Little Girl Lost (Hard Case Crime) Read online

  Of course, Miranda wouldn’t necessarily have had to get that close to them — all she’d needed was to get that close to someone who knew them, or someone who knew someone who did. Maybe one of the gentlemen from Colombia had a girlfriend who worked at the club, and that girlfriend had shared some juicy gossip with Miranda about the big deal going down between her boy and Big Murco. Or maybe one of the girls Murco was using to pass the stuff on to the street-level dealers had been told she’d have some work to do soon, and she’d bragged about it to Miranda.

  One way or another, though, Miranda had heard about the buy — and then, if Murco was to be believed, she’d gone to work. Either she’d raced up to the Bronx and gotten a job there in a hurry or more likely she’d gotten that job earlier, maybe had spent weeks or months cultivating some punch-drunk regulars she could talk into pulling a heist for her when the time came. When it did, she gave them Murco’s name and address, waved goodbye from the doorstep, and waited for them to return with the loot. And why had they? There is such a thing as honor among thieves — if there weren’t, no thieves would ever work together twice. But as much as I didn’t like to think about it, there was probably more to it in this case: given that she’d picked these guys up at a strip club, there was probably an element of sex involved that kept them coming back to her.

  It had been a bad deal for the men. If Murco was right, once the job was finished she’d taken the money and run — although maybe ‘run’ wasn’t quite the right word, since she’d actually stayed right here in New York, God only knew why. Meanwhile, within a few weeks her two companions had been picked up, hustled back to Scarsdale, and subjected to the third degree. Or the fourth degree. Whichever degree involved losing your teeth one by one and then getting dumped in a river or a shallow grave.

  In the end, they’d given her up — as much as they’d had to give, they’d given. Begging and pleading for their lives, or maybe by the end begging and pleading to be put out of their misery, they’d told Murco everything they knew. Which wasn’t much.

  That left him where? He’d gotten back half the money he’d lost, and he’d gotten the people directly responsible for robbing him and beating him up — that was good. But it left the other half of the money unaccounted for, and five hundred thousand dollars wasn’t peanuts to a midlevel operator like Khachadurian. More important, it left the person behind the scheme at large, having gotten away with her crime. This Murco couldn’t tolerate. So he went hunting for her, and shortly thereafter she turned up dead on the roof of his club. But not by his hand, if you believed him.

  Who, then? Well, who would have had a reason to kill her? One possibility: Someone who knew she had the money and wanted it for himself. Another: Someone who was afraid of her and what she might do to him. Which could be the same person — whoever had tipped her off about the upcoming buy might know, or at least suspect, that she now had the money; and that person would have plenty of reason to be afraid of her, knowing that if Murco succeeded in tracking Miranda down, she’d eventually break under Catch’s tender ministrations and name her source of information. Alive, Miranda was a threat. Dead, she was worth five hundred thousand dollars.

  But who was this person? Catch? Lenz? One of the gentlemen from Colombia? Either that, or someone who knew one of them intimately enough to have heard him mumbling something about the buy in his sleep. Or was I forgetting something?

  There was a knock on the bathroom door. “John, are you in there?” It was Susan’s voice.

  I raised myself to a sitting position. “Yes. I’ll be out in a minute.”

  “That’s all right, I just wanted to know if you’re okay.”

  I stepped out of the tub gingerly, holding onto the towel bar for balance. “Okay might be putting it too strongly,” I said. “But at least I’m clean.”

  “That’s an improvement.”

  I smiled. “Hang on.” I wrapped a towel around my waist and opened the door. She was wearing a pair of men’s flannel pajamas and holding a toothbrush and a tube of Colgate in one hand. Her hair was up, her makeup was off, and she looked—

  She looked irresistible. I wanted to take her in my arms and hold her. I didn’t do it, but I wanted to.

  She looked me over, lingering at the old bruise over my right hip and the new ones beginning to discolor my shoulder and my left side under my arm. “Damaged goods,” I said, but it didn’t make her smile. “It’s okay. I’ve had worse.”

  “God, John. Why do you do this?”

  “Get beaten up? I try not to.”

  “Why do you work in a job where you have to try?”

  I could have given a glib response — I’d given them often enough when other people had asked the same question. But somehow it didn’t feel right this time. She was asking seriously and I owed her a serious answer. “I like to think I can do some good,” I said. “Not a lot, maybe — but some. The papers, the news channels — Miranda’s only been dead a few days and they’re already onto the next story. The police, it’s the same thing. But meanwhile, a woman was murdered. She deserved better, Susan. Even if she did the things they’re saying, she didn’t deserve to die for it.

  “The way I look at it is, if I don’t do something about it, who’s going to? Now, maybe Leo’s right and I’m not going to accomplish anything, but maybe he’s wrong and I will. And if it takes me getting a few bruises to do it, well, I’m still better off than she is.” Susan didn’t say anything. “That’s all.”

  She stepped into the bathroom, pulled the door closed behind her. She put one hand on either side of my face gently and stroked the hair above my ears. It hurt when I took her in my arms. I didn’t let go.

  Chapter 16

  There was barely room in the bed for the two of us to lie side by side. She lay with her head on an unbruised portion of my chest and we breathed slowly, recovering. I stroked my fingertips along the back of her neck and she traced hers through the hair below my navel. Neither of us said anything.

  I was thinking about how much had changed, and how little. Here I was again, in the same apartment, in the same bed, looking up at the same bookshelf. The hook was still there. Only the bird was gone.

  I kissed her when she came back from her shower, then limped out to the bathroom to take one of my own. My duffel bag was still there, and I dressed in a fresh pair of jeans and a warm shirt. I was still sore, but it wasn’t so bad now that some of the soreness had been gained in a good cause.

  She met me at the door to my room with a handful of notes. “Let me fill you in on what I found out last night. I made a lot of calls.”

  “Coffee first.”

  I found the filters hidden in the butter compartment of the refrigerator, next to a small bag of hazelnut coffee. It was the sort of thing I’d never buy for myself, but now, as it brewed, it made me very happy. The smell was wonderful: warm and rich and domestic.

  I poured each of us a cup, and Susan flattened out the first sheet of paper. “Steven Dubois. Runs a club outside Dallas called Cooter’s.”

  “Cooter’s.”

  “It’s not as bad as it sounds. I danced there once. It’s a good place for beginners, and Steven’s not a bad guy. He won’t push you to do anything you don’t want to do. Holds open auditions and amateur nights and wet T-shirt competitions, and the crowd he gets isn’t too raunchy, more southern gentlemen than good old boys.”

  “Southern gentlemen and wet T-shirt competitions don’t sound like a natural combination.”

  “You’d be surprised. Anyway, I called him, and he said yes, sure, he remembered two Rianon girls showing up at his door in ‘96.” She read from her notes. “He said they were ‘green as grass, but gorgeous and game.’ž”

  “Did he actually say that? Green and gorgeous and game?”

  “That’s how he talks,” she said. “The first night I was there, I remember when he announced me he said

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, may I present, from the sunny shores of Fremont, California, the feisty and f
abulous Rachel Firestone.’ž”

  “Ladies and gentlemen?” I said.

  “They get a few ladies.”

  “Well, I can’t argue with fabulous.” I drank some coffee. “Fabulous Firestone. I like it.”

  “You don’t think I’m feisty?”

  “You could teach courses in feisty. What else did Mr. Dubois have to say?”

  “That’s it. He remembered them, said they danced there for a couple of weeks and moved on. He said the men loved them. They did this act where they’d dance together and instead of undressing themselves, they’d undress each other.”

  I remembered the photo, Miranda resting her head on Jocelyn’s shoulder, arm around her waist. It wasn’t so hard to picture them dancing together, peeling off each other’s clothes.

  “The second place I found where someone remembered them was a club called Sans Souci in New Orleans.” She looked up from her notes. “I’m just telling you about the yesses. There were something like twenty who said no or just weren’t willing to talk to me. Your mom is going to have one hell of a long distance bill.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “So, Sans Souci. I’ve never been there, but Matt Callan — he’s a booking agent I used to work with — Matt said they hire a lot of unagented girls there. I figured Miranda and Jocelyn probably hadn’t signed with an agent at this point, although I suppose they could have. Anyway, I talked to the manager, and after I got through to him that I wasn’t looking for a job myself, I managed to get him to think back, and he remembered them, too. That act of theirs seems to have stuck in people’s minds.”

  “Was it that unusual?”

  “Two girls stripping each other? I haven’t seen anything like it. There are girl-girl acts in the champagne rooms sometimes, but that’s usually just a sex show, not a dance routine. From what people are saying, Miranda and Jocelyn had a really nice number worked out, with choreography and everything.”

  “Must have been something to see.”

  “Well, that brings us to number three. Matt told me about a guy named Morris Levy who operates a string of clubs in the Southeast. As far east as Jacksonville, as far north as Atlanta. According to Matt, he bought up a bunch of failing clubs in the eighties, renamed them Mo’s, put the waitresses in hotpants and matching Tshirts, repainted the bathrooms, and reopened. The clubs are still in business twenty years later, so I guess it worked.”

  “You ever work at one of them?”

  Susan shook her head. “Wait till you hear why. Matt said he never books his dancers at Mo’s because Mo Levy has a habit of shooting videotapes of his dancers without their permission. Not just their acts — I’m talking about in the dressing room, the bathroom, the whole nine yards. All the decent agents avoid him, which means he has to rely on lots of amateurs and girls who don’t know any better. A couple of dropout college girls would be a perfect fit for him.”

  “What does he do with these videotapes?”

  “He used to sell them through classified ads in sex papers until he got in trouble for it. These days, I don’t know, he probably swaps them over the Internet. Or maybe he just watches them himself, or shows them to his friends. But Matt says he never stopped making them.”

  “How does he know that?”

  “I told you, they all talk to each other in this business. Word gets around.”

  “Okay. So you called Levy?”

  She nodded. “Matt gave me his number. I asked him about Miranda and Jocelyn, described the act, and he knew exactly who I meant. Said they’d worked for him for almost a year starting in 1999, going from one of his clubs to another. They’d been a popular act, brought in a lot of business. So I asked if he had a tape of them.”

  “You just asked?”

  “I told him about the murder first. I explained I was working with your firm on the investigation. He sounded honestly upset about the whole thing. Maybe he was just frightened, I don’t know. I told him it was important that he share with us anything he knew, and when he was done telling me what he remembered, I asked him whether he had any pictures or videos that would show either of the women. He said no.”

  “So he didn’t have anything.”

  “Hold on,” she said. “I told him that we knew about his history with the videotapes, we had evidence that he’d continued to make them, and now he had two choices: show us anything he had with Miranda and Jocelyn on it, or wake up tomorrow morning to the cops knocking on his door.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I also said we’d contact every dancer who’d worked in one of his clubs and by next week he’d be buried in law- suits. While if he sent us what he had, we’d leave him alone.”

  “Jesus Christ. Leo would love you. What did he say?”

  She sipped her coffee. “He said I was a ball-buster. That was the nicest thing he called me, actually. It went on for a while. But in the end there wasn’t much he could do. He swore he didn’t have anything of the bathroom or dressing room variety, but he finally admitted he had a tape of their performance itself. You should be getting a package at your office tomorrow by express mail.”

  “He’s sending the tape?”

  “A copy of it,” she said. “I don’t know if it will help in any way, but I figured it couldn’t hurt.”

  It couldn’t hurt? The case, maybe. I tried to imagine what it would be like to watch Miranda perform this popular act of hers, this tandem striptease that had all the strip club patrons from New Mexico to Florida talking. Susan reached across the table to put a hand on my arm.

  “You don’t have to watch it,” she said. “I can watch it for you, tell you if there’s anything on it you need to know about.”

  I shook my head. “No. It’s just a different type of bruising I’ve got to take. Leo warned me when this all started that I wouldn’t like what I learned. Doesn’t change what I’ve got to do, though.”

  She took her hand back, folded the papers. “I’ve got some more calls out from yesterday and another twenty or so places to call today. We’ve still got three years to fill in and they’re nowhere near New York.”

  “And they’re still dancing together.”

  “Right. So there’s plenty of work left. I’ll do what I can.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I really appreciate it, Susan.”

  “I like it, actually. It’s interesting work, and it keeps my mind occupied. Keeps me from thinking too much about how I’m going to get by with no job, and probably no one willing to hire me.”

  “You could always go to work as a detective,” I said. “You seem to have a knack for it.”

  “What about you? What are you going to do?”

  “Murco told me she recruited the burglars at a club in the Bronx. I figured I’d pay it a visit.”

  “Be careful,” Susan said.

  I squeezed her hand.

  “If you need anything, you can give me a call,” she said. “If I’m on the phone here, you can try me on my cell. I programmed the number into your phone while you were in the shower.”

  “You think that’s safe? Trusting me with your number?”

  “I decided to take the chance,” she said.

  Chapter 17

  The Wildman was about as different from the Sin Factory as two places could get. The building was only one story tall but it sprawled over what in Manhattan would have been the footprint of a skyscraper. The parking lot out back could have fit four brownstones.

  The walls looked like they’d been made from stacked cinderblocks and the roof was just slanted enough to let the snow slide off in the winter. There was a lighted billboard out front, but no doorman or bouncer, and even standing right under the front awning you couldn’t hear a thing from inside.

  Down the block and across the avenue were car lots and a mini-mall featuring a food court, a karate studio, and a combination Carvel ice cream store and video rental place. None of these establishments seemed to be doing much business.

  Neither was the Wildman, but that wasn�
�t a surprise given that it wasn’t even noon yet. Only hardcore alcoholics crack their first pint in the morning, and the same was true of strip club devotees. At noon or one you might see some local businessmen taking in the sights over lunch, but in the morning the clientele was limited to the addicted, the unemployed, and a few bleary-eyed night shift workers just getting off the job.

  But “24-Hour Action!” was one of the things the Wildman advertised on its sign, so it had to be open for business. I pushed through the door, paid the twentydollar cover to the man behind the barred bank teller window, and stepped through the curtain of heavy plastic strips that separated the front room from the back.

  My eyes took a moment to adjust. This room took up most of the rest of the building’s space, with five platform stages and a long wooden walkway snaking from one to the next. At the far end there was a full-sized stage with a red curtain and no one in front of it. Two of the five platforms were occupied, one by a tall woman with a Grace Jones flattop and small, natural breasts, the other by a woman closer to my height, chunkier, wearing silver hoops through her nipples and an ankh tattoo at the base of her throat. Her breasts looked natural, too. I hadn’t realized you could still find strippers with natural breasts in New York, even if you went to the Bronx at eleven in the morning.

  A few of the stools were occupied, though most were still stacked upside down on their tables. In one corner of the room a bartender was setting up, ripping open boxes of beer bottles and packing them into a cooler. There was a wooden bowl full of nuts and pretzels, and I grabbed a handful, popped them one by one while I waited for the bartender to come over.