Little Girl Lost (Hard Case Crime) (23 page)

What I thought about instead was what I would do. The sensible part of my brain was telling me to watch from the street, maybe from the doorway of one of the projects across the avenue, to follow her if she came out, but otherwise to stay where I was and not get involved. When Murco showed up, I should point the apartment out to him and then walk away.

But I had too many questions, too many things I needed to understand. I needed to face her, to look Jocelyn in the eye, to hear from her own mouth what had happened, how she could have killed someone we’d both loved.

I stopped the cab a half block early, paid and walked the rest of the way. The fire escape ladder was still down, and one of the windows in Jocelyn’s apartment was still dark. But the other window, the kitchen window, was brightly lit. My heart was pounding. There was no one coming from either direction. I took hold of the ladder, pulled myself silently up to the first rung, and started to climb.

I didn’t have the knife with me this time, but I also hadn’t closed the bedroom window all the way on my way out. There was enough room for me to get my fingertips under it and slowly raise it. The room was dark, but the light from outside was sufficient to show that the bed was still empty, the comforter pushed to one side exactly as I had left it. I stepped inside and quietly pulled the window closed. Through the bedroom door I could hear the sound of the television going in the living room. I couldn’t make out the words, but it seemed to be a news program, maybe CNN or NY1. Footsteps crossed from the living room to the kitchen. A glass was set down on the countertop, or maybe in the sink. Then I heard water running.

The TV on and water running — I wasn’t likely to have a better chance than that to open the door unnoticed. So I turned the knob carefully and drew the door back. I followed the hallway past the bathroom to the living room. The kitchen was on my right, a pair of narrow French doors flung open on either side. I crept up to the one closer to me.

She was at the sink, with her back to me. She was wearing black jeans and black canvas sneakers and a hooded grey sweatshirt with the hood draped down between her shoulders. A plate and a fork were set out to dry on a rubber tray next to the sink, and from the way her arms were moving, it looked like she was working on the glass.

“Don’t move, Jocelyn,” I said. “My name is John Blake, and I’m—”

I heard the glass slip and smash in the bottom of the sink. One of her hands leaped to her chest. “Jesus, you scared me,” she said, turning around. “You shouldn’t do that, John. Sneaking up on me like that, after all this time.”

And suddenly I was back where it all began, staring in blank confusion at a picture from the past. Because it wasn’t Jocelyn.

It was Miranda.

“How’s your head?” Miranda said. “Sorry I had to hit you so hard, but you really didn’t give me any choice. It was either that or kill you, and I really didn’t want to kill you.” She was holding a steak knife in one hand and had picked up a piece of the broken glass in the other, but when she looked at my hands and saw that they were empty, she dropped both on the rubber tray and came forward. “Don’t need those, I guess. You’re not going to hurt me, are you? Poor, sweet John. I can still hear you telling Wayne how all you wanted was for me to be alive again. It touched me. Seriously.”

She was a foot away from me. She put a hand up to my face, touched my cheek. I felt her fingertips against my skin as though from a mile away. She said, “You’re going to have to talk to me, sweetie. This isn’t going to work otherwise.”

Like one of those optical illusions where first the cubes seem to be pointing in one direction and then suddenly they’re pointing in the other, and you can’t imagine how they could ever have looked like they weren’t.

“Miranda—” The words wouldn’t come. Everything was wrong. If Miranda was here, was alive, then who... ? “Jocelyn. You killed Jocelyn.”

She shrugged. “I’d be dead now if I hadn’t.”

“And Lenz. You killed them both.”

“Look, if we’re going to have this conversation, let’s sit down.” I didn’t move. “You want to stand? Fine, John, we’ll stand.” She leaned against the refrigerator, crossed her arms over her chest.

“How could you do it?”

“Do you mean how could I or how did I? Are you disgusted with me, or just confused?”

“Both,” I said.

“It’s not so hard, baby. Really, it isn’t. You do what you have to do to get by. But you’ve learned that, too, haven’t you?”

“What happened to you?” I said, in a small voice.

“To me? What about you? All these years, I always pictured you down at NYU thinking great thoughts, reading — I don’t know, ancient Greek history or something. I figured you’d be a professor, or maybe a scientist — or, or, I don’t know, you’d go into politics, I’d turn on the news and there you’d be, running for mayor of New York. I’ll tell you, it made it easier when I was dancing in every cheap dive across the South. At least one of us was doing better, you know? I certainly didn’t picture you doing this. Working with drug dealers, breaking into people’s apartments. Chasing after strippers with blood on their hands.”

“You were going to be a doctor,” I said.

“I was going to be a lot of things.” She came forward again, gently pushed me out of the doorway so she could step through. “At least let me turn off the TV.”

I caught her arm as she passed, stepped out into the living room with her. “What,” she said, “you don’t trust me? I’m not going to do anything.” She kept her hands high as she went to the couch, picked up the remote control, and turned the TV off. “See?” She sat down. “Now you.”

I sat across from her. It was beyond comprehension. That she was here at all, that I was, that we were sitting across from each other like old friends catching up after years apart, all while Susan lay in the hospital, clinging to life, and Jocelyn lay in the morgue, half her face blown away, deliberately misidentified to the police by Lenz. On one level, it all finally made sense — the pieces fit. But on another, it made no sense at all.

“It was you dancing at the Wildman,” I said. “Not Jocelyn. Danny Matin said it was you and so did the bartender, and it wasn’t because she looked like you, it was because it
was
you.”

“Yeah, it was me.” She lit a cigarette, held the pack out to me, dropped it on the coffee table when I didn’t react. “I’m not proud of what I did there, but I did it.”

“But why did you use her name?”

“I couldn’t use mine — not to set up a robbery. And they won’t hire you in a strip club these days without seeing ID. I had an old ID of Jocelyn’s from when we were dancing together. The picture was close enough.”

Close enough. And when the burglars she’d recruited were caught and tortured and killed, and she’d needed someone to die in her place on the roof of the Sin Factory, Jocelyn had been close enough for that, too. Jocelyn, who was still in love with her, and who came running, bringing flowers no less, when Miranda had called her out of the blue offering a reconciliation. I thought about the message on the answering machine — Miranda hadn’t set herself up accidentally, she’d set Jocelyn up, very deliberately.

“How did you get Lenz to go along with it?” I asked.

“What choice did he have? He’s the one who’d told me about the buy in the first place. He shouldn’t have, but the man couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He just had to brag. And thank goodness. If he hadn’t, I’d have been working at that dive for nothing, not to mention fucking him for nothing.” She put on an expression of mock sympathy. “I’m sorry, sweetie. You didn’t think I’d been saving myself for you, did you?”

“Hardly,” I said.

“I remember the day he came home from that bar and said Khachadurian’s son had been in and had told everyone they’d caught the men who’d robbed his father. Wayne was so happy. He told me, ‘Those sons of bitches got what they deserved.’ž” She took a long drag on the cigarette. “You know what Khachadurian did to them?”

“Yes,” I said, “I know what he did.”

“Well, I had to give Wayne the bad news. I told him, ‘If we don’t do something and fast, you and I are going to be in the same boat as those sons of bitches, because I’m the one who told them about the deal, and you’re the one who told me.’ I thought he was going to have a heart attack, drop dead right there.”

She waited for me to say something, but I didn’t know what to say.

“Wayne had two choices,” she went on. “He could go to Khachadurian, explain what had happened, and beg for mercy, in which case the best he could hope for was that maybe they’d just kill him instead of cutting out his eyes first, or he could agree to help me. And let’s not forget that if he helped me, he also got half the money. And he got me. All he had to do was identify her body as mine and then let me stay at his apartment until the heat died down.”

That wasn’t quite true. He could identify Jocelyn’s body as Miranda’s, but the word of a two-time convict might not be enough for the police. And while expanding shells pumped into the back of a person’s head could do a lot to interfere with either a visual or a dental identification, they couldn’t change one person’s DNA into another’s. If the police picked up anything at Miranda’s apartment for a comparison, Miranda needed to know they’d get trace amounts of Jocelyn’s hair and skin, not hers. Even a drop-out pre-med would know that.

Meanwhile, Miranda needed to have clothing to wear while she was in hiding, but she couldn’t empty her apartment without making the police suspicious. Fortunately, there was a simple solution to both problems: the afternoon of the murder, Miranda could take Jocelyn out on the town, and while they were away from both apartments, Lenz could come down to Avenue D, fill a big, rolling suitcase with Jocelyn’s clothing, hairbrush, toothbrush, and so forth, and then go to Miranda’s apartment and swap the contents of the suitcase for the things Miranda needed. That’s how Jocelyn’s baseball cap had ended up hanging on the inside of Miranda’s door. The clothing in Miranda’s dresser had been Jocelyn’s, too, or at least the things on the top of each drawer had been. The luggage cart had never had money in it — just Jocelyn’s things on the way in and Miranda’s on the way out.

And the paper band behind the dresser? Maybe it really had fallen there by accident, and just gone unnoticed by everyone until Little Murco turned it up.

“You’re lucky,” I said. “Once everyone thought you were dead, it would have been simple for Lenz to kill you for real and just keep all the money for himself.”

“Sure,” she said, “if he’d known where the money was.”

“How could you keep it hidden while you were staying at his apartment?”

“Oh, John, come on, I’m not that stupid,” she said. “I didn’t keep it at the apartment. I put it in a safe deposit box. Or I should say Jessie Masters did, since that’s who the bank thought it was renting to.”

And that explained why she hadn’t left the city after killing Lenz — the murder had taken place on Friday night, and a bank wouldn’t let her get into her safe deposit box until Monday morning. Yes, all the pieces fit now. It had all been constructed so carefully, right from the start. I thought back to what Susan had said that first night at the Derby about how Miranda had told her in the dressing room that she was afraid that Murco was going to kill her. It was a perfect way to set the stage for her apparent death the next day. There might be some dispute later about who’d killed Miranda, but not about whether it had actually been Miranda who’d died. She’d put it all together masterfully.

“You really thought of every angle.”

“A girl’s got to take care of herself,” she said. “Jocelyn taught me that.”

A girl’s got to take care of herself — even if doing so meant killing. It had meant killing Lenz when it had looked like he might talk. It had meant killing Susan, or trying to, presumably because she was making too many calls to too many people, asking too many questions, getting too close. And now did it mean killing me? I imagined it had to, despite what she’d said about not wanting to.

“What happens now?” I said.

“You tell me, baby,” she said. “I’m not going to go to jail. Not after everything I’ve been through. And I’m certainly not going to let you hand me over to Khachadurian. I don’t want to kill you, John, I swear to God I don’t, but it’s kind of up to you, isn’t it?”

She reached between the cushions of the couch and came up with a knife. It was a simple steak knife, the same sort as the one she’d left by the sink, probably the same sort she’d used on Susan. Maybe the same one, washed clean and ready for another use. She wasn’t holding it in a threatening manner, not yet, but she was pointing it in my general direction. Her eyes had a question in them. I stood up.

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t pretend you’re giving me a choice. Do me that one favor, Miranda. Don’t treat me like you treated the others. I’m sure you told them it was up to them, too, that as long as they worked with you, you’d be on their side. That you loved them. It lasted just as long as you needed them, and then when you didn’t any more, when it was more convenient to you for them to be dead, all the sweet talk went out the window.”

“It’s not the same,” she said. “It’s not. Wayne Lenz was a disgusting man. It made me sick to touch him. And you know what Jocelyn did to me? After nine years, after I followed her across the whole goddamn country, after I gave up everything for her, she takes one look at this... at this...
woman
, and I don’t matter any more. After
nine years
, John. You can’t imagine what it’s like.” She stood up and came toward me. The knife was between us. “I’ve never had anyone, John, not since you. That’s the truth. No one I could trust.” I saw tears forming in her eyes. “You were always good to me. If you said you’d leave me alone, if you swore that you wouldn’t tell anyone, I know you’d keep your word. You’ve changed, but you haven’t changed that much.”

Now the point of the knife pressed against my shirt, and through my shirt, against my chest. “But I have to know. I can’t let you out of here otherwise. I can’t.”

I saw her in front of me, holding the knife to my chest, but I also saw her as she had been at age eighteen. Where along the way had Miranda turned into the person she was today? How had it happened? Was there any trace of my Miranda still in there somewhere? Or was there only the murderer, the betrayer, the woman who deserved the sort of punishment I’d imagined in the cab on the way downtown? I wanted to believe there was more. I wanted to desperately.