Little Girl Lost

Chapter 28

“How’s your head?” Miranda said. “Sorry I had to hit you so hard, but you really didn’t give me any choice. It was either that or kill you, and I really didn’t want to kill you.” She was holding a steak knife in one hand and had picked up a piece of the broken glass in the other, but when she looked at my hands and saw that they were empty, she dropped both on the rubber tray and came forward. “Don’t need those, I guess. You’re not going to hurt me, are you? Poor, sweet John. I can still hear you telling Wayne how all you wanted was for me to be alive again. It touched me. Seriously.”

She was a foot away from me. She put a hand up to my face, touched my cheek. I felt her fingertips against my skin as though from a mile away. She said, “You’re going to have to talk to me, sweetie. This isn’t going to work otherwise.”

Like one of those optical illusions where first the cubes seem to be pointing in one direction and then suddenly they’re pointing in the other, and you can’t imagine how they could ever have looked like they weren’t.

“Miranda-” The words wouldn’t come. Everything was wrong. If Miranda was here, was alive, then who…? “Jocelyn. You killed Jocelyn.”

She shrugged. “I’d be dead now if I hadn’t.”

“And Lenz. You killed them both.”

“Look, if we’re going to have this conversation, let’s sit down.” I didn’t move. “You want to stand? Fine, John, we’ll stand.” She leaned against the refrigerator, crossed her arms over her chest.

“How could you do it?”

“Do you mean how could I or how did I? Are you disgusted with me, or just confused?”

“Both,” I said.

“It’s not so hard, baby. Really, it isn’t. You do what you have to do to get by. But you’ve learned that, too, haven’t you?”

“What happened to you?” I said, in a small voice.

“To me? What about you? All these years, I always pictured you down at NYU thinking great thoughts, reading – I don’t know, ancient Greek history or something. I figured you’d be a professor, or maybe a scientist – or, or, I don’t know, you’d go into politics, I’d turn on the news and there you’d be, running for mayor of New York. I’ll tell you, it made it easier when I was dancing in every cheap dive across the South. At least one of us was doing better, you know? I certainly didn’t picture you doing this. Working with drug dealers, breaking into people’s apartments. Chasing after strippers with blood on their hands.”

“You were going to be a doctor,” I said.

“I was going to be a lot of things.” She came forward again, gently pushed me out of the doorway so she could step through. “At least let me turn off the TV.”

I caught her arm as she passed, stepped out into the living room with her. “What,” she said, “you don’t trust me? I’m not going to do anything.” She kept her hands high as she went to the couch, picked up the remote control, and turned the TV off. “See?” She sat down. “Now you.”

I sat across from her. It was beyond comprehension. That she was here at all, that I was, that we were sitting across from each other like old friends catching up after years apart, all while Susan lay in the hospital, clinging to life, and Jocelyn lay in the morgue, half her face blown away, deliberately misidentified to the police by Lenz. On one level, it all finally made sense – the pieces fit. But on another, it made no sense at all.

“It was you dancing at the Wildman,” I said. “Not Jocelyn. Danny Matin said it was you and so did the bartender, and it wasn’t because she looked like you, it was because it was you.”

“Yeah, it was me.” She lit a cigarette, held the pack out to me, dropped it on the coffee table when I didn’t react. “I’m not proud of what I did there, but I did it.”

“But why did you use her name?”

“I couldn’t use mine – not to set up a robbery. And they won’t hire you in a strip club these days without seeing ID. I had an old ID of Jocelyn’s from when we were dancing together. The picture was close enough.”

Close enough. And when the burglars she’d recruited were caught and tortured and killed, and she’d needed someone to die in her place on the roof of the Sin Factory, Jocelyn had been close enough for that, too. Jocelyn, who was still in love with her, and who came running, bringing flowers no less, when Miranda had called her out of the blue offering a reconciliation. I thought about the message on the answering machine – Miranda hadn’t set herself up accidentally, she’d set Jocelyn up, very deliberately.

“How did you get Lenz to go along with it?” I asked.

“What choice did he have? He’s the one who’d told me about the buy in the first place. He shouldn’t have, but the man couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He just had to brag. And thank goodness. If he hadn’t, I’d have been working at that dive for nothing, not to mention fucking him for nothing.” She put on an expression of mock sympathy. “I’m sorry, sweetie. You didn’t think I’d been saving myself for you, did you?”

“Hardly,” I said.

“I remember the day he came home from that bar and said Khachadurian’s son had been in and had told everyone they’d caught the men who’d robbed his father. Wayne was so happy. He told me, ‘Those sons of bitches got what they deserved.’z” She took a long drag on the cigarette. “You know what Khachadurian did to them?”

“Yes,” I said, “I know what he did.”

“Well, I had to give Wayne the bad news. I told him, ‘If we don’t do something and fast, you and I are going to be in the same boat as those sons of bitches, because I’m the one who told them about the deal, and you’re the one who told me.’ I thought he was going to have a heart attack, drop dead right there.”

She waited for me to say something, but I didn’t know what to say.

“Wayne had two choices,” she went on. “He could go to Khachadurian, explain what had happened, and beg for mercy, in which case the best he could hope for was that maybe they’d just kill him instead of cutting out his eyes first, or he could agree to help me. And let’s not forget that if he helped me, he also got half the money. And he got me. All he had to do was identify her body as mine and then let me stay at his apartment until the heat died down.”

That wasn’t quite true. He could identify Jocelyn’s body as Miranda’s, but the word of a two-time convict might not be enough for the police. And while expanding shells pumped into the back of a person’s head could do a lot to interfere with either a visual or a dental identification, they couldn’t change one person’s DNA into another’s. If the police picked up anything at Miranda’s apartment for a comparison, Miranda needed to know they’d get trace amounts of Jocelyn’s hair and skin, not hers. Even a drop-out pre-med would know that.

Meanwhile, Miranda needed to have clothing to wear while she was in hiding, but she couldn’t empty her apartment without making the police suspicious. Fortunately, there was a simple solution to both problems: the afternoon of the murder, Miranda could take Jocelyn out on the town, and while they were away from both apartments, Lenz could come down to Avenue D, fill a big, rolling suitcase with Jocelyn’s clothing, hairbrush, toothbrush, and so forth, and then go to Miranda’s apartment and swap the contents of the suitcase for the things Miranda needed. That’s how Jocelyn’s baseball cap had ended up hanging on the inside of Miranda’s door. The clothing in Miranda’s dresser had been Jocelyn’s, too, or at least the things on the top of each drawer had been. The luggage cart had never had money in it – just Jocelyn’s things on the way in and Miranda’s on the way out.

And the paper band behind the dresser? Maybe it really had fallen there by accident, and just gone unnoticed by everyone until Little Murco turned it up.

“You’re lucky,” I said. “Once everyone thought you were dead, it would have been simple for Lenz to kill you for real and just keep all the money for himself.”

“Sure,” she said, “if he’d known where the money was.”

“How could you keep it hidden while you were staying at his apartment?”

“Oh, John, come on, I’m not that stupid,” she said. “I didn’t keep it at the apartment. I put it in a safe deposit box. Or I should say Jessie Masters did, since that’s who the bank thought it was renting to.”

And that explained why she hadn’t left the city after killing Lenz – the murder had taken place on Friday night, and a bank wouldn’t let her get into her safe deposit box until Monday morning. Yes, all the pieces fit now. It had all been constructed so carefully, right from the start. I thought back to what Susan had said that first night at the Derby about how Miranda had told her in the dressing room that she was afraid that Murco was going to kill her. It was a perfect way to set the stage for her apparent death the next day. There might be some dispute later about who’d killed Miranda, but not about whether it had actually been Miranda who’d died. She’d put it all together masterfully.

“You really thought of every angle.”

“A girl’s got to take care of herself,” she said. “Jocelyn taught me that.”

A girl’s got to take care of herself – even if doing so meant killing. It had meant killing Lenz when it had looked like he might talk. It had meant killing Susan, or trying to, presumably because she was making too many calls to too many people, asking too many questions, getting too close. And now did it mean killing me? I imagined it had to, despite what she’d said about not wanting to.

“What happens now?” I said.

“You tell me, baby,” she said. “I’m not going to go to jail. Not after everything I’ve been through. And I’m certainly not going to let you hand me over to Khachadurian. I don’t want to kill you, John, I swear to God I don’t, but it’s kind of up to you, isn’t it?”

She reached between the cushions of the couch and came up with a knife. It was a simple steak knife, the same sort as the one she’d left by the sink, probably the same sort she’d used on Susan. Maybe the same one, washed clean and ready for another use. She wasn’t holding it in a threatening manner, not yet, but she was pointing it in my general direction. Her eyes had a question in them. I stood up.

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t pretend you’re giving me a choice. Do me that one favor, Miranda. Don’t treat me like you treated the others. I’m sure you told them it was up to them, too, that as long as they worked with you, you’d be on their side. That you loved them. It lasted just as long as you needed them, and then when you didn’t any more, when it was more convenient to you for them to be dead, all the sweet talk went out the window.”

“It’s not the same,” she said. “It’s not. Wayne Lenz was a disgusting man. It made me sick to touch him. And you know what Jocelyn did to me? After nine years, after I followed her across the whole goddamn country, after I gave up everything for her, she takes one look at this… at this… woman, and I don’t matter any more. After nine years, John. You can’t imagine what it’s like.” She stood up and came toward me. The knife was between us. “I’ve never had anyone, John, not since you. That’s the truth. No one I could trust.” I saw tears forming in her eyes. “You were always good to me. If you said you’d leave me alone, if you swore that you wouldn’t tell anyone, I know you’d keep your word. You’ve changed, but you haven’t changed that much.”

Now the point of the knife pressed against my shirt, and through my shirt, against my chest. “But I have to know. I can’t let you out of here otherwise. I can’t.”

I saw her in front of me, holding the knife to my chest, but I also saw her as she had been at age eighteen. Where along the way had Miranda turned into the person she was today? How had it happened? Was there any trace of my Miranda still in there somewhere? Or was there only the murderer, the betrayer, the woman who deserved the sort of punishment I’d imagined in the cab on the way downtown? I wanted to believe there was more. I wanted to desperately.

I reached out, touched her wrist gently. “You can put the knife away,” I said. “I won’t hurt you, Miranda. I could never hurt you.”

“Swear it,” she said.

“I swear.”

“On your life. On your mother’s life.”

“I swear,” I said. “On everything I love, on everything I care about. On your life, Miranda. I swear. Now put the knife away.”

“I want to believe you,” she said.

“I may be many things, Miranda, but I’m not a liar. Put the knife away.”

“Just give me a few days,” she said. “I’m realistic, I’m not asking for forever. But don’t tell anyone for a week, okay? I can get far away in a week.”

“Okay,” I said. “One week.”

The knife lowered. It was by her side, and then her fingers opened and it dropped to the floor. She was crying freely now, tears streaming down her cheeks. I took her in my arms and realized that I was crying, too, for her, for both of us. How had we ended up here, in a filthy tenement with a knife on the floor between us, she a killer and I – and I I stroked her hair back behind her ear with a thumb, and tried not to think about anything, tried only to feel her in my arms, to burn this fragile instant into my memory.

I let her go. I lifted her chin and pressed my lips against her forehead. “Goodbye, Miranda.”

“One week,” she said.

“One week,” I said. “I promise.”

She stood at the door as I went downstairs. At the first turn of the stairway, I looked back and saw her there, leaning against the door, framed in the light. If this was going to be the last image I ever had of her, despite everything, I was grateful for it. I’ve never hated myself as much as I did at that moment.

I turned back and kept going down.

They were waiting on the sidewalk when I opened the building’s front door. They were wearing heavy overcoats and leather gloves and dark fur hats with flaps to cover their ears. The father was patting his hands together impatiently, while the son stood absolutely still, looking at me over his father’s head.

“Where were you,” Murco said. “We’ve been here ten minutes. We were starting to think you’d doublecrossed us.”

“She’s upstairs,” I said.