Songs of Innocence

Chapter 27

I stripped off my jacket. The back was coated with blood, most of it his, some mine. My back hurt badly, though the tight bandages had contained the worst of it.

I folded the jacket inside out and dropped it in the trash can at the corner. The cops would probably find it and the Post would have a field day with it, but I was past caring.

I turned my cell phone back on. I’d shut it off to conserve the battery, and because they say the phone company can pinpoint your location if you keep it on. Who knows if it’s true. I didn’t want to find out.

I tucked myself into a darkened doorway, faced away from the street, plugged one ear with a finger to deaden the traffic noises. Even after midnight, Herald Square is a roaring intersection. Susan answered after four rings. “Hello? Who...John, is that you?” She must have looked at her caller ID. The cops who were tapping her line were probably doing the same thing.

“Where we met, Susan. Where we met. You understand?”

“John—”

I closed the phone, turned it off, and started walking toward Keegan’s Brown Derby.

Technically, the Sin Factory was the first place Susan and I had seen each other. She’d been pole dancing and I’d been in the crowd, getting myself thrown out by the manager for asking too many questions. But it hadn’t been till later that night that we’d actually met, and that had been at a little pub down the block. Keegan had sold the place since then and the new owners had spiffed it up, adding a video trivia game at one end of the bar and some new track lighting. They’d kept the old name, though, I guess for fear of scaring off the old clientele. They needn’t have worried. The girls from the Sin Factory had nowhere else to go after their late-night shift ended, and the neighborhood drunks would’ve shown up no matter what you called the place.

I stayed outside now, across the street, crouched beneath the front steps of a brownstone whose side gate I’d found unlatched. The building’s windows were dark and I figured the people inside were asleep. They wouldn’t begrudge me the use of their shadows.

It took almost half an hour for Susan to show up in a cab. I waited while she paid and the car rolled off, its roof light glowing hopefully. Susan pulled the front door open and I watched through the windows as she looked for me, scanning the place table by table. Suddenly she stopped and pawed at her handbag, opened it, dug for her cell phone, got it up to her ear. I spoke into mine: “Across the street.” Then I turned mine off again.

She headed out the front door, darted across the empty street, turned this way and that, trying to spot me. It didn’t look like she’d been followed. I came out from behind the big Rubbermaid garbage can that had been concealing me. I winced as I stood.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, keeping my voice low. “It’s just my back.”

I started walking, pulled her along with me. I didn’t feel comfortable standing in one place anymore.

“What’s happening, John? Why’d you get me down here?”

“Miklos is dead,” I said.

“How?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it matters. Did you do it?”

“No,” I said. “But I was there when it happened.”

“John, you have to give yourself up now. If the police don’t find you, Ardo will, and that’s worse.”

“Maybe you don’t want to stand so close, then,” I said.

“It’s nothing to joke about.”

“I’m not.”

“So what do you want me to do, John? Other than stand further away.”

It was a good question. But how could I give her the honest answer—that I was desperate, that my bag of tricks was empty, that Kurland’s words had rattled me: You’re on your own. I’d been on my own too long; I couldn’t keep it up much longer.

“I was hoping...I don’t know, Susan. I was just hoping you’d found something since I saw you last. Anything.”

“I didn’t,” she said. “I didn’t, John, I’m sorry. I heard back from one of the guys whose names you found—Smith. But I saw him and he’s just this random guy, completely ordinary, certainly no killer vibe. And Adams I’ve heard nothing from at all. His e-mail address seems to be working since I’m not getting bounces, but he’s not answering no matter what I send him. And believe me, I’ve sent him pictures of the biggest tits I could find.” She smiled at me, tried to coax a smile in response. I didn’t have one in me.

“Smith,” I said, grasping at straws. “Tell me about him.”

“There’s nothing to tell. He’s about 55, 56, lives downtown. I got a picture for you and an address, but John, what the hell are you going to do with it? You can’t go around questioning people when you’re wanted by the police for three murders yourself.”

“Let me see.”

She opened her bag, pulled out a folded sheet of paper, handed it to me. I carried it over to a streetlamp.

“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.