Little Girl Lost (Hard Case Crime) (12 page)

I heard someone pick up and Roy took the phone. He was still holding tight to the front of my jacket with one huge fist.

“Mr. Khachadurian? This is Roy from the club. Yes. I’m with John Blake, he says you — Yes, in his apartment. Wayne did. Because he’s sticking his nose — He’s hanging around the club, he’s bothering the girls — No, I haven’t. Yes. Yes. Yes, I understand.” He slammed the phone down.

He pulled me close again. “You’re one lucky son of a bitch,” he said. He shoved me back and my knees buckled against the bed. I went sprawling. Then he was standing above me, blocking what little light came in through the window. I didn’t see his fist come down, but I felt it as he buried it deep in my belly.

“Murco,” I croaked.

“I don’t work for Murco,” he hissed. “I work for Wayne Lenz.” An uppercut slammed against the underside of my chin, snapping my head back against the mattress. “That’s first of all. Second, I don’t like getting sprayed in the eyes.” One more punch, this one aimed at my groin. I turned and caught it on my hip.

“He’ll kill... he’ll kill you.” I could barely get the words out.

“Well, now, that’s third,” he said, and I could hear the satisfaction in his voice. “The man said don’t do any permanent damage. Didn’t say don’t hit you.” The next blow caught me on the side of the head. After that, I didn’t feel the rest, just heard them as they landed.

Eventually he got tired of the game. “Lucky son of a bitch,” he said again.

He walked out, slammed the door behind him.

The window was still open, letting the cold air in. I rolled to the edge of the bed, got my feet under me, limped over to the window, and pulled it shut. Though I knew it wouldn’t do much good. This apartment was too insecure and getting a little too well known.

Moving slowly, I stuffed a duffel bag with an armful of clothes, slung it over my shoulder, grabbed the Serner files and my notebook, and made my way down to the street. There were no cabs, so I started walking.

The streets were dark and empty, and the few people I saw left me alone. Bit by bit I made my way to Ninth Street.

The heated lobby was a balm at first, warming my stiff fingers and cold face, but by the time I got to the fourteenth floor the protective numbness the cold had provided had worn off and I felt sore in every part of my body. I don’t have a lot of padding and, like most people, have never learned the right way to take a beating. Some of the worst of it had been absorbed by the mattress, thank God, but the rest of it had been absorbed by me, and I could still feel every spot his fists had landed. I leaned against the wall and put all my effort into pressing the doorbell. I felt like an old man.

My mother let me in. I must have looked pretty bad, because her hand flew to her mouth when she opened the door. Behind her on the living room couch, I saw Leo. Of course he’d come here, I realized belatedly — he’d had to drop off Susan’s things.

“Sorry, Leo,” I said. “I lost your gun.”

“What happened?”

I tried to shrug, but it hurt too much. “Too much,” I said. “I’ll tell you in the morning. You get her stuff?”

He pointed to two suitcases next to the couch. “No problem. I didn’t see anyone watching the room.”

“No, you wouldn’t have. They were all at my place.”

I heard a toilet flush and a moment later Susan came in. Her hand flew to her mouth, too. “My God, John, what happened?”

“I’m okay,” I said, but she stood there wanting more. “Just had a nice little meeting with the Murcos, pere and fils—”

“They did this to you?” she said.

“No, they were perfect gentlemen. Though they were the ones who took your gun, Leo.”

“That’s all right,” he said, but I could see he was seething.

“Then,” I said, “after they left, I had a nice little visit from Roy. Been nicer if I’d still had the gun. But I’m here.”

Leo cleared a place for me on the couch and I lay down.

“Anything else you want to tell us?” Leo said.

“No,” I said. “Yes. He didn’t do it. Murco. He didn’t kill Miranda. Someone set it up to look like he did, and he would have, but he didn’t.”

“Johnny, you’re not making sense.”

“Tomorrow,” I said. I’d never realized my mother’s couch was this comfortable. My eyes were closing. Someone kissed my forehead. Probably wasn’t Leo.

Under the spinning lights, Miranda was dancing. Her face was the face from the newspaper, from the yearbook, and she was dressed in her graduation gown and mortarboard cap, but she was on a stage between two brass poles, and as I watched she threw the cap to the crowd and started unzipping the front of the gown. The stools on either side of me were packed and behind me men were cheering, clapping rhythmically to the beat of the music. Across the stage from me one man made a bullhorn of his hands and started shouting,
Take it off! Take it off!
until the chant spread, and now the room was echoing with the words and the sound of pounding palms. The zipper went down, down, and the V-shaped split in the gown spread, showing nothing under it but skin. Her breasts spilled out, enormous and surgically sculpted, and the men roared their approval. She shrugged the gown off and danced up to me, dropped to her knees in front of me, lifted her breasts to me with one arm and cupped the back of my head with the other. She was pressing my head forward, and behind me someone clapped me on the back and urged me on. Then her breasts were in my face, soft under my cheeks, and her skin smelled like I remembered. With her arm around my head, the sound was blocked — I could still hear it, but only from very far away. And from much closer I heard her voice, her soft voice saying, “Don’t let me go, John, please, don’t let me go... ”

When I woke up, my shoes and socks were off and there was a blanket over me. My mother’s bedroom door was closed and so was mine. Leo was gone, maybe back to Jersey, maybe just to the office. I wasn’t the only one who occasionally spent the night on a couch, though I seemed to be doing an unusual amount of it lately.

Standing up wasn’t as bad as I feared, though I’d never heard my legs or back crack so loudly. I dragged my duffel bag into the bathroom, stripped off the rest of my clothes, and climbed into the tub. It was still dark outside the window, but as I lay there with the hot water pouring in and the drain open to let it out again, it slowly turned light. My left wrist hurt — I must have twisted it when I landed. My neck was bad, and so was my abdomen. But the water helped, as did lying in one spot and not moving. I flipped the lever to stop the drain and eventually turned the water off with one foot, then just lay and soaked.

I thought about what Murco had said. Was it possible that Miranda had dreamed up a million-dollar theft, had talked two poor sons of bitches into pulling it off for her, and had vanished with half the money while they were left twisting in the wind? I thought about the girl I’d known, the one who’d grown up with dreams of helping people, and I told myself yes, it was possible. Because anything’s possible. Turn on the nightly news and you’ll see that every killer was a nice young man to his neighbors, a good son to his parents, a faithful parishioner at his church. Every corporate swindler led off in cuffs had a history of donations to the Metropolitan Museum or the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation. Maybe my Miranda couldn’t have done the things Murco described, but my Miranda had vanished the day she got on the plane to New Mexico.

But
how
? There were only so many people who’d have known that Murco was about to make a big buy. The son would have known, presumably, but I didn’t see any signs of disloyalty there. Maybe Lenz, although the way Murco had talked about him, it didn’t sound like he was part of the inner circle:
You think I would have left the body there for Lenz to find? You think I’m stupid?
Certainly the sellers — whoever Murco was giving the money to would have known about the buy. But that was about it. And how would Miranda have known any of these people? She would have known Lenz, of course, from working at the Sin Factory; but would she have known any of them well enough to be in a position to hear them talking about Murco’s upcoming buy and all the cash he’d have on hand the night before?

Of course, Miranda wouldn’t necessarily have had to get that close to them — all she’d needed was to get that close to someone who knew them, or someone who knew someone who did. Maybe one of the gentlemen from Colombia had a girlfriend who worked at the club, and that girlfriend had shared some juicy gossip with Miranda about the big deal going down between her boy and Big Murco. Or maybe one of the girls Murco was using to pass the stuff on to the street-level dealers had been told she’d have some work to do soon, and she’d bragged about it to Miranda.

One way or another, though, Miranda had heard about the buy — and then, if Murco was to be believed, she’d gone to work. Either she’d raced up to the Bronx and gotten a job there in a hurry or more likely she’d gotten that job earlier, maybe had spent weeks or months cultivating some punch-drunk regulars she could talk into pulling a heist for her when the time came. When it did, she gave them Murco’s name and address, waved goodbye from the doorstep, and waited for them to return with the loot. And why had they? There is such a thing as honor among thieves — if there weren’t, no thieves would ever work together twice. But as much as I didn’t like to think about it, there was probably more to it in this case: given that she’d picked these guys up at a strip club, there was probably an element of sex involved that kept them coming back to her.

It had been a bad deal for the men. If Murco was right, once the job was finished she’d taken the money and run — although maybe ‘run’ wasn’t quite the right word, since she’d actually stayed right here in New York, God only knew why. Meanwhile, within a few weeks her two companions had been picked up, hustled back to Scarsdale, and subjected to the third degree. Or the fourth degree. Whichever degree involved losing your teeth one by one and then getting dumped in a river or a shallow grave.

In the end, they’d given her up — as much as they’d had to give, they’d given. Begging and pleading for their lives, or maybe by the end begging and pleading to be put out of their misery, they’d told Murco everything they knew. Which wasn’t much.

That left him where? He’d gotten back half the money he’d lost, and he’d gotten the people directly responsible for robbing him and beating him up — that was good. But it left the other half of the money unaccounted for, and five hundred thousand dollars wasn’t peanuts to a midlevel operator like Khachadurian. More important, it left the person behind the scheme at large, having gotten away with her crime. This Murco couldn’t tolerate. So he went hunting for her, and shortly thereafter she turned up dead on the roof of his club. But not by his hand, if you believed him.

Who, then? Well, who would have had a reason to kill her? One possibility: Someone who knew she had the money and wanted it for himself. Another: Someone who was afraid of her and what she might do to him. Which could be the same person — whoever had tipped her off about the upcoming buy might know, or at least suspect, that she now had the money; and that person would have plenty of reason to be afraid of her, knowing that if Murco succeeded in tracking Miranda down, she’d eventually break under Catch’s tender ministrations and name her source of information. Alive, Miranda was a threat. Dead, she was worth five hundred thousand dollars.

But who was this person? Catch? Lenz? One of the gentlemen from Colombia? Either that, or someone who knew one of them intimately enough to have heard him mumbling something about the buy in his sleep. Or was I forgetting something?

There was a knock on the bathroom door. “John, are you in there?” It was Susan’s voice.

I raised myself to a sitting position. “Yes. I’ll be out in a minute.”

“That’s all right, I just wanted to know if you’re okay.”

I stepped out of the tub gingerly, holding onto the towel bar for balance. “Okay might be putting it too strongly,” I said. “But at least I’m clean.”

“That’s an improvement.”

I smiled. “Hang on.” I wrapped a towel around my waist and opened the door. She was wearing a pair of men’s flannel pajamas and holding a toothbrush and a tube of Colgate in one hand. Her hair was up, her makeup was off, and she looked—

She looked irresistible. I wanted to take her in my arms and hold her. I didn’t do it, but I wanted to.

She looked me over, lingering at the old bruise over my right hip and the new ones beginning to discolor my shoulder and my left side under my arm. “Damaged goods,” I said, but it didn’t make her smile. “It’s okay. I’ve had worse.”

“God, John. Why do you do this?”

“Get beaten up? I try not to.”

“Why do you work in a job where you have to try?”

I could have given a glib response — I’d given them often enough when other people had asked the same question. But somehow it didn’t feel right this time. She was asking seriously and I owed her a serious answer. “I like to think I can do some good,” I said. “Not a lot, maybe — but some. The papers, the news channels — Miranda’s only been dead a few days and they’re already onto the next story. The police, it’s the same thing. But meanwhile, a woman was murdered. She deserved better, Susan. Even if she did the things they’re saying, she didn’t deserve to die for it.

“The way I look at it is, if I don’t do something about it, who’s going to? Now, maybe Leo’s right and I’m not going to accomplish anything, but maybe he’s wrong and I will. And if it takes me getting a few bruises to do it, well, I’m still better off than she is.” Susan didn’t say anything. “That’s all.”

She stepped into the bathroom, pulled the door closed behind her. She put one hand on either side of my face gently and stroked the hair above my ears. It hurt when I took her in my arms. I didn’t let go.

There was barely room in the bed for the two of us to lie side by side. She lay with her head on an unbruised portion of my chest and we breathed slowly, recovering. I stroked my fingertips along the back of her neck and she traced hers through the hair below my navel. Neither of us said anything.