“Oh, that – that was terrible, too,” he said, shaking his head. “Poor woman, six, seven years ago. Heart attack. She was young – fifty-six, I think. But one minute to the next, just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “She was trying on clothing at a store and-” He snapped his fingers again. “They found her on the floor, nothing they could do.”
Six, seven years. I did the math. Miranda would just have been finishing her bachelor’s degree, or maybe not even. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for her, alone, half a continent away, her only living relative suddenly gone.
“Did Miranda come back when it happened?”
“I didn’t see her. All I know is when it’s the end of the month, there’s no rent check, and the building tells us clean it out. We threw out a lot of stuff – a sofa, table, shelves. Books, lots of books. Records. We put it all on the sidewalk, maybe someone sees something he likes, he takes it before the garbage truck comes. We paint, put in a new stove, new refrigerator. The Bakers moved in two, three weeks later.”
“And you never saw Miranda again?”
“Never. Never. Except now, in the paper.”
A dead end. But maybe it was also the beginning of an explanation, since whatever money Mrs. Sugarman had left Miranda, it couldn’t have been a lot. And when you think about young women who start stripping, there’s usually money at the root of it. Here was Miranda with maybe a year left on her undergraduate degree and a dream of going to medical school, and suddenly the single-income parent supporting her vanishes, taking the support with her. Maybe the school offered Miranda financial aid, or maybe it didn’t, but either way there were living expenses to be paid, and what does an attractive twenty-year-old girl taking classes all day have to make money with other than her body at night? Oh, there were other answers, of course. She could have taken night-hour temp work filing and faxing for a law firm, or she could have flipped burgers for McDonald’s. But where else could you pull down a few hundred dollars in a night, all cash? Stripping might have been the sensible, conservative alternative to turning tricks.
But this was all speculation. There had to be someone who knew what had really happened. Someone she’d known in college, someone she’d stayed in touch with from high school, someone she’d confided in when she’d returned to New York. Someone I could find if I looked hard enough.
The super reached up to put his arm across my shoulders. “So, what are you doing now? Still in school?”
“No,” I said, “not for years now. I’m working.”
“You work for a big company? Bank? Computers?”
I shook my head. “Small company. Investigations.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m a private investigator.” His expression said the penny hadn’t dropped yet. “A detective,” I said.
“No!” He looked like he was waiting for me to laugh, tell him I was pulling his leg. I didn’t. “Yes? Like in the movies?”
“Sure,” I said. “Just like in the movies.”
Chapter 3
On the way home, I stopped in at the office. Leo was there, going through his files. He had five piles of paper on his desk and two on the floor next to his chair. The trashcan was overflowing. My desk was neat by comparison: just one stack of case documents and half-finished paperwork and a second, smaller pile of correspondence, junk mail, and phone messages. I glanced at the messages; none was more recent than a week ago. It’s not just the strip club business that slows down around the holidays.
“You go there?” Leo said without looking up from his work.
“I went.”
“And?”
“It’s a dive. Little hole in the wall, barely enough room for a stage. It just doesn’t make sense.”
“What doesn’t make sense?”
“None of it makes sense, Leo. What’s she doing back in New York, working as a stripper? This is a girl who… she didn’t have to be a doctor. If that didn’t work out there were plenty of things she could have done.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Okay, say she falls on hard times, she starts stripping. Somehow she ends up back in New York. Say that’s all true. But why the hell does she end up at a place like the Sin Factory? She was too smart to work there.”
“When did they start screening dancers for their IQ?”
“I just mean she would have known better. Fine, you need money, you’re an attractive woman, maybe you start dancing a few nights a week – but you don’t do it at a place like that, where you’re lucky if someone tips you in fives instead of ones.”
“Maybe she couldn’t get work anywhere better.”
“No, I don’t buy that. She had the figure for it; she could have worked anywhere she wanted.”
“Says the man who hasn’t seen her in ten years.” Leo put down the report he was working on and dropped his glasses on top of it. “You’re going to have to face facts, Johnny. She could have been strung out, worn down, overweight, out of her mind, she could have been a lousy dancer, you don’t know.”
“She was a good dancer,” I said.
“Ten years ago. You don’t know what she was now.”
No, all I knew she was now was dead.
“I’m not asking you to help,” I said.
“I’m not offering.”
“I know it’s a waste of time.”
“Your time’s my time, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“So what’s the big case you want me to work on instead? This?” I held up the phone messages. “A guy pretends to have a limp so he can collect disability from his employer?”
“It pays the bills.”
“Barely. And anyway I already got the photos. What’s left is just clean-up.”
“What about Leventon?”
“Leventon can wait.”
“She’s a paying customer.”
“And she can wait. A woman’s dead, Leo, someone who meant a lot to me. You can’t tell me to sit back and do nothing.”
“What do you think you can do?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’ve got to do something. What’s the point of being a detective if when something like this happens you just let it?”
“Who said there was a point? It’s a living, like being a dentist or fixing shoes. That’s all it is.”
“You don’t believe that,” I said. “I certainly hope you don’t.”
“We’re private investigators. We’re not cops. We don’t solve murders. That’s paperback novel stuff.”
“At least let me look into it for a few days. I need to put it to rest, Leo. I can’t do that without knowing more.”
He smeared one hand across his jaw, a gesture of defeat. “You never could,” he said.
Leo Hauser was twice my age and looked older. Looking at him, you couldn’t picture him as the beat cop he’d been in the seventies, walking the streets of Times Square before Disney and Giuliani made it the oversized shopping mall it was today. But he’d shown me pictures, and by God, the uniform had fit him, he’d had good posture and a steely gaze, and if that wasn’t enough to make people take him seriously there’d been the couple of pounds of iron in a holster on his hip. Today – today he not only didn’t look like a cop, he didn’t look like the private detective he’d become. He looked like an accountant. His hair had gone white, where it hadn’t just gone. You looked at him in his twelve-dollar shirts, with his glasses propped on the top of his head, and you saw an uncle at a barbecue.
But Leo was the man who had taught me this business, and along the way I’d seen what he was capable of.
