Little Girl Lost jb-1 Read online

  It was like one of those optical illusions where first the cubes seem to be pointing in one direction and then suddenly they’re pointing in the other, and you can’t imagine how they could ever have looked like they weren’t. Jocelyn had known that Murco would hunt for her, would eventually find her, and would surely kill her, unless she could get someone else to take the fall. Miranda had not been a perfect match, but she’d been close enough, especially after a pair of hollow point bullets turned her face into what Kirsch had so sensitively described as chopped meat.

  Lenz must have broken into Miranda’s apartment not to take the money but to plant the torn paper band behind the dresser, so that Murco would know for sure that the dead woman and the woman who’d stolen from him were one and the same. That, and maybe, while he was at it, to remove from the apartment any photos Miranda had of herself that, shown to the folks at the Wildman, might cast some doubt on the point. That would explain why the newspapers hadn’t had any recent photos, at least.

  Then at midnight on New Year’s Eve, it must have been Jocelyn who lured Miranda onto the roof of the Sin Factory, Jocelyn who got behind her and pulled the trigger, Jocelyn who escaped with the murder weapon while Lenz called for the ambulance they both knew could do no harm because it could do no good.

  Did I know for sure this was how it had happened? No. Some of the details might be wrong. But the broad outline felt right. It had begun when the girls were teenagers: Jocelyn had lured Miranda to her bed, had talked her into leaving school, had turned her life inside out and remade her into what I had just seen on the video. She had led Miranda step by step down the path that ultimately led to her death, had used her and finally, when it had served her needs, brutally sacrificed her. It was Jocelyn, not Miranda, that had fallen in with thieves and killers. Miranda had just made the fatal mistake of falling in love with a woman who eventually turned into a thief and a killer herself.

  Because whether it was Jocelyn or Lenz who had pulled the trigger on the rooftop – and maybe I’d never know – it had to have been Jocelyn who had pulled the trigger in Lenz’s apartment. She’d smashed me in the head with Lenz’s statue and when he’d gotten out of the chair and headed for the bedroom, she’d picked up my gun and shot him twice, then coolly wheeled a luggage cart filled with a half million dollars past his body and mine, leaving me to take the rap.

  Why not kill me, too? Because this way maybe I’d burn in her place for Lenz’s murder – and even if I didn’t, even if I had the chance to go to Murco as I’d threatened, what could I tell him that would hurt her? As far as Jocelyn knew, I didn’t even know she existed. If I told the same story to Murco that I’d told Lenz about Lenz having conspired with Miranda, it did nothing but make Jocelyn’s escape cleaner.

  Whereas if she’d left Lenz alive and I’d gone to Murco, Murco would have picked him up and he’d have cracked like an egg. He’d almost cracked at my hands, and I hadn’t even touched him. And if Lenz gave her up, she’d have been on the run again, only this time with Murco knowing who she was.

  It made sense, damn it. All you had to do was look at the world through the eyes of a calculating, soulless bitch who used people and threw them away. I thought about all the interviews Serner had done with the people who had known Jocelyn back in college. They didn’t give any hint of this side of her personality. There was no sign that people back then knew what sort of person she really was. But maybe that was the point: no one had known her, or Miranda either, for that matter. And who knows, maybe back then Jocelyn hadn’t been so bad – the years on the road, the years spent going from one strip club to the next, must have brought out the worst in her, made her harder and more ruthless, until maybe even Miranda couldn’t take it any more and broke up with her. Even though breaking up meant giving up a successful act and starting over, dancing solo at a tenth-rate club like the Sin Factory – maybe it had been worth it for Miranda to get away. But then when Jocelyn had needed Miranda for one last purpose, she had shown up at Miranda’s door, flowers in hand, and had talked her into a reconciliation. The reconciliation had been short-lived, and so had Miranda.

  So where was Jocelyn now? Gone, along with the money.

  But she could be found.

  I got up from the couch. Leo was next to me, holding out a bottle and a glass, but I didn’t want soothing and I didn’t want anything that would calm me down. I wanted blood.

  “Damn it, Leo, I know what happened.”

  “What, just from watching that tape?”

  I shrugged my jacket on. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Where?”

  I yanked open the office door. “We need to find Jocelyn,” I said. I raced out into the street. A cab with its light on was passing and I stepped out in front of it to flag it down. I was in and had the door shut before the car could come to a stop.

  “You got to be careful,” the driver said. “It is very dangerous to run in front of a taxi.”

  “Just drive.” I gave him my mother’s address, and when we got there I threw a handful of bills over the back seat. He honked at me as he drove off.

  What would Susan have turned up? Something, I prayed. Something that would help us figure out where Jocelyn might have gone. I tapped my foot impatiently as the elevator climbed to the fourteenth floor.

  My mother came to the door when I rang and looked startled when she saw me. “My goodness, John, I heard on the news you were arrested-”

  “They let me out. Is Susan here?”

  “Susan?”

  “I’m sorry. Rachel. Is she here?”

  “No, she went out. John, what’s going on?”

  “Where did she go?”

  “John Blake, you tell me what’s going on or so help me-”

  I put one hand on each of her arms. They felt tiny and frail. “Mom, I’m sorry. I can’t. Not now. I need to find Rachel. Did she say anything about where she went?”

  “Yes, hold on,” she said, and picked up a piece of paper from the telephone stand by the door. She took her glasses down from her forehead and squinted at the page. “She’s meeting someone at a restaurant. A place called Dorni-” She squinted some more. “Dorneolo? Dormiolo? I can’t read what she wrote.”

  I took the paper from her hand. It said Dormicello.

  *

  It was early enough in the afternoon that Zen wasn’t there yet. Her day-shift bartender was a parolee called Trunks who nodded at me when he saw me come through the door. The place was as close to empty as I’d ever seen it, which was just as well. Less chance for Susan to get herself in a scrape.

  She wasn’t at the bar or any of the tables out front. There was a wall of booths in the back, past the wallmounted TV that was quietly showing NY1 and the pool table where a broad-backed guy in a wifebeater blocked my view. I waited till he was between shots and squeezed past, careful not to knock down the second cue stick that was leaning against the table. There was presumably a second player somewhere, maybe in the bathroom, and if he looked anything like this one, I didn’t want to do anything to piss him off.

  Only one of the booths was occupied, and from where I was I couldn’t see who Susan was talking to, just the back of his head. His salt-and-pepper hair was combed straight back and held in place by some sort of shellac, and I had a strong sense of deja vu: based on his hair alone, he could have been Wayne Lenz’s taller, older brother.

  I came around to the front of the booth. Susan must have been surprised to see me, but she kept it from showing on her face. “Peter, this is John,” she said. “He… works with me.”

  “At the studio?” The man extended his hand. “Good to meet you, John. I’m Pete Cimino.”

  I shook the hand. “Pete.”

  “I was explaining to Pete about the segment we’re doing for Fox News on the Sugarman murder, and he’s offered to help. He’s even willing to talk on camera.”

  On camera. Good God, she was a natural. “That’s good, Pete,” I said. “Thank you.” Susan had her hair tied back and wa
s wearing a simple blouse. She didn’t look like a TV producer to me, but she didn’t look like a stripper either, and maybe that was enough. People generally believed what you told them, especially when it was something they wanted to believe. And who didn’t want to be on TV?

  Of course, the answer to that was that most of the people you met at Zen’s didn’t – but this guy obviously wasn’t a regular, not if he called the place Dormicello. He looked like some kind of tough guy wannabe, the sort who thought some hairspray and a Brooklyn accent made him Tony Soprano. If he kept hanging around here, it was just a matter of time before he got on the wrong side of someone who was the real thing and exited with a blade in his stomach. But that was his problem, and Zen’s, not ours. He was obviously someone Susan had felt was important enough to meet in person and that meant I wanted to talk to him.

  “What do you do, Pete?” I asked.

  “Things,” he said. “Little of this, little of that. You know how it is.”

  “And you knew Miranda?”

  He kissed his fingertips and sent a glance toward the ceiling.

  “What does that mean?” I said.

  “May she rest in peace, she was something. A great dancer, and what a body. Really gave a hundred ten percent every night, her and Jessie both. Any time they worked my club, I could make another ten, twelve percent easy, people coming in because of them. When they split up, I tried to talk some sense into them, but no. I even offered them a raise, which I’ve never done for any girl before or since. But there was no talking to them.”

  “Why don’t you tell John what you were telling me,” Susan said. “About how it happened.”

  He turned to me. “There was this other girl, this black chick, Tracy, who started at the club halfway through their last booking. We used her as their warm-up act. But then things got a little too warm, if you know what I mean.”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “Man, this Tracy, I’ll tell you, I would’ve done her, and I don’t go for no melanzana normally. She was built like you wouldn’t believe. But strictly a dyke, and she went for Jessie like a bullet. Now, Randy must’ve known about it from the day it started. She was no dummy. But she didn’t say anything, so I figured maybe they’ve got an agreement, they’re not tied down, whatever. Lots of girls are like that. Get so sick of men looking at them, they’ll go to bed with anything long as it doesn’t have a dick.” He raised a placating hand to Susan. “Excuse my French.”

  “You can say ‘dick’ in here,” Susan said, “just not on the air.”

  “So this goes on for two weeks, three weeks. It’s coming up on the end of their booking, and I’m thinking I want them to extend – all three of them, what the hell, the guys love Tracy, too. So I go to talk to them backstage and it’s like walking into a meat locker. They’re not talking to each other. They’re glaring at each other like they’re ready to take each other’s eyes out. It was ugly.”

  “And?”

  He shrugged. “What can I tell you? I tried to get them to talk, I tried to joke with them a little, but they weren’t having any of it. If it got to the point where I offered money, you know it was bad.”

  “What makes you think they broke up because of Tracy?”

  “It was obvious. All three of them were there, and every time Tracy moved closer to Jessie, Randy moved further away. It was like two magnets, you know, pushing each other apart? Finally, Tracy put her arm around Jessie and Randy just walked out. That was it. Never came back.”

  “What about Jessie?” I asked.

  “She re-upped for two more weeks, tried to teach Tracy the act, but it wasn’t the same. You know, black and white’s not twins, and the twin angle was part of what had made it so hot. But the real problem was just they weren’t good together. They may have been great in the sack, but onstage? There wasn’t that chemistry. They were easy on the eyes, but you put the two of them on stage and it was just two strippers on a stage. With Randy it was something else.”

  I’d seen what it had been, and he was right. There’d been something more between them. I tried to imagine the backstage scene Cimino had described, thought about what it must have been like for Miranda to find herself suddenly cast off and replaced in Jocelyn’s life by this other woman. This, after giving up her dreams of medical school and spending years traveling the country at Jocelyn’s side. It must have been crushing.

  “When did this happen?”

  “What, a year ago? Year and a half, maybe.”

  “And you had no idea where Miranda went after she left?”

  “None. Not till you guys called me.”

  “Do you know what happened to the other two? Jessie and Tracy?”

  “I think they were living together for a while. Then they broke up. You know how it goes. I think Tracy’s dancing somewhere in the city. I haven’t heard from Jessie in ages. Maybe Tracy would know how to find her.”

  Maybe she would. “How could we find Tracy?”

  Susan spoke up. “Pete gave me the number of her booking agent, a guy named Andrew Kodos. I have a call in to him.”

  “Good,” I said. “Well, Pete, I think that covers it. You’ve been very helpful.” I stood up, and Susan stood with me.

  “So?” he said. “You think you’ll be able to use me?”

  “There’s an excellent chance,” Susan said. “We’ll let you know.”

  “You’ll call me?” he said, miming a phone receiver with his thumb and pinky.

  “We’ll call you,” I said.

  We backed away toward the pool table. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw there were two guys there now, but instead of playing, they were watching the TV. As we passed them, I realized the story being covered was the Lenz murder: the newscaster was standing across the street from the Sin Factory and the picture framed in a box over his shoulder showed Lenz’s face next to mine. “… sources have informed us that the only suspect in the shooting, private investigator John Blake, was released from custody earlier today. Police say they are investigating other leads, but so far they haven’t released any further information. We’ll be updating the story as soon as they do. Pat?”

  The two pool players watched us closely as we walked past them, then they both leaned their cues against the table and one stepped forward, the taller of the two. It was the one who’d been in the bathroom earlier, and he looked like he benchpressed more than I weighed.

  “Hey,” he said. “You’re the guy they were talking about.”

  I shrugged, turned to go, but a hand on my shoulder stopped me. “Go on,” I said to Susan, “I’ll handle this.”

  “I’m not going to-”

  “Go.” I pushed the big man’s hand off my shoulder with the back of my arm. “Why don’t we each mind our own business?”

  “Wayne Lenz and I did time together,” he said, clapping his hand back where it had been. “Who killed him is my business.”

  “Mine, too,” I said, “and if you leave me alone I might be able to find out.”

  “He might be able to find out,” he said over his shoulder to his buddy. “You hear that?” He looked back at me, and there was no trace of sympathy in his voice. “You want to give me one good reason why I shouldn’t just break your fucking neck?”

  From behind the bar came the sound of a pumpaction shotgun being racked. Trunks leveled the long barrel at the lot of us. “Take it outside,” he said.

  The hands lifted from my shoulders and the guy gave me a little push that rocked me back on my heels. “Private investigator,” he said, in a voice that suggested he thought private investigators fell somewhere between worms and dogshit on the evolutionary scale. “Why don’t you investigate this?” He reached back with one of his big fists, and I put up my own smaller ones to block him.

  “Outside,” Trunks barked, and gestured with the gun.

  “Hello?” Susan had taken out her cell phone and was speaking into it loudly, pointedly, staring Lenz’s old cellmate in the eyes as she did. We were all watchin
g her – even Pete Cimino was watching from his booth in the back. “I want to report gunfire coming from a place called Dormicello – Yes, officer, west Third Street, that’s right. Please send someone immediately.”

  The guy looked from Susan to me, to Trunks, and back again. She didn’t blink. “The cops will be here in a minute,” she said.

  He stepped back, dropped his fists, angrily picked up his cue stick. “Next time,” he said.

  We didn’t turn our backs on him, and Trunks kept the gun up till we were at the door.

  Chapter 23

  “You didn’t really call the police, did you?” I said.

  “Of course I did. Those guys could have killed you.”

  “You called the police on Zen’s,” I said. “I can never show my face in there again.”

  She patted my cheek. “Well, then, honey, we’re even.”

  We walked away from Zen’s as quickly as we could. Trunks could take care of himself – he’d have a good hiding place for the gun, and maybe one for himself, too. As for Zen, she might forgive me in time, depending on how badly the police shook her down. The police, though, were unlikely to be as forgiving, so it was important that they not find me at yet another scene where shooting had been reported.

  We headed east, putting the sound of police sirens further behind us with every step. As we went, I told Susan about my morning, about getting out of jail and watching the video, and about what I figured Jocelyn had done.

  “It’s hard to believe,” she said. “Nothing I’ve heard makes her sound like the sort of person who could turn into a murderer.”

  “Anyone could,” I said. “If they thought their life depended on it.”

  “I guess.”

  “Have you learned anything that would help us track her down?”

  “Only what Cimino told us. I’ve made a lot of calls, and I’ve found some people who remember Miranda and Jocelyn, but no one who worked with them more recently than Cimino.”