wine.”
“And how much is wine?”
“Ten dollars a glass.”
I took a handful of bills out of my pocket, picked out a twenty and a five and put the rest back. “Must be pretty good wine.”
She tapped a few spots on the screen of her cash register and then the tray shot out and my twenty disappeared inside. The five went in the pocket of her jacket.
“You can take the glass with you. Just wave when you want another.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll stay here.”
“Suit yourself.” She resumed her work with the glasses, drying them and tucking them away in the overhead rack.
From the far end of the room came the sound of light applause from one of the patrons. The song had ended, and in the interval before the next one began the girl onstage padded around softly, swinging her hips awkwardly in time to the silence. She was neither Mountains nor Firestone, but like the headliners she was topless and looked surgically enhanced. She also looked exhausted, but apparently there wasn’t another girl to relieve her, so she kept on dancing, or anyway making enough of an effort to keep the air moving onstage.
The man seated to her left looked like a Wall Streeter on his lunch break, except that it was three in the afternoon and we were on west Twenty-fourth Street. He had an empty beer glass in front of him and a small pile of dollar bills soaking in a spill next to it. His tie was flung back over his shoulder and he kept taking his glasses off to wipe them with a paper napkin.
On the other side of the stage was the guy who had clapped at the end of the last song, and now he clapped again as the next song began. But between the beginning and end of each song, he showed his appreciation in a different way: as I watched, his hand stole into his pants through his open zipper.
I caught the bartender’s attention. “Doesn’t bother you that our friend there is jerking off?”
“Why? Does it bother you?”
“It’s not my club.”
“It’s not mine either,” she said.
“Yeah, but you’re going to have to wash his glass.”
“You want to call him on it, be my guest,” she said. “Far as I’m concerned, as long as he keeps it in his pants, it’s between him and whoever does his laundry.”
I held my hands up. “Fair enough.”
She topped off my drink, even though I had only taken a sip. “It’s disgusting,” she said softly, leaning forward to say it into my ear. “But, you know, this isn’t exactly Scores here.”
That was putting it mildly. There was top drawer and there was second rate in New York the same as anywhere else, but this wasn’t even second rate, it was tenth rate. Scores was a “gentleman’s club” where, between dances, you could get rare prime rib and watch hockey games on flat-screen TVs. A notch or two down, strip clubs like Flashdancers and Private Eyes dispensed with the steak but still had large dance floors and pretty girls in nice costumes, and gave the impression that they cared about the impression they gave. The Sin Factory was another animal altogether. It hurt to picture Miranda working here.
“Let me ask you something.”
“I don’t date customers.”
“That’s not it. I think you knew a friend of mine. She used to work here as a dancer.”
“Yeah? Who’s that?”
I drank some of my club soda. “Miranda Sugarman.”
I watched as the muscles under the skin of her face tightened. “What are you, a cop or a reporter?”
“Neither,” I said. “Just a friend of Miranda’s.”
She was trying to make up her mind whether to talk to me or throw me out of the place.
“We went to high school together,” I said. “Ten years ago. She was my girlfriend.”
The bartender shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t know her.”
“The paper said she was dancing here.”
“A lot of girls dance here.” She shot a glance at the dancer on the stage. “That one up there now, she’s been here at least as long as your girlfriend was. But I don’t know her. All I know is she calls herself ‘Star,’ and every day she complains about how cold it is in the dressing room.”
“Is it cold?”
“Like fucking Alaska.”
I stirred the ice in my glass. “What did Miranda call herself when she worked here?”
“Randy,” she said. “I didn’t even know her real name was Miranda. If you’d have asked me, I’d have guessed it was anything but Miranda, because why pick a stripper name that’s short for your real name? I didn’t know her any better than I know you.”
“You never spoke to her?”
“Sure – hello, how are you, how was your Thanks giving. Sometimes she’d be at the Derby when some of us got a bite after closing. But that was it.”
“How long had she been working here?”
“I don’t know, a few months? Look, I’m not going to be able to help you, I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay,” I said. I got up to leave. “The thing is, the last time I saw her, she was heading off to college to become a doctor. I’m just trying to understand how she got from there to here.”
“A doctor,” the bartender said. “Jesus. All I ever gave up was being a model.”
“Yeah. Well.” I drank the rest of my soda. “Thanks for the wine.”
The sunlight blinded me when I walked outside – I’d almost forgotten it was still day. This time of year, it wouldn’t be for much longer, and once the night came, the crowds would come with it. Business would normally be light the day after New Year’s, but tonight I imagined the Sin Factory would get an extra boost from rubberneckers drawn by the story in the paper. The murder had taken place on the roof, and unless I’d missed something there was no way for patrons to get up there, but that didn’t mean people wouldn’t show up and try. Maybe Mandy Mountains would make a little extra on her last night in town, and if her shift hadn’t ended yet, maybe that bartender would as well. But none of it would do Miranda any good.
Was that what I was trying to accomplish? I thought about this as I made my way to the subway station at Twenty-third Street. If it was, I was in for a disappointment, because nothing would do Miranda any good any more.
The 1 train carried me up to Eighty-sixth Street and from there I walked back two blocks. The red brick apartment building Miranda had lived in when we were in high school was still there, though the synagogue next to it was now a youth center with construction paper Christmas trees taped to the inside of the windows. If anyone could explain what had happened to Miranda, I figured it would be her mother – and even if she couldn’t, she deserved a visit.
But when I asked in the lobby to be buzzed up, the doorman didn’t know who I was talking about. Mrs. Sugarman? There was no Mrs. Sugarman in this building. 8-C? That was the Bakers. Look – And sure enough, on the intercom panel, a label said “Baker” where it had once said “Sugarman.”
“You used to have a tenant named Sugarman,” I said. “Is there anyone still on staff here who was working here ten years ago?”
He thought about it. “The super, maybe. You want to talk to him?”
I told him I did.
The super was a short man with a potbelly the size of a soccer ball and untrimmed grey hair around his ears. When I’d seen him last he’d had more hair, but it had already been grey. He’d just been a porter then, but seniority had apparently pushed him up the ladder. He jabbed a finger at me when he saw me and his face lit up. “Look at you! All grown up! How are you?”
I shook his hand and he dragged me into a hug. “I heard about the girl. It’s terrible. Terrible. The only good thing is her mother didn’t live to see it.”
“What happened?”
He stepped back. “You don’t know? New Year’s Eve, somebody shot her.”
“To her mother,” I said. “What happened to Mrs. Sugarman?”
