Little Girl Lost (Hard Case Crime) Read online

  I heard someone pick up and Roy took the phone. He was still holding tight to the front of my jacket with one huge fist.

  “Mr. Khachadurian? This is Roy from the club. Yes. I’m with John Blake, he says you — Yes, in his apartment. Wayne did. Because he’s sticking his nose — He’s hanging around the club, he’s bothering the girls — No, I haven’t. Yes. Yes. Yes, I understand.” He slammed the phone down.

  He pulled me close again. “You’re one lucky son of a bitch,” he said. He shoved me back and my knees buckled against the bed. I went sprawling. Then he was standing above me, blocking what little light came in through the window. I didn’t see his fist come down, but I felt it as he buried it deep in my belly.

  “Murco,” I croaked.

  “I don’t work for Murco,” he hissed. “I work for Wayne Lenz.” An uppercut slammed against the underside of my chin, snapping my head back against the mattress. “That’s first of all. Second, I don’t like getting sprayed in the eyes.” One more punch, this one aimed at my groin. I turned and caught it on my hip.

  “He’ll kill... he’ll kill you.” I could barely get the words out.

  “Well, now, that’s third,” he said, and I could hear the satisfaction in his voice. “The man said don’t do any permanent damage. Didn’t say don’t hit you.” The next blow caught me in the side of the head. After that, I didn’t feel the rest, just heard them as they landed...

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  Little Girl LOST

  by Richard Aleas

  A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

  (HCC-004)

  First Hard Case Crime edition: October 2004

  Published by

  Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street

  London

  SE1 0UP

  in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

  Copyright © 2004 by Winterfall LLC. All rights reserved.

  Cover painting copyright © 2004 by Robert McGinnis

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Print edition ISBN 978-0-85768-315-1

  E-book ISBN 978-0-85768-382-3

  Design direction by Max Phillips

  www.maxphillips.net

  The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime Books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.

  Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com

  For Naomi

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 1

  The headline made me sit down when I read it, that and the picture next to it and the article that spilled out over two columns underneath.

  After I finished, I spread the paper out on the table, flattened it down with both hands, and stared at the photo. I wasn’t reading, not any more, just watching the girl in the photo stare back at me, a big smile on her face, all her teeth showing, her eyes squinting against the photographer’s flash, blond bangs hanging down under the peak of her mortarboard cap. That was one of two photos the paper had run; the other was on page nineteen, where the article continued. I didn’t turn to page nineteen, not again, just stood up, bearing down on the table, leaning on my fists, and looked at her. The strangest thought came to me then: I thought about the bird.

  It was made of styrofoam, with a yellow-and-red coating on it meant to look like feathers, a black plastic beak, and wire feet twisted into claws at the ends. I found it in the incinerator room at the end of the hall, in a balsa wood cage balanced on the rim of the slop sink. I’d come out to throw out the kitchen garbage for my mother, so I went ahead and dragged the door to the incinerator open and let the knotted plastic bag slide down the chute. But my eyes were on the bird, the shoddy styrofoam bird in its shoddy wooden cage.

  One of our neighbors must have thrown it out, either the Tolberts or the Nelsons or Mrs. Knechtel in 14-D. No one would mind if I took it. My mother complained that it was filthy, but it wasn’t, not very, and when I promised to wash it off, she said she’d let me keep it.

  My father put a hook in the side of my bookcase and hung the cage on it, higher up than I could reach, and it stayed there, where I could see it every time I lay in bed, for the next ten years. My father left us somewhere along the way, but the bird stayed.

  When Miranda Sugarman finally let me sleep with her, she did it looking up at that bird, a ten-year accumulation of dust mottling its coat, the cage splitting where the hook bit into the wood. It was the night before we graduated from high school and only a week before she would leave New York for summer school in Los Alamos, where she hoped to get a head start on the pre-med courses that would put her on track for a career as an optometrist, or an ophthalmologist, I could never remember which.

  But that night I remember. I remember her eyelids trembling as she kissed me and how, afterwards, she weaved her fingers into my hair and pulled my head to her chest. I remember the curve of her shoulders as she leaned over the side of the bed to pick her glasses up off the floor. I remember listening to her heart as it hammered slower and slower against her ribs. Her chest was sticky with perspiration and so was my cheek, and we lay like that for a long time.

  Out of nowhere she said, “I hate that thing. That bird. I really do.”

  I followed her glance and it was as though I were noticing the cage up the
re for the first time. It was an ugly, god-awful thing. I couldn’t remember why I’d ever wanted it. I stood on tiptoe to get it down, wobbling a little as blood rushed to my head. Miranda laughed and I felt her hands around my waist, trying to hold me back, but I carried the cage out to the living room and she followed, my blanket wound around her body. She hissed at me as I unlocked the front door — “You’re naked!” — but she held the door for me and I walked out into the hall, past 14-B and 14-C and 14-D. The door to the incinerator room squeaked as I opened it and again, once I’d put the cage on the edge of the sink, when I let it slam shut.

  I walked back, all the length of that long hall, to where Miranda waited wrapped in my blanket, a look of mischief and delight shining in her face; and at the last instant, while a neighbor might still have opened the door and seen her, she opened the blanket and let it fall to her feet.

  A sign of things to come? I didn’t see it that way then. I only knew, in that instant, and maybe only for that instant, that I loved her: loved her as only an eighteen-year-old escaping from virginity and high school in the same night can. We swept the blanket under us. It didn’t matter to us that we were in my mother’s living room. We struggled to be silent, and failed. Thankfully, my mother didn’t wake up — or, if she did, she was discreet enough to stay in her bedroom with the door closed. Or if she wasn’t, we never noticed.

  The following afternoon, as I mounted the stage to the sound of our music teacher pounding out “Pomp and Circumstance” on the piano, I was struck by a thought. Last night, I’d left the bird in exactly the same place I’d found it ten years earlier, in more or less the same position on the edge of the sink. And despite the decade that had passed, we still had all the same neighbors. One of them was the person who had thrown the thing out in the first place. What a shock it would be, I thought, what a Twilight Zone kick in the head, if the same neighbor who had thrown the bird out all those years earlier happened to walk into the incinerator room today and see it there, exactly as he or she had left it ten years ago. What would it be like? To think that you have safely disposed of something, that for better or worse it is out of your life forever, and then to walk into a room ten years later and find it there again, staring you in the face?

  I saw Miranda for the last time a week later. She went away, and despite the best intentions on both sides we didn’t stay in touch. I didn’t know what happened next in her life, but I could imagine: after college, she settled down into a safe, sensible, hard-working Midwestern life, turned into a damn good doctor, while I — I stayed in New York and turned into what New York turns people into.

  That was where I thought the story ended. And it was — until I walked into a room ten years after our graduation and saw Miranda Sugarman’s yearbook photo staring at me out of the Daily News under a headline that said “Stripper Murdered.”

  Chapter 2

  Visiting a strip club in the middle of the day is like visiting a well-lit haunted house. The magic, such as it is, is gone. At night, the Sin Factory was probably decked out like a casino, with a flashing marquee and a tuxedoed bouncer checking IDs at the door. Maybe even a velvet rope to make the patrons feel special when they were let in. But at three in the afternoon there was no one at the door, the neon was turned off, and even the beat of the music leaking out into the street sounded sluggish and half-hearted.

  Under glass in a frame on the door were photos of this week’s featured performers, Mandy Mountains and Rachel Firestone. In her photo, Mandy was cradling breasts some mad doctor had built for her out of equal measures of silicone and cruelty. Rachel’s photo showed a thin brunette straddling a chair backwards, her bare breasts peeking out between the slats. Judging by their shape, hers had gone under the knife as well, but next to Mandy’s, Rachel’s breasts looked almost modest. Either to keep the cops from complaining or to keep passers-by from getting too much of the show for free, management had stuck tiny silver stars over each woman’s nipples. Along the top of the frame, a printed card announced the dates on which each woman would be appearing. Rachel had more than a week left, but tonight was Mandy’s last night.

  I pulled the door open. The place was smaller than most strip clubs I’d seen, just a single, narrow room with a bar against one wall and a tiny wooden stage at the far end. Mirrors on all the walls struggled to make the place and the crowd it held seem larger, but the attempt was a failure. The stools at the bar were all empty, the crowd consisted of two men on opposite sides of the stage, and the mirrors weren’t fooling anyone.

  Behind the bar, a woman was wiping glasses and racking them overhead. She was wearing an open black jacket over a lace-trimmed black bustier that gave her deep cleavage. Her chest couldn’t have been on display more if she’d been holding her breasts out to me on the palms of her hands. Her blonde hair was pulled back with an elastic band and her nails were painted the color of a cosmopolitan.

  I sat on a stool and asked for club soda when she came over. She thumbed one of the buttons on her dispenser and tossed in a plastic stirrer and a piece of lime while the glass filled. “Just so you know,” she said, “it’s a twodrink minimum to watch the show. Doesn’t matter if you order club soda, I’ve got to charge you for wine.”

  “And how much is wine?”

  “Ten dollars a glass.”

  I took a handful of bills out of my pocket, picked out a twenty and a five and put the rest back. “Must be pretty good wine.”

  She tapped a few spots on the screen of her cash register and then the tray shot out and my twenty disappeared inside. The five went in the pocket of her jacket.

  “You can take the glass with you. Just wave when you want another.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll stay here.”

  “Suit yourself.” She resumed her work with the glasses, drying them and tucking them away in the overhead rack.

  From the far end of the room came the sound of light applause from one of the patrons. The song had ended, and in the interval before the next one began the girl onstage padded around softly, swinging her hips awkwardly in time to the silence. She was neither Mountains nor Firestone, but like the headliners she was topless and looked surgically enhanced. She also looked exhausted, but apparently there wasn’t another girl to relieve her, so she kept on dancing, or anyway making enough of an effort to keep the air moving onstage.

  The man seated to her left looked like a Wall Streeter on his lunch break, except that it was three in the afternoon and we were on west Twenty-fourth Street. He had an empty beer glass in front of him and a small pile of dollar bills soaking in a spill next to it. His tie was flung back over his shoulder and he kept taking his glasses off to wipe them with a paper napkin.

  On the other side of the stage was the guy who had clapped at the end of the last song, and now he clapped again as the next song began. But between the beginning and end of each song, he showed his appreciation in a different way: as I watched, his hand stole into his pants through his open zipper.

  I caught the bartender’s attention. “Doesn’t bother you that our friend there is jerking off?”

  “Why? Does it bother you?”

  “It’s not my club.”

  “It’s not mine either,” she said.

  “Yeah, but you’re going to have to wash his glass.”

  “You want to call him on it, be my guest,” she said. “Far as I’m concerned, as long as he keeps it in his pants, it’s between him and whoever does his laundry.”

  I held my hands up. “Fair enough.”

  She topped off my drink, even though I had only taken a sip. “It’s disgusting,” she said softly, leaning forward to say it into my ear. “But, you know, this isn’t exactly Scores here.”

  That was putting it mildly. There was top drawer and there was second rate in New York the same as anywhere else, but this wasn’t even second rate, it was tenth rate. Scores was a “gentleman’s club” where, between dances, you could get rare prime rib and watch hockey games on flat-scree
n TVs. A notch or two down, strip clubs like Flashdancers and Private Eyes dispensed with the steak but still had large dance floors and pretty girls in nice costumes, and gave the impression that they cared about the impression they gave. The Sin Factory was another animal altogether. It hurt to picture Miranda working here.

  “Let me ask you something.”

  “I don’t date customers.”

  “That’s not it. I think you knew a friend of mine. She used to work here as a dancer.”

  “Yeah? Who’s that?”

  I drank some of my club soda. “Miranda Sugarman.”

  I watched as the muscles under the skin of her face tightened. “What are you, a cop or a reporter?”

  “Neither,” I said. “Just a friend of Miranda’s.”

  She was trying to make up her mind whether to talk to me or throw me out of the place.

  “We went to high school together,” I said. “Ten years ago. She was my girlfriend.”

  The bartender shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t know her.”

  “The paper said she was dancing here.”

  “A lot of girls dance here.” She shot a glance at the dancer on the stage. “That one up there now, she’s been here at least as long as your girlfriend was. But I don’t know her. All I know is she calls herself ‘Star,’ and every day she complains about how cold it is in the dressing room.”

  “Is it cold?”

  “Like fucking Alaska.”

  I stirred the ice in my glass. “What did Miranda call herself when she worked here?”

  “Randy,” she said. “I didn’t even know her real name was Miranda. If you’d have asked me, I’d have guessed it was anything but Miranda, because why pick a stripper name that’s short for your real name? I didn’t know her any better than I know you.”