Not in his narrow, lined face, not in his slight build, his lank, flat hair. He was dark where she’d been pale, wiry where she’d been voluptuous. But his eyes were soft and deep, like Dorrie’s, and troubled and sad like hers, too.
“Robert,” he said, and stopped. He turned to face me, looked up at me with a mixture of embarrassment and defiance. “Twenty-one years ago, Robert, I lost my other daughter, my older daughter. Catherine.” He nodded toward the other grave. “A short time after that I lost my wife, my family. After that, my job. Now I’ve lost my younger daughter. And there’s not a person on earth I can talk to about it.” He smiled at me apologetically. He had bad teeth. “Would you come have a drink with me, Robert? If you don’t mind listening to an old man whine about how unfair life is?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll have a drink with you.”
We followed the gentle curve of the walkway down to the cemetery’s front gate. Doug led me slowly down Front Street and then along West Wingohocking. That’s how you know you’re not in New York City anymore—the streets have names like “West Wingohocking.” He made an abrupt turn onto North Bodine and climbed the four steps it took to reach the front door of a pub whose only sign said PUB.
The windows were dirty, and the light filtering through them cast pale brownish shadows on the walls and the high-backed chairs at the bar. Doug pulled one of the chairs out, climbed up into it, and ordered a rum and coke. I took the seat next to his, asked the bartender to get me a beer.
“What kind?” the bartender said, and I almost replied, Dreher. Sumting Hongeiryen.
“Whatever you’ve got,” I said, and watched him pop the cap off a bottle of Budweiser.
Doug took a long drink, swallowing till the glass was drained and the ice clicked against his teeth. “Give me another,” he told the bartender.
Off to one side a small television set was showing CNN, the crawl at the bottom of the screen telling us something about troop escalations in the Middle East. The sound was turned down but you could still hear them chattering.
“When was the last time you saw Dorrie?” I asked. I wasn’t deliberately being cruel, or anyway that’s what I told myself. It’s a question a stranger would have asked.
He shrugged, didn’t answer. “That’s what she called herself? Dorrie?”
“Yes.”
“She wrote to me once,” he said. “Maybe six months ago. A long letter. What she’d been doing, how she’d been taking classes at Columbia. Even included a picture of herself. My god, she was...lovely. It was like seeing Catherine, only grown up.” He took a mouthful of his drink, held it, swallowed. “She signed the letter ‘Your daughter, Dorothy.’ I guess she thought I wouldn’t know who it was if she’d signed it ‘Dorrie.’ ”
“You opened it?” I said. “The letter?”
He looked at me strangely. “Of course I did. Why?”
“She showed me that letter. It came back unread.”
He closed his eyes. “No. No. Not unread.”
“It said ‘refused.’ ”
“Right. Refused,” he said. “I did refuse it. But I opened it first. ‘Dorothy Burke’ on the envelope, how could I not open it? Burke’s her mother’s name. She took it back when she got rid of me.”
“But if you opened the letter—”
“I did it carefully, so I could seal it up again, drop it back in the mailbox.”
“Why? Why would you do that?”
He seemed at a loss for an answer—his mouth opened, but nothing came out. Finally he said, “I’d ruined her sister’s life, her mother’s life, my own. I didn’t want to ruin hers.”
“Do you understand how that made her feel?” I said. “Her own father, she finally finds you after all this time, sends you a letter, and not only won’t you meet her or talk to her, you send her letter back—”
“I couldn’t meet her. I couldn’t. Sending that photo back was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But I, I...” He wound down, came slowly to a halt. “I’m not a good father. She was better off without me.”
“Probably,” I said, thinking maybe I’d stepped over the line to deliberate cruelty now. Dorrie wouldn’t have wanted that. I stopped talking, drank my beer.
“I went to her apartment once,” he said. “Went to the address that had been on the envelope, all the way uptown. I got as far as standing outside the building. I was going to push the button, say, Hello, it’s your father. I had my thumb on the button. But I couldn’t do it.”
“Why the hell not?”
“After twenty years? After all the things I’m sure Eva must have told her about me? I couldn’t face her. Not like that.”
“You should have.”
“Maybe,” he said.
His glass was empty again and the bartender filled it without being asked. On the TV, some talking heads were going on about urban violence. Hell of a topic.
“You want to hear something terrible?” he said. “I was at Cornerstone all weekend. Drying out. Too much of this stuff.” He raised his glass. “Then I walk out on Monday morning, head across Sixth Avenue to Universal News, pick up the paper, and what’s the first thing I see?” He rotated the glass slowly between his fingers, like a jeweler examining a stone for a flaw. He didn’t seem to find one.
“My daughter’s dead. There’s two days of sobriety out the window.”
I was learning more about him than I really wanted to know. So he was a drunk, and a coward, and yes, a lousy father. Dorrie had deserved better. Didn’t we all.
I took another swallow of my beer, pushed the bottle away, got to my feet. “Sorry I can’t stay, Doug. I have to get back to the city.”
He didn’t answer, and I realized that he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking past me at the TV screen. I followed his gaze.
The banner on the screen said “MANHUNT.” Above it there were two faces, the newsreader’s and, in a little box over the newsreader’s shoulder, mine. With hair. But it didn’t matter.
“The search continues,” came the low voice from the TV, “for suspected murderer John Blake, in whose Manhattan apartment police found the body of 27-year-old Jorge Garcia Ramos. The police report that Blake is now wanted in connection with a second killing as well, that of Ramos’ girlfriend, 25-year-old Candace Webb, who was found strangled to death early this morning on West 32nd Street.”
I looked over. Doug Harper glanced nervously at me and then back at the screen.
Over the newsreader’s shoulder, the photo of me had been replaced by a photo labeled “WEBB.”
It was a photo of Di.
I felt my throat constrict, my heart start to pound. Di. Strangled—and on West 32nd Street. I remembered her repeating like a mantra, the last time I’d seen her, I’m going to kill them, I’m going to kill them both. Why the hell had she actually tried to do it? I pictured her facing Miklos, his enormous hands reaching out toward her throat. She’d told me if I went up against him I’d better have a gun. Well, if she’d had one, it hadn’t been enough.
Another dead woman, I thought. Another funeral. And for what? For what?
I groped in my pocket, dropped some small bills on the bar. “That’s awful,” I said, my voice sounding weak and strange in my ears. “Someone like that on the loose.”
Doug just looked at me. I didn’t see fear in his face, or anger. Just a troubled expression, as though he didn’t know what to think.
“What?” I said, and when he didn’t answer, “What? You want to ask me something, Doug?”
He shook his head.