Richard Aleas - Little Girl Lost

“They are.”

“I might as well have thrown my money out the window. They would send these reports, pages and pages of ‘We went here,’ ‘We went there,’ ‘We talked to him,’ ‘We talked to her’ – but they didn’t find my daughter. That’s what we were paying them to do.”

“I understand.”

“Do you? Do you? It’s been six years, Mr. Blake. I don’t sleep. My wife is grey. Completely grey. My daughter’s gone. When you sent your fax… ”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to make things worse.”

“You didn’t make them worse, it’s just… We’d stopped hoping, you know?”

I wanted to say, At least your daughter’s not dead. But maybe she was, and if she wasn’t, was that necessarily better? For her certainly, but for her parents?

On the other hand, maybe knowing would be better than not knowing.

“I don’t want to get your hopes up,” I said, “since I probably won’t find anything. If Serner couldn’t, I probably can’t either. But I’ll try, and if you give me your number, I’ll call you with anything I find out.” Mastaduno gave me a Westchester number and I scrawled it down under Kirby Kirsch’s. “One other thing, could you tell me who you worked with at Serner? Maybe I can get something out of them.”

“The man we dealt with was William Battles. Do you want his phone number? I can look it up.”

Bill Battles. No, that was one phone number I didn’t need.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I know him.”

We’d lost our share of business to Serner over the years – every small agency had. When you do corporate work, you come across plenty of clients who want to use the biggest and best-known firm whether or not they’ll do the best job, and the fact is that Serner did do a good job, so it’s not even as though we could bad-mouth them with a clear conscience. And Bill Battles was a good investigator. He knew his way around every public record there was, and if you were looking to hire a mortgage trader he could tell you if the guy had ever been reprimanded back in summer camp.

But a corporate background check and a missing daughter are two very different things. There were people at Serner I’d go to if it were my daughter, and Bill Battles wasn’t one of them.

Could another investigator have done a better job? Maybe. Could we have, if Mastaduno had come to us? And if we had, might Miranda have been alive today?

You could drive yourself crazy with questions like that. They’d gone to the top firm, the firm had assigned one of their top investigators, and Jocelyn Mastaduno had stayed missing. It happened.

I left a message on Bill’s office voicemail asking him to call me. I tried to think of someone else I could call, but other than Big Murco, I was pretty well tapped out of phone numbers. I wanted to hear Susan’s voice, know that she was okay, but there was no easy way to accomplish that. I considered stopping at the Derby after hours, but my side twinged at the thought.

There was only one other thing for me to do, and I’d been putting it off. I didn’t relish going to Zen’s even when I was in full health. But I needed to find out more about Khachadurian, and if the cops couldn’t tell me anything useful, that left – Well, it left some people Leo wouldn’t have been happy to see me talking to. And Zen’s was where I would find them.

Zen was Zenobia Salva, and her bar wasn’t called Zen’s except by the people who went there. Its official name was Dormicello, which was an in-joke of sorts, since Reuben Dormicello had been Zen’s first husband, and he’d drunk himself to death. No one had ever seen Zen take a drink, but she worked the stick well enough to please her thirsty clientele. She’d have pleased her husband, too, if he’d lived to see it, but back when he was alive, she didn’t own a bar yet, didn’t own much of anything, in fact, except the clothes on her back, and she’d take those off readily enough if you had two hundred dollars you were willing to part with. I hadn’t known her then, but I’d heard the story many times over the years from people at the bar, and if it wasn’t quite the same any two times I heard it, Zen herself never seemed troubled by the inconsistencies. She had the impassive expression of someone who was beyond offending, though also the look of someone you didn’t want to push too far.

The story had it that her second husband, who died of a knife wound in the laundry at Riker’s Island while serving seven-to-ten for armed robbery, had won the bar in a poker game and willed it to her. The poker game part of the story sounded like a romantic embellishment to me, but who knows?

“You don’t look so good,” Zen said. She took a pull on a cigarette, laid it down on a saucer. “You getting enough sleep?”

“Probably not, but that’s not the problem. Someone I used to know was killed the other day. I’ve been looking into it and getting nowhere, but someone must have thought I was getting somewhere, since they sent some muscle to teach me a lesson.” I mimed a rabbit punch and got the slightest little shake of her head in response.

“You’ve got to take care of yourself, John.”

“I’m still here, aren’t I?” I said.

“You got any idea who you’re dealing with?”

“Some. That’s why I came here. Thought you might know someone who could help.”

“You know,” she said, “you can come by when you’re not working on a case, too.”

“I know.”

She looked around the room. It wasn’t packed yet, and it wouldn’t be till later in the night, but already you could see the crowds forming. The ex-cons stayed near the walls, by themselves or in pairs, watching the doors and each other. The rummies sat at the bar nursing their drinks and telling old stories about great hauls they’d only pulled off in their imaginations. A few men clustered around the pool table, trading gibes and laying down bets on the ledge of the chalkboard. There were straight patrons, too, people who walked in off the street for a beer, ignoring the blacked-out windows and lack of a sign, but there weren’t many and they generally got the feeling they weren’t welcome pretty quickly. Though not always. Once, I remembered, a Wall Street power broker in striped tie and braces had gotten into a shoving match with a scrawny Puerto Rican kid named Simon Corrina. A smarter man would have seen the look in Corrina’s eyes and stopped shoving, but then a smarter man would have taken the hint and stayed out of Zen’s to begin with. Three of us were eventually able to pull Corrina off him, but then you can pry open the jaws of a bear trap, too.

How much blood had been spilled on the floor of this bar, both before Zen took it over and since? I generally tried not to think about it, beyond the immediate problem of making sure none of mine was added to the tally.

“Tell me who you think it is,” Zen said, “and I’ll tell you if anyone here’s likely to know anything.”

“Murco Khachadurian,” I said.

“Oh, Jesus. You sure can pick them. You talking about Big Murco or Little Murco?”

“Actually, I’m not sure. Whichever owns the Sin Factory.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“It’s a strip club-”

“I know it’s a strip club. And your friend was a stripper, wasn’t she? I seem to remember reading about some poor girl getting shot there. It was in the Post.”

“ Daily News, too. Page eighteen.”

“And how did a college boy like you come to know a Sin Factory stripper?” She waved away her own question before I could answer it. “Forget I asked. You’d think I’d have learned to mind my own fucking business after all these years. You bring out the mother hen in me.”