The Hollow Girl (28 page)

“Okay. If I’m right, tonight’s post will be more of the same or some variation of the same. The photograph will still be at her feet, but with one less strip of tape on the face. If I’m wrong, if it’s much worse or really different, we’ll call the cops immediately.”

“But if you’re wrong, Moe, we’re giving this sick bastard six free hours to kill my daughter and get away.”

“I have no right to ask, but I’m asking,” I said, handing her the phone. “If you feel you have to call now, I will do everything I can to help the cops and no matter what happens, I won’t ever second-guess your decision.”

She took the phone. “What would you do if it was Sarah?”

“I guess I would call.”

She handed the phone back to me.

I’d never been so relieved to be right, relieved but not happy. One look at the condition of the Hollow Girl removed happiness from the equation. She was terribly pale, and it seemed the ropes were so tight that she could barely breathe. Her eyes remained closed. I couldn’t help but wonder if I had missed something about the ropes. Were they meant to be metaphorical? Was there a message in this about lack of mobility, or the inability to breathe? I could almost taste the answer, but being close was no good. The photograph was, as I suspected it would be, still at her feet, with one less strip of tape across the face. Now we could see the eyebrows, jawline, and nose of the girl in the picture. That much was clear from what had been revealed: She was a girl, not yet a woman. Surely, this had to be enough for Devo’s software to get me an answer.

Then, about halfway through the post, my eyes drifted away from the center of the frame, away from the Hollow Girl and toward the blank white wall behind her. Staring at Siobhan, at her shallow, labored breaths, was gut-wrenching, hypnotic, and horrifying. Somehow, shifting focus to the wall behind her seemed like the most important thing in the world to me. Things came to me all at once: Anthony Rizzo’s timeline, Nancy’s timeline, the brief mentions of Millie McCumber in the press, Giorgio Brahms’s sour expression. Giorgio Brahms and his fucking kitchen walls. I was sick of him living in my head, him and his petty bullshit. Then I remembered his parlor. Suddenly, I was on my feet, standing between Nancy and her TV, screaming.

“When did you say Millie McCumber came back into Siob—Sloane’s life?”

“What does that have to—”

“When?” I shouted. “When?”

“Four, maybe five months ago.”

“That’s it! That’s it, Nancy.”

“That’s what?”

“The key.”

“To what?”

“Maybe everything. Stay here. I’ll call you later. Just stay here.”

* * *

The main floor of Brahms’s brownstone was dark, but there was light coming from the second floor of his place, shadows, too. The problem was he didn’t seem disposed to answer his front door, no matter how often I pounded on it. Nor did he answer his phone when I called from the stoop. So I did the next best thing: I threw a rock through his front window. When he didn’t respond immediately to the sound of breaking glass, I got another rock, and another. That third rock was the charm.

“What the fuck!” he screamed, yanking his front door open. His feet were bare. He was shirtless, wet with sweat, and his gym shorts were untied. “I’m calling the cops.”

“Please do,” I said, pushing past him. “Get in here and shut the door.”

“Who the fuck are you to order me around in my own house?” he ranted, shutting the front door and following me just the same.

I showed him my .38 and pointed it at him. “You wanna ask me that again?”

“Georgie, c’mon, Mama’s waiting for you. I was so fucking close,” a raspy-voiced woman called down from the top of the stairs. It was a voice with some mileage on it.

I whispered to Brahms, “Tell Mama you’ll be up in five minutes.”

“Me, too, honey. I was close, too. I’ll be up in five minutes. Have another drink, honey,” he called up.

I heard bare feet padding away. I nodded for Giorgio to follow me into the kitchen. He was good at following instructions, at least from a man with a gun.

“What’s this about?” he whispered when we stopped.

“These walls,” I said pointing the short barrel of my .38 at them. “When I was here, you couldn’t take your eyes off them. You were muttering to yourself.”

“You’re holding a gun on me because my kitchen walls are unfinished? And they say theater people are crazy.”

“The first time we met, you gave an earnest little speech about Millie McCumber and how you were so upset over her death because her family would take her money and exploit her, but that’s not why you were upset, was it, Giorgio?”

He didn’t answer, his face pinching up tight.

“Giorgio!” I growled, pointing the revolver at him once again. “I don’t have time for this shit.”

“Yes and no,” he relented, and waved at me. “Will you put that damned thing away? You’ve made your point.” He moved to the stove. “Tea?”

I put the .38 away. “No, thanks. What about Mama? Won’t she get impatient?”

“Trust me, Mr. Prager, Mama will wait. But you’re wrong about Millie. I did love her. I think I’m the only person who ever did. She didn’t make it easy to love her, trust me.”

“But she was paying you for something, Giorgio. She was paying you a lot of money.”

“Some, not as much as you think, but some, in dribs and drabs.”

“Then she died between a drib and a drab and left you and your walls high and dry. But why was she paying you? And please, don’t make me pull it out of you, Giorgio. Just tell me, and tell me the truth because Siobhan’s life depends on it. And if what you tell me isn’t the truth and something happens to her because you lied to me, your life won’t be worth shit.”

He picked up the kettle and banged it on the stove. “Stop threatening me.”

“Start talking.”

“It had been a year since I’d seen Millie. She was staying with me here back then, because she had nowhere else to go and because she was as low as she’d ever been. That was saying something. There were no parts for her, and the drugs and booze had gotten completely out of hand. She was so desperate, she’d even tried to land work as an escort. A perfect job for her, one would have thought. That woman loved to fuck, and acting is acting, right? So you can imagine how crushing it was when they turned her down for that, too. One of the services told her that she was too old, and that only steak houses were interested in dry aged beef.

“She was ragged and one step away from living on the streets. One day, I left here to do some shopping, and she just split. But not before relieving me of all the cash I had in the house and most of my jewelry. I also had a collection of signed photographs and theater paraphernalia worth tens of thousands of dollars. She took all that as well. When she showed back up here in March, I nearly shit myself. I couldn’t believe she had the
chutzpah
, but I remembered this was Millicent McCumber. She had no shame.”

“Does this story have a point?”

The kettle whistled. He fussed with a mug, tea bag, and honey. “You’re the one who threatened me not to leave things out.”

“Okay.”

“She strutted in here like she’d done nothing wrong. She acted as if robbing the most valuable possessions from her only friend, agent, and sometimes lover was perfectly normal. I couldn’t speak, but I noticed that she looked fabulous: healthy, tanned, and dressed in several thousand dollars’ worth of haute couture and fur. Before I could open my mouth, she handed me a check for thirty thousand dollars and promised there was more to come. She didn’t apologize or ask after me. All she said was, ‘Can you get me a bottle of water, George? Shopping is such thirsty work.’ And when I came back with her water, she had spread herself out on my couch and commented on how dingy my place was. ‘We have to do something about that immediately,’ she said. When I asked about the clothes and the check and the water drinking, she said she’d sort of hit the lottery.”

“Sort of?”

“A man, of course. A rich one,” Giorgio said. “He’d come looking for her and had a proposition. He claimed to be a large shareholder in several media companies and had an idea for a project. The project was based on the whole Hollow Girl phenomenon of the late ’90s and there would be a big part in it for her, but he needed access to Siobhan Bracken. He told Millie that his attempts to approach Siobhan directly or through that dried-up old bitch, Anna Carey, had been rebuffed. So he offered Millie a lot of money if she could insinuate herself back into Siobhan’s life. He told her to spend all the money she needed and to get whatever help she needed to get close to Siobhan.”

“Georgie!” Mama called from the top of the stairs, stomping her feet. “I need you, baby.”

“He’ll be up in a few minutes,” I shouted to her. I turned back to Brahms. “Did you ever meet this money man?”

“Never had to.”

“Did you believe there really was a project?”

“I believed his money.”

“So what was your part in all this?”

“After Millie had worked her way back into Siobhan’s good graces and her bed, I was invited in. After we’d all been together a few times, my job was to try and lure Siobhan away from Anna and to become my client. That way I’d be able to facilitate this guy getting together with Siobhan to discuss the Hollow Girl project. I told you the last time you were here that I’d tried to get her to be my client. When she refused to dump Anna, Millie told me it would be okay, that she would handle it and that I’d still get my money. But I knew it was too good to be true. Millie started using and drinking again. Then the payments slowed down. Then they stopped alto—” There was a knock at the door. “Holy shit! When did I become the most popular guy in town? Excuse me. I’ll be right back.”

Brahms got up from the kitchen table and walked to the front door. His hand was on the knob when I screamed for him to get down. He didn’t get down, but turned sideways back towards the kitchen, his hand still on the knob. “What?”

That’s when the holes appeared, one after the other, in the front door—splinters flying everywhere. Puffs of sawdust and plaster dust filled the air. Giorgio let out a sickening cry and thudded to the little oriental rug in the hallway. Mama was shrieking with panic at the top of the stairs. I headed for Giorgio at full speed, which, at my age, was only slightly faster than standing still. I raised my .38 to fire through the door, but stopped myself. I realized that if I missed I might hit a passerby or someone in a house across the street. Worse, if I hit and killed the shooter, we might never find Siobhan alive. I got to Brahms pretty quickly, just in time to hear feet scuttling down the steps and the screeching of car tires. There wasn’t a lot of blood, but Brahms was holding his hands up over his face. I yelled up to Mama to call 911 while pulling Giorgio’s hands away. I nearly passed out when I saw the needle-like sliver of wood sticking three inches out of the corner of his right eye.

“It’s not in your eye itself,” I told him. ”You’ll be fine. When the cops get here, leave me out of it or say I was someone else. Siobhan’s life might depend on it.”

I stood, opened the front door, and ran for my car.

I had a rough timeline and the half-exposed face of a girl in a photograph. I hoped that was enough. It had to be. My guess was that the photograph girl’s death was connected to the Hollow Girl’s suicide post. I knew there was someone out there with a lot of money to throw around, but was the dead girl his girlfriend, his friend, his sister, his daughter, or his niece? Maybe the photo was an old picture of his wife or mother as a girl. Whoever she was, she had an angry angel out there willing to kill to get his revenge. That told me a lot about him. He was used to getting his way. I guess most people with a lot of money are used to that. Nancy and Julian Cantor certainly were. Maybe that’s why he wanted revenge in the first place, because the universe had dared defy him; it had taken away something he treasured. And I couldn’t forget that it was important that he do this thing himself and not hire proxies to do it for him. It wasn’t enough to kill the Hollow Girl. It wasn’t enough for him to do it. He had to be seen to do it.

What was the old saying? It isn’t enough for justice to be done. It has to be seen to be done.

I counted backwards from Millie McCumber’s reappearance at Giorgio Brahms’s door in March.

He said she’d looked fit, tanned, and healthy. And given how Giorgio had described her when she’d left him the year before, I figured it would have taken at least three or four months to clean her up and get her healthy. That took me back to November or December of 2012. Regardless of how many resources and how much money he had at his disposal, it would take time to find a junkie on the run, even a semi-famous one. I counted back three months more. That put me in July or August. And I figured that in spite of all this guy’s planning and apparent lust for revenge, it took him some time to make the decision to turn his dream into murder. It’s one thing to plan to take a life. It’s something very different to take one. So I counted back another month. That left me at May or June of 2012.

What I had was a girl—at least, she was a girl when the photo was taken—or a woman dying in the spring of 2012, somehow connected to the Hollow Girl’s late-’90s posts. She was probably, but not definitely, from a wealthy family. Suddenly, it felt like all my figuring didn’t add up to much. Before I started my computer search, I checked out the background material Devo had sent that had sat unread in my inbox. There was nothing there I hadn’t expected. Both Millie McCumber and Anthony Rizzo had too much money in their bank accounts; Michael Dillman and Giorgio Brahms, not enough. That was all moot except for old Giorgio. At least he was still alive, though a bit worse for wear.

* * *

The phone was ringing in my head, and then in my condo. I’d been in that disoriented, groggy middle world between sleeping and wakefulness when I startled.
What day is it? What time is it? Where am I supposed to be? What am I supposed to be doing?
For the first few seconds, the only thing I was certain of was the ringing phone. Shaking the sleep out of my head, I looked at the clock and saw that it was nearly 4:00
A.M
. I grabbed the phone.