Little Girl Lost (Hard Case Crime)

by Richard Aleas

  “One of the other girls in her class took that,” Bill said. “Katherine Chin, I think.”

  “I talked to her. She’s married, living in Chicago now. Katherine Lewis.”

  “Good to know. I’ll get her number from you if we need to do a follow-up.”

  I turned the pages, not reading anything in detail but getting a feel for the work Serner had done, who they had talked to. Professors, students, area residents. The one travel agent in town, who said she hadn’t made any arrangements at either girl’s request. Local police. The school newspaper and the local newspaper. Then branching further out: people in neighboring towns, people who’d known the girls before college. It was very thorough. In a way, I was surprised they hadn’t called me. But the investigation had mainly focused on Jocelyn, as was appropriate given that her father was paying the bills.

  Jocelyn also seemed to have been the instigator behind whatever the two of them did. Students who knew them had told Serner that Miranda had dropped out of Intro to Psych a week after Jocelyn had, that she had signed up for classes in yoga and modern dance when Jocelyn had, that Jocelyn had been the one behind their request to room together in Heward Hall. It didn’t quite make Miranda out to be a doe-eyed follower and Jocelyn some sort of Svengali, but Jocelyn had tended to dominate in the relationship.

  And what sort of relationship had it been? Some of the girls’ peers hadn’t hesitated to speculate. Neither Miranda nor Jocelyn seemed to date much or to date any one boy for long. They preferred spending time together. It wouldn’t have been the first fling between two girls on the Rianon campus, and it’s not surprising that some people drew that conclusion. But as far as Serner could find, there was no evidence one way or the other.

  I set the first file aside and started flipping through the second. There was more material here than I could read sitting in Bill’s office, and I asked him whether there was a conference room I could use.

  “There is,” he said, “but you don’t have to do that. Those are all copies, except for the photo, which we’ll need to keep here. Sign them out and you can take them back to your office.”

  “Leo’ll think you’re coming after me again if he sees your files on my desk.”

  “Let him think it,” Bill said. “Maybe he’ll give you a raise.”

  I shook my head. “He’s paying me what he can.”

  “I hope you realize you’re too good to be wasted in a little two-man operation like that.”

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were coming after me again.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Listen,” I said, “I didn’t see anything here about Miranda’s dancing in any of the local strip clubs. I don’t know when she started, but I was assuming it was around the time her mother died, which would have been before she left school. Do you know if anyone mentioned anything along those lines?”

  “It’s not a question we asked.”

  “Yeah, well, why would you? All I’m saying is, she must have started sometime. Am I going to find anything about it in here?”

  “No,” he said. “Believe me, if we’d heard a breath of it, we would have followed up on it.”

  It was disappointing, but not a surprise.

  “Still, maybe you’ll find something useful in there.” He handed me their form non-disclosure agreement, and I signed it. “God knows we never did.”

  We were lying on her bed, in the apartment on Eightyfourth Street, the one that was now home to the Bakers and next door to a youth center instead of a synagogue. Her mother was at work, and would be for two hours still, which was plenty of time to finish our math homework, or would have been if we could keep our hands off each other. She’d just discovered what it did to me when she put her tongue in my ear, and so had I, and both of us liked it more than trigonometry. Her shirt and bra were on the floor, on top of my shirt, which had come off first, and her skirt and my pants were crumpled next to us in the bed. But she still had her panties on and I still wore my Fruit of the Loom briefs, and we both understood it would stay that way throughout, one last concession to the pointless, old-fashioned rules we’d set for ourselves.

  It hardly mattered. We couldn’t have enjoyed ourselves more if we’d gone further, and now, thinking back on it, I remembered that afternoon more fondly than any of the encounters I’d had later, first at NYU and then, after graduating, with girls I met through friends or at parties. There had been women since Miranda — but none I’d loved, not even for a night.

  We lay in her bed, my fingers tracing the line of her sex through her underwear, and she told me about Rianon College, with its ophthalmology-focused pre-med program, one of the oldest in the country, and its campus, so green and open, so different from anything we’d ever known in New York City. They’d accepted her on an Early Decision basis, she said, which meant that for her the college application process was now over. What about me?

  What about me.

  Thinking back now, I could remember the bed, I could remember the feel of her body under my hand, I could even remember the quality of the light filtering in through her bedroom window, motes of dust dancing slowly over our heads. But I couldn’t remember my answer. I’d known I’d never leave the city, I’d known that since I was a kid — I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. But I wouldn’t have told her that, not then. Did I join her in spinning a dream of going away to New Mexico, cutting all our ties to our friends and our homes? Did I tell her I’d go with her, that I’d apply, too, maybe for the program in literature, or history, or God only knows what? And if I did, was it a lie, or did I mean it — maybe only for that afternoon, maybe only for that minute, but with all my heart?

  She’d gone. I’d stayed. But all through the years that followed, part of me had gone with her, vicariously enjoying the rolling, green campus when I was riding crammed subways past Washington Square, living with her in a clean suburb when my real life took place in a fourth-story walk-up with windows that didn’t close properly and junkies outside on the sidewalk. Leo was my real life. While she was learning to heal people, he was training me to uncover the worst things about them. But late at night, in bed with the door closed and the blinds drawn and my eyes shut, I’d see through her eyes, and because she was someplace better, so was I.

  Only now I knew she wasn’t, that she hadn’t been anywhere better. Everything I’d imagined for her — the happiness, the comfortable life — those were the lie. Somehow she’d fallen into my world.

  Chapter 11

  There were more than four hundred pages of interviews, and I read them all. Everyone had something to say, and everyone had nothing to say. Jocelyn was a girl like any other, a solid B student who showed no signs of caring about her classes, an unremarkable participant in campus events, and more often than not Miranda was at her side. Then they were gone, and no one missed them for long.

  Were there any hints before they left that either girl might be unhappy? You wouldn’t know it from the file. Had they ever gotten in any sort of trouble? Not so as you’d notice. Why would they leave school? The answer Serner had received was a collective shrug.

  Had they gone off to Canada, as someone had suggested to me? It was one of two possibilities, the other being that they had gone somewhere else.

  I thought about ways I might turn up more information, but none seemed promising — Serner would have tried them, and I wasn’t likely to do better with them after seven years had passed. More promising, it seemed to me, was the idea of working backwards. After all, the one thing I had to work with that Serner hadn’t had is that I knew where the story ended, or at least where half of it did. I knew where Miranda had ended up.

  I tried to imagine the two of them, as close as sisters or maybe closer, when the news arrived that Miranda’s mother had died. Jocelyn was at best a decent student and only lightly committed to school. Miranda had cared a great deal about her studies once, but her grades had turned out poor, and maybe she’d felt the dream of medical school s
lipping away from her anyway. Then the telegram comes, or the phone call, and suddenly she has no family anymore and no source of money. Maybe Jocelyn has been working on her to drop out anyway, and this gives her the final push to do it.

  Maybe. It was a plausible picture. But it was still a long way from stripping at the Sin Factory.

  They need money — for tuition or just to live, and either Miranda’s inheritance doesn’t supply enough or it would take too long to come, or both. Maybe Jocelyn could get some from her parents, but she’s already not talking to her parents much, and anyway it’s one thing to support your daughter, another thing to support her roommate — especially if maybe she’s more than just a roommate. They’ve been taking modern dance and yoga; they’re free, attractive, and twenty years old; and one day someone tells them about a club, one a town or two over, where no one who knows them ever goes. Or maybe they come across a club during a weekend driving trip and laughingly dare each other to go inside. Maybe it’s amateur night, a quick fifty dollars for any good-looking girl willing to get up on stage and take off her shirt.

  Maybe. Maybe the first time it just pays for their gas and their drinks, but the second time it pays for their books and their medical insurance, and before long they’re pulling down four hundred, five hundred a week and the only cost is that dancing to loud music at two in the morning means being too tired to take tests the next day. Maybe they want to get away for a while, so they put in for a leave of absence, pack the contents of their dorm room into a car, and hit the road, paying as they go with this new currency they’ve discovered. There isn’t a town in America of any reasonable size that doesn’t have at least a couple of strip clubs, on the outskirts if not in the town proper, and maybe it starts out as a big, liberated adventure before settling, at some point along the way, into being a grind.

  Because it must have. Not just because taking your clothes off for money in front of rooms full of rowdy drunks must lose its charm awfully quickly, even if you’ve got a friend along for the ride, but also because we knew that somewhere along the way the friends had split up. They may have been a sister act in New Mexico, but Miranda was working solo by the time she got to New York.

  Or did I know that? No — the truth was, I didn’t know any of this. Maybe they were still together when she arrived in New York and only split up later. Maybe the stripping didn’t start right out of Rianon and only began when the cash ran out along the road. All sorts of scenarios were possible. But as I thought through them one by one, a picture began to emerge. Anything was possible, but some things were more likely than others. Initially, for instance, I’d been thinking only of Miranda as having turned to stripping, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized this wasn’t the way it must have happened. Miranda had followed Jocelyn’s lead in so many things — she wouldn’t have been the one to initiate this.

  And that gave me a thread to pull on. Two college girls working their way east starting in 1996, two twenty-yearold, Rianon-educated blondes coming to work at the same clubs at the same time, if not outright working in tandem — that was the sort of thing people might remember even seven years later.

  Assuming I could get the right people on the phone. Now the question was, who did I know with contacts in the strip club business? There was Wayne Lenz, but I didn’t see him doing me any favors. There was Murco Khachadurian.

  And then there was Susan.

  My friend was behind the bar again at the Derby. Maybe he did own the place, or maybe he just liked working lots of hours. He eyed me with a certain amount of suspicion that he made no effort to disguise.

  “She’s not here,” he said.

  “I didn’t think she would be. But I told her that if I needed to get in touch with her, I’d leave a message with you.”

  “I know,” he said. “She checked yesterday to see if you’d left one.”

  “She look okay?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I just want to know she’s okay.”

  “No sign she wasn’t,” he said.

  “No need to jump down my throat,” I said.

  “Young man, I don’t like you hanging around here. I told you that the last time I saw you, and I meant it.”

  Young man. No one had called me that for a while.

  “I wasn’t planning to hang around. I’d just been planning to ask you to tell her I’d been by. But maybe I should. If she came by yesterday, she’ll probably come again today.”

  “If you’re going to hang around, it’s not going to be in my bar. You can do what you like on the street.”

  “I’ll pay for my drinks,” I said.

  “Not here you won’t, because you won’t be served any.”

  We stared each other down for a bit while I got my temper under control. This wasn’t Zen’s, but it’s never good to get into shoving matches, especially when you can’t see the other man’s hands. Somewhere along the way, Keegan’s had dropped behind the bar.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll wait outside.”

  “That’s your privilege.”

  I stepped out into the street, buttoned my jacket collar against the cold. I wished I’d brought gloves, but I hadn’t thought of it. I stuck my hands in my pockets instead.

  Through the window, I saw Keegan — if that’s who he was — watching me. He lifted a phone receiver from the wall behind him, dialed a number, and after a moment started talking. He didn’t take his eyes off me.

  Who was he calling? It only hit me after a minute, and then I couldn’t believe how stupid I’d been. Who would he be calling? How many people would have an interest in knowing that some man was hanging around bothering the Sin Factory girls? Maybe Keegan did keep his place open nights out of a feeling of paternal kindness toward the girls; on the other hand, maybe it was an arrangement he had with the club’s management. Either way, he’d be bound to have some sort of relationship with Lenz. More of one, at least, than he had with me.

  And that answered a question that should have been bothering me but hadn’t been: How had Roy known where to find me the night he’d given me his “warning”? Someone must have tipped him or Lenz off when I left the Derby, and watching Keegan on the phone now, I didn’t have much doubt as to who it had been.

  Which made walking away the smart thing for me to do now. But there was a problem with that. If Keegan had told Lenz he’d seen me talking to Susan, she might be in danger, too. And even if she wasn’t, I needed to talk to her, and leaving messages at the bar was no longer an option.

  It was a few minutes to six, but there was no way of knowing when she would come by today, or even whether she would. The only person I could be confident would be showing up soon was the man who’d come close to putting me in the hospital two days ago.

  It was already as dark as the night would get, but it was still close to rush hour, so the street was full. Cars were jostling to beat each other to the next red light, and the pedestrians on the sidewalk were doing the equivalent.

  But there were lulls in the flow of the crowd, and during one of them I spotted Roy. He was coming casually from the direction of the club, wearing a duster-style leather overcoat over corduroys and a tan shirt. He’d been smarter than I had: he’d remembered his gloves.

  When he was half a block away, he saw me standing in front of the Derby. He didn’t walk any faster, or for that matter any slower.

  I looked back over my shoulder, and almost missed her — but then I realized who the woman was with her hand on Keegan’s door and one foot inside the bar.

  “Susan.” I grabbed her arm and steered her away from the bar. Now, when I glanced back over my shoulder, Roy seemed to be moving faster. “Come with me.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’ll tell you later, just keep moving.”

  “John!” She pushed my hand off her arm and stopped dead. “What’s going on?”

  I started to say something, but it was too late. Roy was pushing through the last of the crowd separ
ating us from him. We wouldn’t be able to outrun him — and if we tried, if Susan turned and ran with me, it would be the same as announcing she was on my side against them.

  “Yell at me,” I whispered.

  “What?” she said.

  “I grabbed you. Just do it.”

  Then Roy was beside us.

  Chapter 12

  “Get your fucking hands off me,” Susan said.

  “This guy bothering you?” Roy said. He took hold of my arm.

  “I’m trying to go in, he grabs me.”

  “We’ve had trouble with him before,” Roy said. He turned to me. “Haven’t we?”

  What the hell was I doing? I couldn’t take another beating. And that was assuming a beating was all Roy had in mind this time. “No,” I said, “there’s no trouble.”

  “So why’re you pawing the ladies, man? You can’t do that.” His grip tightened, and even through the padding of his glove and my coat, it hurt. “We’re going to need to have a little talk.”

  “It was a mistake,” I said. “I thought she was someone else.” I winced as he squeezed harder. Over his shoulder, I saw Susan’s face go pale. She started going through her purse.

  “Sure it was,” Roy said. “Like it was a mistake when you bothered her two nights ago. You make a lot of mistakes, man.”

  “It won’t happen again.”

  “Now that’s the truth,” Roy said. “My boss told me to make sure it doesn’t.”

  “What are you going to do,” I said, “hit me out here in front of all these people?”

  “No,” he said, steering me back toward the club, “we’re going to show you a good time in one of our private rooms tonight.”

  I couldn’t let him get me inside — if he did, I might never come out again. But I had a couple of blocks to deal with that. The important thing was getting him away from Susan. I let him walk me down the block.

  Suddenly he stopped, and I saw a hand between us reaching up to tap him on the shoulder. We both turned back, and Susan was there, holding a canister in her hand, about the size of a cologne bottle or a travel-sized can of shaving cream. With her thumb, she depressed the trigger on top.