“It’s Lewis now, but then it was Chin.”
“Do you know where I can reach her?”
“Yeah, hold on.” From the other end of the phone came the sound of a clasp being opened, pages being turned. “Katherine Lewis, she’s in Chicago now, working at the Children’s Hospital? I can give you her work number.”
“Thank you.”
I got numbers, I got names. I checked names off my list and I added new names to it. Call by call, a picture started to grow, a picture of Miranda that was half familiar and half alien. She hadn’t had many friendships, but the few she’d had had been exceptionally tight. She’d been an A student in high school but did poorly in her freshman year at Rianon, and her grades didn’t get better after that. She hadn’t dated anyone. Or maybe she had – there were conflicting stories. She started rooming with Jocelyn in the second semester of her sophomore year, and a year later they both left the school. There was a rumor that they’d dropped out to go on the road, drive across the country or maybe up to Canada, but nobody knew for sure.
Eventually, a man from the alumni office called me back. They’d already talked to the police and weren’t comfortable sharing information with anyone else. Could they at least confirm that Miranda and Jocelyn had dropped out before the start of their senior year? No, he was afraid that was personal information. Did they have an address for Jocelyn? That would be personal information, too. Could they at least pass a message to her if they did have an address? Grudgingly, he agreed, so I wrote a brief note and faxed it to him. I didn’t have high hopes.
But that’s the nature of the detective business. Nothing you do has especially good odds of working, but if you do enough things, make enough calls and knock on enough doors, eventually something will work. Or that’s the idea, anyway.
By two, my shoulder hurt from gripping the phone and I’d run out of people to call, so I switched to the computer. Search engines like Google are only a starting point, though they’re a good one; when you’re in the business, you become familiar with all the other resources out there, ones that allow you to track down municipal filings, business filings, deeds, insurance data, court records, and the like. I tracked through all of them, keeping one eye on the clock. Four hours seems like a long time, but the Internet eats hours like a kid eats popcorn.
Miranda hadn’t left much of a trail – she hadn’t been sued, hadn’t been arrested, hadn’t been fingerprinted. She hadn’t started a business, hadn’t taken out loans, or at least none that I could find a record of. Jocelyn was similarly blank. They were just two kids who stepped out of their dorm room one morning and into the ether.
But Wayne Lenz and the Sin Factory were another story. No shortage of paper on the club, of course: you can’t run a nightclub, strippers or no strippers, without filing plenty of forms. But searching on Lenz turned up a nice pile of material, too.
I looked at his pinched features staring out at me from the screen. Born in Ohio in 1959, where he was remanded to the custody of an aunt after his parents made local headlines by driving off a bridge. Apparently moved to New York as a teenager, since he started having run-ins with the NYPD as early as 1978. Two charges in one year: aggravated assault, though he was only given probation, and then, late in the year, mail fraud. The details of the fraud charge were opaque, as criminal court records so often are, but it looked like he’d tried his hand at running a con and had done a lousy job of it. He’d gotten a five-year sentence and served two. Kept his head down in the eighties, only to surface again in a drug bust in ’93. Back in prison, out in four.
And then he’d bought the Sin Factory? No, the club’s SICA filings made it clear that Lenz was just an employee. The business was owned by a limited liability company set up in Delaware, GoodLife LLC, whose only listed address was a P.O. box. And the man behind GoodLife? He didn’t seem to like to sign his name to things, but in this day and age it takes a lot of work to stay anonymous. All it takes is one slip to blow it, and Leo and I had seen people a lot slicker than this guy. After hunting for about an hour I found a loose thread to pull on: the administrative contact listed in the registration records for the domain name of the Sin Factory’s onepage web site. A man named Mitchell Khachadurian with a New Jersey phone number.
I waited while the phone rang seven, eight times, then heard an out-of-breath voice pick up on the ninth ring. “Yeah? Hello?”
“Mr. Khachadurian?”
“Yes? Who is this?”
“This is officer Michael Stern of Midtown South in Manhattan,” I said. “We’re following up on a disturbance at the Sin Factory-”
“You people have got to stop calling me. I’m not involved with my brother’s business, I don’t know anything about it, and I don’t want to know.”
“Your name is listed as a contact for your brother’s web site.”
“I begged him to take that off,” he said. “I made that site three years ago. Listen, I haven’t even talked to Murco in a year.”
“Mr. Khachadurian, do you know how we could reach Murco?”
He snorted. “You guys probably know better than I do. You certainly see him more.”
“What’s the last number you had for him?”
He had to think for a second, but then he rattled off a 917 number. A cell phone, presumably. I wrote it down.
“If you talk to him,” Mitchell said, “don’t mention you got his number from me, okay?”
“You’ve got my word of honor,” I said, “as a policeman.”
I made it through the door at six on the dot, but Rachel wasn’t there yet. The same old man was behind the bar, and he recognized me from the previous night. “Another cheeseburger? Chef’s got some practice with it now.”
“No, thanks. Just a coke.”
He filled a glass and set it down on a napkin, dropped in a straw. “Saw you were talking to the girls last night. They’re a good bunch,” he said. “Don’t have an easy lot in life.”
“No,” I said.
“They come in here for some peace and quiet, and I’m glad to give it to them. They need a place to let off steam, feel safe. I wouldn’t keep the place open so late nights, only where would they go if I didn’t?”
I nodded.
“Time to time,” he said, “people see them here, figure out who they are, and start dropping by. Think maybe they can make friends, or pick up some company for the night, have a little fun. They don’t encourage it, and neither do I.”
He shot some more coke into my glass now that the foam had settled.
“You seem like a nice fellow, clean cut, well dressed, that’s why I’m talking to you like this. There’s some you talk to and some it’s not worth the breath, you’ve got to find other ways to get through to those.”
“I hear you,” I said. “The girls won’t have any trouble from me.”
“Ah, that’s good,” he said. “We’ve got to look out for one another in this world, don’t we?”
So where were you, I wanted to ask, when Miranda needed someone to look out for her? But all I said was, “That we do.”
I saw Rachel come through the door then, look around the room, and spot me at the bar. She was wearing jeans and a cardigan, with a hat pulled down over her ears. She took the hat off and shook out her hair as she walked over.
“Don’t break my kneecaps,” I said. “She asked me to meet her here.”
We sat in the back, at the table farthest from the door. Even so, Rachel kept darting glances over her shoulder.
“Thanks for meeting me. I wasn’t even sure you got my message.”
“I’m sorry I missed your call. I was on the subway.”
“That’s okay.”
We were both silent for a bit. She had something to say, and I figured she’d say it when she was ready. In the meantime, I didn’t want to open my mouth and maybe scare her off by saying the wrong thing.
“The reason I asked you to meet me is, Randy talked to me the night before she was shot,” she finally said. “She was terrified. She told me she was afraid someone was going to kill her.”
“Did she say who?”
“Yes,” Rachel said. “Murco Khachadurian.”
