“Please, John,” she said, “let me arrange something, a way for you to get yourself into police custody. I can make sure they treat you properly, that you’ve got the best representation...” She kept talking, saying something, but I wasn’t hearing a word of it. Because I’d unfolded the paper and seen the photograph on it, the picture of James Smith.
“Oh, no,” I said.
Chapter 28
I’ve felt colder in my life, and I’ve felt weaker, but not often; and I don’t think I’ve ever felt worse. I could feel my guts hardening, turning to stone inside me. The knife wound in my back burned like there was acid in it. I felt rancid.
I crumpled the photograph and stuffed it in my pocket. My hands were shaking.
“Susan,” I whispered, “what’s Eva Burke’s phone number? Her home number?”
“Why?”
“Just give it to me.”
She opened her phone, read it off. I keyed it into mine.
“Why?” she said again.
I didn’t answer. I could hear the phone ringing on the other end. It was one in the morning; she would be asleep. Well, that was too bad.
“What’s wrong?” Susan said. “Do you recognize him? Who is he?”
A sleepy voice picked up. I didn’t wait for her to finish her sluggish hello. “Mrs. Burke, this is John Blake. John Blake. Yes. I’m here with Susan. I need to ask you a question.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. She was awake now—she just wasn’t saying anything. She was waiting for the question, the way aristocrats during the Terror waited for the guillotine blade.
“Mrs. Burke,” I said, “how did your other daughter die?”
In college I was an English major. I’d never considered working as a detective. Who would? But Leo had posted a job in the NYU Career Development office and I’d seen it and we’d met over coffee to discuss it.
“You want to know what it’s like?” Leo had said to me, clearly hoping to scare me off if I was considering the job for the wrong reasons. He’d had one assistant before me and it hadn’t worked out. “It’s like this. You work like a bastard for days and days and nothing makes any sense. You’re lost, you’re confused, you’ve got no answers and you’re wasting your client’s money. You’re a fraud, you’ve always been a fraud, and no one in his right mind would hire you to find Times Square on a map or add two plus two. Then one day, you think of something. Or you see something. Or someone tells you something. And suddenly, everything that didn’t make sense does. Only here’s the thing: nine times out of ten, you wish it didn’t. You wish you were a fraud again. Because the things people hire us to figure out are the ugliest fucking things in the world.”
I’d nodded, kept my mouth shut, and taken the job. I’d needed the money.
But Leo had been right, and more than once I’d wished I’d listened to him and walked away while I could.
Until finally I did walk away.
But obviously I hadn’t walked far enough.
“Mrs. Burke?”
“What is this?” she said. “What does this have to do with Dorothy?”
“Just answer the question: How did Catherine die?”
The words came slowly. “She was very sick. We took her to the hospital and they said she had...I don’t know, some long Latin name, I couldn’t tell you what it was. But she got worse. They put her on antibiotics, said it would help, and then two days later, she was dead. They said it was sepsis that killed her.”
“Did they say what caused the sepsis?”
There was a long silence.
“We knew what caused the sepsis,” Eva Burke said.
How much had I been able to find out about Catherine Marie Burke? Very little.
I’d tried—Dorrie had decided to write about her for Stu Kennedy’s assignment, and I’d decided she needed help. She hadn’t asked me to help; I’d offered, and when she’d been reluctant, I’d insisted. It was a sort of atavistic machismo: If I’d been a carpenter I’d have insisted at some point on making her a cabinet; if I’d been a plumber maybe I’d have put in new pipes over her protests. But I didn’t know how to do those things. What I knew how to do was find people and information. And when I saw her frustrated by her mother’s unwillingness to talk to her about her sister, I’d gone to work. What’s the use of sharing your bed with a former private investigator if you couldn’t lean on him for something like this?
Except that I’d come up empty. The girl was fourteen when she died—not a taxpayer yet, not married, not eligible for jury duty, had never been sued or dunned or garnisheed or subpoenaed. She’d died before making a permanent mark in any of the places our society records such things. There were a few school photos I found, some chicken scratch from doctors on her hospital charts, a death certificate; precious little else.
So I’d decided to change the rules. I’d taken it on myself to track down her father, on the theory that maybe he’d be willing to tell Dorrie what her mother wouldn’t. But he hadn’t been willing to talk to her at all, and his pointed rebuff had left her more miserable than she’d been before.
I’d stopped searching then, and I could tell she was relieved that I had. To make progress on her assignment she’d resorted to making things up—judicious lying, if you will. She’d given her sister a rare form of bone cancer and her absent father a case of crippling insomnia, and who the hell knew whether either of these things were true, and it really didn’t matter.
But it was too late. Things had been set in motion. Things I might have understood sooner if I’d known how Catherine Marie Burke had died.
“She’d had a procedure,” Eva Burke said. “My husband took her to a private clinic. And she got an infection.”
“What sort of procedure?”
“She needed to have something removed,” Eva Burke said. “Like a tumor.”
“Like a tumor,” I said. “What’s like a tumor?”
Silence.
“She didn’t have a tumor,” I said. “And she didn’t have something like a tumor. Did she.” No response. “Did she.”
“Don’t you dare raise your voice to me,” Eva Burke said.
“Then tell me the truth.”
“The truth? She was fourteen years old, Blake. Fourteen goddamn years old. It was like a tumor. The kind that just keeps growing and growing. And it had to come out.”
We spoke for another minute, then I gently closed the phone, pocketed it. The stone in my gut was turning to water. Very softly I said to Susan, “Go home. Go home. Tomorrow I’ll turn myself in.”
“What did she say to you?”
I took hold of her by the shoulders, leaned close and kissed her on the forehead. The smell of her shampoo was strong. I inhaled deeply. “Go home,” I whispered. “We’ll deal with it tomorrow.”
“I’m not leaving till you tell me.”
I stepped out into the street, into the path of an oncoming taxi. It screeched to a halt inches away from me. Mr. Lucky.
I pulled the rear door open, got inside, waited for Susan to join me. “Two stops,” I told the driver when she did. “First is 60th and Madison, then we’ll go uptown to the park.” He turned the meter on and drove off.
“I’ll need to ask you to pay for this, Susan,” I said. “I have no money. I’m sorry.”
“That’s fine, John,” she said, digging out her wallet. She pressed a handful of bills on me. I took a twenty, made her take the rest back. “But tell me what Mrs. Burke said.”
“She didn’t say anything. Nothing at all.”
“That’s not true,” Susan said.