus Award. But nothing in John Blake’s first case could prepare you for the shocking conclusion of his second…

  Raves For the Work of RICHARD ALEAS!

  “Excellent...Aleas has done a fine job of capturing both the style and the spirit of the classic detective novel.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Barrels forth at the speed of [a] Manhattan taxi...and contains some whiplash-inducing plot twists...Tightly written from start to finish, this crime novel is as satisfyingly edgy as the pulp classics that inspired it.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Little Girl Lost is a wonderful novel, brilliantly plotted, beautifully written, and completely satisfying. I loved the book.”

  —Richard S. Prather

  “A pleasant visit to an unpleasant society where honor and loyalty count for more than life.”

  —James Crumley

  “Dark energy and period perfection.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “The most striking first chapter in recent memory...an absolutely terrific read.”

  —Craig Clarke

  “Aleas builds his tale slowly and really throws it into high gear in the emotional final chapters.”

  —George Pelecanos

  “[Aleas] succeeds in melding a classic hardboiled missing persons case and something a bit deeper with Little Girl Lost’s subtle but intriguing literary undertow.”

  —This Week

  “Another standout [about a] man on a memorable downward spiral.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Aleas’ book is incredibly good.”

  —Sarah Weinman

  “Gives Chandler a run for his money.”

  —Paramour

  “A dark little gem about deadly compassion.”

  —Futures

  “A great character with a very original voice. Little Girl Lost feels both old fashioned and bang up to date at the same time...diverting and exhilarating.”

  —Donna Moore

  “Reads like O. Henry run amok in McBain’s 87th Precinct.”

  —Ink19

  “Little Girl Lost is classic pulp.”

  —Kevin Burton Smith, January Magazine

  “An outstanding noir tale.”

  —Monsters and Critics

  “[A] hot-blooded, classic crime novel.”

  —Femme Fatales

  “A wonderful chase from start to finish.”

  —Charlie Stella

  “[An] exciting first novel...I read Little Girl Lost twice and the second time I found it even more interesting.”

  —Swank

  “Fans of taut, popcorn-tasty storytelling can buy any Hard Case Crime title with confidence, but [Little Girl Lost is one] of the most noteworthy.”

  —Booklist

  “Excellent...terrific.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “Able to cut to the heart of a character or a situation with equal ease, he has a voice as unforgettable as his stories.”

  —Billie Sue Mosiman

  “Little Girl Lost belongs in your to-be-read stack, and should be grabbed post haste...If Aleas decides to continue with the Blake character, he could give us one of the best private eyes of this generation.”

  —Noir Originals

  I finished unbuttoning my shirt and laid it on the sofa, rolled my pants up into a ball next to it. Dropped my wristwatch into one of my shoes. She looked away as I pulled down my underwear, busied herself with a row of plastic bottles by the CD player as I hoisted myself onto the table and lay down.

  It was too dim to see whether she blushed when she turned around. “Face down,” she said.

  I rolled over. She crouched by the bottles, uncapped one, and carried it back to the table.

  She was wearing a peach-colored bra and a red bikini bottom. Once she was behind me, I heard her taking the bra off.

  Harp strings played on the CD. So did flutes.

  Her hands were cool and damp with lotion. They traveled down my back and up, down and up, down and up. Eventually they stayed down, and eventually she said I could turn over onto my back and I did.

  “Close your eyes,” she said. She’d been working her way up from the soles of my feet and by then had spent about as much time as she could get away with kneading my shins. She worked up to my thighs and then hesitated. After a second, she squirted some more lotion into her palm and kept going.

  I opened my eyes. Her legs weren’t shaking now. They were locked rigidly in place. Her shoulders were thrown back and her elbows were pinned by her sides. She was still wearing the bikini bottom and a thin gold necklace with a tiny cross on it, but nothing else. Tiny goosebumps stood out all over her breasts.

  One of her hands was resting on my arm. The other wasn’t, either on my arm or resting. She was looking across the room at a poster for the 1988 season of the Metropolitan Opera, staring so hard at it that you’d have figured her for a real opera lover.

  And that was how her new life began...

  SONGS of INNOCENCE

  by Richard Aleas

  A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

  (HCC-033)

  Sex is death’s way of making more dead bodies.

  —Karl Kroeber

  PART ONE

  Can I see another’s woe,

  And not be in sorrow too?

  Can I see another’s grief,

  And not seek for kind relief?

  WILLIAM BLAKE,

  SONGS OF INNOCENCE

  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 appli
cations, 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 leaped 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.”