Free The Hollow Girl by Reed Farrel Coleman

place?”
    “Once, yeah. I needed the extra scratch, you know? He owns a brownstone in Hell’s Kitchen somewheres.”
    “Text me the address too.”
    After another drink, Anthony fed me the basics, the more mundane stuff that any doorman who wasn’t sleeping with one of his tenants would have known. The last time he’d seen Siobhan in either his capacity as a doorman or paid lover was at the very end of August.
    “She was goin’ on one of her trips, you know, probably international because the cab I hailed for her was takin’ her to JFK, not LaGuardia or Newark.”
    “Any idea where?”
    “Nah, she didn’t discuss shit with me. When she saw me outside of the bedroom, she treated me like the hired help … worse, maybe. But she used to go on a lotta trips.”
    “For how long?”
    “Most of the time, a week, ten days maybe; two weeks max.”
    “So she’s been gone a long time, then?”
    He nodded. “Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, it’s been a while, you know?”
    “How long has Millie been staying in Siobhan’s apartment?”
    “A month maybe. She’d been around a lot lately.”
    “When did Millie first start coming around?”
    Anthony thought about that for a minute, rubbing his forehead as he did. “A couple of months. I think Siobhan introduced me to her in May. Told me Millie had keys and that I should let her in and to treat Millie the way I treated her.”
    “How long have you had your little arrangement with Siobhan?”
    “A year, maybe. We’d do it about once a month, like when she needed it bad, but since Millie showed up, I been in 5E a lot, you know. Even after Siobhan split for wherever, I was up with Millie a few times. She was a generous bitch, man, and she could really fuck,” Anthony said, pumping his fist. “She was the best I ever had. Too bad about her, huh?”
    I wasn’t sure if Rizzo was more upset by the loss of future income, or by the thought he was never going to sleep with Millie again.
    “So if you’d been servicing her a lot, weren’t you curious when she stopped calling?”
    “Hey, I ain’t a 7-Eleven, man. I don’t work there seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. I figured the bitch split, like Siobhan. People in that building come and go without telling me shit.” He looked at his watch. “Can I get outta here now?”
    “Soon, Anthony. In a minute. Just one more question.”
    “Fine.”
    “Did you have any idea of who Siobhan and Millie were?”
    “What the fuck does that mean, who they were? One was a hard-up bitch with a lot of money who liked to get fucked hard, for whatever reason. And the other was a drunken whore who loved cock and pussy more than anybody I ever met, you know?”
    I handed him two more twenties, reminded him to text me Giorgio’s contact info, and told him I’d be in touch if I needed anything else. He didn’t look pleased for someone who’d just drank about eighty dollars’ worth of free vodka and who’d made almost two hundred bucks cash in the last hour and a half. I suppose he preferred making his money the old-fashioned way: hustling for it and working for tips. I guess I didn’t blame him for resenting me. No one likes having a hammer held over his head, and the hammer I was holding over Anthony’s was a heavy one. But leverage is a funny thing and much harder to use than people would expect. I learned that lesson a long time ago at the hands of Brighton Beach’s mob boss, a guy we called Tony Pizza. It was a lesson I have never forgotten.

CHAPTER TWELVE
    I thought about killing time until I received Anthony Rizzo’s texts about the mysterious Giorgio, but chose to play a hunch instead. Giorgio, I figured, could wait until tomorrow. So when I walked out of Grogan’s, I turned north, then west. I’d decided to go sniff around Kid Charlemagne’s on 2nd Avenue and 7th Street. Kid Charlemagne’s, like Grogan’s Clover, was one of those Manhattan meta creations—a theme restaurant as Venus Flytrap—a place created by