Little Girl Lost (Hard Case Crime)

by Richard Aleas

  “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.

  Chapter 9

  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.

  “Tell me who you think it is,” Zen said, “and I’ll tell you if anyone here’s likely to know anything.”

  “Murco Khachadurian,” I said.

  “Oh, Jesus. You sure can pick them. You talking about Big Murco or Little Murco?”

  “Actually, I’m not sure. Whichever owns the Sin Factory.”

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “It’s a strip club—”

  “I know it’s a strip club. And your friend was a stripper, wasn’t she? I seem to remember reading about some poor girl getting shot there. It was in the Post.”

  “Daily News, too. Page eighteen.”

  “And how did a college boy like you come to know a Sin Factory stripper?” She waved away her own question before I could answer it. “Forget I asked. You’d think I’d have learned to mind my own fucking business after all these years. You bring out the mother hen in me.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I knew her ten years ago, when we were in school together. She was going to be a doctor. An eye doctor. You know, treat glaucoma and prescribe glasses.” Suddenly, I did feel tired, awfully tired. I was feeling the effects of the drink Leo had given me, and my bruises, and the night spent on the office couch, but even more than th
at, I was feeling the weight of the task I’d taken on, which was more than just finding Miranda’s killer, it was finding Miranda herself, finding out who she had been, and how in God’s name was I going to do that? “The day before she was killed, she told someone she expected it to happen. She said she was afraid of Murco Khachadurian. It’s the only lead I’ve got.”

  Zen bent forward, pointed to a table in the corner near the bathrooms. “See that guy there, the one with the forehead? Blue shirt, jeans. There.” I saw who she meant. There was nothing special about his forehead except that you could see a lot of it, since his hairline had receded halfway up his scalp. The skin of his face showed the ravages of old acne scars, but otherwise he was a reasonably good-looking guy. “That’s who you need to talk to.”

  He looked normal enough, and as Zen walked me over to him I found myself wondering what crimes he had committed. I imagine everyone else in the place was wondering the same thing about me.

  When we got there, he looked from Zen to me and back again. “Yes?”

  “This man’s a friend of the house,” Zen said. “He doesn’t need to know your name, and you don’t need to know his. I thought you could help each other out.”

  “What sort of help does he need?”

  “I’m trying—”

  “He’s got a beef with Big Murco,” Zen said. The man’s eyebrows rose. “You see why I thought of you.”

  “What’d Murco do to you?” he asked me.

  I lifted my shirt to show the bruise. “That, and killed a friend of mine.”

  “Let’s talk,” he said.

  Zen brought over my glass and refilled his, but otherwise left us alone. The tables on either side of us were empty, and the noise from the pool table and the TV set and the bar masked our conversation pretty well, but he kept his voice low and so did I.

  “What did Khachadurian do to you?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Let’s talk about you.”

  How many times had I told the story? I was starting to feel like the Ancient Mariner, buttonholing everyone with my tale of woe.

  But what other way was there? I told him, told him about seeing Miranda in the paper, about going to the Sin Factory and getting thrown out, I told him about the bouncer and about what Miranda had said to Susan about Murco. I left Susan’s name out of it — both her names. But the rest I told him.

  “Your girlfriend was right,” he said. “Murco does use the girls to move drugs. Not dime bags to the customers, nothing like that. He’s a middleman, he’ll take a few kilos and spread it out to three small dealers, maybe four, take a cut off the top. They’re the ones who sell it to the street, and by then he’s out of the picture.” I knew better than to ask how he knew this. My money was on his being one of the three or four dealers — or more likely he had been one once and now Murco had cut him out. “A ditch in Jersey City I don’t know about, but he certainly wouldn’t let one of the girls get too talkative. Your girlfriend had a mouth on her?”

  Did she? When I’d known her, she’d been pretty shy. But people change. I shrugged.

  “Murco’s certainly got a temper, and you wouldn’t want to get on his bad side.”

  I rubbed my side. “Tell me about it,” I said.

  “That? That’s nothing. You heard about the burglary, right?”

  “No.”

  “You should have been here last week.”

  “What happened last week?”

  “Got to go back to the beginning. Maybe six weeks ago, these two guys break into Murco’s house. The man lives in Scarsdale. A house that’s like two mansions side by side, and he lives out there by himself — no staff, nothing, not since the son moved out and his wife died. So, these two punks are going through the neighborhood, and they come to this enormous place, and they figure, this guy’s got to have some good stuff. So they break in through the garage, go room to room, filling up their bags. And God knows he’s got plenty to take any night of the week — but just as it happens, this particular night is the night before Murco is going to be making a buy, so he has a suitcase full of cash waiting to be handed over to the gentlemen from Colombia. The punks go into his bedroom, and there he is, counting the money. They must’ve thought they’d died and gone to heaven.

  “They pull guns on him, tie him up, smack him around some, take the money, and they leave. A million dollars in cash, plus whatever else they picked up along the way. It’s a better score than they could’ve imagined. There’s just one problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They didn’t kill him.” He finished the rest of his drink, set the glass down carefully. “I could have told them. You’re going to pull something like that, you have to go all the way. You can’t leave him there tied up, blood running down his face, for his son to find when the old man doesn’t call for two days. I don’t care if you wore masks, disguised your voices, I don’t care if you left no fingerprints, this man’s not the fucking police force, he’ll find you and then you’re going to wish you’d never been born. And that’s what happened.”

  I felt my skin start to crawl.

  “Last week, it must have been the day after Christmas, the son came in here. Little Murco, though you just try to call him that to his face. He calls himself ‘Catch.’ž”

  I remembered Roy’s question the first time I met him. Have you seen the big guy here tonight? I’d asked, and he’d said, Catch?

  “Anyway, Catch comes in, and he sits down over there, by the phone, and he’s carrying a dice cup, rattling it like a guy on the street with a cup of change. We’d all heard about what had happened, and you could tell he wanted someone to ask him about it, but no one says a word to him. So he goes to the bar and says to Zen, but loud so everyone can hear, ‘You know those guys that broke into my father’s place? You won’t be seeing them any more.’ And he spills out the dice cup all over the bar, and what it was full of is teeth. He spills them out, spreads them around a little with one finger, then he walks out.”

  “Lovely,” I said.

  “Now, I can’t tell you for sure whose teeth those were, and neither can anyone else, since Zen did the right thing and got rid of them. But I’d bet dollars to doughnuts Big Murco got his million back, and those two poor bastards are in a landfill somewhere, gumming their food in the next life.”

  “Murco do this sort of thing a lot?”

  “He doesn’t have to. You do it once, people tend to leave you alone after that.”

  “The cops think he’s small potatoes,” I said.

  “He is. He’s just a vicious small potato.”

  “And Miranda? What are people saying about her murder?”

  “People figure Murco probably did it, but then again, it didn’t really have a lot of style to it, just—” He made a gun of his forefinger and thumb, fired it at me twice.

  “No teeth in a dice cup, you mean.”

  “The man does like to send a message.”

  I nodded. “And why are you telling me all this?”

  “You’re a friend of Zen’s,” he said, “and Murco’s no friend of mine.”

  On my way out, Zen called me over. “Was he able to help you?”

  “You didn’t tell me about the teeth,” I said.

  “I didn’t want to scare you.”

  “Yes you did, you just wanted someone else to do the dirty work for you.”

  “If I’d said you should lay off, would you have listened to me?”

  “No,” I said.

  “But you’re going to, right?” She looked in my eyes, saw something there she didn’t like.

  I patted her on the arm. “Give my molars to Leo,” I said. “You can hang the bicuspids over the bar.”

  Chapter 10

  Bill Battles called me back in the morning and agreed to meet me at his office. He said he’d have to verify with Mastaduno that it was okay to share information with me, and I told him to be my guest. By the time I arrived, he apparently had, since he greeted me by dropping five pounds of
files in my lap. Then he pulled open the blinds to let some light in and offered me a cup of coffee.

  It reminded me of what I was missing out on working for Leo. Serner’s offices filled the top three floors of an office building on Madison and Fifty-ninth, and Bill’s office filled one corner of the middle floor. He wasn’t quite their top producer, I guess, or maybe it was just that he wasn’t a corporate officer — one way or another he’d been denied the top floor — but even one of Serner’s second-tier corner offices was light years away from the ground-floor suite Leo and I shared in Chelsea. Bill’s windows looked out over the avenue, and we were high enough up that you could look down on the traffic and not hear a sound. If you stood at the right angle, you could see the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the distance. In our office, if you stood at the right angle near the window, you could see into the kitchen of an Indian restaurant.

  I accepted the coffee, burned my tongue on it, and set it aside. I opened the first file. There was a picture clipped to the inside of the folder showing a pair of college- age girls in Rianon sweatshirts and blue jeans, one with her hip cocked and arms crossed, the other with her arm around the first girl’s waist and her head resting on the first girl’s shoulder. I looked hard at the pair. The one on the left was the subject of the five pounds of reports that followed. The one on the right was Miranda.

  Miranda hadn’t changed much by the time this picture was taken. She looked a little thinner, maybe, but the yearbook photo had only been a headshot, and my tenyear- old memories were, as Leo had pointed out, not entirely reliable. She’d given up glasses somewhere along the way, presumably for contacts.

  Jocelyn Mastaduno was a tiny bit taller than Miranda, a little heavier. She had shorter hair and, if you could go by their poses in this one photo, a cockier attitude. They looked like sisters. It wasn’t even a matter of resemblance as much as it was something about the way they were standing, the way Miranda held onto Jocelyn’s waist, the look of contentment on her face as she rested on Jocelyn’s shoulder. It had the intimacy of a family photo.