Little Girl Lost (Hard Case Crime) Read online

  “—my daughter. Mr. Blake? Are you there?”

  “I’m here. Who is this?”

  “Daniel Mastaduno. You sent a fax with your phone number on it. Is this a bad time to call?”

  “No, it’s fine,” I said. It took a second for the name to click. Mastaduno. The roommate. “Your daughter is Jocelyn Mastaduno?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Where is she? Can I talk to her?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me. We haven’t heard from Jocelyn in six years, Mr. Blake. Do you have any idea where she is?”

  Six years? “No,” I said. “I—”

  The punch came from behind, and it landed square in my kidney. The phone flew from my hand and clattered against the door of a car. I dropped to my knees and took a boot in the stomach that knocked out of me what little breath I’d had left. Another kick dug deep into my gut, and then another. My chest was pounding and my side was screaming with pain. I wanted to move, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t breathe. It was all I could do to keep from throwing up.

  Ten feet away, my phone lay on its side, chirping, “Hello? Hello? Mr. Blake?”

  A gloved hand gripped my hair, pulled my head off the ground. I felt a pair of lips brush my ear. “Leave it alone, man, or next time they’ll make me give you more than a warning.”

  The hand laid my head down gently. The cell phone was silent now. No cars came.

  Chapter 8

  The look of pity Leo gave me was almost worse than the beating.

  “How do you let a guy get close enough to you to land a punch without noticing?”

  “I was on the phone, I told you.”

  “Goddamn cell phones,” he said, “how many times have I told you—”

  “Lots of times. It’s enough.”

  “It’s not enough! Look at you!”

  “Leo, please. I want you to put me in touch with someone who can tell me about Murco Khachadurian. Someone on the force.”

  “Anyone I knew on the force retired five years ago, and I’ll tell you something else — if I did know someone, I wouldn’t ask him to help you. I’m not going to help you go and get yourself killed.”

  “I’m not going to get myself killed.”

  “Stand up and say that,” he said.

  I was lying flat on my back on the leather couch in our reception area. I’d made it to the office because it was closer to the Sin Factory than my apartment, and getting in didn’t require me to climb any stairs. Spending the night on the couch had left me with a stiff neck that I hadn’t had before, but at least the pain in my stomach was a little less intense. My side still felt like someone was sticking in a knife in me any time I turned, and standing up was out of the question.

  Leo had found an old hot water bottle in the bottom of one of his desk drawers and he’d filled the thing with water he’d heated in the coffee maker. It had gone cold in the meantime, but it was too much trouble to get it out from under me. He’d also fed me a glass of whiskey, and between the red rubber pad under my back and the rocks tumbler in my hand, I felt like my own grandfather.

  “Khachadurian’s involved,” I said. “Whether he killed Miranda or not, he’s part of what happened, and I’m going to talk to him.”

  “What are you going to do, call him on your cell phone?”

  “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m going to do. I got a number for him from his brother, and if that doesn’t work I’ll get another number somewhere else.”

  “I should never have trained you,” Leo said.

  “Leo, I’m going to find the man and I’m going to talk to him, and if he killed Miranda, I’m going to bring him in. All I’m asking is, before I make the call, I want to know more about him. The more I know, the better the chances I come out of it in one piece.”

  “Have another drink.”

  I set my glass down on the floor. “I don’t want another drink. I didn’t even want the first one. All I want is some information. If you don’t help me, I’ll get it some other way. But don’t tell me you can’t get it because you don’t know anyone anymore. You’re not that out of touch.”

  Leo took the glass, refilled it, and put it back within arm’s reach. “Here’s a deal. When you can make it to the bathroom on your own, no promises, but I’ll make a few calls.”

  I tried to sit up, winced as the pain shot through me.

  “When,” Leo said.

  “Yeah. When.” I lay back down.

  By midday, I could stand on my own, as long as I leaned against the back of a chair. At one, Leo brought me a turkey sandwich and a Snapple, and at three I was leaning against the bathroom door, pissing it away. It was excruciating. But I came back from the bathroom as proud of myself as a newly toilet-trained toddler.

  “Zip up,” Leo said.

  “You’ll want to start making those calls now,” I said.

  I went back to the couch while he went into the other room to work the phone. The truth was that he probably didn’t know anyone still on the force — his contemporaries were all out of the game one way or the other, retired or dead, and even the rookies who’d shaken his hand at his retirement party were probably coming up on their own. But his buddies had had kids, and the police force is one of the last great dynastic employers: if your daddy was a cop, there was a good chance you’d go into the Academy yourself when the time came. So, no, Bill O’Malley, Leo’s partner for his first five years, wasn’t around any more, but Bill, Jr. was. Leo would be able to get someone on the phone.

  That left me to hold up my end of the bargain, and with Leo in the other room, I didn’t have to put a brave face on it any more. The truth was I felt like shit. I could walk again, and I didn’t think anything inside me was torn or broken, but my God, it couldn’t have hurt any more if something had been. I thought about the man who’d done it. Until he’d spoken, I couldn’t be sure who it was, but the voice wasn’t one you’d forget. I’d been bounced by the Sin Factory’s bouncer, and that meant either Lenz or maybe Khachadurian himself had told him to do it. Which meant I was in their sights already.

  It didn’t mean for sure that Rachel — Susan — was right. It didn’t mean that Khachadurian had put the bullets in the back of Miranda’s head or given the order to do so. All it meant for sure was that they didn’t want me poking around and maybe bringing to light whatever dirty business they were carrying on behind the closed doors of the champagne rooms. Maybe it was just sex, not drugs, or maybe it was both, but that didn’t necessarily mean it was murder, too.

  Not necessarily.

  But as Susan had said, someone had killed Miranda, and the little I’d heard about Khachadurian so far didn’t make him sound like an unlikely candidate.

  I fiddled with my cell phone while I waited for Leo to come back. Overnight, the battery had drained and I didn’t have a charger in the office. But I’d get it working again. The faceplate was scuffed and scratched, but it didn’t look like the damage was serious. They built those things to take a beating. Wish I could say the same for myself.

  I thought about what Dave Mastaduno had been saying to me when we’d been interrupted. No, not Dave. Daniel. What Daniel Mastaduno had been saying: We haven’t heard from Jocelyn in six years, Mr. Blake. Rianon must have forwarded my fax after all. I tried to imagine what it had been like for him to get it. Six years of silence, and then out of the blue one day a fax comes from a stranger with your daughter’s name on it. A little like waking up one morning and seeing Miranda in the newspaper. A name from the past, a face from the past, all your worst fears brought to life.

  Was Jocelyn Mastaduno dead, too? Or was she just missing? Or hiding? Or maybe she just didn’t want to talk to her parents — God knows I hadn’t talked to my father in more than six years, though once a year we exchanged chilly Christmas cards. There wasn’t necessarily a big mystery here. And yet somehow I had a bad feeling about it, as though Miranda’s death was poisoning everything else around her.

  Leo opened the door, shut it quietly
behind him, and held up a slip of paper. He made me walk all the way across the room to take it from him, and I forced myself to do it without grimacing and without holding onto the chairs along the way.

  “What I wouldn’t give to be your age again. Take a beating at night, ready to run a marathon the next morning.”

  I snatched the paper, saw the phone number for the Midtown South Precinct house. I didn’t recognize the extension. “O’Malley?”

  “No, Stan Kirsch’s son. Kirby, and you tell me, what’s a worse name than that for a guy named Kirsch?”

  “Leo.”

  “Leo Kirsch? What’s wrong with that?”

  “Leo.”

  “What?”

  “Thank you.”

  He sat down at his desk, didn’t look at me. “Can’t let you fuck up on your own,” he said. “I’ve got too much invested in you.”

  I took a deep breath before climbing the stairs and had to stop for another at each landing, but eventually I made it to my apartment. My cell phone would take hours to charge completely, so I got it going and used the phone by my bed to call Kirby Kirsch.

  “John. Yeah. I got the message you’d be calling. I think your dad knew my dad?”

  “Leo’s not my dad. He’s my boss. But yes, he used to work with your dad, I think in the late seventies.”

  “That’s when it would have had to be,” he said, “since my dad never made it into the early eighties.”

  “What happened?”

  I heard him chew something and swallow. “Shooter at a street fair, took out two pedestrians and two policemen before blowing his own brains out.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. Me, too. But that’s the job.” Some more chewing came over the line. This one had a thick hide, all right.

  “Did the message say what I’m calling about?”

  “Just that you’d call.”

  “Someone I used to know was shot a few nights ago, a woman named Miranda Sugarman.”

  “Sugarman, that’s the stripper?”

  “That’s what she was now. Ten years ago, she was my girlfriend when we were in high school.” This was his turn to say Sorry, but he didn’t. “We’re looking into it—”

  “We?”

  “I work for Leo’s agency. We’re just trying to find out some more.”

  “For the family?”

  “There’s no family,” I said. “It’s for me.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Someone told me the club she was working at is owned by a man named Murco Khachadurian, and he sounds like a bit of a questionable character.”

  “He’s a fucking scumbag, is what he is.”

  “Yeah. Well. That’s what I was hoping you could tell me about.”

  “There are two of them, Little Murco and Big Murco, the son and the father, and they’re both scumbags.”

  “Connected?”

  “They wish. The son’s just a thug, and the father, he’s a ‘businessman,’ which means he made some money in some legitimate racket, Armenian carpets or something, and now he’s always trying to cut himself in on deals that are bigger than he is, make a big score.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Drugs, some schlock, some grey market booze, whatever he can get a piece of.”

  “You ever bust him?”

  “He’s small potatoes. We keep an eye on him to see if he’ll lead us to someone bigger.”

  “And the murder?”

  “Sugarman? There were forty people in the club at midnight, girls and customers and the bartender and the janitor, and any of them could have done it.”

  “Not Khachadurian?”

  “He’s probably never set foot in the club.”

  “I don’t mean personally.”

  “Well, when we find the person who pulled the trigger, we’ll ask whether someone put him up to it.”

  “What do you think?”

  “What do I think? You talk about strippers, hookers, massage parlor girls, it’s almost always another girl who does it. They hate each other. ‘She used my lipstick. She took my customer. I saw her going through my locker.’ Either that or a john, some guy she rubbed the wrong way, or maybe the right way but he’s fucked up with guilt feelings about the whole thing. One or the other, that’s your killer nine times out of ten.”

  “And the tenth time?”

  He was silent for a moment. “How long have you been working for Leo?” he said

  “Why?”

  “Ask him. In this job, you don’t worry about the tenth time. When it comes it comes, but most cases it doesn’t and you don’t worry about it before you have to.”

  Leo had told me. He’d told me plenty of times. All the cop wisdom this guy had, Leo had double, and he’d been pouring it in my ear since the day he plucked me out of NYU to be his part-time research assistant. I knew all about the nine times out of ten and the standard procedures and the steps the police would be taking to solve the crime. I also knew a murdered stripper wouldn’t be at the top of their priority list and that any one-off violent crime that wasn’t solved in the first forty-eight hours was likely to stay unsolved forever. Every day brought a dozen more, and there were only so many cops to go around.

  I also knew that Kirby Kirsch was right, that if anything was going to work, it was probably going to be the standard procedure, and that there was no point in inventing complicated explanations for a crime that was probably very simple. I knew all this, but it didn’t do any good.

  “You think I could see the body?” I said.

  “You don’t want to,” he said. “Not if you used to go out with her. We’re talking chopped meat, man. There wasn’t even enough left for a good dental — we had to go to her apartment for a DNA match.”

  The guy was still eating. I listened to him chew.

  “Thanks for talking to me,” I said. I tried hard to keep my voice level. “I appreciate your taking the call.”

  “Leo still carries some weight around here. A lot of people remember him.”

  “I’ll tell him,” I said. “It’ll make his day.”

  I carefully stripped off my clothes and got under the hottest shower I could stand.

  When I moved in, I’d bought one of those three-speed massaging showerheads but I’d never used more than the one speed it came set on, the one that came at you like water out of a watering can. Now I turned it to the one that felt like a thousand tiny needles and let it go to work on my back. There was a fist-sized bruise on my right side, plum-colored and tender to the touch, but it was starting to go yellow at the edges and wasn’t the source of shooting pain it had been before. I’d live.

  I thought about the other bruises I’d gotten over the past half decade of working for Leo, that and the threats, the fights I’d only narrowly talked my way out of, the dirt I’d dug up on people who’d wanted to keep it hidden. How had I ended up doing this for a living? Around the time Miranda had been making plans to become a doctor, what was it I thought I’d be doing? I couldn’t remember. But it wasn’t this. I did remember the day I met Leo, and the day I joined him full-time because it was either that or go to work for an Internet company and I still had some self-respect. I’d never wanted to do this for a living, but I couldn’t remember wanting to do anything else either, and after a while, it was the only thing I’d ever done.

  It was a living, as Leo had said — but not like being a dentist or fixing shoes. It was more like being a stripper, I imagined. Even if you took pride in doing your job well, you ended up feeling dirty at the end of the day.

  So why did I do it? I didn’t know how to do anything else, but there was another side to it as well. I did it because somebody had to. Someone had to stand up for people like Miranda. It was the sort of thought you could only entertain in the shower, or in bed when you were on the verge of falling asleep, and even then not for long. Look too closely at it and it would embarrass you. But on days when I had nothing else, it gave me a reason to k
eep going into the office in spite of the bruises and the people I had to deal with and the general feeling that I was pitching my tent in a sewer.

  When I turned off the water, I heard my cell phone going, the vibration rattling the base of the charger against the top of my desk. I didn’t bother toweling off and walked as quickly as I could, snatching up the phone before whoever was calling could hang up.

  “Mr. Blake?”

  I recognized the voice. “Mr. Mastaduno. Hold on a second.” I slipped into a pair of pants and a sweatshirt I’d left draped over the chair. The last thing I needed was to catch a cold on top of everything else. “I’m back. I’m sorry about last night—”

  “What happened?”

  “Just some business I had to take care of. Let’s talk about your daughter.”

  “What do you know about her?”

  “I don’t — just that she was once the roommate of a woman named Miranda Sugarman, who was killed in New York on New Year’s Eve. I wanted to talk to Jocelyn to see if she could tell me anything about Miranda.”

  “Oh.” I could hear the man deflating over the phone. “I was hoping... It’s been so long.”

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “I don’t know. I honestly just don’t know. She was at school. She was doing fine, or anyway that’s what we assumed. And then... “

  “And then?”

  “We got a call from the dean’s office saying she had turned in a leave-of-absence form and when we tried calling her, the phone was disconnected. We tried her roommate, but that phone was shut off, too. We called some of the other girls whose names Jocelyn had mentioned, but no one knew where she’d gone, just that she’d gone off with her roommate, this Sugarman. That was six years ago, Mr. Blake. Not one phone call since then, not a letter, not a postcard. Nothing. We figured she’d come back, here if not to school, but no. Her mother’s been sick with worry, I’ve been sick with worry — not one word.”

  “Had you been close before that?”

  “Close? Your own daughter, that’s as close you can get.”

  “Did you ever hire anyone to try to find her?”