Little Girl Lost (Hard Case Crime) (11 page)

What else? I could change my clothes. I could take another hot shower. I could try to get some sleep, start with a fresh head tomorrow. These were all reasonable things to do, and they were all just excuses to put off what I had to do.

I dug out the cell phone number and dialed it.

His voice, when it finally came, sounded hoarse, like he’d spent the night talking in a crowded bar or the past twenty years smoking two packs a day.

“Hello, who is this?”

“Mr. Khachadurian?”

“Yes? Who is this?”

“My name is John Blake,” I said. “I’m a private investigator.”

“
Blake?
You’re calling me? How did you get this number?”

“It sounds like you know who I am,” I said. “That means you probably know I’m looking into the death of Miranda Sugarman.”

Silence. Then: “I can’t talk to you now. I’m with company. I’ll call you back.”

“Why don’t you tell them it’s a personal call and you have to take it,” I said.

“Don’t push me,” he said. “We’ll talk when I’m ready to talk.” The line was disconnected.

I put the cell phone down on my desk and watched it. Like the proverbial pot, it didn’t boil. But that was the number Khachadurian would be calling on if he did call back, since that was the number that would have shown up on his phone’s display.

I wondered what he was doing. Company, he’d said, and in the background there’d been the noise of conversations, the sound of cutlery and dishes. It could have been a dinner party in Scarsdale or a restaurant just down the block. No way to tell.

He’d known my name. Of course, all that meant is that Lenz had told him about the incident at the club, or maybe that one of the cards I’d handed out to the girls had made it back to him — but all the same it made me anxious. I had the feeling that Murco Khachadurian had been paying closer attention to me than I had realized.

The more time passed without his calling back, the more nervous I got. What if he did know where I lived? It was certainly possible. That risk was why I hadn’t brought Susan here, and it was a good reason for me not to stick around either. Maybe there hadn’t been someone waiting for me in my apartment, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t someone watching the building from the street, or that there wouldn’t be momentarily.

I grabbed the cell phone and the gun, took one last look around for anything I might be forgetting. I was locking the door behind me when the cell phone started buzzing. I pocketed my keys and flipped the phone open left-handed, holding tight to the gun in my other hand.

“I ended my dinner early for you, Mr. Blake,” he said. “Now I’m ready to talk.”

“Good.” I started down the stairs.

“I want to know everything you know about Miranda Sugarman,” he said.

“That’s funny,” I said, “I was about to say exactly the same thing.”

“Well, then, maybe we can sit down together, share some information.”

“I appreciate the invitation, but I prefer the phone. Scarsdale is a little out of my way.”

“Who said anything about Scarsdale? We’re right here, Mr. Blake.”

I rounded the corner to the last half-flight of stairs. An enormous man was standing with one foot on the lowest step and a gun held casually in his fist. Behind him, a thin man with a grey crew cut was talking into a cell phone. He saw me and flipped it closed, raised the gun in his other hand. “Put your gun down, Mr. Blake. And the phone. You won’t need them.”

Maybe in his prime Leo would have gone for the double play. Or maybe he would have turned around and run for it, back up the four floors and into the apartment, or maybe up five and out onto the roof. And maybe he’d have pulled it off. I didn’t have a chance.

I lowered the gun, put it down on the stairs, snapped my cell phone back into its holster.

The younger man came up to meet me, leaned over to snatch up my gun, and gestured me down to the foot of the stairs. He stood well over six feet and had a neck like a linebacker’s packed into a collarless shirt. It looked like he used the same grease in his hair that Lenz used. This must be Little Murco, though it had clearly been years since the nickname had fit.

Big Murco was a head shorter than his son but had the same olive coloring and a skinnier version of the same features. He looked a little like Jack Kevorkian, I thought. He held the front door open and his son prodded me in the back with his pistol. I stepped outside.

Across the street, a black four-door sedan sat with its engine running and its lights on. Had it been there before, waiting for me when I’d gotten home? I couldn’t remember. Most likely Little Murco — Catch — had been watching the building, maybe with instructions to call his dad when I showed up. Then I’d thrown a monkey wrench into things by calling him myself. If I hadn’t, would they have just kept watching, hoping I’d lead them to something — maybe to Susan — or would they eventually have come calling on me? I’d never know now.

“Where are we going?” I asked as the father followed me into the car’s back seat. Catch squeezed in behind the steering wheel.

“Nowhere. We’re just going to sit and talk. And you’re going to tell me what you’ve found out about that bitch who set me up.”

I thought back to the conversation I’d had at Zen’s. “You don’t mean the burglary, do you? I thought you got the guys who did that.”

“You see? This is a man who knows how to do his job.” He said this to his son, who was turned sideways in his seat and watching over the headrest, gun at the ready. “Yes, I mean the burglary.” He pointed to a scar running from above his right eye to his hairline. It looked recent and was about the right size to have been made with the butt of a pistol. “It’s true that I got the men who did this to me. I could show you more of what they did, but I won’t. Let’s just say those two men won’t be doing it to anyone else ever again.”

“So?”

“Those two men — they were nothing. Amateurs. They didn’t plan the job themselves. Someone else told them where to go and what to do and when to do it. It was no accident that they broke in when they did. Someone knew I’d have a lot of cash at home that night. Someone who got half the take for putting the finger on me. Someone who walked away with five hundred thousand dollars of my money.”

“You think it was Miranda?”

“I know it was.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he rasped, “they told me it was. While they could still talk.”

I thought about Catch and the cup full of teeth. I pictured the two burglars tied to chairs, the father and son working them over till they spilled everything they knew. I looked from one to the other. Would the old man have held their heads, or would he have been the one working the pliers?

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “How could Miranda have known about the money?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Blake. But I can tell when a man’s lying and when he’s telling the truth, and those two, at the end... they weren’t lying.”

No, they probably wouldn’t have been — and it didn’t sound as though Murco was, either. He believed what they’d told him, and he believed what he was telling me. But what did that mean? If it was true, it meant Miranda hadn’t just turned into a stripper — she’d turned into a thief as well. It also meant he’d had one hell of a reason to kill her. It certainly explained why Miranda had been so frightened of him.

But if he had killed her, why was he talking to me now? “You killed Miranda,” I said, “and now you can’t find the money she took from you.”

“If I’d killed her, Mr. Blake, you’d better believe I’d have gotten her to tell me where the money was first.”

“You’re saying you didn’t kill her?”

“Of course I am.”

“You realize everyone thinks you did it.”

“Everyone’s an idiot. You think I would have done it in my own club? You think I would have left the body there for Lenz to find? You think I’m stupid?”

It didn’t seem to call for an answer.

For the first time, Catch spoke. His voice was a husky baritone. “If we’d killed her,” he said, “it wouldn’t have been with two bullets to the back of the head either.” His eyes were completely dead. This was the man who’d held the pliers, I decided.

“Don’t get me wrong,” the father said, “I would have killed her, if I’d known she was the one who set me up. But I didn’t know it was Sugarman until after she was dead.”

“You said the two men you caught told you—”

“They told us the person who’d set them up for the job was a woman, a stripper named Jessie they’d met at a club in the Bronx called the Wildman. They didn’t know Jessie’s real name, just that she had blonde hair and fake tits and that she gave them my address and took her cut of the money when they returned after the job. That’s all they knew. We talked to the owner of the Wildman, but by that time Sugarman hadn’t shown up for work in weeks, and all the information they had on her in their files was wrong. You understand? She made it up. Fake name, fake address. That left me nowhere. You know how many blondes with fake tits there are in this city?

“When Sugarman was killed, my son had the idea to take the newspaper back to the club and show her picture to the owner. He said yes, it was Jessie.

“So I sent my son to Sugarman’s apartment, and he found this.” He took a strip of paper from his pocket, held it up for me to see. It was a torn money band, the sort banks wrap around stacks of bills. “It was behind the dresser.” He put it away.

“Now it’s your turn, Mr. Blake. I understand you’ve been going around, asking questions. I want to know everything you’ve learned. You see,” he said, “if you find the killer, I’ll find my money.”

What was it I saw in his eyes? They weren’t dead like his son’s, they were alive, but what was it that animated them — greed? Anger? A hunger to get back what was his? He sat leaning forward, eager to hear what I had to tell him. What I felt like telling him was that he disgusted me, that sitting in the same car with him and his son made me feel physically ill. But it wasn’t worth it. There were many disgusting men in the world, some of them worse than these two. If I wanted the man who killed Miranda, I had to save my energy for that fight.

“I might be able to help you,” I said. “I don’t know who killed her, but I’ll tell you what I do know.”

So I told it again, from the beginning, from waking up to Miranda’s face in the paper through my second run-in with Roy. I left out the trip to Zen’s — they didn’t need to know about that if they didn’t already. But there was no point in leaving Susan out of it, since either Roy had already told Lenz about the encounter we’d had or he would soon enough, and I assumed Lenz would tell Murco. All I left out was where she was staying now, and they seemed to accept it when I said I didn’t know, that we’d separated on the subway.

“Who do you think did it?” Murco said.

“I’m going to have to think about that. Until now, you were at the top of my list.”

“Was Sugarman living with anyone?” he said. “A boyfriend? A girlfriend?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about this old girlfriend, Mastaduno? What happened to her?”

“I don’t know that either,” I said. “Just that somewhere along the line she and Miranda went their separate ways.”

“You think they stayed in touch?”

“I have no idea.”

“It sounds to me like you’ve got a lot of work to do,” he said. “And you understand, it’s work I’d like to see done.” He tapped me in the chest with the gun. “Quickly.”

When it was over, I found myself back on the sidewalk across from my building, watching the sedan pull away.

For the second time this evening, I thought about taking a shower, changing my clothes — I could smell my own sweat. But I wanted to hear Leo’s voice first, know that he was okay. I called the office as I climbed the stairs to my apartment. Our answering machine picked up, so I tried dialing him at home.

“This is Leo Hauser. Leave your name at the beep—”

I hung up. Maybe he was in transit. That was the good possibility. The alternative was that Roy had been waiting for him at the hotel, had overpowered him and taken his gun away, had given him the sort of beating you couldn’t expect a man Leo’s age to survive, no matter how tough he was. I tried the office again, hung up when I heard my own voice.

I just had to wait. I unlocked the door to my apartment. I’d try him again at home in a half hour, and if that didn’t work—

One of my windows was open.

I tried to pull the door shut again, but from the side a long arm snaked around my waist and pulled me off balance. I fell to the floor and tried to roll out of the way but didn’t get far before I felt one hand grab my belt and another grab a handful of my jacket collar. Then I was off the ground and in the air. I landed on the floor on the far side of my bed, the phone charger in my pocket digging into my side. The man who’d thrown me was taking the long way around the bed. The lights were off and the door had swung shut, and in the darkness I couldn’t make out his face, but there were only two people I knew with a silhouette that massive, and one of them had just driven away with his father.

“Roy, stop.” I looked around for something I could use as a weapon. I grabbed my desk lamp and yanked the cord out of the wall, brandished it like a club. He batted it out of my hands.

“Don’t do this,” I said. He grabbed the front of my jacket and pulled me close. I could smell his breath.

“Why not, motherfucker?”

Why not.

“Murco just hired me,” I said.

“What?”

“Your boss. He was here, just a minute ago. With his son. They want me to do some work for them. Call them. You’ll see.” I couldn’t stop talking. As long as I was talking, he wasn’t hitting me. “His cell phone number’s in my pocket. Call him. He’ll be very angry if you hurt me.”

I could almost see the gears turning in his head, the enormous effort it took for him to hold himself back. But Murco’s name scared him.

“If you’re lying... ” he said. He didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t have to.

He released me with one hand and took the slip of paper from me when I dug it out of my pocket. He pulled me over to the window so he had enough light to read it. “Dial,” he said and read the number off to me. I pressed the buttons on my desk phone, held the receiver out to him.