Free The Hollow Girl by Reed Farrel Coleman Page B

chat with the mysterious Giorgio. I decided to skip both. I was beat, and a little shaky. I hadn’t been awash in alcohol for so long as to get the DTs. I didn’t black out or see rabbis dancing on pinheads, but I’d been at it long enough to know when I needed a drink and when to sleep. I found my car and aimed it at the Brooklyn Bridge.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
    One drink. That was all I had. Sleep came rather more easily than I expected. I guess working a case made me more tired than I’d expected. It had been a while. When I was sick and getting treated, I was tired all the time. Between the damned drugs and radiation, it was as if the doctors were busy trying to kill me and the cancer at the same time, and it was a toss-up to see which would outlast the other. Even after the cancer was gone, the exhaustion stayed with me as a reminder of my fragility. As if I needed reminding.
    I hadn’t dreamed, that I could recall. In the immediate wake of Pam’s death I’d dreamed all the time, none of it very pleasant. Strangely, those dreams were rarely of Pam. I didn’t picture her being crushed beneath the wheels of Holly D’Angelo’s Jeep. Nothing like that. Mostly I dreamed of Katy, my first wife, Sarah’s mom. She was the only woman I think I’d ever loved to the point of stupidity, but we’d been doomed from the start. I would dream over and over and over again of the baby Katy had miscarried in the early ’80s. Imagining I had seen the baby’s face, that it had talked to me and wagged a tiny accusatory finger at me, I’d wake up in a sweat. Regardless of how hard I tried, I could never remember its face or what it had said or sounded like. I couldn’t even remember if the lost baby had been a boy or a girl. All that stayed with me when I awoke was the translucence of the skin on the baby’s tiny finger, how I could see the blood pulsing through it.
    Showered, shaved, and coffeed up, I sat down to scan the papers. Millicent McCumber’s death wasn’t exactly front-page news. She was like a thousand actors before her—pretty, talented, full of promise and potential that came to nothing more than a footnote or afterthought. She had died not as a celebrity remembered, but as someone people
thought
they might’ve remembered. A chasm exists between those two things. There was a listing of her acting credits: a few Off-Broadway plays, Ophelia in a Shakespeare in the Park production of
Hamlet
—the role that got her noticed—plus two Broadway shows, six movies, and a five-episode run on a star-crossed prime time soap about a wealthy New England family that lost their money during the Depression.
    Although there was no explicit mention of the cause of death, an NYPD spokesperson was quoted as saying, “There is no reason to suspect foul play.” I knew the ME had a working theory about a heart attack, but given what Nancy and Anthony Rizzo had told me about Millie’s wild and addictive nature, I wasn’t so sure. I was awfully curious to see what the toxicology report would say. My curiosity would no doubt fade in the six weeks it would probably take to get those reports back. Six weeks, as I had learned during my illness, could be a lifetime.
    One thing that grabbed my attention was a statement from Millie’s agent, Giorgio Brahms. Poor Giorgio was heartsick at the loss: “We’d been through some very tough times together, but lately Millie was re-energized and we were excited to put her back out there.” It wasn’t the statement that so much caught my eye as the person who gave it. Old Giorgio didn’t know it yet, but he had an appointment with me that afternoon. There was at least one other person I wanted to see first, so I made a few phone calls as I waited for my computer to boot up.
    * * *
    Michael C. Dillman was happy to see me as long as he believed I had come to his offices at 7 Hanover Square down by Wall Street in order to enlist his assistance in diversifying my portfolio. Dillman was a fit and