I wanted to put that knife through his chest, pin him to the back of the chair with it like an insect. I could feel it in my arm, the wanting. My palm was sweating, aching. I didn’t do it.
“How did you find out what Dorrie did for a living?” I asked.
“I told you, I went to her apartment—to her building, I should say. I didn’t ring the bell, I think I told you that too. But I didn’t leave. I waited for her. I couldn’t talk to her, I couldn’t face her. But how could I leave without seeing her?
“She came out and, Robert, I don’t have to tell you what one look at her did to me. I couldn’t let her go, couldn’t let her out of my sight. I walked behind her to the subway, got on the same car as she did, rode it to the same stop. When she got out, I got out with her, thinking at every moment, ‘Now I’ll speak to her,’ and ‘Now,’ and ‘Now’...but I never did, I just followed her till she got to where she was going and went inside.”
“Sunset?”
He nodded. “I waited outside. Why, I don’t know. Some instinct maybe. Or more likely just the thought that if I waited long enough she’d come out again. And she didn’t—but one man after another did, arriving and leaving a half hour later, or an hour, and eventually I stopped one of them and asked what that place was. In retrospect, I was lucky he didn’t beat me up, or call the cops, or think I was a cop. But he didn’t. He was a fat little guy, about my age, and he was glad to tell me, glad to let me in on his little secret, man to man. He gave me their phone number, told me to ask for Samantha, who was his favorite.”
“But you didn’t ask for Samantha, did you?”
“I didn’t do anything! Robert, I went home, I tore up the phone number, I threw it out, I got stinking drunk. I told myself to let it drop, to forget I ever saw her. But I couldn’t. How could I? She was so very beautiful. And this was no 13-year-old girl, Robert, no virgin not to be touched—she was taking money every day, five, six times a day, from little fat men old enough to be her father—”
“But they weren’t her father.”
“And so what if one of them was?” he said. He looked at me with longing in his eyes. “What possible difference could it make? She didn’t know what I looked like—she’d told me in her letter about Eva cutting me out of all their photographs. I wasn’t going to tell her. And I would be the perfect customer, on my best behavior, I’d tip generously, every dollar I could save would go to her...
“It did, you know. Whatever I didn’t spend on food and drink and rent, it went to her. I haven’t bought anything for myself in six months. I have no savings anymore. And I felt good about it. I was paying her tuition, I was helping her get ahead. Finally doing something good for her.”
“You were fucking your daughter!”
“We never had sex,” he said, with great dignity. “I’ll have you know. I asked—but she wouldn’t. She drew the line.”
I touched the knife to his throat. “Where?” I said. “Where did she draw the line?”
“Why ask me that?” he said. “You don’t want to know the answer.”
“I need to know it.”
“Please,” he said.
“Where?” I roared.
“Oral,” he said quietly. “She drew the line there.”
“You son of a bitch.”
“I never meant for her to know—”
“You bought blowjobs from your own daughter,” I said.
“So did dozens of other men—”
“They weren’t her father!”
“No,” he said.
I was crying now and so was he. The hand holding the knife was trembling and I let it sink slowly.
“But Robert,” he said, “you’ve got to believe me, I didn’t kill her. I swear to god, when I read in the paper that she was dead, my heart broke. My only daughter, the only one left in the world that I cared about, and she was gone.”
I placed the tip of the knife against his chest, beneath the sternum, held it as steady as my shaking hand allowed.
“Robert, it’s the truth! I swear, I swear, I loved her, I would have given her anything. You have to believe me. I didn’t kill her.”
“No,” I said, and I was weeping as I said it. “I did.” And I shoved the knife into him.
Chapter 30
It felt like slipping a playing card between the pages of a closed book.
His blood spilled out over my knuckles and my wrist, hot and sticky and it just kept coming. It spilled onto his lap and started spreading on the floor beneath him. The glass fell out of his hand, rolled along the carpet. His eyes got wide and he tried to speak, to say something, but no sound came out.
He died looking into my eyes. I forced myself not to look away. I couldn’t help thinking of Kurland bracing me at the train station, one hand on my chest, telling me I wasn’t a virgin anymore. It was a simple thing, crossing the line. Dorrie had done it, going from booking massage appointments to servicing them herself. Doug Harper had done it, some sunny morning in 1985, after glimpsing his daughter once too often in the yard. Now I’d done it. There was no thunder in the sky, no crash of cymbals, just blood all over my hands and a dead man in a chair. But there was a before and an after, and I was something different on either side of that line.
I found the bathroom and scrubbed my hands under the taps, turning the hot water on as high as it would go. I revolved the bar of soap between my hands till no trace of blood remained. Then I bent over the sink and threw up.
I couldn’t stop heaving. There was nothing inside me anymore, but I kept trying, choking from straining to expel something that wouldn’t come. I turned on the cold water, splashed some on my face, tried to swallow some. I couldn’t get any into my mouth, my hand was shaking so badly.
I had a headache suddenly, a full-on migraine, and I was shivering. I needed to sit down, to catch my breath, to get my racing heartbeat under control. But not here.
I exited by the front door after fumbling for a minute with the locks. On the way downstairs, I left my fingerprints everywhere—on the banister of the staircase, on the wall, on the glass of the front door.
I was less than a mile away from Carmine Street, from my home—from what had once been my home. But there would be policemen there, staking the place out, watching for me to return, waiting to take me into custody, to put me on trial. I turned east instead, started walking.
I found my way to a subway station, one of the system’s many unmanned platforms, and only once I reached the bottom of the stairs realized I had no money for a fare. There were some discarded MetroCards scattered on the ground and I picked them up one by one, slid them through the reader, hoping one might still have a single fare left on it. One did. I passed through the revolving gate and sank onto a wooden bench by the tracks.
She’d promised. We’d promised each other. If either of us ever became desperate enough to actually do the thing we’d sometimes talked about in whispers, we’d call each other. But when the time came, she hadn’t called. And then I’d found all her papers shredded, her phone bills, her photos—something she would have had no reason to do. Naturally my mind had jumped to murder. Because nothing else made sense to me.
But now—
I remembered our dinner Friday night. One week ago. We’d eaten at Shabu-Tatsu on Tenth Street. Dorrie had been excited—she was almost finished with her last chapter for Stu Kennedy. The last chapter of the family history he’d assigned her to write, her sister’s story, the one she’d written with next to no help from her mother and no help at all from her father. I’d done what I’d been able to; I’d found the man for her. If he wasn’t willing to talk to her, there was nothing else I could do.