Little Girl Lost

Chapter 3

On the way home, I stopped in at the office. Leo was there, going through his files. He had five piles of paper on his desk and two on the floor next to his chair. The trashcan was overflowing. My desk was neat by comparison: just one stack of case documents and half-finished paperwork and a second, smaller pile of correspondence, junk mail, and phone messages. I glanced at the messages; none was more recent than a week ago. It’s not just the strip club business that slows down around the holidays.

“You go there?” Leo said without looking up from his work.

“I went.”

“And?”

“It’s a dive. Little hole in the wall, barely enough room for a stage. It just doesn’t make sense.”

“What doesn’t make sense?”

“None of it makes sense, Leo. What’s she doing back in New York, working as a stripper? This is a girl who… she didn’t have to be a doctor. If that didn’t work out there were plenty of things she could have done.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Okay, say she falls on hard times, she starts stripping. Somehow she ends up back in New York. Say that’s all true. But why the hell does she end up at a place like the Sin Factory? She was too smart to work there.”

“When did they start screening dancers for their IQ?”

“I just mean she would have known better. Fine, you need money, you’re an attractive woman, maybe you start dancing a few nights a week – but you don’t do it at a place like that, where you’re lucky if someone tips you in fives instead of ones.”

“Maybe she couldn’t get work anywhere better.”

“No, I don’t buy that. She had the figure for it; she could have worked anywhere she wanted.”

“Says the man who hasn’t seen her in ten years.” Leo put down the report he was working on and dropped his glasses on top of it. “You’re going to have to face facts, Johnny. She could have been strung out, worn down, overweight, out of her mind, she could have been a lousy dancer, you don’t know.”

“She was a good dancer,” I said.

“Ten years ago. You don’t know what she was now.”

No, all I knew she was now was dead.

“I’m not asking you to help,” I said.

“I’m not offering.”

“I know it’s a waste of time.”

“Your time’s my time, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“So what’s the big case you want me to work on instead? This?” I held up the phone messages. “A guy pretends to have a limp so he can collect disability from his employer?”

“It pays the bills.”

“Barely. And anyway I already got the photos. What’s left is just clean-up.”

“What about Leventon?”

“Leventon can wait.”

“She’s a paying customer.”

“And she can wait. A woman’s dead, Leo, someone who meant a lot to me. You can’t tell me to sit back and do nothing.”

“What do you think you can do?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’ve got to do something. What’s the point of being a detective if when something like this happens you just let it?”

“Who said there was a point? It’s a living, like being a dentist or fixing shoes. That’s all it is.”

“You don’t believe that,” I said. “I certainly hope you don’t.”

“We’re private investigators. We’re not cops. We don’t solve murders. That’s paperback novel stuff.”

“At least let me look into it for a few days. I need to put it to rest, Leo. I can’t do that without knowing more.”

He smeared one hand across his jaw, a gesture of defeat. “You never could,” he said.

Leo Hauser was twice my age and looked older. Looking at him, you couldn’t picture him as the beat cop he’d been in the seventies, walking the streets of Times Square before Disney and Giuliani made it the oversized shopping mall it was today. But he’d shown me pictures, and by God, the uniform had fit him, he’d had good posture and a steely gaze, and if that wasn’t enough to make people take him seriously there’d been the couple of pounds of iron in a holster on his hip. Today – today he not only didn’t look like a cop, he didn’t look like the private detective he’d become. He looked like an accountant. His hair had gone white, where it hadn’t just gone. You looked at him in his twelve-dollar shirts, with his glasses propped on the top of his head, and you saw an uncle at a barbecue.

But Leo was the man who had taught me this business, and along the way I’d seen what he was capable of. A lot of the time when we were hired it was by a corporation that just wanted a background check on someone they were thinking of hiring – that was the bulk of any small agency’s business these days, and you did it over the phone or on the computer. But sometimes there was serious legwork to be done, and he’d done his share of it, chasing down leads and confronting the people behind them. Not recently, not so much since Arlene died – that had taken some of the chase out of him. But even now he’d insist on coming with me on a job every so often. I used to think it was his way of checking up on me, keeping an eye on the half-assed literature major he’d pulled out of NYU and tried to turn into a detective, but eventually I realized it was just his way of keeping his hand in.

When I’d shown him the article about Miranda, he’d warned me to leave it alone, and I knew he was speaking from experience. “You won’t like what you find. I’ll tell you that right off the bat. Whatever you find out about her, you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

“I already wish I hadn’t,” I said. “I wish she was still alive, raising two kids and practicing optometry in Wisconsin. And I wish I was there with her. But what does any of that matter? I’m here, she’s here, and somebody put a fucking bullet in her. I can’t just sit around and wait to read about it in the paper.”

“Better than ending up in the paper yourself.”

“I won’t.”

“Better not,” Leo said. “I’m too old to start again with some other kid.”

I picked up a sandwich at the Korean grocery on the corner and ate it on the way home. The wind had picked up as the sun had gone down and now there was no mistaking what season we were in. People complain more about New York in the summer, the heat of August, the humidity, the clothing sticking to your back, but it’s the winter that always makes me think about packing it in. Everything that’s wrong with the city is still wrong in the winter, only you’ve got the wind chill factor to think about, too.

I climbed the four flights to my apartment and unbundled myself to the accompaniment of the hissing and clanking of my radiator. The landlord was acting out of short-lived gratitude for his Christmas tips – by February, he’d have lost interest and we’d be shivering in our kitchens again.

There was nothing on the six o’clock news, but I set my VCR to tape the eleven. You never know. Then I took a hot shower and killed some time on the Internet, tracking down every reference I could find to Miranda, the Sin Factory, or the murder. There wasn’t much. Each of the local papers had covered the murder, of course, but not at great length, and details were scarce. Two gunshot wounds to the back of the head, hollow-point bullets for maximum damage. Victim pronounced dead at the scene, police were investigating. She’d been found by the club’s manager, a man named Wayne Lenz, just after midnight, and he’d called an ambulance immediately on his cell phone. They’d gotten there quickly, but there’s no such thing as quickly enough when you’ve been shot in the head with hollow point bullets.

The Sin Factory had a web site, if you could call it that: one web page showing their logo and a photo of a topless woman with one leg wrapped around a brass pole. The bullet items on the right side of the screen shouted: “Full Bar!” “Sumptuous Buffet!” and “10 Gorgeous Girls Live!!!” I couldn’t imagine where they’d fit ten gorgeous girls, never mind the buffet. But then this wouldn’t be the first strip club to look better on the web than it did in person.

As for Miranda herself, Google only came up with a single link, to the student directory of Rianon College in New Mexico. The link didn’t work when I clicked on it. The historical copy stored in Google’s archives came up just fine, but all it showed was Miranda’s name on a long list of what had presumably been her classmates. She’d been in Heward Hall, room 1140, phone extension 87334. I searched the page for other instances of “1140” and found several, but only one other for Heward Hall: Jocelyn Mastaduno, extension 87333. I wrote down the name.

Then, because there was more time to kill, I did a few searches on Jocelyn Mastaduno’s name. I didn’t find much. One J. Mastaduno listed in Pensacola, another in Cedar Rapids. None in New York, but then why would there be? Not every pre-med at Rianon came from or ended up in New York.

Was it late enough now? I looked at the clock and decided that I wasn’t in the mood to wait any longer. Lenz would either be there or he wouldn’t, and either I would learn something useful or I wouldn’t, but at least I’d be doing something more than just working the computer.

I had a sudden recollection, as I switched off the machine, of Miranda struggling with the PC in our computer lab – this was before the Internet, but our school had a computer elective and in our junior year we’d both taken it. I remembered sitting with her at the monitor, Miranda desperately trying to finish an assignment, me fighting with the printer when it refused to print. I finally got the thing working in time for us to be only five minutes late to class.

We wouldn’t even have been five minutes late if she hadn’t pushed me up against the lockers in the hallway, looked left and right to make sure we were alone, and pressed her lips to mine. “My hero,” she’d said, smoothing back my hair. “Will you always be there to fix my printer for me?”

I turned off the light and returned to the Sin Factory.