A lot of the time when we were hired it was by a corporation that just wanted a background check on someone they were thinking of hiring – that was the bulk of any small agency’s business these days, and you did it over the phone or on the computer. But sometimes there was serious legwork to be done, and he’d done his share of it, chasing down leads and confronting the people behind them. Not recently, not so much since Arlene died – that had taken some of the chase out of him. But even now he’d insist on coming with me on a job every so often. I used to think it was his way of checking up on me, keeping an eye on the half-assed literature major he’d pulled out of NYU and tried to turn into a detective, but eventually I realized it was just his way of keeping his hand in.
When I’d shown him the article about Miranda, he’d warned me to leave it alone, and I knew he was speaking from experience. “You won’t like what you find. I’ll tell you that right off the bat. Whatever you find out about her, you’ll wish you hadn’t.”
“I already wish I hadn’t,” I said. “I wish she was still alive, raising two kids and practicing optometry in Wisconsin. And I wish I was there with her. But what does any of that matter? I’m here, she’s here, and somebody put a fucking bullet in her. I can’t just sit around and wait to read about it in the paper.”
“Better than ending up in the paper yourself.”
“I won’t.”
“Better not,” Leo said. “I’m too old to start again with some other kid.”
I picked up a sandwich at the Korean grocery on the corner and ate it on the way home. The wind had picked up as the sun had gone down and now there was no mistaking what season we were in. People complain more about New York in the summer, the heat of August, the humidity, the clothing sticking to your back, but it’s the winter that always makes me think about packing it in. Everything that’s wrong with the city is still wrong in the winter, only you’ve got the wind chill factor to think about, too.
I climbed the four flights to my apartment and unbundled myself to the accompaniment of the hissing and clanking of my radiator. The landlord was acting out of short-lived gratitude for his Christmas tips – by February, he’d have lost interest and we’d be shivering in our kitchens again.
There was nothing on the six o’clock news, but I set my VCR to tape the eleven. You never know. Then I took a hot shower and killed some time on the Internet, tracking down every reference I could find to Miranda, the Sin Factory, or the murder. There wasn’t much. Each of the local papers had covered the murder, of course, but not at great length, and details were scarce. Two gunshot wounds to the back of the head, hollow-point bullets for maximum damage. Victim pronounced dead at the scene, police were investigating. She’d been found by the club’s manager, a man named Wayne Lenz, just after midnight, and he’d called an ambulance immediately on his cell phone. They’d gotten there quickly, but there’s no such thing as quickly enough when you’ve been shot in the head with hollow point bullets.
The Sin Factory had a web site, if you could call it that: one web page showing their logo and a photo of a topless woman with one leg wrapped around a brass pole. The bullet items on the right side of the screen shouted: “Full Bar!” “Sumptuous Buffet!” and “10 Gorgeous Girls Live!!!” I couldn’t imagine where they’d fit ten gorgeous girls, never mind the buffet. But then this wouldn’t be the first strip club to look better on the web than it did in person.
As for Miranda herself, Google only came up with a single link, to the student directory of Rianon College in New Mexico. The link didn’t work when I clicked on it. The historical copy stored in Google’s archives came up just fine, but all it showed was Miranda’s name on a long list of what had presumably been her classmates. She’d been in Heward Hall, room 1140, phone extension 87334. I searched the page for other instances of “1140” and found several, but only one other for Heward Hall: Jocelyn Mastaduno, extension 87333. I wrote down the name.
Then, because there was more time to kill, I did a few searches on Jocelyn Mastaduno’s name. I didn’t find much. One J. Mastaduno listed in Pensacola, another in Cedar Rapids. None in New York, but then why would there be? Not every pre-med at Rianon came from or ended up in New York.
Was it late enough now? I looked at the clock and decided that I wasn’t in the mood to wait any longer. Lenz would either be there or he wouldn’t, and either I would learn something useful or I wouldn’t, but at least I’d be doing something more than just working the computer.
I had a sudden recollection, as I switched off the machine, of Miranda struggling with the PC in our computer lab – this was before the Internet, but our school had a computer elective and in our junior year we’d both taken it. I remembered sitting with her at the monitor, Miranda desperately trying to finish an assignment, me fighting with the printer when it refused to print. I finally got the thing working in time for us to be only five minutes late to class.
We wouldn’t even have been five minutes late if she hadn’t pushed me up against the lockers in the hallway, looked left and right to make sure we were alone, and pressed her lips to mine. “My hero,” she’d said, smoothing back my hair. “Will you always be there to fix my printer for me?”
I turned off the light and returned to the Sin Factory.
Chapter 4
There was no velvet rope and the man standing at the door was wearing a leather jacket and cargo pants rather than a tux, but the music was going full blast, the lights were all lit, and it had attracted a crowd. Each time the bouncer pulled the door open, the sound of glasses being filled and emptied drifted out along with the pounding bass line of a house techno mix. While I watched from the deli next door, five people went in, one at a time, and four people came out. It was mostly businessmen, loosened ties showing under their heavy overcoats, wedding rings hidden under leather gloves, but there were also some of the low-rent types you see around any strip club, the overweight guys wearing sneakers and down coats leaking feathers at the seams. I was actually surprised to see the ratio at this place favoring the businessmen. They’re the ones who can afford to go to Scores.
The bouncer stopped me at the door, one hand lightly pressing against my chest. They tell me I’ll be glad later in life that I look young, and maybe it’s true – Leo would probably kill to look ten years younger again. But when you’re almost thirty and still get carded, the thrill escapes you.
“I was here earlier today,” I said. “Nobody stopped me then.” But I pulled out my wallet all the same. I could have shown him my P.I. license, I suppose, but that’s rarely a good idea unless you specifically want to stir things up. I fished out my driver’s license.
The bouncer turned it this way and that under the light, then handed it back. “Okay.”
“Let me ask you something,” I said. “Have you seen the big guy here tonight?”
“Catch?”
I didn’t follow what he meant. “Lenz,” I said. “Is Lenz here?”
A smile cracked open beneath the man’s cheeks. I counted two gold teeth before it snapped shut again. “Yeah, Lenz is here. You don’t want to be calling him ‘big guy,’ though.”
“Why’s that?”
“You ain’t never met the man, have you?”
I shook my head.
“Well, you go right ahead then, call him what you want. I’ll be seeing you out here again in no time.” His voice was the sort of throaty growl that would be right at home coming from an idling motorcycle.
“Thanks for the tip,” I said.
“What they pay me for,” he said. “Preventing trouble.”
The place was packed. Maybe it was all thrillseekers and newshounds, people who had come to soak up the club’s sudden notoriety, but somehow that wasn’t the feeling I got. The guys at the bar had the comfortable, broken-in posture of old regulars, and at the stage it was clearly Eros, not Thanatos, that was on everyone’s mind.
It wasn’t hard to recognize the headliners from their photos on the door. Mandy was the shorter one, and a little older than she looked in her picture, but no less well endowed. She was working the crowd, kneeling at the edge of the stage and pressing the face of one patron after another between her breasts. Her garter had a few bills in it and a few had fallen to the stage. I think one of them might have been a twenty, dropped by some high roller, but I couldn’t swear to it.
Meanwhile, Rachel Firestone was back by the pole, leaning against it, doing a sort of sinuous Salome thing
