Of course, all of this assumed she had come back here at all. Just because Susan thought that was what she would do in Jocelyn’s place, it didn’t mean Jocelyn had actually done it. The most likely case was that the apart- ment was dark because it was empty, and that it was empty because Jocelyn knew better than to come here.
There was only one way to find out. I jumped for the bottom rung of the fire escape ladder. On my second try, the ladder slipped its hook and clattered down. I pulled myself up and started climbing. At the first landing, I crouched between the two windows to catch my breath. I figured the noise would draw some attention, but the street was empty now and none of the windows around me flew open, no angry tenant stuck his head out to see what the racket was. I climbed up to the second landing, and then slowly, working hard not to make any noise, went on to the third. I felt very conspicuous. It wasn’t broad daylight, but anyone who happened to look this way would spot me. Who knew what neighbor might be calling the police right now to report what they were seeing? But I kept going.
The top floor was next, and I took each step gently on the way up. The window on my right looked into a bedroom, the one on my left into a kitchen, and I dodged away quickly after risking a glance through each. Both rooms were dark and looked empty. I tried raising the bedroom window, but it was locked. I opened the blade of the butterfly knife and slipped it between the upper and lower panes, forced the latch of the lock sideways, then shifted the blade to the bottom and used it to lever the window up enough to give me a fingerhold on the frame. I slid the window all the way up, climbed inside, and pulled it down behind me.
The room was empty, all right — but at some point recently it hadn’t been. On the queen-sized bed a crumpled comforter was pushed to one side. And on a table next to the bed there was a quarter-full glass of water.
I kept the knife ready as I slid the closet door open, but there was no one waiting inside to jump out at me. No one was in the living room either, or the bathroom when I quickly looked inside. The apartment was empty. I was tempted to turn on a light, but that would have been crazy — I didn’t know when Jocelyn would be back, and if she saw the light from the street, she’d know someone was there. I went back into the bedroom and gave it a more thorough once-over. The room’s one dresser was nearly empty and so was the closet — lots of empty wire hangers and drawers with only a shirt or two in them. It looked like Jocelyn was planning a quick departure.
I was about to close the closet when I noticed something on the floor in the back behind the sliding door. I pulled it out to get a better look at it. It was a wheeled luggage cart, lying on its back, unzipped and open, crammed full of clothing. It was too dark to see anything on the hard rubber wheels, but I had a feeling I knew what the police would find if they scraped them. Wayne Lenz’s blood.
I pawed through the clothing, but that was all the luggage contained, all the way to the bottom: T-shirts, underwear, two pairs of shoes, some costumes of the sort I’d seen on the video and in Miranda’s apartment. There was a small cosmetics bag, but it contained nothing but cosmetics. There was no sign of the money.
Not that Jocelyn would be likely to leave five hundred thousand dollars in cash lying around in the closet of a tenement apartment. I tried to guess how much space that much money would take up. About as much as two reams of typing paper, maybe three, even if you packed it tightly. I went through the luggage again, felt around the bottom of the closet, glanced under the bed.
It was disappointing, but only slightly. The money was why Murco was after her, and if it didn’t turn up he would be very unhappy, but otherwise it meant nothing to me. What I was after was Jocelyn. I wanted to hear her admit what she had done, and then—
And then what? I felt my hand tighten around the knife. And then I’d call the police, damn it. And then I’d have her arrested, have them test the luggage, have them clear my name and put her in jail where she belonged. There was a part of me that ached for a rawer sort of justice, the sort Murco and his son would deal out — part of me felt Miranda deserved that sort of retribution. But I was not Murco. Justice didn’t have to come at the point of a knife.
I pushed the luggage back into place and drew the closet door in front of it. I went back into the living room, searched through the small pile of mail I found on a table. A clothing catalogue, a credit card bill, a belated Christmas card, all addressed to “Jessie Masters.” I left them where they were.
There was an answering machine on the table, showing one message on its digital readout. I pressed the Play button and heard a woman’s voice. It took me a second to realize whose it was.
“Hey, beautiful,” Miranda said. “It was really good seeing you again. I know it was strange for you. For me, too. But I’d like to do it again, okay? Maybe we could watch the fireworks tomorrow. We should be able to see them from where I’m working. Maybe we can get some dinner first, before I have to go on. Give me a call, okay? Or I’ll call you, if you don’t.” Pause. “I love you, you know.” The machine clicked. A mechanical voice said, “Received Friday, December 30, at seven thirty-four p.m.”
She sounded so eager, so happy. Why? Why had Miranda been so trusting, so willing to take Jocelyn’s overtures at face value, so quick to forgive? I pictured Jocelyn getting this message and laughing, unable to believe her good luck. We should be able to see them from where I’m working. She hadn’t even had to come up with some excuse to lure Miranda to a secluded spot. New Year’s Eve meant fireworks on the Hudson, and sure, maybe you could see them from the roof at the Sin Factory — it was a short building, but it was far enough west that at least you’d see some of the show over the tops of other buildings. And how hard would it have been for Jocelyn to get behind Miranda while they were both watching the show, press the gun to the back of her head, and pull the trigger? For God’s sake, the fireworks would even have masked the sound of the shots. Jocelyn couldn’t have set it up better herself.
And where was she now? Collecting the money from wherever she’d hidden it, in preparation for leaving town? Or was she finding some horrible new way to do damage? The note she’d left at my mother’s building frightened me — who knew what she might do to carry out that threat?
With that in mind, I dialed Susan’s number on my cell phone. When she didn’t answer after four rings, I called my mother’s number.
“Hello? Who is this?” It wasn’t Susan’s voice, it was my mother’s, and she sounded unsteady, frightened.
I spoke as quietly as I could and kept an eye on the front door. “Mom, could you put Rachel on?”
“John! My God, are you okay? Are you safe?”
“Yes, I’m fine — what’s wrong?”
“Oh, my God, I was so worried about you, when Rachel said that woman was threatening to kill you—”
“She’s threatening all of us,” I said. “We all have to be careful. That’s why I asked Rachel to stay with you.”
“But she called!”
“Who called? What are you talking about?”
“She called,” my mother said again. “Just a little while ago. She told Rachel she was going to kill you—”
“Jocelyn called?”
“I didn’t talk to her, Rachel did. She said it was the same woman who left the note. John, she told Rachel she had a knife to your throat and was going to kill you.”
“Well, it wasn’t true. I’m fine. Can you just put Rachel on the phone, please?”
“She’s not here,” my mother said. “She went to find you. She tried to call you first, but there was no answer.”
My blood went cold. The call that had come in while I was being mugged. That had been Susan. And when I hadn’t answered—
“Mom, please think carefully, did Rachel say where she was going?”
“Yes, yes, I have it here. Hold on.” I heard papers rustling. I wanted to scream. “She wrote it down. She said she was going to Corlears Hook Park, to the bandstand. She said I should call the police if I didn’t hear from her i
n an hour. It hasn’t been an hour yet. Should I call them?”
“Yes,” I said.
Chapter 26
The bandstand at Corlears Hook Park was built in the Depression and abandoned some time in the seventies. God only knows why it’s still standing. Before Stonewall, before AIDS, and before AOL chatrooms, it used to be a popular cruising spot for East Village men looking to hook up. Now it was nothing, a decrepit pile behind a chain link fence that offered some crude shelter to the homeless during a rainstorm and convenient shadows for drug dealers to hide in at noon. But the truth was you didn’t even see that many homeless or drug dealers any more — even they didn’t feel safe there.
I climbed down the fire escape as quickly as I could without breaking my neck, then ran all out down to Houston Street. I dropped the knife in the first garbage can I passed. I couldn’t afford to have the police find it on me when they arrived. I cut across Delancey, under the Williamsburg bridge, and over to Grand Street. These were long blocks, and I was badly out of breath by the time I rounded Cherry, but I kept going. My heart wasn’t beating any more, it was exploding, twice per second, against the inside of my ribs. My throat was raw from the freezing air I was taking in and my legs were burning like I’d just climbed ten flights of stairs. But I couldn’t stop, and I couldn’t slow down. I hadn’t asked my mother how long ago Susan had left — all I knew was that it hadn’t been an hour yet. But a lot can go wrong in less than an hour. I pictured Jocelyn standing behind Miranda, aiming a gun at the back of her head, pulling back gently on the trigger. A lot can go wrong in less than a second.
The park was empty. Wire fences surrounded a pair of dirt baseball diamonds. Basketball hoops with no nets stood on either end of a concrete square. In the distance, the bandstand rose behind a screen of trees, their dead branches obscuring whatever might have been going on there. But when I passed them, there was nothing to see. The bandstand was as empty as the rest of the park. I found a hole in the fence that was supposed to block access to it, and raced up to the structure. There was a pair of bathrooms on one side, but they’d been locked tight for years. I went around to the back, where a few metal doors led to storage closets or God knows what, but they were locked, too, or anyway wedged shut. The whole thing was covered with ancient graffiti and surrounded by broken bottle glass, crushed beer cans, and the droppings of the countless birds and rats that found shelter there. There was nothing else — no sign of Susan, none of Jocelyn, nothing.
I took out my cell phone again. It was futile, but I speed-dialed Susan’s number. Maybe she’d answer, maybe she was safe after all, maybe Jocelyn hadn’t found her yet or Susan had managed to elude her. The phone started to ring.
And offset by a half second or so, I heard the sound of Ravel’s Bolero beeping faintly, not in my ear, but from the back of the bandstand.
I followed the sound to one of the doors in the rear, a rusted metal door with no knob even, just a round hole where you’d expect the doorknob to be. From behind it, muffled but distinct, came the sound of Susan’s cell phone. Then the beeping stopped, and in my ear I heard Susan’s voice as her voicemail picked up: “Hi, I’m not available right now—”
I slammed the phone shut, stuck two fingers through the hole in the door, and pulled as hard as I could. It didn’t budge. “Susan,” I shouted. There was no response. “Help me get this open. Come on!” She had to be in there. Unless it was just her phone, thrown there by Jocelyn so Susan couldn’t use it, but that didn’t make any sense — why would she go to the trouble of opening one of these old doors just to get rid of a phone? I yanked harder. I planted my foot against the wall for leverage and pulled till it felt like my arms were tearing apart at the joints. The door started moving, slowly, a millimeter at a time. I pulled again, and again, and the metal groaned as the door scraped open an inch. I couldn’t see inside. But now I had leverage. I wrapped my hands around the edge of the door and dragged it open. Half a foot. A foot. Two feet.
It was a narrow utility closet with a stripped circuit breaker box on the back wall. Susan was huddled on the ground in a heap. She wasn’t moving. I touched the side of her face. It was cold.
I gently pulled her out of the closet and laid her on the ground. She was wearing the same sweater she’d had on the first night we’d talked at Keegan’s, only it wasn’t the color of ginger ale any more. The front was soaked through with blood.
In the distance, I heard sirens approaching, but that wasn’t good enough. I thumbed 911 into my phone. “Send an ambulance to Corlears Hook Park,” I said when the operator answered, “and hurry. A woman’s been hurt, badly.”
I tried to take her pulse. I couldn’t feel it.
The waiting area at Bellevue’s emergency room was packed. One boy with what looked like a broken arm was howling while his mother tried alternately to calm him down and get the attention of the triage nurse. But a broken arm could wait. There were head wounds, there were infectious diseases. This was one of the largest trauma centers in the world, but also one of the busiest, and there was never enough staff to go around.
But Susan was inside. Even at Bellevue, a chest wound like hers took priority. The ambulance had arrived in less than five minutes and had torn up First Avenue with its siren blaring, dodging around cars and pedestrians to shave seconds off our arrival time. Even so, I knew it might not have been enough. They said she’d lost a lot of blood — as though that wasn’t obvious. They told me she was in critical condition. When I asked if she’d make it, they’d shrugged. EMTs had no time for politeness.
“She’s got a chance,” one of them had said. I’d been clinging to that ever since.
The cops had followed us to the hospital, adding their siren to the mix. They’d waited while I got her admitted, waited some more while I filled out paperwork as best I could. Last name: Feuer. First name: Susan. Home address? Home phone? Social security number? I left it all blank. Medical insurance provider? All I could do was hand over my credit card and hope I wasn’t close to my limit.
They waited while I called Leo from a payphone and told him where I was and what had happened. They stood next to me and listened, but they waited.
Then they were done waiting. They steered me through the triage station to an empty administrative office just past the ER. Both were uniformed cops from the Seventh Precinct. One was about my height but twice my weight, with a round face and a thick moustache and a patch on his chest that said “Conroy.” The other’s patch said “Gianakouros” and belonged to a veteran with hair the color of old curtains and deep grooves creasing his face. He was the one who had me by the arm and he took the lead in questioning me.
“Your name?”
“John Blake.”
“And the victim’s name?”
“Susan Feuer. F-E-U-E-R.”
“What’s your relationship to the victim?”
“She’s a friend. And we’ve been working together recently.”
“What do you do, Mr. Blake?”
I took out my license and showed it to him. He handed it over his shoulder to Conroy, who jotted down the license number on a spiral-bound pad. “I work for Leo Hauser. He used to be at Midtown South. He has a small agency now — just the two of us, basically.”
“And Feuer works with you?”
“No. She’s just been helping me with one case I’m working on. Just as a favor.”
“Some favor,” Conroy said. He handed my license back.
“You want to tell us what happened?” Gianakouros said.
How to answer that? I wanted to, but this was not a story I could tell quickly. Where did it even start? When Susan began making calls for me, or before that when I first saw her dancing at the Sin Factory, or before that, when I opened the paper and saw Miranda’s face staring out at me, all innocence and accusation? Or ten years earlier, when I’d seen Miranda last, when I’d sent her off on a boomerang voyage from New York to New Mexico and back again, from possibility to disaster and from life to death? I’d
have to explain an awful lot if I wanted them to understand what had happened.
And I wouldn’t mind explaining — but right now I couldn’t afford the time. Jocelyn was still in town, but for how long? She was packed and ready to go. She’d just needed to sew up some loose ends, like the troublemaker who was calling all the strip clubs she’d ever worked at and trying to track her down. I’d set Susan on Jocelyn’s trail, and somehow it had gotten back to her. Was it any wonder that Jocelyn had decided to eliminate Susan before leaving the city?
Now, Jocelyn probably just needed to pick up the money from wherever she’d stashed it and then she’d vanish forever. One of the country’s best agencies hadn’t been able to find her the last time she’d gone on the road, and back then she hadn’t had a half million dollars to help her hide.
“We’re looking for a missing woman named Jocelyn Mastaduno,” I said. “Her parents haven’t heard from her in six years and they want to know what happened to her. Susan was helping me make some calls to track her down.”
“What was she doing in the park?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“How did you know she was there?”
“Susan was staying with my mother. She told her she was going to the park, and my mother mentioned it to me.”
“So you went there.”
“I was worried,” I said. “I didn’t understand why she’d gone there, and the park can be dangerous at night.”
Little Girl Lost (Hard Case Crime) Page 17