real tension behind it – you could see the stress in the eight pairs of eyes suddenly aware of me, the eight women who’d lost one of their own just fortyeight hours ago.
“Get the fuck out of here or we’ll call the cops,” the bartender said. “I’m not joking.”
“I’m a private investigator.” I took out my wallet and this time I did fish out my P.I. license. Maybe they couldn’t read it from where they were sitting, but they could see that I was holding up a laminated card with the state seal on it. That was something, I suppose.
“I’m investigating the death of Miranda Sugarman. I would appreciate your help.”
“You were in the club tonight.” This was from Rachel, who was at the table closer to me. She held my eye as she said it.
“That’s right.”
“You’re the guy Lenz threw out.”
“Yes.”
“You said you were her boyfriend,” the bartender said. “Was that just a line?”
“No, that was the truth. I knew her ten years ago. We went to high school together.”
There was silence around the tables. They’d stopped picking at their food.
“Did any of you know her?” I asked.
Jasmine spoke up. “We worked the C shift together last week. First time I met her.”
“Did she say anything to you that seemed strange? Anything that might explain what happened?” Jasmine shook her head. “Anyone else?”
“She didn’t talk much,” one of them said, and a few of the others nodded. “Just came in, did her sets, got dressed, and left.”
“Someone told me she ate with you here sometimes.”
“Once, maybe. I don’t remember her saying two words to anyone.”
“Did she have any regular customers? Were there people who came just to see her?”
No one seemed to remember any.
I looked from face to face and saw the same things in each of them. Fear, distrust, but also a sort of cautious wishfulness, as though they hoped I was for real and not just some scam artist. Rachel especially – she watched me more intently than the others and seemed to be mulling something over. But whatever it was, she didn’t come out with it.
I took out a handful of business cards with my name and phone number on them, handed them to Rachel who dealt them out around the table. “My name is John Blake,” I said, “and you’ve got my cell phone number there. You remember anything, anything at all, please call me. If something happens – anything at all – call me. Okay?” A few of them nodded.
“Mr. Blake,” one of them said as I turned to leave, and I turned back. “Do you think it’s going to happen again? I mean, do you think it’s someone going after dancers? Or was it just her?”
I thought about the two bullets to the back of the head. A classic execution, Leo had called it. Maybe a little bloodier than average – a pair of hollow-points fired at point-blank range would tear half your face off – but still, it wasn’t the sort of thing you’d expect from a serial killer or someone getting a sexual thrill from the act.
God knows these women wanted and deserved some reassurance, and standing there I wanted to give them some. But what if I did, and they let down their guard, and then it turned out I was wrong?
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
I walked back past the club, which was dark and locked up tight behind a metal gate. The Sin Factory filled the ground floor of a three-story brownstone, and I assumed the whole building was theirs – I couldn’t imagine unrelated tenants living above a club like this, if only because of the noise. Although in New York, you never knew.
There was a narrow passage at the side of the building, wide enough for a stack of overstuffed Hefty bags filled with the night’s refuse. The garbage trucks would be here in a few hours, and in the meantime the rats could enjoy their own buffet.
I edged past the garbage and came out in a little rear courtyard, lit by the feeble glow of a sixty-watt bulb over the door. There was graffiti all over the rear wall and dark stains along the base. The door had a plate for a Medeco deadbolt in addition to the standard Rabson cylinder above the knob, and though I was tempted to try to pick them and get inside, I’d learned enough over the past six years not to bother. In the movies you always see people opening locks like it’s nothing, but the truth is it’s easier to take a door off its hinges than it is to pick a Medeco.
Besides, there were other ways in, if in was where I wanted to be. There was a fire escape running up the rear wall. There were only slightly taller buildings on either side, and the odds were they didn’t both have Medeco locks. And if they did, there were more short buildings on either side of them – it was probably how the killer had gotten onto the roof and then gotten away afterwards.
But what would I see if I went there now? I could go to the roof and see where Miranda had died, maybe get a feeling for what it had been like there that night, but if I was thinking of searching for clues, I could forget it. The NYPD would have picked it clean. They’d certainly have done a better job than I could do at two in the morning with no light.
I went out the way I’d come in, my back to the wall, trying not to inhale the sour smell of the trash. On the street, traffic was light and none of the cars that passed me were empty cabs, so I walked to the train station and rode the 1 downtown. When I came up out of the subway, my phone beeped in its plastic holder on my hip. The screen showed a little picture of an envelope with a letter “V” next to it. I found an empty doorway, thumbed in*86 and my password.
“Mr. Blake? This is Rachel Firestone. We met earlier tonight? I was hoping to talk to you. I guess you’re not there.” I waited, but that seemed to be the end of the voicemail. Either Verizon had cut her off or she’d run out of things to say. But then I heard her voice again. “Listen, there’s no good number where you can reach me. Why don’t you come to the Derby tomorrow at six – I don’t go on until eight, and we can talk. Okay? Okay. See you then.”
I played the message again when I got upstairs and then once more after getting undressed, but it didn’t say any more to me either time. There was nothing I could do about it but wait.
I didn’t want to – I wanted to get up, get on the computer, and chase down a dozen leads. I wanted to bang on some doors until someone told me why Miranda Sugarman was lying in the morgue. But it was almost three in the morning now, I was exhausted, and Miranda wasn’t going anywhere. I forced myself to lie down, close my eyes, and try to get some sleep.
Chapter 6
In the morning, I made some toast and a cup of coffee and started working the phone. The only thing that slowed me down was having to wait till noon to reach offices on the West Coast.
Neither of the Mastadunos I’d found was Jocelyn – one was Jessica, the other Jerome – and neither of them knew a Jocelyn. I left a message with the Rianon alumni office, asking for their help. I logged on to the Internet again and copied down the names of the girls who’d been in all the other rooms on the eleventh floor of Heward Hall, and while I was at it the ones on the tenth and the twelfth. Some were named Smith and Jones or the equivalent, but others had more obscure names and I started hunting them down through public directories. I found a Lainie Burroughs in Midland, Wisconsin, and it was the right Lainie Burroughs, but she hadn’t known either Miranda or Jocelyn. I found Maya Eskin. I found Jody Sinkiewicz. Jody remembered Jocelyn and both of them remembered Miranda, but neither had any idea what had become of them.
“They were really close,” Jody said, “I remember that, I’d always see them in the hall together. I mean, I didn’t see them all that often, but if I saw one of them, I saw them both. And then for a long time I didn’t see either of them and I asked someone, and she said they’d dropped out.”
“Who told you that?”
“God, who was it. Was it Katherine? Probably Katherine, she knew them better than I did.”
“What’s Katherine’s last name?”
