Randy and Jessie. Our favorite twins.
Why hadn’t I seen it? Goddamn it, why? Miranda had danced under the name Randy; Jocelyn had been Jessie. If Miranda had kept using the same name after they had split up, why wouldn’t Jocelyn?
But if she had If she had, it meant Miranda hadn’t been the one dancing at the Wildman, the one Matin and the bartender thought they’d recognized from the photo in the paper. It had been Jocelyn. Jocelyn Mastaduno, missing for six years, had been in New York after all, living a stripper’s life just a two-hour commute away from her grieving parents and a few miles uptown from where her former partner was dancing.
How had Jocelyn hooked up with Wayne Lenz? God only knew. Maybe she’d danced at the Sin Factory once; maybe Miranda had introduced them. But they’d hooked up somehow, and between the two of them, Lenz and Jocelyn had come up with the plan. It had been Jocelyn who had recruited the burglars, Jocelyn who had walked away with half of Murco’s money – and then Jocelyn who had turned to murder to keep it when the burglars were caught and gave her up. Because all the burglars had given – all they could give – was a physical description, and all Jocelyn needed to supply to take the heat off her was a body that matched that description.
It was like one of those optical illusions where first the cubes seem to be pointing in one direction and then suddenly they’re pointing in the other, and you can’t imagine how they could ever have looked like they weren’t. Jocelyn had known that Murco would hunt for her, would eventually find her, and would surely kill her, unless she could get someone else to take the fall. Miranda had not been a perfect match, but she’d been close enough, especially after a pair of hollow point bullets turned her face into what Kirsch had so sensitively described as chopped meat.
Lenz must have broken into Miranda’s apartment not to take the money but to plant the torn paper band behind the dresser, so that Murco would know for sure that the dead woman and the woman who’d stolen from him were one and the same. That, and maybe, while he was at it, to remove from the apartment any photos Miranda had of herself that, shown to the folks at the Wildman, might cast some doubt on the point. That would explain why the newspapers hadn’t had any recent photos, at least.
Then at midnight on New Year’s Eve, it must have been Jocelyn who lured Miranda onto the roof of the Sin Factory, Jocelyn who got behind her and pulled the trigger, Jocelyn who escaped with the murder weapon while Lenz called for the ambulance they both knew could do no harm because it could do no good.
Did I know for sure this was how it had happened? No. Some of the details might be wrong. But the broad outline felt right. It had begun when the girls were teenagers: Jocelyn had lured Miranda to her bed, had talked her into leaving school, had turned her life inside out and remade her into what I had just seen on the video. She had led Miranda step by step down the path that ultimately led to her death, had used her and finally, when it had served her needs, brutally sacrificed her. It was Jocelyn, not Miranda, that had fallen in with thieves and killers. Miranda had just made the fatal mistake of falling in love with a woman who eventually turned into a thief and a killer herself.
Because whether it was Jocelyn or Lenz who had pulled the trigger on the rooftop – and maybe I’d never know – it had to have been Jocelyn who had pulled the trigger in Lenz’s apartment. She’d smashed me in the head with Lenz’s statue and when he’d gotten out of the chair and headed for the bedroom, she’d picked up my gun and shot him twice, then coolly wheeled a luggage cart filled with a half million dollars past his body and mine, leaving me to take the rap.
Why not kill me, too? Because this way maybe I’d burn in her place for Lenz’s murder – and even if I didn’t, even if I had the chance to go to Murco as I’d threatened, what could I tell him that would hurt her? As far as Jocelyn knew, I didn’t even know she existed. If I told the same story to Murco that I’d told Lenz about Lenz having conspired with Miranda, it did nothing but make Jocelyn’s escape cleaner.
Whereas if she’d left Lenz alive and I’d gone to Murco, Murco would have picked him up and he’d have cracked like an egg. He’d almost cracked at my hands, and I hadn’t even touched him. And if Lenz gave her up, she’d have been on the run again, only this time with Murco knowing who she was.
It made sense, damn it. All you had to do was look at the world through the eyes of a calculating, soulless bitch who used people and threw them away. I thought about all the interviews Serner had done with the people who had known Jocelyn back in college. They didn’t give any hint of this side of her personality. There was no sign that people back then knew what sort of person she really was. But maybe that was the point: no one had known her, or Miranda either, for that matter. And who knows, maybe back then Jocelyn hadn’t been so bad – the years on the road, the years spent going from one strip club to the next, must have brought out the worst in her, made her harder and more ruthless, until maybe even Miranda couldn’t take it any more and broke up with her. Even though breaking up meant giving up a successful act and starting over, dancing solo at a tenth-rate club like the Sin Factory – maybe it had been worth it for Miranda to get away. But then when Jocelyn had needed Miranda for one last purpose, she had shown up at Miranda’s door, flowers in hand, and had talked her into a reconciliation. The reconciliation had been short-lived, and so had Miranda.
So where was Jocelyn now? Gone, along with the money.
But she could be found.
I got up from the couch. Leo was next to me, holding out a bottle and a glass, but I didn’t want soothing and I didn’t want anything that would calm me down. I wanted blood.
“Damn it, Leo, I know what happened.”
“What, just from watching that tape?”
I shrugged my jacket on. “I’ve got to go.”
“Where?”
I yanked open the office door. “We need to find Jocelyn,” I said. I raced out into the street. A cab with its light on was passing and I stepped out in front of it to flag it down. I was in and had the door shut before the car could come to a stop.
“You got to be careful,” the driver said. “It is very dangerous to run in front of a taxi.”
“Just drive.” I gave him my mother’s address, and when we got there I threw a handful of bills over the back seat. He honked at me as he drove off.
What would Susan have turned up? Something, I prayed. Something that would help us figure out where Jocelyn might have gone. I tapped my foot impatiently as the elevator climbed to the fourteenth floor.
My mother came to the door when I rang and looked startled when she saw me. “My goodness, John, I heard on the news you were arrested-”
“They let me out. Is Susan here?”
“Susan?”
“I’m sorry. Rachel. Is she here?”
“No, she went out. John, what’s going on?”
“Where did she go?”
“John Blake, you tell me what’s going on or so help me-”
I put one hand on each of her arms. They felt tiny and frail. “Mom, I’m sorry. I can’t. Not now. I need to find Rachel. Did she say anything about where she went?”
“Yes, hold on,” she said, and picked up a piece of paper from the telephone stand by the door. She took her glasses down from her forehead and squinted at the page. “She’s meeting someone at a restaurant. A place called Dorni-” She squinted some more. “Dorneolo? Dormiolo? I can’t read what she wrote.”
I took the paper from her hand. It said Dormicello.
*
It was early enough in the afternoon that Zen wasn’t there yet. Her day-shift bartender was a parolee called Trunks who nodded at me when he saw me come through the door. The place was as close to empty as I’d ever seen it, which was just as well. Less chance for Susan to get herself in a scrape.
She wasn’t at the bar or any of the tables out front. There was a wall of booths in the back, past the wallmounted TV that was quietly showing NY1 and the pool table where a broad-backed guy in a wifebeater blocked my view. I waited till he was between shots and squeezed past, careful not to knock down the second cue stick that was leaning against the table. There was presumably a second player somewhere, maybe in the bathroom, and if he looked anything like this one, I didn’t want to do anything to piss him off.
Only one of the booths was occupied, and from where I was I couldn’t see who Susan was talking to, just the back of his head. His salt-and-pepper hair was combed straight back and held in place by some sort of shellac, and I had a strong sense of deja vu: based on his hair alone, he could have been Wayne Lenz’s taller, older brother.
