Little Girl Lost (Hard Case Crime) Read online

  “Did Miranda open the door?”

  “I don’t know, I imagine so.” She thought about it for a moment. “Yes, I remember I heard the door close.”

  “And you don’t remember anything about this woman?”

  “No,” she said. “Just that she was holding flowers.”

  “Flowers?”

  “Wrapped up in paper, like you get in the street. I remember that.” She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, grimaced as she settled into the new position. “That’s all I remember.”

  “Did she have dark hair, blond hair—”

  “Blond hair, I think. She was wearing one of those hats, like the teenagers wear, but under it I’m pretty sure her hair was blond.”

  A woman with blond hair wearing a hat and carrying flowers. The flowers made me think of Jocelyn, but that was silly — it could have been anyone.

  The hat, on the other hand, made me think of the cap I’d found on the inside of Miranda’s door. “Do you remember what color the hat was?” I asked.

  She strained to remember. “Red? Dark red, almost purple.”

  That was the hat, all right. Whoever had worn it had apparently left it behind. Which was all well and good, but it didn’t tell me anything about what happened to Murco’s money.

  “Are you sure there was no one who visited her more recently than that? Maybe on the afternoon of the thirtyfirst or the morning of the first?” I tried to picture how large a package containing half a million dollars in hundred- dollar bills might be. Also how heavy. “Maybe someone carrying a shopping bag or a satchel, or maybe a suitcase?”

  She shook her head helplessly. “Just the man from the cable company. He had one of those cases on wheels, the kind you pull with a handle. But no one with a suitcase or a bag.”

  “The cable company sent someone on New Year’s Day?”

  “No, this was Saturday, maybe five o’clock. I was surprised, too. Usually their service is terrible, and on a holiday evening, forget it. But the reception’s been so bad, someone must have complained.”

  “And he went to 4-J?”

  “I don’t know, maybe it was 4-H — I just saw him coming this way on his way out. I tried to get him to come take a look at my cable, too, but he said I’d have to call for an appointment. He was quite rude.”

  “And he was pulling a case?”

  “Sure, for his equipment.”

  “Mrs. Krieger,” I said, “what did this man look like?”

  “I don’t know. He was young — not like you, but young. Maybe forty. Very short.”

  “When you say short... was he shorter than me?”

  “Oh, yes. Much shorter.”

  Much shorter. “Did he have dark hair? Slick, dark hair?”

  “Oh, yes. It looked very greasy. These workers they send over aren’t very clean, you know.”

  Very short. Greasy hair. That could describe any of ten thousand men in New York, maybe more. But not in this case. In this case, it described one man: Wayne Lenz. “What made you think he was with the cable company?” I asked.

  “Well, he told me, of course. When I came out in the hallway and asked him what he was doing. And he had those things hanging on his belt, those tools they use.”

  God only knew what he’d hung on his belt, and God only knew what he’d told this old busybody when she’d stuck her head out in the hall and asked him to fix her cable. But I had a feeling I knew what had been in the rolling case.

  Five hundred thousand dollars.

  Chapter 19

  I was on the street again, and suddenly it was freezing. The wind had picked up while I was inside and I could feel it through my clothes. I pulled my jacket closer around me, felt the weight of Leo’s pistol inside the pocket.

  Lenz. It made sense. Here you had a two-time loser, a two-bit con man working in a strip club because he’s never managed to make a real score, and along comes the score he’s been waiting for: his boss is about to make a buy for a million dollars in cash. He had to go for it.

  But not by himself, because physically he’s not exactly a powerhouse, and anyway what if he gets caught? He knows what Murco would do to him. So he gets one of the girls to work with him. He picks a loner who doesn’t talk to the other girls much, a girl who doesn’t entirely fit in. Because no matter how many years she’d been doing it, I couldn’t believe Miranda would ever entirely fit in — she’d been a pre-med at Rianon, for God’s sake.

  And then he cooks up a plan that gives both of them an extra layer of protection: she’ll recruit some toughs from another part of the city to do the dirty work, they’ll get their cut, and Miranda and Lenz will split what’s left. Yes, Lenz will only walk away with a few hundred thousand instead of a million this way, but by his standards that’s still big money, and it beats taking the personal risk of being the guy who actually holds Murco Khachadurian at gunpoint.

  But something goes wrong. The men who pulled the job get caught. They talk, and Lenz hears that they’ve talked — maybe Catch tells him in a moment of illadvised gloating. And now all bets are off. If the men who did the job talked, that means Miranda’s life isn’t worth a damn. And if Miranda has a chance to talk, Lenz’s life won’t be worth a damn either.

  That’s if she talks. On the other hand, if what she does is die, he gets to keep the whole five hundred thousand instead of half of it, or whatever split they’d agreed to. And with Miranda dead, maybe Murco will stop looking for more culprits. Even if he doesn’t, how is he going to tie Lenz to the burglary? Lenz presumably took precautions not to be seen with Miranda. To hammer home his innocence, he doesn’t run away after shooting her, he stays right there by the body and phones for an ambulance. Would a guilty man do that?

  It wasn’t a complete picture, and the pieces I did have didn’t all fit perfectly. There was the problem of the murder weapon: how had Lenz gotten rid of it before the police arrived? And there was the timing: Miranda must have taken the job at the Wildman long before Lenz could have heard about this particular buy Murco was going to make. Realistically, how far back could he have started setting this plan up? But enough of the pieces fit, and I didn’t feel like waiting around for more to fall into place.

  I flipped my cell phone open and stepped into a doorway to get out of the wind. I brought up the phone’s directory, thumbed through the entries until I found the new one for “Susan F.” I realized as the phone dialed that I still didn’t know what the ‘F’ stood for. Probably not Firestone.

  Susan picked up on the third ring. “The afternoon of the murder, Lenz came to Miranda’s apartment, dressed as a cable guy,” I said. “He must have picked a time when he knew Miranda wasn’t there, found the money, and taken it out in his equipment trunk.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Someone saw him, a neighbor. The description fits.”

  “Does that mean he killed her?”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “But it’s sure starting to look that way.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to go talk to him and find out. Do you know where he lives? Did he ever say anything while you were working for him?”

  “I know he came to work by train. He was always complaining about the 7 train and the long ride he had,” she said. “That’s all I know.”

  “That’s plenty.”

  “John, be careful. Wayne’s an angry man and he could get violent.”

  “He’s not the only one,” I said.

  I caught the 1 to Times Square and got on the 7 just as the doors were closing. An announcement came over the speakers as the train began its long, slow trek out to Flushing. I couldn’t understand what it said, but I wasn’t really trying.

  After almost an hour, the train let out at Main Street and Roosevelt Avenue. This intersection was as cosmopolitan as Flushing got: a jumble of Asian restaurants and grocery stores, drug stores selling vials of ginseng alongside the out-of-season Coppertone displays, newsstands carrying foreign papers and
international calling cards. A video store was promoting the latest Chow Yun- Fat import, a film whose two-character Chinese title was translated as A Sound of Distant Drums. The signs over the doors at McDonald’s and Citibank were covered with Asian lettering. Scattered here and there were remnants of the old Flushing: a Macy’s outlet store advertising a sale on men’s suits and bedding, a bakery with a small sign in one corner of the window certifying it as kosher. The sidewalk was packed, and everyone on it was dressed more warmly than I was. I pushed through, hands in my pockets.

  I’d had an hour in which to calm down and change my mind about confronting Lenz, but the trip had had the opposite effect on me.

  Once I was off Roosevelt, the neighborhood quickly reverted to Queens normal: six-story red brick buildings interspersed with occasional stretches of one- and twostory homes, tiny patches of lawn squeezed in between the sidewalks and the facades. I passed Union and turned in on Bowne.

  The telephone operator had found two listings for “W. Lenz” in the 718 area code, but only one was located on the 7 line. That W. Lenz lived here, in a building whose chipped cornerstone said it had been built in MCMXLI.

  The front door wasn’t locked, and the one just past the vestibule, which normally would have been, was held open with a rubber doorstop. Someone was moving out, maybe, or bringing a package in from his car. It would just be a minute, and in the meantime why not leave the door propped open? Being able to leave your door open was why you lived in Flushing instead of Manhattan.

  Lenz’s name was listed on the intercom board next to a button marked 3-B. I didn’t push it.

  I started up the stairs. Normally, when you have a sense of déjà vu you can’t explain the feeling, but it wasn’t hard to understand it now. I climbed carefully, slowly, hugging the wall and placing each foot gently to make as little noise as possible. No one passed me on the stairs, but I kept the gun in my pocket just in case.

  The second floor smelled of someone’s late lunch or early dinner. The third floor didn’t smell of anything. There were four apartments on the floor, with B facing A at one end of the hall. I took the gun out before I got to the door and listened at the door before I knocked. Nothing.

  Was he not home? Had he already left for work? I knocked, and when I didn’t get an answer, I knocked again, louder.

  “Yeah? Who is it?”

  It was his voice. I felt my blood rising. “Officer Michael Stern from Midtown South. I have some questions for you, Mr. Lenz.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ.” I heard a chain slide back. “You people never stop.” The top lock turned, then the bottom lock. The door opened a crack. “What is—”

  I didn’t wait for the rest of the sentence. I set the heel of one foot against the door and shoved inward hard, bringing my gun up as I stepped inside. Lenz stumbled backwards, against the arm of a recliner. The door banged against the inside wall, swung back and slammed shut. I advanced on him. I saw it in his eyes when he recognized me. “Keep your hands where they are,” I said. “Don’t reach for your pockets or you’re a dead man. Turn around. Turn around!” I gestured for him to put his hands on the back of the chair, then spread his legs with one foot and patted him down one-handed the way Leo had taught me. I stepped back and he turned to face me again.

  “What the fuck is this?” he said.

  “Shut up.” I risked a quick look to the left and right. The apartment was apparently a one bedroom, since there were only three doors leading out of the living room. The one in the far wall was open and led to a small kitchen. One of the others would lead to a bathroom, the other to the bedroom. There was a Pat Nagel print on one wall of a woman in the act of peeling off a leotard, one breast exposed, and a Leroy Neiman poster of two boxers going at it in multicolored fury. “Sit down and put your hands in your lap.”

  He looked like he was going to argue, but I took a step forward with the gun aimed at his head. He sat down. “I should’ve taken care of you that night in the club,” he said.

  “Maybe you should have. But you didn’t, and now I’m here. And you’re going to answer my goddamn questions or I’m going to put a hole in your head bigger than the ones you gave Miranda. That’s right, Lenz. I know what you did.”

  “Fuck you,” he said in a voice of utter contempt. “You don’t know a fucking thing.”

  I could understand, suddenly, how Murco could have sat by while his son pulled those burglars’ teeth one by one.

  “I don’t know anything?” I said. “Try me. I know about Miranda dancing at the Wildman. I know how you tipped her off about the buy and had her recruit the men who actually carried out the burglary. I know what Murco did to those men and I know that you were scared to death he’d do the same to you if she gave you up. I know you went to Miranda’s apartment and stole five hundred thousand dollars, took it out of her apartment in a phony cable company equipment case. And I know that later that night you took Miranda up to the roof of the Sin Factory and put two bullets through the back of her head.”

  “You’re so wrong it’s not even funny,” he said. “I never stole any money from her and I never killed anyone in my life. Get that?”

  I shook my head. “Don’t even try it, Lenz. I may not have enough hard evidence to put you in jail, but frankly that’s not what I’d be worried about if I were you. I have enough to convince Murco.” His face went pale. “That’s right. Now we’re speaking the same language. He wants to know where his money is, and all I have to do is tell him you have it and you’ll wish I’d shot you instead.”

  His voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. “I don’t have the money, I swear to God,” he said. “But what if I could get my hands on it? What if I agreed to split it with you?”

  “I don’t want the money, you stupid son of a bitch.

  What I want you can’t give me. I want Miranda back. I want her to be alive again, and unless you can give me that, don’t try to offer me anything.”

  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.

  Chapter 20

  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 w
hen 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—