Little Girl Lost (Hard Case Crime) Read online

  “You never spoke to her?”

  “Sure — hello, how are you, how was your Thanks giving. Sometimes she’d be at the Derby when some of us got a bite after closing. But that was it.”

  “How long had she been working here?”

  “I don’t know, a few months? Look, I’m not going to be able to help you, I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. I got up to leave. “The thing is, the last time I saw her, she was heading off to college to become a doctor. I’m just trying to understand how she got from there to here.”

  “A doctor,” the bartender said. “Jesus. All I ever gave up was being a model.”

  “Yeah. Well.” I drank the rest of my soda. “Thanks for the wine.”

  The sunlight blinded me when I walked outside — I’d almost forgotten it was still day. This time of year, it wouldn’t be for much longer, and once the night came, the crowds would come with it. Business would normally be light the day after New Year’s, but tonight I imagined the Sin Factory would get an extra boost from rubberneckers drawn by the story in the paper. The murder had taken place on the roof, and unless I’d missed something there was no way for patrons to get up there, but that didn’t mean people wouldn’t show up and try. Maybe Mandy Mountains would make a little extra on her last night in town, and if her shift hadn’t ended yet, maybe that bartender would as well. But none of it would do Miranda any good.

  Was that what I was trying to accomplish? I thought about this as I made my way to the subway station at Twenty-third Street. If it was, I was in for a disappointment, because nothing would do Miranda any good any more.

  The 1 train carried me up to Eighty-sixth Street and from there I walked back two blocks. The red brick apartment building Miranda had lived in when we were in high school was still there, though the synagogue next to it was now a youth center with construction paper Christmas trees taped to the inside of the windows. If anyone could explain what had happened to Miranda, I figured it would be her mother — and even if she couldn’t, she deserved a visit.

  But when I asked in the lobby to be buzzed up, the doorman didn’t know who I was talking about. Mrs. Sugarman? There was no Mrs. Sugarman in this building. 8-C? That was the Bakers. Look — And sure enough, on the intercom panel, a label said “Baker” where it had once said “Sugarman.”

  “You used to have a tenant named Sugarman,” I said. “Is there anyone still on staff here who was working here ten years ago?”

  He thought about it. “The super, maybe. You want to talk to him?”

  I told him I did.

  The super was a short man with a potbelly the size of a soccer ball and untrimmed grey hair around his ears. When I’d seen him last he’d had more hair, but it had already been grey. He’d just been a porter then, but seniority had apparently pushed him up the ladder. He jabbed a finger at me when he saw me and his face lit up. “Look at you! All grown up! How are you?”

  I shook his hand and he dragged me into a hug. “I heard about the girl. It’s terrible. Terrible. The only good thing is her mother didn’t live to see it.”

  “What happened?”

  He stepped back. “You don’t know? New Year’s Eve, somebody shot her.”

  “To her mother,” I said. “What happened to Mrs. Sugarman?”

  “Oh, that — that was terrible, too,” he said, shaking his head. “Poor woman, six, seven years ago. Heart attack. She was young — fifty-six, I think. But one minute to the next, just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “She was trying on clothing at a store and—” He snapped his fingers again. “They found her on the floor, nothing they could do.”

  Six, seven years. I did the math. Miranda would just have been finishing her bachelor’s degree, or maybe not even. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for her, alone, half a continent away, her only living relative suddenly gone.

  “Did Miranda come back when it happened?”

  “I didn’t see her. All I know is when it’s the end of the month, there’s no rent check, and the building tells us clean it out. We threw out a lot of stuff — a sofa, table, shelves. Books, lots of books. Records. We put it all on the sidewalk, maybe someone sees something he likes, he takes it before the garbage truck comes. We paint, put in a new stove, new refrigerator. The Bakers moved in two, three weeks later.”

  “And you never saw Miranda again?”

  “Never. Never. Except now, in the paper.”

  A dead end. But maybe it was also the beginning of an explanation, since whatever money Mrs. Sugarman had left Miranda, it couldn’t have been a lot. And when you think about young women who start stripping, there’s usually money at the root of it. Here was Miranda with maybe a year left on her undergraduate degree and a dream of going to medical school, and suddenly the single-income parent supporting her vanishes, taking the support with her. Maybe the school offered Miranda financial aid, or maybe it didn’t, but either way there were living expenses to be paid, and what does an attractive twenty-year-old girl taking classes all day have to make money with other than her body at night? Oh, there were other answers, of course. She could have taken night-hour temp work filing and faxing for a law firm, or she could have flipped burgers for McDonald’s. But where else could you pull down a few hundred dollars in a night, all cash? Stripping might have been the sensible, conservative alternative to turning tricks.

  But this was all speculation. There had to be someone who knew what had really happened. Someone she’d known in college, someone she’d stayed in touch with from high school, someone she’d confided in when she’d returned to New York. Someone I could find if I looked hard enough.

  The super reached up to put his arm across my shoulders. “So, what are you doing now? Still in school?”

  “No,” I said, “not for years now. I’m working.”

  “You work for a big company? Bank? Computers?”

  I shook my head. “Small company. Investigations.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m a private investigator.” His expression said the penny hadn’t dropped yet. “A detective,” I said.

  “No!” He looked like he was waiting for me to laugh, tell him I was pulling his leg. I didn’t. “Yes? Like in the movies?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Just like in the movies.”

  Chapter 3

  On the way home, I stopped in at the office. Leo was there, going through his files. He had five piles of paper on his desk and two on the floor next to his chair. The trashcan was overflowing. My desk was neat by comparison: just one stack of case documents and half-finished paperwork and a second, smaller pile of correspondence, junk mail, and phone messages. I glanced at the messages; none was more recent than a week ago. It’s not just the strip club business that slows down around the holidays.

  “You go there?” Leo said without looking up from his work.

  “I went.”

  “And?”

  “It’s a dive. Little hole in the wall, barely enough room for a stage. It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “What doesn’t make sense?”

  “None of it makes sense, Leo. What’s she doing back in New York, working as a stripper? This is a girl who... she didn’t have to be a doctor. If that didn’t work out there were plenty of things she could have done.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Okay, say she falls on hard times, she starts stripping. Somehow she ends up back in New York. Say that’s all true. But why the hell does she end up at a place like the Sin Factory? She was too smart to work there.”

  “When did they start screening dancers for their IQ?”

  “I just mean she would have known better. Fine, you need money, you’re an attractive woman, maybe you start dancing a few nights a week — but you don’t do it at a place like that, where you’re lucky if someone tips you in fives instead of ones.”

  “Maybe she couldn’t get work anywhere better.”

  “No, I don’t buy that. She had the figure f
or it; she could have worked anywhere she wanted.”

  “Says the man who hasn’t seen her in ten years.” Leo put down the report he was working on and dropped his glasses on top of it. “You’re going to have to face facts, Johnny. She could have been strung out, worn down, overweight, out of her mind, she could have been a lousy dancer, you don’t know.”

  “She was a good dancer,” I said.

  “Ten years ago. You don’t know what she was now.”

  No, all I knew she was now was dead.

  “I’m not asking you to help,” I said.

  “I’m not offering.”

  “I know it’s a waste of time.”

  “Your time’s my time, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “So what’s the big case you want me to work on instead? This?” I held up the phone messages. “A guy pretends to have a limp so he can collect disability from his employer?”

  “It pays the bills.”

  “Barely. And anyway I already got the photos. What’s left is just clean-up.”

  “What about Leventon?”

  “Leventon can wait.”

  “She’s a paying customer.”

  “And she can wait. A woman’s dead, Leo, someone who meant a lot to me. You can’t tell me to sit back and do nothing.”

  “What do you think you can do?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I’ve got to do something. What’s the point of being a detective if when something like this happens you just let it?”

  “Who said there was a point? It’s a living, like being a dentist or fixing shoes. That’s all it is.”

  “You don’t believe that,” I said. “I certainly hope you don’t.”

  “We’re private investigators. We’re not cops. We don’t solve murders. That’s paperback novel stuff.”

  “At least let me look into it for a few days. I need to put it to rest, Leo. I can’t do that without knowing more.”

  He smeared one hand across his jaw, a gesture of defeat. “You never could,” he said.

  Leo Hauser was twice my age and looked older. Looking at him, you couldn’t picture him as the beat cop he’d been in the seventies, walking the streets of Times Square before Disney and Giuliani made it the oversized shopping mall it was today. But he’d shown me pictures, and by God, the uniform had fit him, he’d had good posture and a steely gaze, and if that wasn’t enough to make people take him seriously there’d been the couple of pounds of iron in a holster on his hip. Today — today he not only didn’t look like a cop, he didn’t look like the private detective he’d become. He looked like an accountant. His hair had gone white, where it hadn’t just gone. You looked at him in his twelve-dollar shirts, with his glasses propped on the top of his head, and you saw an uncle at a barbecue.

  But Leo was the man who had taught me this business, and along the way I’d seen what he was capable of. A lot of the time when we were hired it was by a corporation that just wanted a background check on someone they were thinking of hiring — that was the bulk of any small agency’s business these days, and you did it over the phone or on the computer. But sometimes there was serious legwork to be done, and he’d done his share of it, chasing down leads and confronting the people behind them. Not recently, not so much since Arlene died — that had taken some of the chase out of him. But even now he’d insist on coming with me on a job every so often. I used to think it was his way of checking up on me, keeping an eye on the half-assed literature major he’d pulled out of NYU and tried to turn into a detective, but eventually I realized it was just his way of keeping his hand in.

  When I’d shown him the article about Miranda, he’d warned me to leave it alone, and I knew he was speaking from experience. “You won’t like what you find. I’ll tell you that right off the bat. Whatever you find out about her, you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

  “I already wish I hadn’t,” I said. “I wish she was still alive, raising two kids and practicing optometry in Wisconsin. And I wish I was there with her. But what does any of that matter? I’m here, she’s here, and somebody put a fucking bullet in her. I can’t just sit around and wait to read about it in the paper.”

  “Better than ending up in the paper yourself.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Better not,” Leo said. “I’m too old to start again with some other kid.”

  I picked up a sandwich at the Korean grocery on the corner and ate it on the way home. The wind had picked up as the sun had gone down and now there was no mistaking what season we were in. People complain more about New York in the summer, the heat of August, the humidity, the clothing sticking to your back, but it’s the winter that always makes me think about packing it in. Everything that’s wrong with the city is still wrong in the winter, only you’ve got the wind chill factor to think about, too.

  I climbed the four flights to my apartment and unbundled myself to the accompaniment of the hissing and clanking of my radiator. The landlord was acting out of short-lived gratitude for his Christmas tips — by February, he’d have lost interest and we’d be shivering in our kitchens again.

  There was nothing on the six o’clock news, but I set my VCR to tape the eleven. You never know. Then I took a hot shower and killed some time on the Internet, tracking down every reference I could find to Miranda, the Sin Factory, or the murder. There wasn’t much. Each of the local papers had covered the murder, of course, but not at great length, and details were scarce. Two gunshot wounds to the back of the head, hollow-point bullets for maximum damage. Victim pronounced dead at the scene, police were investigating. She’d been found by the club’s manager, a man named Wayne Lenz, just after midnight, and he’d called an ambulance immediately on his cell phone. They’d gotten there quickly, but there’s no such thing as quickly enough when you’ve been shot in the head with hollow point bullets.

  The Sin Factory had a web site, if you could call it that: one web page showing their logo and a photo of a topless woman with one leg wrapped around a brass pole. The bullet items on the right side of the screen shouted: “Full Bar!” “Sumptuous Buffet!” and “10 Gorgeous Girls Live!!!” I couldn’t imagine where they’d fit ten gorgeous girls, never mind the buffet. But then this wouldn’t be the first strip club to look better on the web than it did in person.

  As for Miranda herself, Google only came up with a single link, to the student directory of Rianon College in New Mexico. The link didn’t work when I clicked on it. The historical copy stored in Google’s archives came up just fine, but all it showed was Miranda’s name on a long list of what had presumably been her classmates. She’d been in Heward Hall, room 1140, phone extension 87334. I searched the page for other instances of “1140” and found several, but only one other for Heward Hall: Jocelyn Mastaduno, extension 87333. I wrote down the name.

  Then, because there was more time to kill, I did a few searches on Jocelyn Mastaduno’s name. I didn’t find much. One J. Mastaduno listed in Pensacola, another in Cedar Rapids. None in New York, but then why would there be? Not every pre-med at Rianon came from or ended up in New York.

  Was it late enough now? I looked at the clock and decided that I wasn’t in the mood to wait any longer. Lenz would either be there or he wouldn’t, and either I would learn something useful or I wouldn’t, but at least I’d be doing something more than just working the computer.

  I had a sudden recollection, as I switched off the machine, of Miranda struggling with the PC in our computer lab — this was before the Internet, but our school had a computer elective and in our junior year we’d both taken it. I remembered sitting with her at the monitor, Miranda desperately trying to finish an assignment, me fighting with the printer when it refused to print. I finally got the thing working in time for us to be only five minutes late to class.

  We wouldn’t even have been five minutes late if she hadn’t pushed me up against the lockers in the hallway, looked left and right to make sure we were alone, and pressed her lips to mine. “My hero,” she’d said, smo
othing back my hair. “Will you always be there to fix my printer for me?”

  I turned off the light and returned to the Sin Factory.

  Chapter 4

  There was no velvet rope and the man standing at the door was wearing a leather jacket and cargo pants rather than a tux, but the music was going full blast, the lights were all lit, and it had attracted a crowd. Each time the bouncer pulled the door open, the sound of glasses being filled and emptied drifted out along with the pounding bass line of a house techno mix. While I watched from the deli next door, five people went in, one at a time, and four people came out. It was mostly businessmen, loosened ties showing under their heavy overcoats, wedding rings hidden under leather gloves, but there were also some of the low-rent types you see around any strip club, the overweight guys wearing sneakers and down coats leaking feathers at the seams. I was actually surprised to see the ratio at this place favoring the businessmen. They’re the ones who can afford to go to Scores.

  The bouncer stopped me at the door, one hand lightly pressing against my chest. They tell me I’ll be glad later in life that I look young, and maybe it’s true — Leo would probably kill to look ten years younger again. But when you’re almost thirty and still get carded, the thrill escapes you.

  “I was here earlier today,” I said. “Nobody stopped me then.” But I pulled out my wallet all the same. I could have shown him my P.I. license, I suppose, but that’s rarely a good idea unless you specifically want to stir things up. I fished out my driver’s license.

  The bouncer turned it this way and that under the light, then handed it back. “Okay.”

  “Let me ask you something,” I said. “Have you seen the big guy here tonight?”

  “Catch?”

  I didn’t follow what he meant. “Lenz,” I said. “Is Lenz here?”

  A smile cracked open beneath the man’s cheeks. I counted two gold teeth before it snapped shut again. “Yeah, Lenz is here. You don’t want to be calling him ‘big guy,’ though.”