Little Girl Lost (Hard Case Crime) (22 page)

And offset by a half second or so, I heard the sound of Ravel’s
Bolero
beeping faintly, not in my ear, but from the back of the bandstand.

I followed the sound to one of the doors in the rear, a rusted metal door with no knob even, just a round hole where you’d expect the doorknob to be. From behind it, muffled but distinct, came the sound of Susan’s cell phone. Then the beeping stopped, and in my ear I heard Susan’s voice as her voicemail picked up: “Hi, I’m not available right now—”

I slammed the phone shut, stuck two fingers through the hole in the door, and pulled as hard as I could. It didn’t budge. “Susan,” I shouted. There was no response. “Help me get this open. Come on!” She had to be in there. Unless it was just her phone, thrown there by Jocelyn so Susan couldn’t use it, but that didn’t make any sense — why would she go to the trouble of opening one of these old doors just to get rid of a phone? I yanked harder. I planted my foot against the wall for leverage and pulled till it felt like my arms were tearing apart at the joints. The door started moving, slowly, a millimeter at a time. I pulled again, and again, and the metal groaned as the door scraped open an inch. I couldn’t see inside. But now I had leverage. I wrapped my hands around the edge of the door and dragged it open. Half a foot. A foot. Two feet.

It was a narrow utility closet with a stripped circuit breaker box on the back wall. Susan was huddled on the ground in a heap. She wasn’t moving. I touched the side of her face. It was cold.

I gently pulled her out of the closet and laid her on the ground. She was wearing the same sweater she’d had on the first night we’d talked at Keegan’s, only it wasn’t the color of ginger ale any more. The front was soaked through with blood.

In the distance, I heard sirens approaching, but that wasn’t good enough. I thumbed 911 into my phone. “Send an ambulance to Corlears Hook Park,” I said when the operator answered, “and hurry. A woman’s been hurt, badly.”

I tried to take her pulse. I couldn’t feel it.

The waiting area at Bellevue’s emergency room was packed. One boy with what looked like a broken arm was howling while his mother tried alternately to calm him down and get the attention of the triage nurse. But a broken arm could wait. There were head wounds, there were infectious diseases. This was one of the largest trauma centers in the world, but also one of the busiest, and there was never enough staff to go around.

But Susan was inside. Even at Bellevue, a chest wound like hers took priority. The ambulance had arrived in less than five minutes and had torn up First Avenue with its siren blaring, dodging around cars and pedestrians to shave seconds off our arrival time. Even so, I knew it might not have been enough. They said she’d lost a lot of blood — as though that wasn’t obvious. They told me she was in critical condition. When I asked if she’d make it, they’d shrugged. EMTs had no time for politeness.

“She’s got a chance,” one of them had said. I’d been clinging to that ever since.

The cops had followed us to the hospital, adding their siren to the mix. They’d waited while I got her admitted, waited some more while I filled out paperwork as best I could. Last name: Feuer. First name: Susan. Home address? Home phone? Social security number? I left it all blank. Medical insurance provider? All I could do was hand over my credit card and hope I wasn’t close to my limit.

They waited while I called Leo from a payphone and told him where I was and what had happened. They stood next to me and listened, but they waited.

Then they were done waiting. They steered me through the triage station to an empty administrative office just past the ER. Both were uniformed cops from the Seventh Precinct. One was about my height but twice my weight, with a round face and a thick moustache and a patch on his chest that said “Conroy.” The other’s patch said “Gianakouros” and belonged to a veteran with hair the color of old curtains and deep grooves creasing his face. He was the one who had me by the arm and he took the lead in questioning me.

“Your name?”

“John Blake.”

“And the victim’s name?”

“Susan Feuer. F-E-U-E-R.”

“What’s your relationship to the victim?”

“She’s a friend. And we’ve been working together recently.”

“What do you do, Mr. Blake?”

I took out my license and showed it to him. He handed it over his shoulder to Conroy, who jotted down the license number on a spiral-bound pad. “I work for Leo Hauser. He used to be at Midtown South. He has a small agency now — just the two of us, basically.”

“And Feuer works with you?”

“No. She’s just been helping me with one case I’m working on. Just as a favor.”

“Some favor,” Conroy said. He handed my license back.

“You want to tell us what happened?” Gianakouros said.

How to answer that? I wanted to, but this was not a story I could tell quickly. Where did it even start? When Susan began making calls for me, or before that when I first saw her dancing at the Sin Factory, or before that, when I opened the paper and saw Miranda’s face staring out at me, all innocence and accusation? Or ten years earlier, when I’d seen Miranda last, when I’d sent her off on a boomerang voyage from New York to New Mexico and back again, from possibility to disaster and from life to death? I’d have to explain an awful lot if I wanted them to understand what had happened.

And I wouldn’t mind explaining — but right now I couldn’t afford the time. Jocelyn was still in town, but for how long? She was packed and ready to go. She’d just needed to sew up some loose ends, like the troublemaker who was calling all the strip clubs she’d ever worked at and trying to track her down. I’d set Susan on Jocelyn’s trail, and somehow it had gotten back to her. Was it any wonder that Jocelyn had decided to eliminate Susan before leaving the city?

Now, Jocelyn probably just needed to pick up the money from wherever she’d stashed it and then she’d vanish forever. One of the country’s best agencies hadn’t been able to find her the last time she’d gone on the road, and back then she hadn’t had a half million dollars to help her hide.

“We’re looking for a missing woman named Jocelyn Mastaduno,” I said. “Her parents haven’t heard from her in six years and they want to know what happened to her. Susan was helping me make some calls to track her down.”

“What was she doing in the park?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“How did you know she was there?”

“Susan was staying with my mother. She told her she was going to the park, and my mother mentioned it to me.”

“So you went there.”

“I was worried,” I said. “I didn’t understand why she’d gone there, and the park can be dangerous at night.”

Conroy spoke up. “Any idea who might have done this?”

“None,” I said.

“What about this woman you’re looking for, Mastaduno?”

“It’s possible. I just don’t know.”

“How close are you to finding her?”

Pretty close, I thought — if I can get out of here. I fought to keep my voice calm. “I can’t say. We’re not the first agency to work on it. The last one took a year and never found her.”

“Maybe you’re closer than they were.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“If Miss Feuer could tell us who she was meeting in the park, we might have something,” Gianakouros said. “But she’s not going to be doing much talking any time soon. Not with multiple stab wounds in her chest.”

No, not soon. Maybe not ever.

“We’re going to canvass the area for witnesses tonight, people in the neighborhood, anyone who might have seen it happen. But we’re also going to need to talk to you some more.”

“And your mother,” Conroy said.

“That’s right, your mother, and Mastaduno’s parents, and anyone else you can think of who might know something about this. We’re going to need any information you have.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “But can we do it in the morning? I can’t think straight now.” They looked at each other. “I’m sorry, it’s just too much. I’m a wreck.” I held my hands up. They were trembling, and it wasn’t an act. “First thing in the morning, nine a.m., I’ll be there. I promise, I’ll help any way I can. I’m just not up to it now.”

“Eight a.m.,” Gianakouros said. “Wreck or no wreck. We need you.”

“Thank you,” I said.

Conroy’s voice softened. “You want us to ask the doctor if you can look in on her?” he said. “Maybe she’s out of surgery.”

I shook my head. “Five stab wounds to the chest, there’s only one way she’d be out of surgery this soon. So I hope to God she isn’t.”

Why hadn’t I told them? It would have been simple. I had Jocelyn’s address. They could have gone right now and arrested her, or if she wasn’t there, they could have staked the apartment out and waited for her to arrive. They could at least have taken the luggage cart in as evidence, gotten fingerprints and blood from it, tied Lenz’s murder to Miranda’s, gotten me off the hook in Queens, begun the process of tracking her down — something. But I hadn’t done it.

It would have been the right thing to do — I knew that. But the time was past for doing the right thing. It had passed when Jocelyn lured Susan down to the park and sank a blade five times into her chest. The person who did that, the person who murdered an innocent woman and left her body on a strip club roof, the person who shot Wayne Lenz in cold blood and left me to take the fall, a person who could do those things didn’t deserve to be arrested and prosecuted and defended and maybe sent to jail or maybe not, depending on how sympathetic a jury she found. What she deserved, the police and the courts weren’t the ones to deliver.

I waited till I was well away from the hospital and confident that neither Conroy nor Gianakouros was following me. I dialed the number and waited while it rang. When the hoarse voice said “Yes?” I hesitated for a second. There would be no turning back.

“Yes?” he said again.

“I found her,” I said. “And I’ll give her to you, on one condition.”

“What’s that, Mr. Blake?” Murco said.

“I want her to suffer,” I said.

“You surprise me,” he said.

I kept walking, retracing the ambulance’s path, heading back toward Avenue D. “She attacked a friend of mine,” I said. “This friend may not survive.”

“I see. And now my methods don’t seem so... inappropriate?” he said. “Never mind, you don’t have to answer that. Tell me, Mr. Blake, does she still have my money?”

“It’s not in her apartment, or if it is, she’s hidden it well. But I’m sure she knows where it is, and I’m sure you’ll be able to get it out of her.”

“You make it sound so simple,” he said softly. “Sometimes it can be like pulling teeth.”

Did he think he was being funny? I felt my stomach twist. I forced myself to remember Susan’s bloody body in my arms and Miranda lying on the roof at midnight, half her face blown away by a pair of hollow-point bullets.

I gave him the address. “How soon can you get here?”

“It takes me forty-five minutes to get into the city,” he said.

“How about your son?”

“He’ll meet me there.”

“Well, I’m not waiting. I’m not taking a chance that she gets away while you’re driving in.”

“It almost sounds like you want her worse than I do,” he said.

“You can get back what she took from you,” I said. “I can’t.”

*

I thought about stopping by the office on the way downtown, but it would take too long to cross to the West Side and anyway, what was the point? Maybe if we’d had another gun — but the only guns we owned were now in the possession, respectively, of Little Murco Khachadurian and the 109th Precinct in Queens.

The blocks went by, empty and dark. I felt the cold on my face, but inside my jacket I was sweating. What if Jocelyn was already gone by the time I got there? She’d presumably headed home while I was running to the park, and since then she’d had almost two hours to grab her things and take off. Of course, if taking off had been her plan, she could have done it as soon as she took the luggage cart with the money out of Lenz’s apartment. She hadn’t, and there had to be a reason, though I couldn’t imagine what it was.

It wasn’t the only point that bothered me. There was the luggage cart itself, the one that first turned up in Lenz’s hands in the hallway outside Miranda’s apartment on the afternoon of the murder. It made sense as long as you assumed that Miranda had the money in her apartment and that Lenz had needed a way to get it out — but if Jocelyn and Lenz had the money all along, what the hell did he need to take a luggage cart to Miranda’s apartment for? The only thing Lenz had needed to do in her apartment was plant the torn paper band that would tie her to the burglary. You didn’t need a piece of luggage to carry that.

And what about that paper band? Could the police really have missed it lying behind the dresser? Sure, it was possible, cops missed things, especially if they didn’t look very hard — but Jocelyn and Lenz couldn’t have
counted
on their missing it. And the last thing they would have wanted was to run the risk of getting the police more interested in what was otherwise a relatively routine homicide. Yet that’s exactly the effect that finding a band from a stack of hundred dollar bills would have had. Murco was the one who was supposed to find the band and make the connection, not the police — which meant that the right time for Lenz to plant it would have been after the murder, after the cops had come and gone, not before. But in that case, what was Lenz doing in Miranda’s apartment before the murder?

I’d gone over these questions in my head countless times over the past few days, and the answers just didn’t get any clearer.

I crossed Fourteenth Street and passed an empty cab stopped at a red light. Did I have enough cash? I dug into my pocket, decided I did, and got in. This would give me a chance to catch my breath, at least, and get me past any encounters I might otherwise have in Alphabet City. Barring traffic, it would also get me there faster. “Avenue D and Fifth,” I said. We roared off as the light changed.

I tried not to think about what Murco would do when he got here. Jocelyn needed to be stopped, and more than that she needed to be punished, and Murco would see to both — but I didn’t want to think about it too closely.