It fit. If she was trying to recruit a pair of strongarm types to carry out a job, this was the sort of place to do it. It sounded like she’d had her pick of the Bronx’s tough male population.
“What shift did she work?”
“It varied. Some weeks, she’d be working now, ten to three. Some weeks she’d do the graveyard shift, two a.m. to seven. Never saw her work prime time. She wasn’t a prime time kind of girl.”
That fit, too: she couldn’t be in two places at once, and the hours he was calling prime time were probably the ones she spent at the Sin Factory.
I took out a photocopy of the picture that had run in the Daily News, unfolded it, and handed it to him. “Just for the record, is this her?”
He only looked at it for a second. “Yeah. I mean, she looked different when she was dancing here, but yeah, could be her.”
“Could be?”
“Man, you show me a xerox of a photo from a newspaper from when she was in, what’s that, high school? College? Best I can say is could be. You show me a black girl, I’d say couldn’t be.”
“So all you’re really saying is that this girl and the one you knew as Jessie were both white?”
“No, man. That girl looks right. I don’t know.” He looked at the picture again, handed it back. “It’s just that she’d grown up a lot since that picture was taken.”
We all have, I said. But I said it to myself.
I left a card with him to give to Danny Matin when Matin got in. Martin was the owner; I didn’t expect him to be able to tell me anything more than he’d told Catch, assuming he ever called, but you never find out if you don’t ask. I hadn’t gotten much out of the bartender, but I didn’t consider it a wasted trip. I’d wanted to see the place Miranda had danced, the place where she’d picked up the men who’d robbed Murco. When you put together a puzzle, not every piece is equally important – some just show a bit of the sky, not George Washington’s head. But you don’t have a complete picture until every piece is in place.
I rode the subway back to Manhattan. It gave me plenty of time to think. When I’d called Murco to get Matin’s name, I’d also asked him for Miranda’s address, and that’s where I was headed now. What would I find there? Probably nothing, because that’s pretty much what Catch had found when he’d searched the place. But again, I wanted the whole picture, and for that I needed to see the place where she’d lived, the place where Murco’s money had gone missing.
“You’re wasting your time,” Murco had said. “We’ve already been over the place. There’s nothing to see.”
“With all due respect, you’re not a detective, and neither is your son.”
“The police have been over it, too.”
“You’re going to tell me the police never miss anything?”
This got a laugh out of him, or something like a laugh. It was a nasty sound. “You can look if you want, Mr. Blake. But the clock’s ticking, and I’m not a patient man.”
“Neither am I,” I said.
I wondered what he would do if I did find something and what I found suggested that the person who had tipped Miranda off about the buy was someone close to him. A betrayal by one of the men he bought drugs from might not come as a surprise, but what if it was his own son or the club manager he’d worked with for years?
“How sure are you that Miranda got half the money?”
“Very.”
“They couldn’t have been lying to you, trying to hold something back?”
“Oh, they tried. That didn’t last long.”
“Well, if she had the money in her apartment at one point and it’s not there now, that means someone took it. I don’t think it was the police – they’d be working harder on this case than they are if they’d found half a million dollars in cash in a murder victim’s apartment. That means the money was probably taken out of the apartment by whoever killed her. And if that’s the case, someone in the building might have seen something, or heard something-”
“You’re just fishing.”
“Of course I’m fishing – what do you think detective work is?”
“All I have to say, Mr. Blake, is that you’d better catch something. Soon.”
Before heading up to the Bronx, I’d also called Leo and brought him up to speed on where things stood. I figured maybe he’d be able to see some connection I’d missed or suggest a path I hadn’t thought of pursuing. But all he’d said was the same thing Susan had, which was that I should be careful.
“You’ve already managed to get two dangerous men angry at you. Wayne and Roy. You seem to be in good for the time being with the Khachadurians, but who knows how long that will last. Then there’s this girl you’ve planted in your mother’s apartment – she seems okay, but the truth is you don’t know whether you can count on her.”
“I’m not worried about that,” I said. “But Murco’s another story. On one hand, what’s he going to do to me if I don’t turn up the killer? On the other hand, what if I do and it turns out to be someone close to him, which it pretty much has to be?”
“Like we used to say in the army, one way you’re screwed, the other you’re fucked. That’s why I’m telling you to be careful.”
“Don’t you have any other advice?” I’d asked. “You always have advice.”
“I gave you my advice five days ago. I told you to stay out of it. You didn’t listen. Now you’re just going to have to see it through to the end.”
The train squealed to a stop, and a voice over the loudspeaker said, “Eighth Avenue, last stop. Transfer for the A, C, and E lines… “
I pushed out of the car, joined the midday crowd elbowing its way up to the street. I kept one hand firmly on the flap of my jacket pocket as I climbed the crowded stairs.
“Can I at least come by,” I’d asked Leo, “and pick up the other gun?”
“Yeah,” he’d said, “maybe you’d better.”
Chapter 18
I checked the address against the slip of paper I’d written it down on. It was a converted loft building on the far West Side, one of the neighborhoods in Manhattan that still looks the way it did fifty years ago. On the outside, at least – inside, the building had new elevators, a lobby sporting wire sculptures and recessed track lights, and no doubt rents that weren’t easy to pay even if your income was tax-free. I watched through the glass panel of the door as a man in a heavy overcoat came out of the elevator. I stepped out of his way as he left the building, and he held the door for me. I thanked him and went inside.
The slip of paper said 4-J, so I rode the elevator to the fourth floor and followed the corridor past the gerrymandered chunks of what had once been warehouse space. Landlords in New York know a thing or two about making silk purses: throw up a few sheetrock walls and your derelict industrial building can rent for thousands to hungry young things who can’t afford to live in midtown but don’t want the indignity of moving to Brooklyn or Queens. 4-J was the last apartment on the floor, and having been in a few loft buildings before, I knew it was probably the smallest, made up of whatever space had been left over after the rest of the floor was laid out. I had no key, but Catch Khachadurian hadn’t had one either. I slid an expired MasterCard between the door and the jamb and drove it up sharply against the tongue of the latch. If the deadbolt had been on, it wouldn’t have done me any good, but why would anyone have locked the deadbolt on a dead woman’s apartment? In any event, no one had. The door popped open.
The place was small all right, though I’d seen smaller. One wall had a bank of old-fashioned mullioned windows set into naked brick and a rack radiator clanking out heat. A frameless futon lay against the neighboring wall, a few copies of Cosmo and Us piled neatly at the foot. The floor was bare but clean. The walls were empty. Either the apartment’s previous visitors had stripped the place or Miranda had lived a pretty spartan life in it. She probably hadn’t spent a lot of time at home, I figured. There certainly wasn’t much temptation to, and as I looked
