Little Girl Lost (Hard Case Crime) (7 page)

“There’s no family,” I said. “It’s for me.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Someone told me the club she was working at is owned by a man named Murco Khachadurian, and he sounds like a bit of a questionable character.”

“He’s a fucking scumbag, is what he is.”

“Yeah. Well. That’s what I was hoping you could tell me about.”

“There are two of them, Little Murco and Big Murco, the son and the father, and they’re both scumbags.”

“Connected?”

“They wish. The son’s just a thug, and the father, he’s a ‘businessman,’ which means he made some money in some legitimate racket, Armenian carpets or something, and now he’s always trying to cut himself in on deals that are bigger than he is, make a big score.”

“Drugs?”

“Drugs, some schlock, some grey market booze, whatever he can get a piece of.”

“You ever bust him?”

“He’s small potatoes. We keep an eye on him to see if he’ll lead us to someone bigger.”

“And the murder?”

“Sugarman? There were forty people in the club at midnight, girls and customers and the bartender and the janitor, and any of them could have done it.”

“Not Khachadurian?”

“He’s probably never set foot in the club.”

“I don’t mean personally.”

“Well, when we find the person who pulled the trigger, we’ll ask whether someone put him up to it.”

“What do you think?”

“What do I think? You talk about strippers, hookers, massage parlor girls, it’s almost always another girl who does it. They hate each other. ‘She used my lipstick. She took my customer. I saw her going through my locker.’ Either that or a john, some guy she rubbed the wrong way, or maybe the right way but he’s fucked up with guilt feelings about the whole thing. One or the other, that’s your killer nine times out of ten.”

“And the tenth time?”

He was silent for a moment. “How long have you been working for Leo?” he said

“Why?”

“Ask him. In this job, you don’t worry about the tenth time. When it comes it comes, but most cases it doesn’t and you don’t worry about it before you have to.”

Leo had told me. He’d told me plenty of times. All the cop wisdom this guy had, Leo had double, and he’d been pouring it in my ear since the day he plucked me out of NYU to be his part-time research assistant. I knew all about the nine times out of ten and the standard procedures and the steps the police would be taking to solve the crime. I also knew a murdered stripper wouldn’t be at the top of their priority list and that any one-off violent crime that wasn’t solved in the first forty-eight hours was likely to stay unsolved forever. Every day brought a dozen more, and there were only so many cops to go around.

I also knew that Kirby Kirsch was right, that if anything was going to work, it was probably going to be the standard procedure, and that there was no point in inventing complicated explanations for a crime that was probably very simple. I knew all this, but it didn’t do any good.

“You think I could see the body?” I said.

“You don’t want to,” he said. “Not if you used to go out with her. We’re talking chopped meat, man. There wasn’t even enough left for a good dental — we had to go to her apartment for a DNA match.”

The guy was still eating. I listened to him chew.

“Thanks for talking to me,” I said. I tried hard to keep my voice level. “I appreciate your taking the call.”

“Leo still carries some weight around here. A lot of people remember him.”

“I’ll tell him,” I said. “It’ll make his day.”

I carefully stripped off my clothes and got under the hottest shower I could stand.

When I moved in, I’d bought one of those three-speed massaging showerheads but I’d never used more than the one speed it came set on, the one that came at you like water out of a watering can. Now I turned it to the one that felt like a thousand tiny needles and let it go to work on my back. There was a fist-sized bruise on my right side, plum-colored and tender to the touch, but it was starting to go yellow at the edges and wasn’t the source of shooting pain it had been before. I’d live.

I thought about the other bruises I’d gotten over the past half decade of working for Leo, that and the threats, the fights I’d only narrowly talked my way out of, the dirt I’d dug up on people who’d wanted to keep it hidden. How had I ended up doing this for a living? Around the time Miranda had been making plans to become a doctor, what was it I thought I’d be doing? I couldn’t remember. But it wasn’t this. I did remember the day I met Leo, and the day I joined him full-time because it was either that or go to work for an Internet company and I still had some self-respect. I’d never wanted to do this for a living, but I couldn’t remember wanting to do anything else either, and after a while, it was the only thing I’d ever done.

It was a living, as Leo had said — but not like being a dentist or fixing shoes. It was more like being a stripper, I imagined. Even if you took pride in doing your job well, you ended up feeling dirty at the end of the day.

So why did I do it? I didn’t know how to do anything else, but there was another side to it as well. I did it because somebody had to. Someone had to stand up for people like Miranda. It was the sort of thought you could only entertain in the shower, or in bed when you were on the verge of falling asleep, and even then not for long. Look too closely at it and it would embarrass you. But on days when I had nothing else, it gave me a reason to keep going into the office in spite of the bruises and the people I had to deal with and the general feeling that I was pitching my tent in a sewer.

When I turned off the water, I heard my cell phone going, the vibration rattling the base of the charger against the top of my desk. I didn’t bother toweling off and walked as quickly as I could, snatching up the phone before whoever was calling could hang up.

“Mr. Blake?”

I recognized the voice. “Mr. Mastaduno. Hold on a second.” I slipped into a pair of pants and a sweatshirt I’d left draped over the chair. The last thing I needed was to catch a cold on top of everything else. “I’m back. I’m sorry about last night—”

“What happened?”

“Just some business I had to take care of. Let’s talk about your daughter.”

“What do you know about her?”

“I don’t — just that she was once the roommate of a woman named Miranda Sugarman, who was killed in New York on New Year’s Eve. I wanted to talk to Jocelyn to see if she could tell me anything about Miranda.”

“Oh.” I could hear the man deflating over the phone. “I was hoping... It’s been so long.”

“Can you tell me what happened?”

“I don’t know. I honestly just don’t know. She was at school. She was doing fine, or anyway that’s what we assumed. And then... “

“And then?”

“We got a call from the dean’s office saying she had turned in a leave-of-absence form and when we tried calling her, the phone was disconnected. We tried her roommate, but that phone was shut off, too. We called some of the other girls whose names Jocelyn had mentioned, but no one knew where she’d gone, just that she’d gone off with her roommate, this Sugarman. That was six years ago, Mr. Blake. Not one phone call since then, not a letter, not a postcard. Nothing. We figured she’d come back, here if not to school, but no. Her mother’s been sick with worry, I’ve been sick with worry — not one word.”

“Had you been close before that?”

“Close? Your own daughter, that’s as close you can get.”

“Did you ever hire anyone to try to find her?”

“Yes, after about three months. We hired Serner, because someone told us they were the best.”

“They are.”

“I might as well have thrown my money out the window. They would send these reports, pages and pages of ‘We went here,’ ‘We went there,’ ‘We talked to him,’ ‘We talked to her’ — but they didn’t find my daughter. That’s what we were paying them to do.”

“I understand.”

“Do you? Do you? It’s been six years, Mr. Blake. I don’t sleep. My wife is grey. Completely grey. My daughter’s gone. When you sent your fax... ”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to make things worse.”

“You didn’t make them worse, it’s just... We’d stopped hoping, you know?”

I wanted to say, At least your daughter’s not dead. But maybe she was, and if she wasn’t, was that necessarily better? For her certainly, but for her parents?

On the other hand, maybe knowing would be better than not knowing.

“I don’t want to get your hopes up,” I said, “since I probably won’t find anything. If Serner couldn’t, I probably can’t either. But I’ll try, and if you give me your number, I’ll call you with anything I find out.” Mastaduno gave me a Westchester number and I scrawled it down under Kirby Kirsch’s. “One other thing, could you tell me who you worked with at Serner? Maybe I can get something out of them.”

“The man we dealt with was William Battles. Do you want his phone number? I can look it up.”

Bill Battles. No, that was one phone number I didn’t need.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I know him.”

We’d lost our share of business to Serner over the years — every small agency had. When you do corporate work, you come across plenty of clients who want to use the biggest and best-known firm whether or not they’ll do the best job, and the fact is that Serner did do a good job, so it’s not even as though we could bad-mouth them with a clear conscience. And Bill Battles was a good investigator. He knew his way around every public record there was, and if you were looking to hire a mortgage trader he could tell you if the guy had ever been reprimanded back in summer camp.

But a corporate background check and a missing daughter are two very different things. There were people at Serner I’d go to if it were my daughter, and Bill Battles wasn’t one of them.

Could another investigator have done a better job? Maybe. Could we have, if Mastaduno had come to us? And if we had, might Miranda have been alive today?

You could drive yourself crazy with questions like that. They’d gone to the top firm, the firm had assigned one of their top investigators, and Jocelyn Mastaduno had stayed missing. It happened.

I left a message on Bill’s office voicemail asking him to call me. I tried to think of someone else I could call, but other than Big Murco, I was pretty well tapped out of phone numbers. I wanted to hear Susan’s voice, know that she was okay, but there was no easy way to accomplish that. I considered stopping at the Derby after hours, but my side twinged at the thought.

There was only one other thing for me to do, and I’d been putting it off. I didn’t relish going to Zen’s even when I was in full health. But I needed to find out more about Khachadurian, and if the cops couldn’t tell me anything useful, that left — Well, it left some people Leo wouldn’t have been happy to see me talking to. And Zen’s was where I would find them.

Zen was Zenobia Salva, and her bar wasn’t called Zen’s except by the people who went there. Its official name was Dormicello, which was an in-joke of sorts, since Reuben Dormicello had been Zen’s first husband, and he’d drunk himself to death. No one had ever seen Zen take a drink, but she worked the stick well enough to please her thirsty clientele. She’d have pleased her husband, too, if he’d lived to see it, but back when he was alive, she didn’t own a bar yet, didn’t own much of anything, in fact, except the clothes on her back, and she’d take those off readily enough if you had two hundred dollars you were willing to part with. I hadn’t known her then, but I’d heard the story many times over the years from people at the bar, and if it wasn’t quite the same any two times I heard it, Zen herself never seemed troubled by the inconsistencies. She had the impassive expression of someone who was beyond offending, though also the look of someone you didn’t want to push too far.

The story had it that her second husband, who died of a knife wound in the laundry at Riker’s Island while serving seven-to-ten for armed robbery, had won the bar in a poker game and willed it to her. The poker game part of the story sounded like a romantic embellishment to me, but who knows?

“You don’t look so good,” Zen said. She took a pull on a cigarette, laid it down on a saucer. “You getting enough sleep?”

“Probably not, but that’s not the problem. Someone I used to know was killed the other day. I’ve been looking into it and getting nowhere, but someone must have thought I was getting somewhere, since they sent some muscle to teach me a lesson.” I mimed a rabbit punch and got the slightest little shake of her head in response.

“You’ve got to take care of yourself, John.”

“I’m still here, aren’t I?” I said.

“You got any idea who you’re dealing with?”

“Some. That’s why I came here. Thought you might know someone who could help.”

“You know,” she said, “you can come by when you’re not working on a case, too.”

“I know.”

She looked around the room. It wasn’t packed yet, and it wouldn’t be till later in the night, but already you could see the crowds forming. The ex-cons stayed near the walls, by themselves or in pairs, watching the doors and each other. The rummies sat at the bar nursing their drinks and telling old stories about great hauls they’d only pulled off in their imaginations. A few men clustered around the pool table, trading gibes and laying down bets on the ledge of the chalkboard. There were straight patrons, too, people who walked in off the street for a beer, ignoring the blacked-out windows and lack of a sign, but there weren’t many and they generally got the feeling they weren’t welcome pretty quickly. Though not always. Once, I remembered, a Wall Street power broker in striped tie and braces had gotten into a shoving match with a scrawny Puerto Rican kid named Simon Corrina. A smarter man would have seen the look in Corrina’s eyes and stopped shoving, but then a smarter man would have taken the hint and stayed out of Zen’s to begin with. Three of us were eventually able to pull Corrina off him, but then you can pry open the jaws of a bear trap, too.

How much blood had been spilled on the floor of this bar, both before Zen took it over and since? I generally tried not to think about it, beyond the immediate problem of making sure none of mine was added to the tally.