him, but I didn’t tell him nada. That right?”
“You always do it right,” I said, and she gave a dirty sexy laugh into the phone and we agreed to go for Dominican food later that week in uptown Manhattan where Gloria lived with her kid and her mother.
Before I put my phone away, I looked at the dead woman in the picture Gloria had sent me. She was on a metal table in the morgue. Marks on her face where the duct tape had been peeled away. She was very young. She was pretty.
The bar was solid with human flesh now, and I leaned on the bar itself, a slick blue glass surface, ordered a beer, showed the bartender my badge and asked if the manager was around.
A squat guy, square shoulders, bad skin, came alongside me and I could smell his heavy cologne. Said he was the manager, name was Tito. Tito Dravic, he added, then gestured to the bartender with some kind of authority. My beer arrived pronto, a fat short bottle of Duvel, great Belgian stuff with a big head.
“Anything wrong?” Tito Dravic was nervous. Plenty of people under twenty-one were drinking, and there were kids trading E, too.
I pushed the silver necklace with the blue bead along the slick glass surface of the bar. Wary but not hostile, Tito had an accent I couldn’t figure. He picked up the silver chain. “Yeah, we gave these away as favors, sure.”
“When?”
“You want exactly when?”
“Yeah.”
I held back on the picture Gloria had sent to my phone. It felt obscene, as if the dead girl was trapped in it the way she had been trapped inside the duct-tape shroud.
If I was getting squeamish, I was getting too old for the job. Death needed respecting, but if you were on the job, you did whatever it took. Otherwise, you got out.
What I wanted right now was out of here. The music, the heat, the crowd were driving me a little nuts, maybe because I was sober. You can’t do clubs sober. You need the high from booze or pills. I was thinking of beating it, but I followed Dravic into a little office behind the bar, where the walls were covered with framed clippings.
One of the clippings caught my eye, a picture of three girls in a local newspaper, including one with short blonde hair, big smile, long legs, tiny skirt. Jesus, I thought. The girl in the picture on the wall was the same girl in the picture in my phone. The dead girl from the playground.
I pointed to the picture. “You know this girl?”
“Sure, why?”
“What’s her name?”
“Masha,” Dravic said.
I showed him the photograph in my phone.
Instinctively he put his hand over his mouth as if to keep from crying out. “How?”
“You knew her well?”
“I knew her. How did it happen?”
“You have a name besides Masha?”
“He real name was Maria, everybody called her Masha.” He sat down on the edge of the desk, color draining from his face, the skin suddenly gray, drab.
“Masha what?” I said.
“Panchuk. Her husband’s name, I think. I never knew her own.”
“There was a husband?”
“Yeah, for a while. I don’t think she liked him much. I’m not even sure if he was still around the last few months.”
“What else did you know about her?”
“I thought you wanted to know about the blue charm. They’re connected, the charm, Masha?”
“Go on.”
“We give out favors when business is slow, during the week, usually. The girls like these things, evil eyes, they call them.”
“Okay, so tell me some more about Masha.”
“Tall. Blonde. Pretty. Short hair. Crew cut almost. You want the picture?” He reached up to the wall and took the framed clipping down.
“You have one of her alone?”
From a folder on the desk, he got a picture, a color snap, a bad photograph but it was her, and she was tall and skinny, long-legged, wearing a skirt slit to her thighs, big earrings, smiling and posing. She looked very young.
“Can I keep it?”
“Sure.”
“So you knew her pretty well, but you didn’t fucking know she was dead, even though the story’s been on TV already?” I kept my tone even, but I was feeling pissed off with this guy.
“I was upstate at my mother’s in Kingston for a couple days, I did three shifts straight here and then I went up to her place to sleep.”
“Your mother doesn’t have a TV?”
“It was broken,” he said. “Yeah, it’s true. I only got here an hour ago, so I didn’t know anything.”
“Nobody here mentioned it?”
“You’re telling me you people already made her identity public?” asked Dravic. “So how come you asked me for her name? If I knew earlier, I would have called somebody. How did it happen?” His eyes welled up.
I told him.
“My God,” he said, then grabbed his phone, made a call, talked fast, hung up.
“The guy that was on duty before, he said another cop was nosing around earlier.”
“Listen, please, man, I’m sorry I came on so heavy.” I said. “Just please tell me whatever you can.” I had almost lost him by sounding aggressive, and now I changed my tone. You get a lot more that way, and now Dravic offered me the chair, and switched on a fan. It was a tight fit, me, him, the little office piled with crates of booze.
“Masha was here a lot,” he said. “A few weeks ago, she starts pestering me for a job, says she has some fucking bartending certificate, I tell her, it’s not for a kid serving hundreds of crazy people at midnight when they’re already soused and high, you have to scrape teenagers off the floor when they OD on Midori shots and E.”
“She stopped bugging you?”
“I told her I’d give her a tryout. I tried her out, a couple of weeks ago, Tuesday night, easy crowd. She wasn’t bad, but I didn’t like it, I wasn’t sure she was even twenty-one, I wasn’t sure she was eighteen, tell you the truth, she dressed up older and wore a lot of make-up and she had a real grown-up body, but I thought she was a kid, something about her, so I told her, you have to get some real ID if I’m gonna keep you. She was using fake stuff, driver’s license, social security card, but crap, the kind you can buy for sixty bucks. She left. I didn’t hear back.”
“Any rough stuff in the club?”
“We get mostly Russians, but the kind with money, they come to party, show off their moves. No fights. Some tension once in a while, especially when there’s a Ukrainian bunch.”
“Masha got involved?”
“She could work both crowds, she was very good-looking, and sweet. She was a great dancer. I probably have a video someplace from a dance contest.”
“Where?”
“The main office is on the next block over, there’s a house where they keep most of the stuff. I put it there. I might have something else for you.”
“What’s that?”
“She had this little resume, you know, not much but a couple places she had worked, a few bars, I put it in a file, that any use to you?”
“Plenty.”
“Can you stop back Sunday? It’s quiet Sunday. I could go over to the office and get you the stuff.”
“What’s wrong now?” I said.
