Did she? When I’d known her, she’d been pretty shy. But people change. I shrugged.
“Murco’s certainly got a temper, and you wouldn’t want to get on his bad side.”
I rubbed my side. “Tell me about it,” I said.
“That? That’s nothing. You heard about the burglary, right?”
“No.”
“You should have been here last week.”
“What happened last week?”
“Got to go back to the beginning. Maybe six weeks ago, these two guys break into Murco’s house. The man lives in Scarsdale. A house that’s like two mansions side by side, and he lives out there by himself – no staff, nothing, not since the son moved out and his wife died. So, these two punks are going through the neighborhood, and they come to this enormous place, and they figure, this guy’s got to have some good stuff. So they break in through the garage, go room to room, filling up their bags. And God knows he’s got plenty to take any night of the week – but just as it happens, this particular night is the night before Murco is going to be making a buy, so he has a suitcase full of cash waiting to be handed over to the gentlemen from Colombia. The punks go into his bedroom, and there he is, counting the money. They must’ve thought they’d died and gone to heaven.
“They pull guns on him, tie him up, smack him around some, take the money, and they leave. A million dollars in cash, plus whatever else they picked up along the way. It’s a better score than they could’ve imagined. There’s just one problem.”
“What’s that?”
“They didn’t kill him.” He finished the rest of his drink, set the glass down carefully. “I could have told them. You’re going to pull something like that, you have to go all the way. You can’t leave him there tied up, blood running down his face, for his son to find when the old man doesn’t call for two days. I don’t care if you wore masks, disguised your voices, I don’t care if you left no fingerprints, this man’s not the fucking police force, he’ll find you and then you’re going to wish you’d never been born. And that’s what happened.”
I felt my skin start to crawl.
“Last week, it must have been the day after Christmas, the son came in here. Little Murco, though you just try to call him that to his face. He calls himself ‘Catch.’z”
I remembered Roy’s question the first time I met him. Have you seen the big guy here tonight? I’d asked, and he’d said, Catch?
“Anyway, Catch comes in, and he sits down over there, by the phone, and he’s carrying a dice cup, rattling it like a guy on the street with a cup of change. We’d all heard about what had happened, and you could tell he wanted someone to ask him about it, but no one says a word to him. So he goes to the bar and says to Zen, but loud so everyone can hear, ‘You know those guys that broke into my father’s place? You won’t be seeing them any more.’ And he spills out the dice cup all over the bar, and what it was full of is teeth. He spills them out, spreads them around a little with one finger, then he walks out.”
“Lovely,” I said.
“Now, I can’t tell you for sure whose teeth those were, and neither can anyone else, since Zen did the right thing and got rid of them. But I’d bet dollars to doughnuts Big Murco got his million back, and those two poor bastards are in a landfill somewhere, gumming their food in the next life.”
“Murco do this sort of thing a lot?”
“He doesn’t have to. You do it once, people tend to leave you alone after that.”
“The cops think he’s small potatoes,” I said.
“He is. He’s just a vicious small potato.”
“And Miranda? What are people saying about her murder?”
“People figure Murco probably did it, but then again, it didn’t really have a lot of style to it, just-” He made a gun of his forefinger and thumb, fired it at me twice.
“No teeth in a dice cup, you mean.”
“The man does like to send a message.”
I nodded. “And why are you telling me all this?”
“You’re a friend of Zen’s,” he said, “and Murco’s no friend of mine.”
On my way out, Zen called me over. “Was he able to help you?”
“You didn’t tell me about the teeth,” I said.
“I didn’t want to scare you.”
“Yes you did, you just wanted someone else to do the dirty work for you.”
“If I’d said you should lay off, would you have listened to me?”
“No,” I said.
“But you’re going to, right?” She looked in my eyes, saw something there she didn’t like.
I patted her on the arm. “Give my molars to Leo,” I said. “You can hang the bicuspids over the bar.”
Chapter 10
Bill Battles called me back in the morning and agreed to meet me at his office. He said he’d have to verify with Mastaduno that it was okay to share information with me, and I told him to be my guest. By the time I arrived, he apparently had, since he greeted me by dropping five pounds of files in my lap. Then he pulled open the blinds to let some light in and offered me a cup of coffee.
It reminded me of what I was missing out on working for Leo. Serner’s offices filled the top three floors of an office building on Madison and Fifty-ninth, and Bill’s office filled one corner of the middle floor. He wasn’t quite their top producer, I guess, or maybe it was just that he wasn’t a corporate officer – one way or another he’d been denied the top floor – but even one of Serner’s second-tier corner offices was light years away from the ground-floor suite Leo and I shared in Chelsea. Bill’s windows looked out over the avenue, and we were high enough up that you could look down on the traffic and not hear a sound. If you stood at the right angle, you could see the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the distance. In our office, if you stood at the right angle near the window, you could see into the kitchen of an Indian restaurant.
I accepted the coffee, burned my tongue on it, and set it aside. I opened the first file. There was a picture clipped to the inside of the folder showing a pair of college- age girls in Rianon sweatshirts and blue jeans, one with her hip cocked and arms crossed, the other with her arm around the first girl’s waist and her head resting on the first girl’s shoulder. I looked hard at the pair. The one on the left was the subject of the five pounds of reports that followed. The one on the right was Miranda.
Miranda hadn’t changed much by the time this picture was taken. She looked a little thinner, maybe, but the yearbook photo had only been a headshot, and my tenyear- old memories were, as Leo had pointed out, not entirely reliable. She’d given up glasses somewhere along the way, presumably for contacts.
Jocelyn Mastaduno was a tiny bit taller than Miranda, a little heavier. She had shorter hair and, if you could go by their poses in this one photo, a cockier attitude. They looked like sisters. It wasn’t even a matter of resemblance as much as it was something about the way they were standing, the way Miranda held onto Jocelyn’s waist, the look of contentment on her face as she rested on Jocelyn’s shoulder. It had the intimacy of a family photo.
“One of the other girls in her class took that,” Bill said. “Katherine Chin, I think.”
“I talked to her. She’s married, living in Chicago now. Katherine Lewis.”
“Good to know. I’ll get her number from you if we need to do a follow-up.”
I turned the pages, not reading anything in detail but getting a feel for the work Serner had done, who they had talked to. Professors, students, area residents. The one travel agent in town, who said she hadn’t made any arrangements at either girl’s request. Local police. The school newspaper and the local newspaper. Then branching further out: people in neighboring towns, people who’d known the girls before college. It was very thorough. In a way, I was surprised they hadn’t called me. But the investigation had mainly focused on Jocelyn, as was appropriate given that her father was paying the bills.
Jocelyn also seemed to have been the instigator behind whatever the two of them did. Students who knew them had told Serner that Miranda had dropped out of Intro to Psych a week after Jocelyn had, that she had signed
