Little Girl Lost (Hard Case Crime) (16 page)

His eyes looked desperate. His head was twitching sharply from side to side, like it had in the club.

“Now, you’re going to answer some simple questions,” I said. “I want to know how you talked Miranda into going along with your plan, I want to know what you did with the gun after you shot her, and I want to know where the money is. You answer those questions and I’ll ask some more. Maybe if you tell the truth I’ll be better to you than you deserve and turn you over to the police rather than to Murco. Give me enough facts to get a conviction and maybe it’ll save your life.”

He was sweating fiercely and his eyes were darting around the room. I was watching them and his hands. That was my mistake.

How could the bedroom door have opened without my noticing? How could someone have come up behind me so silently? Maybe it was the combination of a light step and a carpeted floor working against me, or maybe I was just so focused on Lenz that I would have missed the footfalls of an elephant. More likely both.

I pieced this all together later. At the time, I only knew that there was someone behind me when Lenz smiled, a look of relief blossomed on his face, and something heavy smashed into the back of my head.

I came out of it slowly, feeling the throbbing of my pulse behind my ear and the rough weave of the carpet under my cheek. At first, when I opened my eyes I couldn’t see anything, then objects began to swim darkly into view: the base of the recliner, the legs of a table. The darkness wasn’t a problem with my eyes, or at least not entirely. The sun had set while I was out and there were no lights on in the room.

My head swam when I tried to sit up, so I lay down again, closed my eyes. The back of my head felt pulpy when I touched it and my fingers came away wet. I probably had a concussion. I was lucky to have woken up at all.

I waited till the urge to vomit passed and tried very slowly to sit up again. When that worked, I took a few deep breaths and forced myself onto my knees. I let my head settle. Slowly, carefully, I stood up. I held my arms out to balance myself and swayed a little when finally upright.

To the light switch was only five steps. I covered the distance slowly, leaning against the wall all the way.

I wasn’t ready for the light. The room came slowly into focus. I had a pounding headache, but the rest of me felt the same is it had before — whoever had clocked me hadn’t taken the opportunity to do any further damage, and what surprised me more, neither had Lenz. This despite the fact that he’d had my gun lying right there. Speaking of which—

I spotted the gun by the foot of the recliner, next to where I’d been lying a moment earlier. And that made even less sense. I could imagine reasons Lenz might not kill me — he knew I had some tie to Murco now, he was in deep enough already and didn’t want another capital charge on his head, he was in a rush to get away — but I couldn’t think of a reason he would have left my gun behind. I bent at the knees, lowered myself slowly to pick it up.

It smelled like it had been fired. But I hadn’t pulled the trigger — unless when I was hit I’d pulled it by reflex. Did that sort of thing happen? I didn’t know. I didn’t think so. And in this particular case I knew it hadn’t, since I’d been aiming at Lenz and he’d been sitting in the recliner. He wasn’t there now and there was neither a hole nor a bloodstain in the back of the chair.

I looked around the room. The bedroom door was open and I staggered to it, even though I knew I’d find nothing. Surely the money was long gone along with Lenz.

And maybe it was — but he wasn’t.

Wayne Lenz was lying on his side on the floor, one arm flung up beside his head, the other clamped to his belly.

His shirt was soaked with blood. So was the carpet beneath him. His mouth and eyes were open and the look on his face — was I just imagining the shock, the look of betrayal?

I felt the gun weighing heavily in my hand. I could put it down, wipe it off, but what would that accomplish? It was registered to Leo. I could take it with me, drop it down a sewer grate on the way to the subway, hope no one saw me leave and that no one had seen me arrive—

The idea flickered briefly and died. For one thing, I was still unsteady and couldn’t face two flights of stairs on my own, much less the walk back to Main Street. For another, what were the odds that no one would see me along the way?

I slipped the gun into my jacket pocket and dropped to a squat next to Lenz’s body. He’d been shot at least twice, once in the gut and once in the chest. It would have been the chest shot that had killed him. I looked at his clenched fingers and decided that the look on his face might only be pain.

I took out my cell phone and speed-dialed Leo at the office. On a Friday night he’d normally be long gone, but given everything that was going on, I was hoping he’d decided to stick around.

“Come on,” I said as it rang. “Leo, pick up.”

The answering machine picked up instead and I heard my own voice asking me to leave a message. “Leo, I need your help. Call me back as soon as—”

The machine cut off with a beep. “Johnny?”

“Leo, we’ve got a problem.”

“What is it?”

I stood up, moved away from the body. The bedroom rug was charcoal gray and leading toward the door I could see two parallel streaks, the sort that might have been made by the wheels of a piece of luggage after rolling over a patch of bloody carpet. “I’m in Flushing,” I said, “at Wayne Lenz’s apartment. He’s—” I looked at the body. Leo had strong feelings about what you did and didn’t say over a cell phone, because you never knew who was listening in with a shortwave. But fuck it. “He’s dead. Shot twice, once through the heart. There was someone else in the apartment, came up behind me and knocked me out with something heavy, then used my gun to shoot him. Your gun, I mean.”

“Damn it,” Leo said. “Did you touch anything?”

“Just the gun.”

“
Just the gun?
”

“Leo, I—”

“Forget it. Just give me the address.” I gave it to him. “Stay there. Don’t touch anything else, don’t move anything. I’m going to call some people, but I’m not sure what I can do. The local precinct will want to handle it, and I don’t know anyone in Queens.”

“Next time I get framed for murder, I’ll try to do it in Manhattan.”

“This is not a joke. You’re going to be arrested. I’ll try to get them to listen, but Johnny, every murderer has a story. Every one of them, and plenty of times it’s how they were knocked out and when they woke up, there was a dead body and they didn’t know how it got there. It won’t look good.”

“Neither does the back of my head, Leo.”

“You wouldn’t be the first man to smash himself in the head to get out of a murder charge.”

“Leo — you don’t think I did it, do you?”

He said no, but I heard the moment of hesitation.

“I was knocked unconscious, Leo, and someone else — I don’t know who — took my gun, shot Lenz with it, and walked out with a trunk full of money. You’ve got to believe me.”

“I’ve got to,” Leo said. “The police don’t.”

Leo was with them when they showed up at the door. They rang up from the lobby and I buzzed them in, just as if I lived there and they were coming for a friendly visit.
Won’t you sit down? No, not there, that’s evidence.

There were three men with Leo, two middle-aged uniformed cops and one in plain clothes who looked about thirty years old except that he was balding like an old man. One of the uniforms took me by the arm and started reading me my rights while the other headed for the bedroom.

“Do you understand these rights as I’ve explained them to you?”

I looked at the name stitched above his breast pocket. “Yes, Officer Lyons, I understand. You’re going to want this.” I picked up my jacket, which I’d taken off and left by the door. “There’s a gun in the pocket. I touched it — I shouldn’t have, but I did, I’d been hit on the head and wasn’t thinking straight. But there may still be other prints on it.” He took the jacket. “Also, I’ve looked around for the object the person who hit me might have used, and I couldn’t find it. But I did find this.” I walked him over to the recliner, and next to where I’d been lying there was a piece of frosted glass. It looked like a horse’s head. “It probably broke off from a bigger piece, some sort of heavy glass sculpture, maybe a cowboy on horseback, something like that. You might find it thrown out somewhere on this block or in the neighborhood.”

“John,” Leo said gently. “Let them do their job.”

“I’m letting them, I’m just pointing a few things out.”

“If there’s something to find, we’ll find it,” Lyons said.

The plainclothes cop came forward. “I’ll watch him, Lyons. You can go check out the body.”

Lyons looked like he wasn’t sure he wanted to let go of me, but the tone in the plainclothes man’s voice suggested he wasn’t just making an offer. Lyons released my arm and went to join his partner in the bedroom.

“Blake, you’re in deep shit. Leo filled me in.”

His voice had sounded familiar, and now I placed it. “Kirsch?”

He nodded. “I don’t have jurisdiction here, but if I can tie this in with Sugarman, maybe they’ll let us take it over.”

“Oh, you can tie it in with Sugarman all right. That I promise you.”

Leo had followed Lyons to the bedroom and now he came back. “What a mess.” I couldn’t tell whether he was talking about the scene in the bedroom or the situation as a whole. Both, probably. “Kirby, what are the odds they’ll let you book him in Manhattan?”

“Zero to none,” Kirsch said. “Best we can hope for is Monday morning they’ll let us move him.”

“Monday morning?” I said.

“Look at it this way,” Kirsch said. “You’re going to spend a weekend in jail, would you rather do it in Flushing or at Midtown South?”

“I’d rather spend it in my own apartment,” I said, “or better yet, working on this case, which I can’t do if I’m in jail. Look at this. Look.” I bent my head forward. “How could I do that to myself?” I pulled him toward the bedroom. “Look at the rug. Someone pulled a trunk through here. If I did it, where’s the trunk?”

Lyons’ partner was talking into a walkie-talkie the size of a hero roll. Lyons looked up from Lenz’s body. “Sir, please calm down.”

“I’m calm. I’m just telling you you’re arresting me for something I didn’t do.”

“If you didn’t do it, that will come out and you’ll be released. In the meantime, we’ve got you at the scene of a murder with a gun you say is the murder weapon and you’re telling us we’re going to find your prints on it. Ask the lieutenant there what would happen to us if we didn’t book you.”

I looked to Kirsch for support and then to Leo, but both knew Lyons was right, and I knew it, too.

“Look, Blake,” Kirsch said. “If your story checks out, maybe Monday we can get you cleared.”

“That’s great, but in the meantime whoever did this has a chance to get away.”

Lyons got up and took hold of my arm again. “Let us worry about that, Mr. Blake.” He steered me toward the front door.

“Do we have to wait till Monday?” I said. “Doesn’t anyone work Saturdays?”

“A Queens judge? On a Saturday?” Kirsch said. “That would take more pull than we’ve got.”

Booking me took the better part of an hour, and then they took me to an infirmary where a police surgeon washed the back of my head, smeared on some antibiotic ointment, and told me I didn’t need stitches. I didn’t argue. I had bigger things to worry about than a scar on the back of my head.

They put me in a holding cell with stacked bunks along two walls. One of the bunks was occupied by a man who was shivering. It wasn’t cold. The others were empty and I sat on the nearest one.

I wasn’t dazed anymore, but I still felt the soreness. It was worse when I lay down, but then I couldn’t have slept anyway, not with so much to sort out.

I’d been assuming that Lenz and Miranda had worked alone — or more precisely that they had worked with no one else other than the two burglars Miranda had recruited at the Wildman. But someone had been in Lenz’s apartment, had hidden in the bedroom when I’d knocked, and had come out swinging when I’d started pressing Lenz for answers. In principle it didn’t have to be someone who’d been in on the robbery — it could just have been a friend who’d jumped to Lenz’s defense when it looked like I might shoot him. Except that jumping to someone’s defense generally doesn’t involve leaving him dead on the floor and walking out with his stash of stolen money.

And the timing was suspicious, too: I didn’t get attacked right away, only after Lenz had offered to split the money with me. He hadn’t been serious, just desperate — but the friend in the bedroom might have thought Lenz was serious, might at least have thought he was going to talk. This certainly suggested someone with something to hide, someone whose face had gone as pale when I’d threatened to go to Murco as Lenz’s had.

Obviously, it had to be someone who knew about the money. Someone Lenz trusted, though he shouldn’t have. I thought immediately of Roy — Lenz had presumably been behind it each of the three times Roy came after me, and if Roy was willing to break into a man’s apartment on Lenz’s say-so, there was obviously more going on there than a simple manager/bouncer relationship. And God knows Roy would be capable of murder. But Roy wouldn’t have needed to smash me in the head with a piece of sculpture — a fist would have done fine. And Roy wouldn’t have left me alone once I was unconscious. Even if he needed me alive to take the fall for Lenz’s murder, he would have gotten in a kick or two.

So who? If I weren’t stuck in this cell, I might be able to find out.

“Coffee?”

A cop stood at the bars holding a cardboard deli tray in one hand. I reached through the bars and took one of the cups.

“Think he wants one?” The cop nodded toward my cellmate, who was still twitching in his sleep.

“Not unless you’ve spiked it with bourbon.”

I took the cup back to my bunk. It was barely warm. Hell, it was barely coffee. I couldn’t help comparing how the day had started and how it was ending. The smell of fresh-brewed coffee, the feel of Susan’s arms around me, her head on my chest — how had I gone from that to this cell stinking of Lysol and sweat? I had a murder charge hanging over my head, a killer slipping further away by the minute, and this cup of brown water that tasted like nothing but would probably keep me up all night if my aching head didn’t.