Little Girl Lost (Hard Case Crime)

by Richard Aleas

  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.

  It was 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. Jocelyn had known that Murco would hunt for her, would eventually find her, and would surely kill her, unless she could get someone else to take the fall. Miranda had not been a perfect match, but she’d been close enough, especially after a pair of hollow point bullets turned her face into what Kirsch had so sensitively described as chopped meat.

  Lenz must have broken into Miranda’s apartment not to take the money but to plant the torn paper band behind the dresser, so that Murco would know for sure that the dead woman and the woman who’d stolen from him were one and the same. That, and maybe, while he was at it, to remove from the apartment any photos Miranda had of herself that, shown to the folks at the Wildman, might cast some doubt on the point. That would explain why the newspapers hadn’t had any recent photos, at least.

  Then at midnight on New Year’s Eve, it must have been Jocelyn who lured Miranda onto the roof of the Sin Factory, Jocelyn who got behind her and pulled the trigger, Jocelyn who escaped with the murder weapon while Lenz called for the ambulance they both knew could do no harm because it could do no good.

  Did I know for sure this was how it had happened? No. Some of the details might be wrong. But the broad outline felt right. It had begun when the girls were teenagers: Jocelyn had lured Miranda to her bed, had talked her into leaving school, had turned her life inside out and remade her into what I had just seen on the video. She had led Miranda step by step down the path that ultimately led to her death, had used her and finally, when it had served her needs, brutally sacrificed her. It was Jocelyn, not Miranda, that had fallen in with thieves and killers. Miranda had just made the fatal mistake of falling in love with a woman who eventually turned into a thief and a killer herself.

  Because whether it was Jocelyn or Lenz who had pulled the trigger on the rooftop — and maybe I’d never know — it had to have been Jocelyn who had pulled the trigger in Lenz’s apartment. She’d smashed me in the head with Lenz’s statue and when he’d gotten out of the chair and headed for the bedroom, she’d picked up my gun and shot him twice, then coolly wheeled a luggage cart filled with a half million dollars past his body and mine, leaving me to take the rap.

  Why not kill me, too? Because this way maybe I’d burn in her place for Lenz’s murder — and even if I didn’t, even if I had the chance to go to Murco as I’d threatened, what could I tell him that would hurt her? As far as Jocelyn knew, I didn’t even know she existed. If I told the same story to Murco that I’d told Lenz about Lenz having conspired with Miranda, it did nothing but make Jocelyn’s escape cleaner.

  Whereas if she’d left Lenz alive and I’d gone to Murco, Murco would have picked him up and he’d have cracked like an egg. He’d almost cracked at my hands, and I hadn’t even touched him. And if Lenz gave her up, she’d have been on the run again, only this time with Murco knowing who she was.

  It made sense, damn it. All you had to do was look at the world through the eyes of a calculating, soulless bitch who used people and threw them away. I thought about all the interviews Serner had done with the people who had known J
ocelyn back in college. They didn’t give any hint of this side of her personality. There was no sign that people back then knew what sort of person she really was. But maybe that was the point: no one had known her, or Miranda either, for that matter. And who knows, maybe back then Jocelyn hadn’t been so bad — the years on the road, the years spent going from one strip club to the next, must have brought out the worst in her, made her harder and more ruthless, until maybe even Miranda couldn’t take it any more and broke up with her. Even though breaking up meant giving up a successful act and starting over, dancing solo at a tenth-rate club like the Sin Factory — maybe it had been worth it for Miranda to get away. But then when Jocelyn had needed Miranda for one last purpose, she had shown up at Miranda’s door, flowers in hand, and had talked her into a reconciliation. The reconciliation had been short-lived, and so had Miranda.

  So where was Jocelyn now? Gone, along with the money.

  But she could be found.

  I got up from the couch. Leo was next to me, holding out a bottle and a glass, but I didn’t want soothing and I didn’t want anything that would calm me down. I wanted blood.

  “Damn it, Leo, I know what happened.”

  “What, just from watching that tape?”

  I shrugged my jacket on. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Where?”

  I yanked open the office door. “We need to find Jocelyn,” I said. I raced out into the street. A cab with its light on was passing and I stepped out in front of it to flag it down. I was in and had the door shut before the car could come to a stop.

  “You got to be careful,” the driver said. “It is very dangerous to run in front of a taxi.”

  “Just drive.” I gave him my mother’s address, and when we got there I threw a handful of bills over the back seat. He honked at me as he drove off.

  What would Susan have turned up? Something, I prayed. Something that would help us figure out where Jocelyn might have gone. I tapped my foot impatiently as the elevator climbed to the fourteenth floor.

  My mother came to the door when I rang and looked startled when she saw me. “My goodness, John, I heard on the news you were arrested—”

  “They let me out. Is Susan here?”

  “Susan?”

  “I’m sorry. Rachel. Is she here?”

  “No, she went out. John, what’s going on?”

  “Where did she go?”

  “John Blake, you tell me what’s going on or so help me—”

  I put one hand on each of her arms. They felt tiny and frail. “Mom, I’m sorry. I can’t. Not now. I need to find Rachel. Did she say anything about where she went?”

  “Yes, hold on,” she said, and picked up a piece of paper from the telephone stand by the door. She took her glasses down from her forehead and squinted at the page. “She’s meeting someone at a restaurant. A place called Dorni—” She squinted some more. “Dorneolo? Dormiolo? I can’t read what she wrote.”

  I took the paper from her hand. It said Dormicello.

  *

  It was early enough in the afternoon that Zen wasn’t there yet. Her day-shift bartender was a parolee called Trunks who nodded at me when he saw me come through the door. The place was as close to empty as I’d ever seen it, which was just as well. Less chance for Susan to get herself in a scrape.

  She wasn’t at the bar or any of the tables out front. There was a wall of booths in the back, past the wallmounted TV that was quietly showing NY1 and the pool table where a broad-backed guy in a wifebeater blocked my view. I waited till he was between shots and squeezed past, careful not to knock down the second cue stick that was leaning against the table. There was presumably a second player somewhere, maybe in the bathroom, and if he looked anything like this one, I didn’t want to do anything to piss him off.

  Only one of the booths was occupied, and from where I was I couldn’t see who Susan was talking to, just the back of his head. His salt-and-pepper hair was combed straight back and held in place by some sort of shellac, and I had a strong sense of déjà vu: based on his hair alone, he could have been Wayne Lenz’s taller, older brother.

  I came around to the front of the booth. Susan must have been surprised to see me, but she kept it from showing on her face. “Peter, this is John,” she said. “He... works with me.”

  “At the studio?” The man extended his hand. “Good to meet you, John. I’m Pete Cimino.”

  I shook the hand. “Pete.”

  “I was explaining to Pete about the segment we’re doing for Fox News on the Sugarman murder, and he’s offered to help. He’s even willing to talk on camera.”

  On camera. Good God, she was a natural. “That’s good, Pete,” I said. “Thank you.” Susan had her hair tied back and was wearing a simple blouse. She didn’t look like a TV producer to me, but she didn’t look like a stripper either, and maybe that was enough. People generally believed what you told them, especially when it was something they wanted to believe. And who didn’t want to be on TV?

  Of course, the answer to that was that most of the people you met at Zen’s didn’t — but this guy obviously wasn’t a regular, not if he called the place Dormicello. He looked like some kind of tough guy wannabe, the sort who thought some hairspray and a Brooklyn accent made him Tony Soprano. If he kept hanging around here, it was just a matter of time before he got on the wrong side of someone who was the real thing and exited with a blade in his stomach. But that was his problem, and Zen’s, not ours. He was obviously someone Susan had felt was important enough to meet in person and that meant I wanted to talk to him.

  “What do you do, Pete?” I asked.

  “Things,” he said. “Little of this, little of that. You know how it is.”

  “And you knew Miranda?”

  He kissed his fingertips and sent a glance toward the ceiling.

  “What does that mean?” I said.

  “May she rest in peace, she was something. A great dancer, and what a body. Really gave a hundred ten percent every night, her and Jessie both. Any time they worked my club, I could make another ten, twelve percent easy, people coming in because of them. When they split up, I tried to talk some sense into them, but no. I even offered them a raise, which I’ve never done for any girl before or since. But there was no talking to them.”

  “Why don’t you tell John what you were telling me,” Susan said. “About how it happened.”

  He turned to me. “There was this other girl, this black chick, Tracy, who started at the club halfway through their last booking. We used her as their warm-up act. But then things got a little too warm, if you know what I mean.”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “Man, this Tracy, I’ll tell you, I would’ve done her, and I don’t go for no melanzana normally. She was built like you wouldn’t believe. But strictly a dyke, and she went for Jessie like a bullet. Now, Randy must’ve known about it from the day it started. She was no dummy. But she didn’t say anything, so I figured maybe they’ve got an agreement, they’re not tied down, whatever. Lots of girls are like that. Get so sick of men looking at them, they’ll go to bed with anything long as it doesn’t have a dick.” He raised a placating hand to Susan. “Excuse my French.”

  “You can say ‘dick’ in here,” Susan said, “just not on the air.”

  “So this goes on for two weeks, three weeks. It’s coming up on the end of their booking, and I’m thinking I want them to extend — all three of them, what the hell, the guys love Tracy, too. So I go to talk to them backstage and it’s like walking into a meat locker. They’re not talking to each other. They’re glaring at each other like they’re ready to take each other’s eyes out. It was ugly.”

  “And?”

  He shrugged. “What can I tell you? I tried to get them to talk, I tried to joke with them a little, but they weren’t having any of it. If it got to the point where I offered money, you know it was bad.”

  “What makes you think they broke up because of Tracy?”

  “It was obvious
. All three of them were there, and every time Tracy moved closer to Jessie, Randy moved further away. It was like two magnets, you know, pushing each other apart? Finally, Tracy put her arm around Jessie and Randy just walked out. That was it. Never came back.”

  “What about Jessie?” I asked.

  “She re-upped for two more weeks, tried to teach Tracy the act, but it wasn’t the same. You know, black and white’s not twins, and the twin angle was part of what had made it so hot. But the real problem was just they weren’t good together. They may have been great in the sack, but onstage? There wasn’t that chemistry. They were easy on the eyes, but you put the two of them on stage and it was just two strippers on a stage. With Randy it was something else.”

  I’d seen what it had been, and he was right. There’d been something more between them. I tried to imagine the backstage scene Cimino had described, thought about what it must have been like for Miranda to find herself suddenly cast off and replaced in Jocelyn’s life by this other woman. This, after giving up her dreams of medical school and spending years traveling the country at Jocelyn’s side. It must have been crushing.

  “When did this happen?”

  “What, a year ago? Year and a half, maybe.”

  “And you had no idea where Miranda went after she left?”

  “None. Not till you guys called me.”

  “Do you know what happened to the other two? Jessie and Tracy?”

  “I think they were living together for a while. Then they broke up. You know how it goes. I think Tracy’s dancing somewhere in the city. I haven’t heard from Jessie in ages. Maybe Tracy would know how to find her.”

  Maybe she would. “How could we find Tracy?”

  Susan spoke up. “Pete gave me the number of her booking agent, a guy named Andrew Kodos. I have a call in to him.”