Little Girl Lost jb-1

by Richard Aleas

  “Blake, you’re in deep shit. Leo filled me in.”

  His voice had sounded familiar, and now I placed it. “Kirsch?”

  He nodded. “I don’t have jurisdiction here, but if I can tie this in with Sugarman, maybe they’ll let us take it over.”

  “Oh, you can tie it in with Sugarman all right. That I promise you.”

  Leo had followed Lyons to the bedroom and now he came back. “What a mess.” I couldn’t tell whether he was talking about the scene in the bedroom or the situation as a whole. Both, probably. “Kirby, what are the odds they’ll let you book him in Manhattan?”

  “Zero to none,” Kirsch said. “Best we can hope for is Monday morning they’ll let us move him.”

  “Monday morning?” I said.

  “Look at it this way,” Kirsch said. “You’re going to spend a weekend in jail, would you rather do it in Flushing or at Midtown South?”

  “I’d rather spend it in my own apartment,” I said, “or better yet, working on this case, which I can’t do if I’m in jail. Look at this. Look.” I bent my head forward. “How could I do that to myself?” I pulled him toward the bedroom. “Look at the rug. Someone pulled a trunk through here. If I did it, where’s the trunk?”

  Lyons’ partner was talking into a walkie-talkie the size of a hero roll. Lyons looked up from Lenz’s body. “Sir, please calm down.”

  “I’m calm. I’m just telling you you’re arresting me for something I didn’t do.”

  “If you didn’t do it, that will come out and you’ll be released. In the meantime, we’ve got you at the scene of a murder with a gun you say is the murder weapon and you’re telling us we’re going to find your prints on it. Ask the lieutenant there what would happen to us if we didn’t book you.”

  I looked to Kirsch for support and then to Leo, but both knew Lyons was right, and I knew it, too.

  “Look, Blake,” Kirsch said. “If your story checks out, maybe Monday we can get you cleared.”

  “That’s great, but in the meantime whoever did this has a chance to get away.”

  Lyons got up and took hold of my arm again. “Let us worry about that, Mr. Blake.” He steered me toward the front door.

  “Do we have to wait till Monday?” I said. “Doesn’t anyone work Saturdays?”

  “A Queens judge? On a Saturday?” Kirsch said. “That would take more pull than we’ve got.”

  Chapter 21

  Booking me took the better part of an hour, and then they took me to an infirmary where a police surgeon washed the back of my head, smeared on some antibiotic ointment, and told me I didn’t need stitches. I didn’t argue. I had bigger things to worry about than a scar on the back of my head.

  They put me in a holding cell with stacked bunks along two walls. One of the bunks was occupied by a man who was shivering. It wasn’t cold. The others were empty and I sat on the nearest one.

  I wasn’t dazed anymore, but I still felt the soreness. It was worse when I lay down, but then I couldn’t have slept anyway, not with so much to sort out.

  I’d been assuming that Lenz and Miranda had worked alone – or more precisely that they had worked with no one else other than the two burglars Miranda had recruited at the Wildman. But someone had been in Lenz’s apartment, had hidden in the bedroom when I’d knocked, and had come out swinging when I’d started pressing Lenz for answers. In principle it didn’t have to be someone who’d been in on the robbery – it could just have been a friend who’d jumped to Lenz’s defense when it looked like I might shoot him. Except that jumping to someone’s defense generally doesn’t involve leaving him dead on the floor and walking out with his stash of stolen money.

  And the timing was suspicious, too: I didn’t get attacked right away, only after Lenz had offered to split the money with me. He hadn’t been serious, just desperate – but the friend in the bedroom might have thought Lenz was serious, might at least have thought he was going to talk. This certainly suggested someone with something to hide, someone whose face had gone as pale when I’d threatened to go to Murco as Lenz’s had.

  Obviously, it had to be someone who knew about the money. Someone Lenz trusted, though he shouldn’t have. I thought immediately of Roy – Lenz had presumably been behind it each of the three times Roy came after me, and if Roy was willing to break into a man’s apartment on Lenz’s say-so, there was obviously more going on there than a simple manager/bouncer relationship. And God knows Roy would be capable of murder. But Roy wouldn’t have needed to smash me in the head with a piece of sculpture – a fist would have done fine. And Roy wouldn’t have left me alone once I was unconscious. Even if he needed me alive to take the fall for Lenz’s murder, he would have gotten in a kick or two.

  So who? If I weren’t stuck in this cell, I might be able to find out.

  “Coffee?”

  A cop stood at the bars holding a cardboard deli tray in one hand. I reached through the bars and took one of the cups.

  “Think he wants one?” The cop nodded toward my cellmate, who was still twitching in his sleep.

  “Not unless you’ve spiked it with bourbon.”

  I took the cup back to my bunk. It was barely warm. Hell, it was barely coffee. I couldn’t help comparing how the day had started and how it was ending. The smell of fresh-brewed coffee, the feel of Susan’s arms around me, her head on my chest – how had I gone from that to this cell stinking of Lysol and sweat? I had a murder charge hanging over my head, a killer slipping further away by the minute, and this cup of brown water that tasted like nothing but would probably keep me up all night if my aching head didn’t.

  I poured the coffee down the cell’s sink, left the cup on the rim, and sat down again. I’d get out. Somehow. But by the time I did, would it be too late? Would Lenz’s killer have vanished? Probably. Would I ever find out what had really happened on that rooftop on New Year’s Eve? The odds were dropping by the minute.

  Come on, Leo, I thought. You can get me out of here.

  “You’ve got a visitor.”

  It was the same cop who’d brought me the coffee the previous night, looking bleary and eager to get to the end of his shift. But he kept a firm grip on my arm as he led me out of the cell and down the long corridor to one of the station’s interview rooms.

  I figured it would be Leo, or possibly Susan, or maybe a lawyer Leo had managed to get to come in on a Saturday morning. Or maybe my mother, carrying a cake with a file baked into it. It wasn’t.

  “Good morning, Mr. Blake,” Murco said.

  He was by himself, though I imagined the son was probably not far away, maybe waiting in the car outside. He’d dressed for the occasion in a double-breasted suit with a narrow chalk stripe, a shirt with French cuffs, even a handkerchief in the pocket. Classic overcompensation, I thought. The man’s trying very hard to show he doesn’t belong in here.

  His voice didn’t suggest any discomfort, though. He spoke quietly and calmly in his hoarse whisper, periodically glancing up over my shoulder through the chicken wire-laced glass at the cop waiting on the other side of the door. “You made the morning news shows,” he said. “The papers haven’t got it yet, but by tonight they will.”

  “What are they saying?”

  “That you killed my floor manager.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Wayne was a valuable employee. Not a perfect one, but he was worth something to me. I can’t have people going around killing my employees. Unless, of course, there was a good reason for it in this case.”

  “I didn’t kill him,” I said. “I went to his apartment, but someone got behind me and knocked me out. That’s who killed him. As for whether whoever did it had a good reason, the answer is yes. Five hundred thousand good reasons.”

  “You’re saying Wayne…?”

  “Yes, I’m saying Wayne. He and Miranda worked together to set you up, and then when it looked like you might identify Miranda, he killed her to keep her from talking.”

  “That’s hard for me to bel
ieve,” he said. “The man had worked for me for years.”

  “That’s probably why he was able to get away with it.”

  “And who is it you’re saying killed him?”

  “Not me. That’s all I know.”

  “And the money?”

  “Gone,” I said. “Whoever killed Lenz has it, presumably, but I’m damned if I know who that is. And as long as I’m locked up in here, I can’t find out.”

  He leaned forward and spoke even more softly than he had until now. “Mr. Blake,” he said, “if you weren’t locked up in here, would you be able to find my money and the person who took it?”

  “If I weren’t locked up in here, I could do lots of things,” I said. “But I’m being held on a charge of murder.”

  “If it’s true that you didn’t do it,” he said, “and it’s just a matter of their releasing you sooner rather than later… ” He spread his hands, palms up, as though there were a simple answer to it all. “The police will listen to reason when you talk to them the right way,” he said.

  “I tried.”

  “Then you didn’t do it the right way.”

  “Are you saying you can-”

  “Let’s not talk about what I can do,” he said. “What I want to know is what you can do.”

  Could I give him what he wanted? Maybe. But saying “maybe” wouldn’t get me out of jail. “Yes,” I said. “I think I can do it.”

  “You’d better do more than think, Mr. Blake. If I do this for you and you don’t come through for me… ”

  Could he really get me out? He seemed confident of it – and given that he’d managed to keep himself out of prison all these years, maybe he had reason for his confidence. I thought about Kirsch’s explanation for why they had never booked Murco: he was small potatoes and maybe he’d lead them to someone bigger. Sure, that could be. But maybe this small-potatoes gangster was also making installment payments to the Stan Kirsch Memorial Fund. And maybe he knew the right palms to cross in Queens, too.

  Of course, if I accepted this favor and then wasn’t able to deliver, I’d wish I was back in my cell with nothing to complain about but bad coffee. But the alternative was worse: sitting in jail while maybe my last chance to find out what had happened to Miranda evaporated.

  “Do it,” I said.

  Whatever Murco did, it worked quickly: I found myself on the steps of the precinct house in less time than it had taken for them to book me in the first place. The cop who gave me back my belt and shoelaces was one I hadn’t seen before and he gave me a warning about not leaving town while I was still a material witness in a homicide investigation. I told him I wouldn’t dream of it.

  An hour later, I climbed out of the train station on Eighteenth Street. I’d tried calling Leo from the train, but couldn’t get a clear signal long enough to complete the call; I tried again now and got him.

  “Where are you?”

  “On my way to the office. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “How did you-”

  “Long story.”

  “I’ve been making calls all morning,” he said. “But I didn’t think I’d gotten anyone to pay attention.”

  “I got some help from Murco.”

  “From Murco? Johnny, you don’t want his kind of help.”

  “What I don’t want is to be in jail,” I said. “And what he’s asking for in return happens to be something I want to do anyway.”

  “Now it is. What about when he asks for something you don’t want to do?”

  “I’ll deal with that then.” I hung up as I turned onto our street and whipped out my keys to unlock the door, but Leo beat me to the punch. He looked worse than I did, haggard and rumpled, as though he’d slept in his clothes, if he’d slept at all.

  He led me inside and handed me a FedEx package marked for Saturday delivery. “This came this morning. Susan told me you were expecting it.”

  I looked at the return address: Jacksonville, Florida. This had to be Mo Levy’s reluctant contribution. I tore the package open and took out the unlabeled videocassette that was the only thing it contained. Would it be worth watching, I wondered, especially now, when there was so much else I needed to do? What good could it do me to see Miranda and Jocelyn dancing in a video shot three years ago and a thousand miles away?

  I almost put it down – I wanted to. But in the end that’s what decided it for me. I didn’t want to watch the tape because of what I was afraid I might see, and that was a bad reason. I slipped the tape into our VCR, powered up the TV set above it, and pressed Play.

  After a minute of snow, a picture jumped into focus. The camerawork was steady, though not otherwise of high quality. I figured Levy had probably hidden a security camera in a light fixture, trained it on the stage, and left it at that. The sound was tinny – I could hear the high notes of the music, but the bass was missing. Of course, sound wasn’t what Mo Levy had been most interested in capturing.

  Miranda and Jocelyn were already on stage when the video started. They were wearing matching gowns, one red, the other green. They had played up their resemblance to each other with identical haircuts, identical makeup, mirror image moves as they strutted away from each other and back. They moved with self-confidence and the crowd responded. I sat down on the couch, forced myself to keep watching.

  They started by playing to the crowd, dancing up to the edge of the stage and back again, bending forward to show lots of cleavage. Then they came together and began working on each other. I watched Miranda stroke Jocelyn’s hair, run her fingers along her arms, embrace her from behind. Then they switched, and it was Jocelyn working on Miranda from behind, easing the straps off Miranda’s shoulders, peeling the dress away from the lace bra underneath, pulling it down over her hips, holding it while Miranda stepped out. Then it was Miranda’s turn, the same moves, till Jocelyn, too, was wearing nothing but heels, a t-back thong, and a push-up bra.

  I realized then that they even had the same figure – and why not? They’d probably gone to the same doctor for the surgery, had deliberately told him to give them both the same breasts. It was all part of the act. It was startling how much they managed to looked like each other.

  And they were both beautiful. No grotesque caricatures here, no vulgar exaggerations of the female body, just two young women with toned physiques and beautiful faces and more talent for movement than you usually saw on a strip club stage. Or was I just imagining it, trying to paint what I was seeing in the best light I could? The truth was, I couldn’t make out all that much. The footage was grainy, the lighting poor. The camera was far enough from the stage that details got lost. As they danced faster and faster, intertwined in each other’s arms, I couldn’t always keep track of which one was which.

  But when they stopped and stood still, caressing each other slowly – then I could tell, then I could see their faces clearly. Miranda was in front. Jocelyn stood behind her, reaching around to slip the clasp of her bra, while Miranda held her pose, hands locked behind her head. And as she stared straight out over the heads of the crowd, straight at the lens of the hidden camera, as Jocelyn opened the bra and pulled the patterned silk away from her breasts and the buzz from the crowd grew louder, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Miranda was looking out at me, trying to speak to me, begging for my help.

  They changed places. Now it was Miranda’s hands on Jocelyn’s breasts, baring them for the crowd, and it was Jocelyn looking out at me, staring, as if to say She’s mine now, not yours. Not any more. Not ever again.

  They danced apart and together again, as they had at the start, only now with the room’s lights streaking across their bare flesh. They each dropped to their knees one last time, each hooking her thumbs under the strips of fabric at the other’s hips, and then even the g-strings were gone. They were in each other’s arms now, embracing, kissing each other deeply, and they kept it up until the song finally ended.

  They ran offstage while the audience was still cheering, only to be pulled back on a
moment later by a man in jeans and a red “Mo’s” T-shirt. He had a handheld microphone in one hand and Jocelyn’s arm in the other – or was it Miranda’s? No, Jocelyn’s. He stood between the women, a head shorter than they were, an ugly man grinning lecherously and shouting into his mike, “They’re really something, aren’t they? Aren’t they? I said, aren’t they? ” The crowd roared louder each time he repeated it.

  “Then let’s hear it for them! Put your hands together – no, not you, mister, you’d better wipe yours first.” Laughter. “Put your hands together for our favorite twins, Randy-”

  He raised Miranda’s arm over her head like a boxing champion, then turned to the other side and raised Jocelyn’s.

  “-and Jessie!”

  The crowd went wild.

  Chapter 22

  Randy and Jessie. Our favorite twins.

  Why hadn’t I seen it? Goddamn it, why? Miranda had danced under the name Randy; Jocelyn had been Jessie. If Miranda had kept using the same name after they had split up, why wouldn’t Jocelyn?

  But if she had If she had, it meant Miranda hadn’t been the one dancing at the Wildman, the one Matin and the bartender thought they’d recognized from the photo in the paper. It had been Jocelyn. Jocelyn Mastaduno, missing for six years, had been in New York after all, living a stripper’s life just a two-hour commute away from her grieving parents and a few miles uptown from where her former partner was dancing.

  How had Jocelyn hooked up with Wayne Lenz? God only knew. Maybe she’d danced at the Sin Factory once; maybe Miranda had introduced them. But they’d hooked up somehow, and between the two of them, Lenz and Jocelyn had come up with the plan. It had been Jocelyn who had recruited the burglars, Jocelyn who had walked away with half of Murco’s money – and then Jocelyn who had turned to murder to keep it when the burglars were caught and gave her up. Because all the burglars had given – all they could give – was a physical description, and all Jocelyn needed to supply to take the heat off her was a body that matched that description.