Little Girl Lost (Hard Case Crime) (6 page)

“Have you seen anything else?”

“Like what?”

“Anything that made you uneasy.”

She laughed, but the laugh itself was an uneasy one. “Nothing worse than at Carson’s.”

“That bad?”

“They’re all the same. Unless you look like Jennifer Lopez or a Playboy centerfold — maybe then the places you get to work at are different. Although actually I doubt it. I’m sure the money’s better, but the management and the customers, I don’t know.”

“Better quality leather in the whips,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“Have you ever met Khachadurian?”

“I only saw him once, on my first day,” she said. “Lenz was walking with this huge guy, took up half the hallway. One of the other girls said that’s who it was.”

“And Lenz? What’s he like in private?”

“The same. In private, in public, he’s a prick. He’s the same with everyone as he was with you last night.” I heard a muted beeping from under the table, the sound of a cell phone picking out the notes to Ravel’s
Bolero
. She picked up her handbag, dropped it on the table, and rooted around in it until she found her phone.

“Go ahead, take it,” I said. “I’ll step over there.”

“No, it’s not a call. I just set the alarm.” She pressed a button on the side of the phone and the melody stopped. “I need to go. I’m sorry. I’ve got to get changed and get ready.” Her hands were shaking again. Or maybe they’d never stopped.

“How can I contact you if I need to?” I said

She still had her cell phone in her hand, so I would have thought the answer was obvious; but then again, I also remembered her saying in her voicemail that there was no good number where I could reach her.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I just don’t give my personal number out to anyone. I mean, like, four people have it. You seem like a normal guy, but I don’t know you.”

“You’re absolutely right,” I said, and I meant it. The more careful she was, the better. “You’ve got my number. Call me if anything happens. If I need to get in touch with you, how about I leave a message for you here?”

She nodded, and got up. “John—” She lowered her voice. “Do you think Randy was right? Part of me thinks she was just making this stuff up and now I’m getting sucked into her fantasy. But someone killed her, and if it’s the guy I’m working for, I could be in real danger.”

This time the reassurance came out before I could stifle it. “I think you’re pretty safe, Rachel. Even if he did kill her — and I don’t know, it doesn’t sound right, why would he do it on the roof of his own building? — but even if he did, I don’t think he’s going to try it again anytime soon, not while the police are watching the place. You’re probably safer there than anywhere in the city.”

She nodded, wanting to believe. Then she said, quietly, “It’s Susan.”

“What?”

“You called me Rachel. That’s for the clubs. My name’s Susan.” She held her hand out, and this time I took it.

I watched her go, then paid the check and left myself. The streets were dark, or anyway as dark as it ever gets in Manhattan. Storefronts kept the avenue well lit, but on the side streets it was another story. Streetlamps left pools of light at regular intervals up and down the sidewalk, but outside these pools it was all shadows.

I stepped out between two parked cars and walked in the street itself. I don’t know why I do this. It’s not clear that it reduces my risk — if anything, it adds the risk of getting run down by a car to whatever risk of a bad encounter I might have on the sidewalk. But somehow it makes me feel safer when I’m not hemmed in by shuttered buildings on one side and empty cars on the other.

Tonight I had it easy: there were no people and no cars. You could hear some honking in the distance, and occasionally the squeal of a set of tires gripping the pavement, but that was in the distance. This block was mine and mine alone.

Halfway between Eighth and Seventh Avenues, my cell phone rang. At first I couldn’t make out the voice of the man on the other end, but when I covered my other ear his voice became clearer.

“—my daughter. Mr. Blake? Are you there?”

“I’m here. Who is this?”

“Daniel Mastaduno. You sent a fax with your phone number on it. Is this a bad time to call?”

“No, it’s fine,” I said. It took a second for the name to click. Mastaduno. The roommate. “Your daughter is Jocelyn Mastaduno?”

“That’s right.”

“Where is she? Can I talk to her?”

“I was hoping you could tell me. We haven’t heard from Jocelyn in six years, Mr. Blake. Do you have any idea where she is?”

Six years? “No,” I said. “I—”

The punch came from behind, and it landed square in my kidney. The phone flew from my hand and clattered against the door of a car. I dropped to my knees and took a boot in the stomach that knocked out of me what little breath I’d had left. Another kick dug deep into my gut, and then another. My chest was pounding and my side was screaming with pain. I wanted to move, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t breathe. It was all I could do to keep from throwing up.

Ten feet away, my phone lay on its side, chirping, “Hello? Hello? Mr. Blake?”

A gloved hand gripped my hair, pulled my head off the ground. I felt a pair of lips brush my ear. “Leave it alone, man, or next time they’ll make me give you more than a warning.”

The hand laid my head down gently. The cell phone was silent now. No cars came.

The look of pity Leo gave me was almost worse than the beating.

“How do you let a guy get close enough to you to land a punch without noticing?”

“I was on the phone, I told you.”

“Goddamn cell phones,” he said, “how many times have I told you—”

“Lots of times. It’s enough.”

“It’s not enough! Look at you!”

“Leo, please. I want you to put me in touch with someone who can tell me about Murco Khachadurian. Someone on the force.”

“Anyone I knew on the force retired five years ago, and I’ll tell you something else — if I did know someone, I wouldn’t ask him to help you. I’m not going to help you go and get yourself killed.”

“I’m not going to get myself killed.”

“Stand up and say that,” he said.

I was lying flat on my back on the leather couch in our reception area. I’d made it to the office because it was closer to the Sin Factory than my apartment, and getting in didn’t require me to climb any stairs. Spending the night on the couch had left me with a stiff neck that I hadn’t had before, but at least the pain in my stomach was a little less intense. My side still felt like someone was sticking in a knife in me any time I turned, and standing up was out of the question.

Leo had found an old hot water bottle in the bottom of one of his desk drawers and he’d filled the thing with water he’d heated in the coffee maker. It had gone cold in the meantime, but it was too much trouble to get it out from under me. He’d also fed me a glass of whiskey, and between the red rubber pad under my back and the rocks tumbler in my hand, I felt like my own grandfather.

“Khachadurian’s involved,” I said. “Whether he killed Miranda or not, he’s part of what happened, and I’m going to talk to him.”

“What are you going to do, call him on your cell phone?”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I’m going to do. I got a number for him from his brother, and if that doesn’t work I’ll get another number somewhere else.”

“I should never have trained you,” Leo said.

“Leo, I’m going to find the man and I’m going to talk to him, and if he killed Miranda, I’m going to bring him in. All I’m asking is, before I make the call, I want to know more about him. The more I know, the better the chances I come out of it in one piece.”

“Have another drink.”

I set my glass down on the floor. “I don’t want another drink. I didn’t even want the first one. All I want is some information. If you don’t help me, I’ll get it some other way. But don’t tell me you can’t get it because you don’t know anyone anymore. You’re not that out of touch.”

Leo took the glass, refilled it, and put it back within arm’s reach. “Here’s a deal. When you can make it to the bathroom on your own, no promises, but I’ll make a few calls.”

I tried to sit up, winced as the pain shot through me.

“When,” Leo said.

“Yeah. When.” I lay back down.

By midday, I could stand on my own, as long as I leaned against the back of a chair. At one, Leo brought me a turkey sandwich and a Snapple, and at three I was leaning against the bathroom door, pissing it away. It was excruciating. But I came back from the bathroom as proud of myself as a newly toilet-trained toddler.

“Zip up,” Leo said.

“You’ll want to start making those calls now,” I said.

I went back to the couch while he went into the other room to work the phone. The truth was that he probably didn’t know anyone still on the force — his contemporaries were all out of the game one way or the other, retired or dead, and even the rookies who’d shaken his hand at his retirement party were probably coming up on their own. But his buddies had had kids, and the police force is one of the last great dynastic employers: if your daddy was a cop, there was a good chance you’d go into the Academy yourself when the time came. So, no, Bill O’Malley, Leo’s partner for his first five years, wasn’t around any more, but Bill, Jr. was. Leo would be able to get someone on the phone.

That left me to hold up my end of the bargain, and with Leo in the other room, I didn’t have to put a brave face on it any more. The truth was I felt like shit. I could walk again, and I didn’t think anything inside me was torn or broken, but my God, it couldn’t have hurt any more if something had been. I thought about the man who’d done it. Until he’d spoken, I couldn’t be sure who it was, but the voice wasn’t one you’d forget. I’d been bounced by the Sin Factory’s bouncer, and that meant either Lenz or maybe Khachadurian himself had told him to do it. Which meant I was in their sights already.

It didn’t mean for sure that Rachel — Susan — was right. It didn’t mean that Khachadurian had put the bullets in the back of Miranda’s head or given the order to do so. All it meant for sure was that they didn’t want me poking around and maybe bringing to light whatever dirty business they were carrying on behind the closed doors of the champagne rooms. Maybe it was just sex, not drugs, or maybe it was both, but that didn’t necessarily mean it was murder, too.

Not necessarily.

But as Susan had said,
someone
had killed Miranda, and the little I’d heard about Khachadurian so far didn’t make him sound like an unlikely candidate.

I fiddled with my cell phone while I waited for Leo to come back. Overnight, the battery had drained and I didn’t have a charger in the office. But I’d get it working again. The faceplate was scuffed and scratched, but it didn’t look like the damage was serious. They built those things to take a beating. Wish I could say the same for myself.

I thought about what Dave Mastaduno had been saying to me when we’d been interrupted. No, not Dave. Daniel. What Daniel Mastaduno had been saying:
We haven’t heard from Jocelyn in six years, Mr. Blake.
Rianon must have forwarded my fax after all. I tried to imagine what it had been like for him to get it. Six years of silence, and then out of the blue one day a fax comes from a stranger with your daughter’s name on it. A little like waking up one morning and seeing Miranda in the newspaper. A name from the past, a face from the past, all your worst fears brought to life.

Was Jocelyn Mastaduno dead, too? Or was she just missing? Or hiding? Or maybe she just didn’t want to talk to her parents — God knows I hadn’t talked to my father in more than six years, though once a year we exchanged chilly Christmas cards. There wasn’t necessarily a big mystery here. And yet somehow I had a bad feeling about it, as though Miranda’s death was poisoning everything else around her.

Leo opened the door, shut it quietly behind him, and held up a slip of paper. He made me walk all the way across the room to take it from him, and I forced myself to do it without grimacing and without holding onto the chairs along the way.

“What I wouldn’t give to be your age again. Take a beating at night, ready to run a marathon the next morning.”

I snatched the paper, saw the phone number for the Midtown South Precinct house. I didn’t recognize the extension. “O’Malley?”

“No, Stan Kirsch’s son. Kirby, and you tell me, what’s a worse name than that for a guy named Kirsch?”

“Leo.”

“Leo Kirsch? What’s wrong with that?”

“Leo.”

“What?”

“Thank you.”

He sat down at his desk, didn’t look at me. “Can’t let you fuck up on your own,” he said. “I’ve got too much invested in you.”

I took a deep breath before climbing the stairs and had to stop for another at each landing, but eventually I made it to my apartment. My cell phone would take hours to charge completely, so I got it going and used the phone by my bed to call Kirby Kirsch.

“John. Yeah. I got the message you’d be calling. I think your dad knew my dad?”

“Leo’s not my dad. He’s my boss. But yes, he used to work with your dad, I think in the late seventies.”

“That’s when it would have had to be,” he said, “since my dad never made it into the early eighties.”

“What happened?”

I heard him chew something and swallow. “Shooter at a street fair, took out two pedestrians and two policemen before blowing his own brains out.”

“Jesus,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Me, too. But that’s the job.” Some more chewing came over the line. This one had a thick hide, all right.

“Did the message say what I’m calling about?”

“Just that you’d call.”

“Someone I used to know was shot a few nights ago, a woman named Miranda Sugarman.”

“Sugarman, that’s the stripper?”

“That’s what she was now. Ten years ago, she was my girlfriend when we were in high school.” This was his turn to say
Sorry
, but he didn’t. “We’re looking into it—”

“We?”

“I work for Leo’s agency. We’re just trying to find out some more.”

“For the family?”