Little Girl Lost

Chapter 17

The Wildman was about as different from the Sin Factory as two places could get. The building was only one story tall but it sprawled over what in Manhattan would have been the footprint of a skyscraper. The parking lot out back could have fit four brownstones.

The walls looked like they’d been made from stacked cinderblocks and the roof was just slanted enough to let the snow slide off in the winter. There was a lighted billboard out front, but no doorman or bouncer, and even standing right under the front awning you couldn’t hear a thing from inside.

Down the block and across the avenue were car lots and a mini-mall featuring a food court, a karate studio, and a combination Carvel ice cream store and video rental place. None of these establishments seemed to be doing much business.

Neither was the Wildman, but that wasn’t a surprise given that it wasn’t even noon yet. Only hardcore alcoholics crack their first pint in the morning, and the same was true of strip club devotees. At noon or one you might see some local businessmen taking in the sights over lunch, but in the morning the clientele was limited to the addicted, the unemployed, and a few bleary-eyed night shift workers just getting off the job.

But “24-Hour Action!” was one of the things the Wildman advertised on its sign, so it had to be open for business. I pushed through the door, paid the twentydollar cover to the man behind the barred bank teller window, and stepped through the curtain of heavy plastic strips that separated the front room from the back.

My eyes took a moment to adjust. This room took up most of the rest of the building’s space, with five platform stages and a long wooden walkway snaking from one to the next. At the far end there was a full-sized stage with a red curtain and no one in front of it. Two of the five platforms were occupied, one by a tall woman with a Grace Jones flattop and small, natural breasts, the other by a woman closer to my height, chunkier, wearing silver hoops through her nipples and an ankh tattoo at the base of her throat. Her breasts looked natural, too. I hadn’t realized you could still find strippers with natural breasts in New York, even if you went to the Bronx at eleven in the morning.

A few of the stools were occupied, though most were still stacked upside down on their tables. In one corner of the room a bartender was setting up, ripping open boxes of beer bottles and packing them into a cooler. There was a wooden bowl full of nuts and pretzels, and I grabbed a handful, popped them one by one while I waited for the bartender to come over.

“Not open yet, champ,” he said. “Another half hour.”

“Danny Matin around?”

“This early? You’re joking, man.”

“So who’s here?”

“You and me, man.” He finished the box of Budweiser, started in on a box of Coors. “What you want Danny for anyway?”

I flashed my wallet open and shut, giving him a glimpse of something that might have been a badge. “Girl who used to dance here was involved in a robbery, later turned up dead downtown. We’re investigating the connection.”

“You talking about Jessie? That girl was bad news.

Everybody knew it.”

“What do you mean?”

He came over, rested his forearms on the bar. “She was always asking for trouble. Guys you wouldn’t want to run into on the street, she’d take them in the V.I.P. room two at a time. Nice little white girl like her and she takes these guys twice her size in the back. More prison tats they got, more she likes them.”

“And what would she do back there?”

“I don’t know, man, but whatever it was it must have been good, since most of the time they came back for more. Wasn’t the type of repeat business Danny really wanted. He was glad, I’ll tell you, when she stopped showing up. Although we was worried maybe she’d got herself hurt or killed. Which I guess she did.”

It fit. If she was trying to recruit a pair of strongarm types to carry out a job, this was the sort of place to do it. It sounded like she’d had her pick of the Bronx’s tough male population.

“What shift did she work?”

“It varied. Some weeks, she’d be working now, ten to three. Some weeks she’d do the graveyard shift, two a.m. to seven. Never saw her work prime time. She wasn’t a prime time kind of girl.”

That fit, too: she couldn’t be in two places at once, and the hours he was calling prime time were probably the ones she spent at the Sin Factory.

I took out a photocopy of the picture that had run in the Daily News, unfolded it, and handed it to him. “Just for the record, is this her?”

He only looked at it for a second. “Yeah. I mean, she looked different when she was dancing here, but yeah, could be her.”

“Could be?”

“Man, you show me a xerox of a photo from a newspaper from when she was in, what’s that, high school? College? Best I can say is could be. You show me a black girl, I’d say couldn’t be.”

“So all you’re really saying is that this girl and the one you knew as Jessie were both white?”

“No, man. That girl looks right. I don’t know.” He looked at the picture again, handed it back. “It’s just that she’d grown up a lot since that picture was taken.”

We all have, I said. But I said it to myself.

I left a card with him to give to Danny Matin when Matin got in. Martin was the owner; I didn’t expect him to be able to tell me anything more than he’d told Catch, assuming he ever called, but you never find out if you don’t ask. I hadn’t gotten much out of the bartender, but I didn’t consider it a wasted trip. I’d wanted to see the place Miranda had danced, the place where she’d picked up the men who’d robbed Murco. When you put together a puzzle, not every piece is equally important – some just show a bit of the sky, not George Washington’s head. But you don’t have a complete picture until every piece is in place.

I rode the subway back to Manhattan. It gave me plenty of time to think. When I’d called Murco to get Matin’s name, I’d also asked him for Miranda’s address, and that’s where I was headed now. What would I find there? Probably nothing, because that’s pretty much what Catch had found when he’d searched the place. But again, I wanted the whole picture, and for that I needed to see the place where she’d lived, the place where Murco’s money had gone missing.

“You’re wasting your time,” Murco had said. “We’ve already been over the place. There’s nothing to see.”

“With all due respect, you’re not a detective, and neither is your son.”

“The police have been over it, too.”

“You’re going to tell me the police never miss anything?”

This got a laugh out of him, or something like a laugh. It was a nasty sound. “You can look if you want, Mr. Blake. But the clock’s ticking, and I’m not a patient man.”

“Neither am I,” I said.

I wondered what he would do if I did find something and what I found suggested that the person who had tipped Miranda off about the buy was someone close to him. A betrayal by one of the men he bought drugs from might not come as a surprise, but what if it was his own son or the club manager he’d worked with for years?

“How sure are you that Miranda got half the money?”

“Very.”

“They couldn’t have been lying to you, trying to hold something back?”

“Oh, they tried. That didn’t last long.”

“Well, if she had the money in her apartment at one point and it’s not there now, that means someone took it. I don’t think it was the police – they’d be working harder on this case than they are if they’d found half a million dollars in cash in a murder victim’s apartment. That means the money was probably taken out of the apartment by whoever killed her. And if that’s the case, someone in the building might have seen something, or heard something-”

“You’re just fishing.”

“Of course I’m fishing – what do you think detective work is?”

“All I have to say, Mr. Blake, is that you’d better catch something. Soon.”

Before heading up to the Bronx, I’d also called Leo and brought him up to speed on where things stood. I figured maybe he’d be able to see some connection I’d missed or suggest a path I hadn’t thought of pursuing. But all he’d said was the same thing Susan had, which was that I should be careful.

“You’ve already managed to get two dangerous men angry at you. Wayne and Roy. You seem to be in good for the time being with the Khachadurians, but who knows how long that will last. Then there’s this girl you’ve planted in your mother’s apartment – she seems okay, but the truth is you don’t know whether you can count on her.”

“I’m not worried about that,” I said. “But Murco’s another story. On one hand, what’s he going to do to me if I don’t turn up the killer? On the other hand, what if I do and it turns out to be someone close to him, which it pretty much has to be?”

“Like we used to say in the army, one way you’re screwed, the other you’re fucked. That’s why I’m telling you to be careful.”

“Don’t you have any other advice?” I’d asked. “You always have advice.”

“I gave you my advice five days ago. I told you to stay out of it. You didn’t listen. Now you’re just going to have to see it through to the end.”

The train squealed to a stop, and a voice over the loudspeaker said, “Eighth Avenue, last stop. Transfer for the A, C, and E lines… “

I pushed out of the car, joined the midday crowd elbowing its way up to the street. I kept one hand firmly on the flap of my jacket pocket as I climbed the crowded stairs.

“Can I at least come by,” I’d asked Leo, “and pick up the other gun?”

“Yeah,” he’d said, “maybe you’d better.”