Little Girl Lost (Hard Case Crime)

by Richard Aleas

  Conroy spoke up. “Any idea who might have done this?”

  “None,” I said.

  “What about this woman you’re looking for, Mastaduno?”

  “It’s possible. I just don’t know.”

  “How close are you to finding her?”

  Pretty close, I thought — if I can get out of here. I fought to keep my voice calm. “I can’t say. We’re not the first agency to work on it. The last one took a year and never found her.”

  “Maybe you’re closer than they were.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “If Miss Feuer could tell us who she was meeting in the park, we might have something,” Gianakouros said. “But she’s not going to be doing much talking any time soon. Not with multiple stab wounds in her chest.”

  No, not soon. Maybe not ever.

  “We’re going to canvass the area for witnesses tonight, people in the neighborhood, anyone who might have seen it happen. But we’re also going to need to talk to you some more.”

  “And your mother,” Conroy said.

  “That’s right, your mother, and Mastaduno’s parents, and anyone else you can think of who might know something about this. We’re going to need any information you have.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “But can we do it in the morning? I can’t think straight now.” They looked at each other. “I’m sorry, it’s just too much. I’m a wreck.” I held my hands up. They were trembling, and it wasn’t an act. “First thing in the morning, nine a.m., I’ll be there. I promise, I’ll help any way I can. I’m just not up to it now.”

  “Eight a.m.,” Gianakouros said. “Wreck or no wreck. We need you.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Conroy’s voice softened. “You want us to ask the doctor if you can look in on her?” he said. “Maybe she’s out of surgery.”

  I shook my head. “Five stab wounds to the chest, there’s only one way she’d be out of surgery this soon. So I hope to God she isn’t.”

  Why hadn’t I told them? It would have been simple. I had Jocelyn’s address. They could have gone right now and arrested her, or if she wasn’t there, they could have staked the apartment out and waited for her to arrive. They could at least have taken the luggage cart in as evidence, gotten fingerprints and blood from it, tied Lenz’s murder to Miranda’s, gotten me off the hook in Queens, begun the process of tracking her down — something. But I hadn’t done it.

  It would have been the right thing to do — I knew that. But the time was past for doing the right thing. It had passed when Jocelyn lured Susan down to the park and sank a blade five times into her chest. The person who did that, the person who murdered an innocent woman and left her body on a strip club roof, the person who shot Wayne Lenz in cold blood and left me to take the fall, a person who could do those things didn’t deserve to be arrested and prosecuted and defended and maybe sent to jail or maybe not, depending on how sympathetic a jury she found. What she deserved, the police and the courts weren’t the ones to deliver.

  I waited till I was well away from the hospital and confident that neither Conroy nor Gianakouros was following me. I dialed the number and waited while it rang. When the hoarse voice said “Yes?” I hesitated for a second. There would be no turning back.

  “Yes?” he said again.

  “I found her,” I said. “And I’ll give her to you, on one condition.”

  “What’s that, Mr. Blake?” Murco said.

  “I want her to suffer,” I said.

  Chapter 27

  “You surprise me,” he said.

  I kept walking, retracing the ambulance’s path, heading back toward Avenue D. “She attacked a friend of mine,” I said. “This friend may not survive.”

  “I see. And now my methods don’t seem so... inappropriate?” he said. “Never mind, you don’t have to answer that. Tell me, Mr. Blake, does she still have my money?”

  “It’s not in her apartment, or if it is, she’s hidden it well. But I’m sure she knows where it is, and I’m sure you’ll be able to get it out of her.”

  “You make it sound so simple,” he said softly. “Sometimes it can be like pulling teeth.”

  Did he think he was being funny? I felt my stomach twist. I forced myself to remember Susan’s bloody body in my arms and Miranda lying on the roof at midnight, half her face blown away by a pair of hollow-point bullets.

  I gave him the address. “How soon can you get here?”

  “It takes me forty-five minutes to get into the city,” he said.

  “How about your son?”

  “He’ll meet me there.”

  “Well, I’m not waiting. I’m not taking a chance that she gets away while you’re driving in.”

  “It almost sounds like you want her worse than I do,” he said.

  “You can get back what she took from you,” I said. “I can’t.”

  *

  I thought about stopping by the office on the way downtown, but it would take too long to cross to the West Side and anyway, what was the point? Maybe if we’d had another gun — but the only guns we owned were now in the possession, respectively, of Little Murco Khachadurian and the 109th Precinct in Queens.

  The blocks went by, empty and dark. I felt the cold on my face, but inside my jacket I was sweating. What if Jocelyn was already gone by the time I got there? She’d presumably headed home while I was running to the park, and since then she’d had almost two hours to grab her things and take off. Of course, if taking off had been her plan, she could have done it as soon as she took the luggage cart with the money out of Lenz’s apartment. She hadn’t, and there had to be a reason, though I couldn’t imagine what it was.

  It wasn’t the only point that bothered me. There was the luggage cart itself, the one that first turned up in Lenz’s hands in the hallway outside Miranda’s apartment on the afternoon of the murder. It made sense as long as you assumed that Miranda had the money in her apartment and that Lenz had needed a way to get it out — but if Jocelyn and Lenz had the money all along, what the hell did he need to take a luggage cart to Miranda’s apartment for? The only thing Lenz had needed to do in her apartment was plant the torn paper band that would tie her to the burglary. You didn’t need a piece of luggage to carry that.

  And what about that paper band? Could the police really have missed it lying behind the dresser? Sure, it was possible, cops missed things, especially if they didn’t look very hard — but Jocelyn and Lenz couldn’t have counted on their missing it. And the last thing they would have wanted was to run the risk of getting the police more interested in what was otherwise a relatively routine homicide. Yet that’s exactly the effect that finding a band from a stack of hundred dollar bills would have had. Murco was the one who was supposed to find the band and make the connection, not the police — which meant that the right time for Lenz to plant it would have been after the murder, after the cops had come and gone, not before. But in that case, what was Lenz doing in Miranda’s apartment before the murder?

  I’d gone over these questions in my head countless times over the past few days, and the answers just didn’t get any clearer.

  I crossed Fourteenth Street and passed an empty cab stopped at a red light. Did I have enough cash? I dug into my pocket, decided I did, and got in. This would give me a chance to catch my breath, at least, and get me past any encounters I might otherwise have in Alphabet City. Barring traffic, it would also get me there faster. “Avenue D and Fifth,” I said. We roared off as the light changed.

  I tried not to think about what Murco would do when he got here. Jocelyn needed to be stopped, and more than that she needed to be punished, and Murco would see to both — but I didn’t want to think about it too closely.

  What I thought about instead was what I would do. The sensible part of my brain was telling me to watch from the street, maybe from the doorway of one of the projects across the avenue, to follow her if she came out, but otherwise to stay where I was and not get involved. When Murco showe
d up, I should point the apartment out to him and then walk away.

  But I had too many questions, too many things I needed to understand. I needed to face her, to look Jocelyn in the eye, to hear from her own mouth what had happened, how she could have killed someone we’d both loved.

  I stopped the cab a half block early, paid and walked the rest of the way. The fire escape ladder was still down, and one of the windows in Jocelyn’s apartment was still dark. But the other window, the kitchen window, was brightly lit. My heart was pounding. There was no one coming from either direction. I took hold of the ladder, pulled myself silently up to the first rung, and started to climb.

  I didn’t have the knife with me this time, but I also hadn’t closed the bedroom window all the way on my way out. There was enough room for me to get my fingertips under it and slowly raise it. The room was dark, but the light from outside was sufficient to show that the bed was still empty, the comforter pushed to one side exactly as I had left it. I stepped inside and quietly pulled the window closed. Through the bedroom door I could hear the sound of the television going in the living room. I couldn’t make out the words, but it seemed to be a news program, maybe CNN or NY1. Footsteps crossed from the living room to the kitchen. A glass was set down on the countertop, or maybe in the sink. Then I heard water running.

  The TV on and water running — I wasn’t likely to have a better chance than that to open the door unnoticed. So I turned the knob carefully and drew the door back. I followed the hallway past the bathroom to the living room. The kitchen was on my right, a pair of narrow French doors flung open on either side. I crept up to the one closer to me.

  She was at the sink, with her back to me. She was wearing black jeans and black canvas sneakers and a hooded grey sweatshirt with the hood draped down between her shoulders. A plate and a fork were set out to dry on a rubber tray next to the sink, and from the way her arms were moving, it looked like she was working on the glass.

  “Don’t move, Jocelyn,” I said. “My name is John Blake, and I’m—”

  I heard the glass slip and smash in the bottom of the sink. One of her hands leaped to her chest. “Jesus, you scared me,” she said, turning around. “You shouldn’t do that, John. Sneaking up on me like that, after all this time.”

  And suddenly I was back where it all began, staring in blank confusion at a picture from the past. Because it wasn’t Jocelyn.

  It was Miranda.

  Chapter 28

  “How’s your head?” Miranda said. “Sorry I had to hit you so hard, but you really didn’t give me any choice. It was either that or kill you, and I really didn’t want to kill you.” She was holding a steak knife in one hand and had picked up a piece of the broken glass in the other, but when she looked at my hands and saw that they were empty, she dropped both on the rubber tray and came forward. “Don’t need those, I guess. You’re not going to hurt me, are you? Poor, sweet John. I can still hear you telling Wayne how all you wanted was for me to be alive again. It touched me. Seriously.”

  She was a foot away from me. She put a hand up to my face, touched my cheek. I felt her fingertips against my skin as though from a mile away. She said, “You’re going to have to talk to me, sweetie. This isn’t going to work otherwise.”

  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.

  “Miranda—” The words wouldn’t come. Everything was wrong. If Miranda was here, was alive, then who... ? “Jocelyn. You killed Jocelyn.”

  She shrugged. “I’d be dead now if I hadn’t.”

  “And Lenz. You killed them both.”

  “Look, if we’re going to have this conversation, let’s sit down.” I didn’t move. “You want to stand? Fine, John, we’ll stand.” She leaned against the refrigerator, crossed her arms over her chest.

  “How could you do it?”

  “Do you mean how could I or how did I? Are you disgusted with me, or just confused?”

  “Both,” I said.

  “It’s not so hard, baby. Really, it isn’t. You do what you have to do to get by. But you’ve learned that, too, haven’t you?”

  “What happened to you?” I said, in a small voice.

  “To me? What about you? All these years, I always pictured you down at NYU thinking great thoughts, reading — I don’t know, ancient Greek history or something. I figured you’d be a professor, or maybe a scientist — or, or, I don’t know, you’d go into politics, I’d turn on the news and there you’d be, running for mayor of New York. I’ll tell you, it made it easier when I was dancing in every cheap dive across the South. At least one of us was doing better, you know? I certainly didn’t picture you doing this. Working with drug dealers, breaking into people’s apartments. Chasing after strippers with blood on their hands.”

  “You were going to be a doctor,” I said.

  “I was going to be a lot of things.” She came forward again, gently pushed me out of the doorway so she could step through. “At least let me turn off the TV.”

  I caught her arm as she passed, stepped out into the living room with her. “What,” she said, “you don’t trust me? I’m not going to do anything.” She kept her hands high as she went to the couch, picked up the remote control, and turned the TV off. “See?” She sat down. “Now you.”

  I sat across from her. It was beyond comprehension. That she was here at all, that I was, that we were sitting across from each other like old friends catching up after years apart, all while Susan lay in the hospital, clinging to life, and Jocelyn lay in the morgue, half her face blown away, deliberately misidentified to the police by Lenz. On one level, it all finally made sense — the pieces fit. But on another, it made no sense at all.

  “It was you dancing at the Wildman,” I said. “Not Jocelyn. Danny Matin said it was you and so did the bartender, and it wasn’t because she looked like you, it was because it was you.”

  “Yeah, it was me.” She lit a cigarette, held the pack out to me, dropped it on the coffee table when I didn’t react. “I’m not proud of what I did there, but I did it.”

  “But why did you use her name?”

  “I couldn’t use mine — not to set up a robbery. And they won’t hire you in a strip club these days without seeing ID. I had an old ID of Jocelyn’s from when we were dancing together. The picture was close enough.”

  Close enough. And when the burglars she’d recruited were caught and tortured and killed, and she’d needed someone to die in her place on the roof of the Sin Factory, Jocelyn had been close enough for that, too. Jocelyn, who was still in love with her, and who came running, bringing flowers no less, when Miranda had called her out of the blue offering a reconciliation. I thought about the message on the answering machine — Miranda hadn’t set herself up accidentally, she’d set Jocelyn up, very deliberately.

  “How did you get Lenz to go along with it?” I asked.

  “What choice did he have? He’s the one who’d told me about the buy in the first place. He shouldn’t have, but the man couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He just had to brag. And thank goodness. If he hadn’t, I’d have been working at that dive for nothing, not to mention fucking him for nothing.” She put on an expression of mock sympathy. “I’m sorry, sweetie. You didn’t think I’d been saving myself for you, did you?”

  “Hardly,” I said.

  “I remember the day he came home from that bar and said Khachadurian’s son had been in and had told everyone they’d caught the men who’d robbed his father. Wayne was so happy. He told me, ‘Those sons of bitches got what they deserved.’ž” She took a long drag on the cigarette. “You know what Khachadurian did to them?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I know what he did.”

  “Well, I had to give Wayne the bad news. I told him, ‘If we don’t do something and fast, you and I are going to be in the same boat as those sons of bitches, because
I’m the one who told them about the deal, and you’re the one who told me.’ I thought he was going to have a heart attack, drop dead right there.”

  She waited for me to say something, but I didn’t know what to say.

  “Wayne had two choices,” she went on. “He could go to Khachadurian, explain what had happened, and beg for mercy, in which case the best he could hope for was that maybe they’d just kill him instead of cutting out his eyes first, or he could agree to help me. And let’s not forget that if he helped me, he also got half the money. And he got me. All he had to do was identify her body as mine and then let me stay at his apartment until the heat died down.”

  That wasn’t quite true. He could identify Jocelyn’s body as Miranda’s, but the word of a two-time convict might not be enough for the police. And while expanding shells pumped into the back of a person’s head could do a lot to interfere with either a visual or a dental identification, they couldn’t change one person’s DNA into another’s. If the police picked up anything at Miranda’s apartment for a comparison, Miranda needed to know they’d get trace amounts of Jocelyn’s hair and skin, not hers. Even a drop-out pre-med would know that.

  Meanwhile, Miranda needed to have clothing to wear while she was in hiding, but she couldn’t empty her apartment without making the police suspicious. Fortunately, there was a simple solution to both problems: the afternoon of the murder, Miranda could take Jocelyn out on the town, and while they were away from both apartments, Lenz could come down to Avenue D, fill a big, rolling suitcase with Jocelyn’s clothing, hairbrush, toothbrush, and so forth, and then go to Miranda’s apartment and swap the contents of the suitcase for the things Miranda needed. That’s how Jocelyn’s baseball cap had ended up hanging on the inside of Miranda’s door. The clothing in Miranda’s dresser had been Jocelyn’s, too, or at least the things on the top of each drawer had been. The luggage cart had never had money in it — just Jocelyn’s things on the way in and Miranda’s on the way out.