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.