Little Girl Lost (Hard Case Crime) Read online

  “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?”

  He had to think for a second, but then he rattled off a 917 number. A cell phone, presumably. I wrote it down.

  “If you talk to him,” Mitchell said, “don’t mention you got his number from me, okay?”

  “You’ve got my word of honor,” I said, “as a policeman.”

  I made it through the door at six on the dot, but Rachel wasn’t there yet. The same old man was behind the bar, and he recognized me from the previous night. “Another cheeseburger? Chef’s got some practice with it now.”

  “No, thanks. Just a coke.”

  He filled a glass and set it down on a napkin, dropped in a straw. “Saw you were talking to the girls last night. They’re a good bunch,” he said. “Don’t have an easy lot in life.”

  “No,” I said.

  “They come in here for some peace and quiet, and I’m glad to give it to them. They need a place to let off steam, feel safe. I wouldn’t keep the place open so late nights, only where would they go if I didn’t?”

  I nodded.

  “Time to time,” he said, “people see them here, figure out who they are, and start dropping by. Think maybe they can make friends, or pick up some company for the night, have a little fun. They don’t encourage it, and neither do I.”

  He shot some more coke into my glass now that the foam had settled.

  “You seem like a nice fellow, clean cut, well dressed, that’s why I’m talking to you like this. There’s some you talk to and some it’s not worth the breath, you’ve got to find other ways to get through to those.”

  “I hear you,” I said. “The girls won’t have any trouble from me.”

  “Ah, that’s good,” he said. “We’ve got to look out for one another in this world, don’t we?”

  So where were you, I wanted to ask, when Miranda needed someone to look out for her? But all I said was, “That we do.”

  I saw Rachel come through the door then, look around the room, and spot me at the bar. She was wearing jeans and a cardigan, with a hat pulled down over her ears. She took the hat off and shook out her hair as she walked over.

  “Don’t break my kneecaps,” I said. “She asked me to meet her here.”

  We sat in the back, at the table farthest from the door. Even so, Rachel kept darting glances over her shoulder.

  “Thanks for meeting me. I wasn’t even sure you got my message.”

  “I’m sorry I missed your call. I was on the subway.”

  “That’s okay.”

  We were both silent for a bit. She had something to say, and I figured she’d say it when she was ready. In the meantime, I didn’t want to open my mouth and maybe scare her off by saying the wrong thing.

  “The reason I asked you to meet me is, Randy talked to me the night before she was shot,” she finally said. “She was terrified. She told me she was afraid someone was going to kill her.”

  “Did she say who?”

  “Yes,” Rachel said. “Murco Khachadurian.”

  Chapter 7

  Her hands were shaking. I fought the urge to reach across the table and cover them with my own.

  “It’s not l
ike we knew each other,” she said. “We didn’t. I’d just come from three weeks at a club in Jersey called Carson’s. Right on the other side of the bridge?”

  I nodded.

  “So who am I to her? Just the new girl, right?” She swallowed some of her drink, stirred the rest with the little red straw. “We’d never talked before. Not one word. But we were changing after the last set, it was just the two of us in the dressing room, and I guess she just needed to talk to someone. God. I wish I’d said something to someone, but I didn’t think she was serious. No, that’s not it — she was serious. I just didn’t believe it was true.”

  “What did she say?”

  Rachel closed her eyes tight. I’ve noticed that some people do that when they’re trying hard to remember, though for others it seems to be a matter of not wanting to look you in the eyes while they tell a whopper. “She said, ‘There are bad things going on at this club,’ and I said something like, ‘You’re saying it’s a high-mileage place?’ and she said no, that it was much worse.”

  “High mileage?”

  “You know, lots of touching.” She looked at me, and I got the feeling that she was suddenly noticing how young I looked — nice and clean-cut, as my friend at the bar had said — and maybe wondering how much I knew about the ways of the world. “Some clubs, there’s a strict hands-off policy, look but don’t touch — that’s no mileage. Some places, the dancers are expected to grind a little during a lap dance, but the guys have to keep their pants on and their hands to themselves. That’s low mileage. Then there are places where the whole point is to make the guy come. Basically they can touch you anywhere except inside your g-string, and you can do anything to get them off short of actually having sex with them.”

  “And that’s high mileage.”

  She nodded. “Only thing higher’s full service. Most girls won’t work for a high-mileage club, but sometimes you don’t know going in, because the high-mileage stuff is going on in the champagne rooms, not out front. So girls will warn each other, especially when you’re new to a club, and I figured that’s what Randy was doing.”

  “But it wasn’t.”

  “No. She said, ‘Believe me, you’ll be glad when someone comes in and all he wants is a hand job.’ And I said, ‘What? What is it? Is it S&M?’ Because some of these places, that’s the big secret, they’ve got a dungeon in the basement and guys come in to get whipped. I’ve never understood that stuff myself, but it doesn’t bother me — I’d rather smack someone with a riding crop than jerk him off. But she said, ‘No, it isn’t sex. It’s drugs.’ “

  “Drugs?”

  “That’s what she said. She had this whole story about how the guy who owns the club is a dealer and is using the girls to move his merchandise, and if you don’t go along with it or you talk to anyone about it, you wind up in a ditch in Jersey City.”

  “But here she was talking to you about it.”

  “Right, exactly,” Rachel said, “and I was thinking, this girl’s watched one too many re-runs of The Sopranos. Because that’s the vibe she was giving off. Real drama queen. The people you meet in this business are not exactly the most stable—” A look of embarrassment washed over her face. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “But you used to date her.”

  “It was a long time ago,” I said.

  We didn’t say anything for a bit. Rachel brushed her hair out of her eyes, and for a moment I was reminded of Miranda. They didn’t look anything alike, but something about the gesture brought her to mind — that and the fact that I’d seen this woman dancing naked on a stage the night before, and here she was now, looking completely normal, completely ordinary. It was like a photographic negative of my experience with Miranda.

  I also found myself noticing how, without the stage makeup and the gel in her hair and all the other trappings of her trade, Rachel was a very beautiful woman. Maybe this shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it did. Dancing on stage she’d been just another pin-up, another pair of high heels and long legs and bare breasts, and I’d found nothing very erotic about the sight. But across a table in a pub at twilight, dressed in faded jeans and a sweater the color of ginger ale, she was an ordinary woman, and infinitely more appealing.

  “What did Miranda say she was afraid of?”

  “She told me she’d found out about the drugs and somehow had gotten on the wrong side of the owner, this Khachadurian, and now she was sure he was going to kill her. She really sounded scared. But you know, lots of girls talk themselves into getting scared or angry or ashamed over all sorts of things, and maybe one tenth of it is real. So I just tried to make her feel better. I remember saying, ‘I’m sure it’s not that bad. You haven’t told anyone, right? So what reason would he have to do anything to you?’ And then a day later, she’s dead.”

  “It may not be related,” I said. But even as I said it, I knew how foolish it sounded.

  “The terrible thing,” Rachel said, “is when I heard what had happened, the first thing I thought about wasn’t her, it was, ‘She told me, and now they’re going to come after me, too.’ “

  “And?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing’s happened. So far, anyway. I’ve got six nights left and then I can move on, and you’d better believe I’m not coming back. I thought about quitting early, but I don’t want to do anything to rock the boat.”

  “Do you know if it’s true, what Miranda said about the owner? Are the dancers moving drugs for him?” An image from the prior night came back to me, the businessmen in suits, coming and going, when you’d normally expect a more downscale crowd at a club like the Sin Factory. The addition of drugs to the picture went a long way toward explaining what guys with money in their wallets might be doing there.

  “I haven’t seen it. Of course, maybe they stopped after the murder because there were police all over the place. I wasn’t there long enough before it happened, I wouldn’t necessarily have seen it.”

  “Have you seen anything else?”

  “Like what?”

  “Anything that made you uneasy.”

  She laughed, but the laugh itself was an uneasy one. “Nothing worse than at Carson’s.”

  “That bad?”

  “They’re all the same. Unless you look like Jennifer Lopez or a Playboy centerfold — maybe then the places you get to work at are different. Although actually I doubt it. I’m sure the money’s better, but the management and the customers, I don’t know.”

  “Better quality leather in the whips,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  “Have you ever met Khachadurian?”

  “I only saw him once, on my first day,” she said. “Lenz was walking with this huge guy, took up half the hallway. One of the other girls said that’s who it was.”

  “And Lenz? What’s he like in private?”

  “The same. In private, in public, he’s a prick. He’s the same with everyone as he was with you last night.” I heard a muted beeping from under the table, the sound of a cell phone picking out the notes to Ravel’s Bolero. She picked up her handbag, dropped it on the table, and rooted around in it until she found her phone.

  “Go ahead, take it,” I said. “I’ll step over there.”

  “No, it’s not a call. I just set the alarm.” She pressed a button on the side of the phone and the melody stopped. “I need to go. I’m sorry. I’ve got to get changed and get ready.” Her hands were shaking again. Or maybe they’d never stopped.

  “How can I contact you if I need to?” I said

  She still had her cell phone in her hand, so I would have thought the answer was obvious; but then again, I also remembered her saying in her voicemail that there was no good number where I could reach her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I just don’t give my personal number out to anyone. I mean, like, four people have it. You seem like a normal guy, but I don’t know you.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” I said, and I meant it.
The more careful she was, the better. “You’ve got my number. Call me if anything happens. If I need to get in touch with you, how about I leave a message for you here?”

  She nodded, and got up. “John—” She lowered her voice. “Do you think Randy was right? Part of me thinks she was just making this stuff up and now I’m getting sucked into her fantasy. But someone killed her, and if it’s the guy I’m working for, I could be in real danger.”

  This time the reassurance came out before I could stifle it. “I think you’re pretty safe, Rachel. Even if he did kill her — and I don’t know, it doesn’t sound right, why would he do it on the roof of his own building? — but even if he did, I don’t think he’s going to try it again anytime soon, not while the police are watching the place. You’re probably safer there than anywhere in the city.”

  She nodded, wanting to believe. Then she said, quietly, “It’s Susan.”

  “What?”

  “You called me Rachel. That’s for the clubs. My name’s Susan.” She held her hand out, and this time I took it.

  I watched her go, then paid the check and left myself. The streets were dark, or anyway as dark as it ever gets in Manhattan. Storefronts kept the avenue well lit, but on the side streets it was another story. Streetlamps left pools of light at regular intervals up and down the sidewalk, but outside these pools it was all shadows.

  I stepped out between two parked cars and walked in the street itself. I don’t know why I do this. It’s not clear that it reduces my risk — if anything, it adds the risk of getting run down by a car to whatever risk of a bad encounter I might have on the sidewalk. But somehow it makes me feel safer when I’m not hemmed in by shuttered buildings on one side and empty cars on the other.

  Tonight I had it easy: there were no people and no cars. You could hear some honking in the distance, and occasionally the squeal of a set of tires gripping the pavement, but that was in the distance. This block was mine and mine alone.

  Halfway between Eighth and Seventh Avenues, my cell phone rang. At first I couldn’t make out the voice of the man on the other end, but when I covered my other ear his voice became clearer.