Songs of Innocence

Chapter 20

I rang the doorbell at the top of the steps, the steps I’d helped him up so often, sometimes giddy and stumbling myself, sometimes stone cold sober like I was right now. I’d cabbed it up to Morningside Heights, another twenty out of my pocket, and that on top of the eighty I’d forced on Sharon before I’d left. Not her fault I wasn’t the paying customer she’d been led to expect, and I didn’t want the house’s fifty percent to come out of her pocket.

I’d stayed long enough to scan the other 94 messages myself, one by one. I found it amazing how many men, when asked to supply a photo of themselves by a young woman over the Internet, responded by sending a digital snapshot of their penis. But then I’m mister vanilla, we’ve already established that.

One of the messages had come from Brian Vincent: “Cassie, I saw this piece in the Post, it looked like you—but it wasn’t, right? Hope not, girl. Don’t you ever do anything like that, understand?” None of the other addresses were ones I recognized. No sign of Mr. Adams, Mr. Lee, or Mr. Smith.

They weren’t much on my mind, though. Let Susan find them. I had Mr. Kennedy to deal with.

No one answered the door, even after I rang twice more and pounded on it with the side of my fist. It was a brownstone in a poor neighborhood; some instructors qualified for faculty housing but Stu didn’t and he couldn’t afford better than this. Two families shared the building with him, but apparently no one was home right now. I looked both ways down the empty street, saw no one coming from either direction, and rammed the door with my shoulder. I felt the impact in my chest, and it wasn’t a pleasure. But the door popped open, as I’d seen it do more than once when Stu couldn’t find or had forgotten his key. Old buildings, old doorframes, old doors. I told myself it wasn’t breaking and entering because I knew the man, which is the kind of logic that only makes sense when you badly need it to. I eased the door shut behind me, made sure the latch caught, then went to Stu’s apartment at the back of the first-floor hallway. I found his spare key where he always stashed it, under the umbrella stand in the corner. Let myself in, turned on the lights.

He was in bed, asleep, breathing heavily through his nose. A bottle of Bushmills stood half empty and uncapped on the table. Beside it, a 1970s-vintage tape recorder, a fist-sized microphone attached to it by a frayed cable. Some handwritten notes on yellow ruled paper, the line of his writing shaky and weak. He had a comforter pulled up to his chin, which was dotted with the beginnings of white stubble. I fought the momentary urge to cover his face with the extra pillow beside him, this man I’d called my friend, this man with his importunate illjudgd attentions.

“Get up,” I said. “Up. Up.” I shook him by the shoulder. His eyes popped open and I saw as recognition slowly settled into them.

“John?” His voice was thick, from sleep and drink. “What are you doing here? What happened to your hair?”

“When was the last time you saw Dorrie, Stu?”

He sat up in bed, his arms thin and pale, his chest hollow beneath his yellowed undershirt. He rubbed a palm across his cheek, eyed the whiskey bottle behind me on the table. He made a motion toward it with his head.

“Will you join me, John?”

“When did you see her last?”

He stood, unsteadily, walked to the table, tilted the bottle toward the tumbler beside it. I saw his arm shake as he raised the glass to his mouth. He wasn’t facing me when he spoke.

“You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t already know,” he said.

“It was on Saturday, wasn’t it?”

“No. No, it was on Thursday. Thursday night.”

“But not in the classroom.”

“No,” he said, “most definitely not in the classroom. How did you find out, John?”

“It wasn’t hard with you sending e-mails to every address she had.”

“Ah,” he said. He pulled out a chair at the table, sat. Put the glass down. “I suppose that was unwise. One forgets that these things are not the ephemera they appear to be.”

“What happened, Stu? What did you do to her?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I did nothing to her. And yet I did too much.”

I felt pressure building up in my chest, in my arms. I could feel my fingers trembling. “Start talking, Stu, or god help me, I’m going to hurt you. I’ve had enough. I’ve had too much. I can’t take any more.”

“John. Please calm down.”

“Did you kill her, you son of a bitch? Did you kill her?”

He creased his eyes shut. When he spoke, it was in a low murmur. “I’ve asked myself that question a thousand times. I don’t think so, John. I don’t think so.”

“What does that mean?”

He paused before answering, as if collecting his thoughts. “You know what Dorrie did for a living, John?”

“Yes.”

“Yes. Of course. How could you not, you two were so close.” He sipped at his drink, for courage. “Well, I didn’t. I just saw an advert on the machine from a young woman who sounded like good company for an old bachelor on a cold night. I pecked out an e-mail in reply—carefully, carefully, one little letter at a time. Oh, it took me forever. But these women won’t respond to a message that looks ragged or in any way distressing. They’re quite choosy—as, I suppose, they need to be.”

I pictured Stu on his computer in the office, scanning through the ads on Craigslist, finding himself tempted by several and finally responding to Dorrie’s. Was it the phrase “well educated” that had attracted him? I couldn’t see him being drawn in by “tantric masseuse.” Though who the hell could say. Before this, I wouldn’t have pictured this man hiring a massage girl at all.

“When I came to the door, she was startled to see me. And so she should have been. But no more startled than I was to see her. In her photo...she’d covered her face with a hat, John, how could I have known?”

“And your photo, Stu? What did you cover your face with?”

“Time.” He leaned over the table to where a bookcase stood against one wall. With one finger he tugged a slim volume off the shelf. Anatomy of a Youth Misspent. His second book, out of print since the year it came out. The back cover showed a young man in ascot and shades and a sleek Vandyke, trying to look awfully continental and chic in the style of the day. It had been taken before I’d been born.

“For Christ’s sake,” I said.

“It’s the best photo I have of myself.”

“It looks nothing like you!”

“Thus does vanity blunt the sharpened edge of truth,” he said. “In the words of a better writer than I.”

“Fine,” I said. “She placed an ad, you answered the ad, you met at the door, you were both mortified. What happened?”

“I invited her in, just to sit, to talk. To take the edge of the shock off. I was there in my robe, she in what I suppose were her working clothes, rather daringly cut under her coat. There was no way to disguise what we had each intended. We might have cried or laughed; she seemed willing, thank heaven, to laugh.

“We took a drink. I asked her about her work, about why she’d never used it in her writing—what a fascinating set of stories she must have had to tell. At which point, I recall, she asked me how I would feel if she told this particular story, the story of meeting me, and I allowed that I’d prefer if she didn’t.

“We had a second drink. I did, anyway. I don’t think she did. We talked some more.”

He closed his eyes again.

“The money, John. It was sitting there, out on the table. I’d left it there, for the girl to see and take. They hate having to ask for it, and I hate offering it. So I’d left it out, and it was there between us, and we’d been talking about money, John, about why she had to do this work, and it was money at the heart of it; and there was this tidy pile of twenty-dollar bills, a dozen of them, crisp bank notes, stacked before us and as good as spent already, and I pushed it toward her. ‘Take it, please,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t,’ she said. ‘You must,’ I said. ‘I can’t,’ she said, ‘I’ve done nothing to earn it.’ ”

He looked at me then with the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen. Tortured, really. But not tortured nearly enough.

“No,” I said. “You didn’t.”

“She was so beautiful, John. So beautiful. And it’s what she’d just told me she’d done with a hundred other men. Surely I wasn’t worse than all the others. I may not be young, John, and my hand may shake, but I’m still a man. I still—” His face contorted into a grimace and he began to bawl, silently, his chest heaving.

“Goddamn it,” he said, biting off the words viciously. “I was a right bastard. I gave her the money, I pushed it on her, I begged her to service me. I’d be quick, I said. Just a touch would be enough. And then she needn’t feel bad about taking my money.”

He tossed back the last of the whiskey in his glass, wiped the back of one hand across his eyes.

“She walked out, of course. Very politely. Too politely. She should have slapped me, should have thrown my money in my face. But she just said, ‘I’ll pretend you didn’t say that, Mr. Kennedy. Because in the morning you’ll wish you hadn’t.’ And she walked out. And I didn’t see her Friday. And on Saturday I sent her an apology. And on Sunday she was dead.

“But not because of me, John—I won’t believe that. Maybe she was angry with me and she had every right to be...maybe she was afraid I might retaliate in some way, though I wouldn’t have done anything, god, I’d never...but she didn’t kill herself because one old drunk made a lewd advance, or out of fear her filthy old professor might expose her secret. She didn’t. She wouldn’t.”

The last thing I felt I owed this man was comfort. But I gave it to him anyway.

“No,” I said, “she didn’t. She was murdered.”

He looked up at me with his quavering, red-rimmed stare. “Good lord, John, what are you saying? She wasn’t. Was she?”

I reached out, took hold of the bottle between us, gripped it by the neck. There was a part of me that wanted to raise the damn thing overhead, swing it down against his skull, smash it and him to bits. For what he’d done to Dorrie. For what he’d wanted to do.

He saw this in my eyes—I could tell, since I saw sudden fear in his, combined with an odd look of resignation, maybe even of relief.

It took an act of will to make myself let go.

“Yes,” I said. “She was. And I’m glad it wasn’t you that did it. I’d have killed you if you had.” I saw him flinch. “Without a moment’s hesitation, Stu. You’d be dead now, you understand? And you’d deserve it.”

It was just an impulse to be cruel, a need to lash out, to make someone else hurt the way I hurt. But I realized when I said it that it was true. Maybe I should have known before.

When I found the man responsible for Dorrie’s death, I’d kill him.

I wouldn’t be able to hold myself back.

There wasn’t will enough in me.