Little Girl Lost jb-1 Page 3

  “Jasmine said you’re looking for me. I don’t think we’ve met. Do we have business together?”

  “We might,” I said. “I was Miranda Sugarman’s boyfriend.”

  He stiffened visibly. After all he’d had to deal with, that had to be low on the list of things he wanted to hear. Still, Leo’d taught me to try the direct approach first.

  “This was a long time ago, in high school,” I said. “I read in the paper about what happened, and I figured maybe I could come here, talk to someone who’d known her more recently.” He was doing a slow burn, which told me my chances weren’t good. “I’d like to talk to you about her. Do you have a minute?”

  His head twitched to the side. “Do I have a minute. No, I don’t have a fucking minute. Two days, the fucking cops have been crawling up my ass, asking me questions. Your girlfriend worked here, what, four months? Gets herself killed on my premises, puts my club in the fucking paper-”

  “Doesn’t look like it’s hurting your business any.”

  “The fuck do you know about my business? Jesus Christ, now I’ve got to talk to the fucking boyfriend from high school? What the hell are you anyway, sixteen years old? Fucking Roy’ll let anyone in. Get out of here!”

  Now some of the heads had turned our way. Even Rachel Firestone was watching from the stage, though she kept shimmying while she did it.

  He tried to grab my arm, but I held my hands up out of his reach.

  “I just want a few minutes of your time,” I said.

  “No, that’s not what you want,” Lenz said. “You want to break my balls. Well, tonight’s your lucky night, since all I’m gonna do is kick you out.” He marched me to the door and pushed me through, giving me a violent shove toward the curb. He turned to the bouncer, shook his index finger in the man’s face. “You let him in again, you’re fired. Understand?” The door slammed shut.

  “Told you not to call him that,” Roy said.

  Chapter 5

  So much for the direct approach.

  I straightened myself up and took my wounded pride down the block, past the deli I’d stood in earlier, past a shuttered FedEx office, past a Radio Shack that was brightly lit but closed, to a pub that was dark but open. The sandwich board on the sidewalk outside listed dinner specials written in chalk – shepherd’s pie, bangers and mash, liver and onions – along with a couple of specialty drinks and the name of the trio that played Mondays through Thursdays from nine to midnight. It was Monday, but after midnight, and both the piano and the microphone stand stood silent.

  Behind the bar, a gray-haired man with rolled-up shirtsleeves and ancient blue tattoos on both forearms was wiping down the bar with a rag. He kept wiping after I sat down and only stopped when I ordered a drink. He looked at me for a second longer than he’d have looked at most people, but in the end he didn’t ask to see an ID.

  “What have you got to eat this late at night?” I asked.

  He set my drink down in front of me. “Anything you want, so long as it’s a hamburger.”

  “How about a cheeseburger?”

  “It’d be stretching a point,” he said, “but I think the chef can manage it.” He hustled off to pass the order to the kitchen.

  Was this guy Keegan? I thought. Or was Keegan the owner, living somewhere down in Florida or out in Arizona while someone else managed his pub for him? Or maybe there never was a Keegan; maybe it was just a name that looked good on the sign. Didn’t much matter, I supposed.

  What did matter was that Keegan’s Brown Derby was the only Derby in the area. I drank my drink and waited for the dancers to arrive.

  The night-shift bartender showed up first, by herself. Then some of the dancers came in – I recognized Jasmine in the first group and Rachel Firestone in the second. Most of the women were wearing baggy sweats under baggier coats, their makeup washed off, their hair tucked up under knit caps. I got the sense that this is what they would have been wearing even if it had been the height of summer – anything to hide the figures they’d spent the night displaying, anything to avoid attracting the attention of the sort of stage-door johnnies who sometimes hang around at strip clubs after hours, hoping to hook up with a dancer.

  Of course, I realized, that’s exactly what I’d look like myself if I wasn’t careful. I waited till there were eight or nine of them sitting around a pair of tables pushed together in the corner, stealing cottage fries and bits of burger from each other’s plates. I came over casually, with my hands in plain view all the way.

  “Sorry to bother you,” I said, “but-”

  “Fuck off, creep.”

  It was a practiced response, a reflex like kicking when the doctor taps your knee. But you could tell there was real tension behind it – you could see the stress in the eight pairs of eyes suddenly aware of me, the eight women who’d lost one of their own just fortyeight hours ago.

  “Get the fuck out of here or we’ll call the cops,” the bartender said. “I’m not joking.”

  “I’m a private investigator.” I took out my wallet and this time I did fish out my P.I. license. Maybe they couldn’t read it from where they were sitting, but they could see that I was holding up a laminated card with the state seal on it. That was something, I suppose.

  “I’m investigating the death of Miranda Sugarman. I would appreciate your help.”

  “You were in the club tonight.” This was from Rachel, who was at the table closer to me. She held my eye as she said it.

  “That’s right.”

  “You’re the guy Lenz threw out.”

  “Yes.”

  “You said you were her boyfriend,” the bartender said. “Was that just a line?”

  “No, that was the truth. I knew her ten years ago. We went to high school together.”

  There was silence around the tables. They’d stopped picking at their food.

  “Did any of you know her?” I asked.

  Jasmine spoke up. “We worked the C shift together last week. First time I met her.”

  “Did she say anything to you that seemed strange? Anything that might explain what happened?” Jasmine shook her head. “Anyone else?”

  “She didn’t talk much,” one of them said, and a few of the others nodded. “Just came in, did her sets, got dressed, and left.”

  “Someone told me she ate with you here sometimes.”

  “Once, maybe. I don’t remember her saying two words to anyone.”

  “Did she have any regular customers? Were there people who came just to see her?”

  No one seemed to remember any.

  I looked from face to face and saw the same things in each of them. Fear, distrust, but also a sort of cautious wishfulness, as though they hoped I was for real and not just some scam artist. Rachel especially – she watched me more intently than the others and seemed to be mulling something over. But whatever it was, she didn’t come out with it.

  I took out a handful of business cards with my name and phone number on them, handed them to Rachel who dealt them out around the table. “My name is John Blake,” I said, “and you’ve got my cell phone number there. You remember anything, anything at all, please call me. If something happens – anything at all – call me. Okay?” A few of them nodded.

  “Mr. Blake,” one of them said as I turned to leave, and I turned back. “Do you think it’s going to happen again? I mean, do you think it’s someone going after dancers? Or was it just her?”

  I thought about the two bullets to the back of the head. A classic execution, Leo had called it. Maybe a little bloodier than average – a pair of hollow-points fired at point-blank range would tear half your face off – but still, it wasn’t the sort of thing you’d expect from a serial killer or someone getting a sexual thrill from the act.

  God knows these women wanted and deserved some reassurance, and standing there I wanted to give them some. But what if I did, and they let down their guard, and then it turned out I was wrong?

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m
sorry.”

  I walked back past the club, which was dark and locked up tight behind a metal gate. The Sin Factory filled the ground floor of a three-story brownstone, and I assumed the whole building was theirs – I couldn’t imagine unrelated tenants living above a club like this, if only because of the noise. Although in New York, you never knew.

  There was a narrow passage at the side of the building, wide enough for a stack of overstuffed Hefty bags filled with the night’s refuse. The garbage trucks would be here in a few hours, and in the meantime the rats could enjoy their own buffet.

  I edged past the garbage and came out in a little rear courtyard, lit by the feeble glow of a sixty-watt bulb over the door. There was graffiti all over the rear wall and dark stains along the base. The door had a plate for a Medeco deadbolt in addition to the standard Rabson cylinder above the knob, and though I was tempted to try to pick them and get inside, I’d learned enough over the past six years not to bother. In the movies you always see people opening locks like it’s nothing, but the truth is it’s easier to take a door off its hinges than it is to pick a Medeco.

  Besides, there were other ways in, if in was where I wanted to be. There was a fire escape running up the rear wall. There were only slightly taller buildings on either side, and the odds were they didn’t both have Medeco locks. And if they did, there were more short buildings on either side of them – it was probably how the killer had gotten onto the roof and then gotten away afterwards.

  But what would I see if I went there now? I could go to the roof and see where Miranda had died, maybe get a feeling for what it had been like there that night, but if I was thinking of searching for clues, I could forget it. The NYPD would have picked it clean. They’d certainly have done a better job than I could do at two in the morning with no light.

  I went out the way I’d come in, my back to the wall, trying not to inhale the sour smell of the trash. On the street, traffic was light and none of the cars that passed me were empty cabs, so I walked to the train station and rode the 1 downtown. When I came up out of the subway, my phone beeped in its plastic holder on my hip. The screen showed a little picture of an envelope with a letter “V” next to it. I found an empty doorway, thumbed in*86 and my password.

  “Mr. Blake? This is Rachel Firestone. We met earlier tonight? I was hoping to talk to you. I guess you’re not there.” I waited, but that seemed to be the end of the voicemail. Either Verizon had cut her off or she’d run out of things to say. But then I heard her voice again. “Listen, there’s no good number where you can reach me. Why don’t you come to the Derby tomorrow at six – I don’t go on until eight, and we can talk. Okay? Okay. See you then.”

  I played the message again when I got upstairs and then once more after getting undressed, but it didn’t say any more to me either time. There was nothing I could do about it but wait.

  I didn’t want to – I wanted to get up, get on the computer, and chase down a dozen leads. I wanted to bang on some doors until someone told me why Miranda Sugarman was lying in the morgue. But it was almost three in the morning now, I was exhausted, and Miranda wasn’t going anywhere. I forced myself to lie down, close my eyes, and try to get some sleep.

  Chapter 6

  In the morning, I made some toast and a cup of coffee and started working the phone. The only thing that slowed me down was having to wait till noon to reach offices on the West Coast.

  Neither of the Mastadunos I’d found was Jocelyn – one was Jessica, the other Jerome – and neither of them knew a Jocelyn. I left a message with the Rianon alumni office, asking for their help. I logged on to the Internet again and copied down the names of the girls who’d been in all the other rooms on the eleventh floor of Heward Hall, and while I was at it the ones on the tenth and the twelfth. Some were named Smith and Jones or the equivalent, but others had more obscure names and I started hunting them down through public directories. I found a Lainie Burroughs in Midland, Wisconsin, and it was the right Lainie Burroughs, but she hadn’t known either Miranda or Jocelyn. I found Maya Eskin. I found Jody Sinkiewicz. Jody remembered Jocelyn and both of them remembered Miranda, but neither had any idea what had become of them.

  “They were really close,” Jody said, “I remember that, I’d always see them in the hall together. I mean, I didn’t see them all that often, but if I saw one of them, I saw them both. And then for a long time I didn’t see either of them and I asked someone, and she said they’d dropped out.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “God, who was it. Was it Katherine? Probably Katherine, she knew them better than I did.”

  “What’s Katherine’s last name?”

  “It’s Lewis now, but then it was Chin.”

  “Do you know where I can reach her?”

  “Yeah, hold on.” From the other end of the phone came the sound of a clasp being opened, pages being turned. “Katherine Lewis, she’s in Chicago now, working at the Children’s Hospital? I can give you her work number.”

  “Thank you.”

  I got numbers, I got names. I checked names off my list and I added new names to it. Call by call, a picture started to grow, a picture of Miranda that was half familiar and half alien. She hadn’t had many friendships, but the few she’d had had been exceptionally tight. She’d been an A student in high school but did poorly in her freshman year at Rianon, and her grades didn’t get better after that. She hadn’t dated anyone. Or maybe she had – there were conflicting stories. She started rooming with Jocelyn in the second semester of her sophomore year, and a year later they both left the school. There was a rumor that they’d dropped out to go on the road, drive across the country or maybe up to Canada, but nobody knew for sure.

  Eventually, a man from the alumni office called me back. They’d already talked to the police and weren’t comfortable sharing information with anyone else. Could they at least confirm that Miranda and Jocelyn had dropped out before the start of their senior year? No, he was afraid that was personal information. Did they have an address for Jocelyn? That would be personal information, too. Could they at least pass a message to her if they did have an address? Grudgingly, he agreed, so I wrote a brief note and faxed it to him. I didn’t have high hopes.

  But that’s the nature of the detective business. Nothing you do has especially good odds of working, but if you do enough things, make enough calls and knock on enough doors, eventually something will work. Or that’s the idea, anyway.

  By two, my shoulder hurt from gripping the phone and I’d run out of people to call, so I switched to the computer. Search engines like Google are only a starting point, though they’re a good one; when you’re in the business, you become familiar with all the other resources out there, ones that allow you to track down municipal filings, business filings, deeds, insurance data, court records, and the like. I tracked through all of them, keeping one eye on the clock. Four hours seems like a long time, but the Internet eats hours like a kid eats popcorn.

  Miranda hadn’t left much of a trail – she hadn’t been sued, hadn’t been arrested, hadn’t been fingerprinted. She hadn’t started a business, hadn’t taken out loans, or at least none that I could find a record of. Jocelyn was similarly blank. They were just two kids who stepped out of their dorm room one morning and into the ether.

  But Wayne Lenz and the Sin Factory were another story. No shortage of paper on the club, of course: you can’t run a nightclub, strippers or no strippers, without filing plenty of forms. But searching on Lenz turned up a nice pile of material, too.

  I looked at his pinched features staring out at me from the screen. Born in Ohio in 1959, where he was remanded to the custody of an aunt after his parents made local headlines by driving off a bridge. Apparently moved to New York as a teenager, since he started having run-ins with the NYPD as early as 1978. Two charges in one year: aggravated assault, though he was only given probation, and then, late in the year, mail fraud. The details of the fraud charge were opaque, as criminal court records so
often are, but it looked like he’d tried his hand at running a con and had done a lousy job of it. He’d gotten a five-year sentence and served two. Kept his head down in the eighties, only to surface again in a drug bust in ’93. Back in prison, out in four.

  And then he’d bought the Sin Factory? No, the club’s SICA filings made it clear that Lenz was just an employee. The business was owned by a limited liability company set up in Delaware, GoodLife LLC, whose only listed address was a P.O. box. And the man behind GoodLife? He didn’t seem to like to sign his name to things, but in this day and age it takes a lot of work to stay anonymous. All it takes is one slip to blow it, and Leo and I had seen people a lot slicker than this guy. After hunting for about an hour I found a loose thread to pull on: the administrative contact listed in the registration records for the domain name of the Sin Factory’s onepage web site. A man named Mitchell Khachadurian with a New Jersey phone number.

  I waited while the phone rang seven, eight times, then heard an out-of-breath voice pick up on the ninth ring. “Yeah? Hello?”

  “Mr. Khachadurian?”

  “Yes? Who is this?”

  “This is officer Michael Stern of Midtown South in Manhattan,” I said. “We’re following up on a disturbance at the Sin Factory-”

  “You people have got to stop calling me. I’m not involved with my brother’s business, I don’t know anything about it, and I don’t want to know.”

  “Your name is listed as a contact for your brother’s web site.”

  “I begged him to take that off,” he said. “I made that site three years ago. Listen, I haven’t even talked to Murco in a year.”

  “Mr. Khachadurian, do you know how we could reach Murco?”

  He snorted. “You guys probably know better than I do. You certainly see him more.”

  “What’s the last number you had for him?”