Richard Aleas - Little Girl Lost

I took out my cell phone again. It was futile, but I speed-dialed Susan’s number. Maybe she’d answer, maybe she was safe after all, maybe Jocelyn hadn’t found her yet or Susan had managed to elude her. The phone started to ring.

And offset by a half second or so, I heard the sound of Ravel’s Bolero beeping faintly, not in my ear, but from the back of the bandstand.

I followed the sound to one of the doors in the rear, a rusted metal door with no knob even, just a round hole where you’d expect the doorknob to be. From behind it, muffled but distinct, came the sound of Susan’s cell phone. Then the beeping stopped, and in my ear I heard Susan’s voice as her voicemail picked up: “Hi, I’m not available right now-”

I slammed the phone shut, stuck two fingers through the hole in the door, and pulled as hard as I could. It didn’t budge. “Susan,” I shouted. There was no response. “Help me get this open. Come on!” She had to be in there. Unless it was just her phone, thrown there by Jocelyn so Susan couldn’t use it, but that didn’t make any sense – why would she go to the trouble of opening one of these old doors just to get rid of a phone? I yanked harder. I planted my foot against the wall for leverage and pulled till it felt like my arms were tearing apart at the joints. The door started moving, slowly, a millimeter at a time. I pulled again, and again, and the metal groaned as the door scraped open an inch. I couldn’t see inside. But now I had leverage. I wrapped my hands around the edge of the door and dragged it open. Half a foot. A foot. Two feet.

It was a narrow utility closet with a stripped circuit breaker box on the back wall. Susan was huddled on the ground in a heap. She wasn’t moving. I touched the side of her face. It was cold.

I gently pulled her out of the closet and laid her on the ground. She was wearing the same sweater she’d had on the first night we’d talked at Keegan’s, only it wasn’t the color of ginger ale any more. The front was soaked through with blood.

In the distance, I heard sirens approaching, but that wasn’t good enough. I thumbed 911 into my phone. “Send an ambulance to Corlears Hook Park,” I said when the operator answered, “and hurry. A woman’s been hurt, badly.”

I tried to take her pulse. I couldn’t feel it.

The waiting area at Bellevue’s emergency room was packed. One boy with what looked like a broken arm was howling while his mother tried alternately to calm him down and get the attention of the triage nurse. But a broken arm could wait. There were head wounds, there were infectious diseases. This was one of the largest trauma centers in the world, but also one of the busiest, and there was never enough staff to go around.

But Susan was inside. Even at Bellevue, a chest wound like hers took priority. The ambulance had arrived in less than five minutes and had torn up First Avenue with its siren blaring, dodging around cars and pedestrians to shave seconds off our arrival time. Even so, I knew it might not have been enough. They said she’d lost a lot of blood – as though that wasn’t obvious. They told me she was in critical condition. When I asked if she’d make it, they’d shrugged. EMTs had no time for politeness.

“She’s got a chance,” one of them had said. I’d been clinging to that ever since.

The cops had followed us to the hospital, adding their siren to the mix. They’d waited while I got her admitted, waited some more while I filled out paperwork as best I could. Last name: Feuer. First name: Susan. Home address? Home phone? Social security number? I left it all blank. Medical insurance provider? All I could do was hand over my credit card and hope I wasn’t close to my limit.

They waited while I called Leo from a payphone and told him where I was and what had happened. They stood next to me and listened, but they waited.

Then they were done waiting. They steered me through the triage station to an empty administrative office just past the ER. Both were uniformed cops from the Seventh Precinct. One was about my height but twice my weight, with a round face and a thick moustache and a patch on his chest that said “Conroy.” The other’s patch said “Gianakouros” and belonged to a veteran with hair the color of old curtains and deep grooves creasing his face. He was the one who had me by the arm and he took the lead in questioning me.

“Your name?”

“John Blake.”

“And the victim’s name?”

“Susan Feuer. F-E-U-E-R.”

“What’s your relationship to the victim?”

“She’s a friend. And we’ve been working together recently.”

“What do you do, Mr. Blake?”

I took out my license and showed it to him. He handed it over his shoulder to Conroy, who jotted down the license number on a spiral-bound pad. “I work for Leo Hauser. He used to be at Midtown South. He has a small agency now – just the two of us, basically.”

“And Feuer works with you?”

“No. She’s just been helping me with one case I’m working on. Just as a favor.”

“Some favor,” Conroy said. He handed my license back.

“You want to tell us what happened?” Gianakouros said.

How to answer that? I wanted to, but this was not a story I could tell quickly. Where did it even start? When Susan began making calls for me, or before that when I first saw her dancing at the Sin Factory, or before that, when I opened the paper and saw Miranda’s face staring out at me, all innocence and accusation? Or ten years earlier, when I’d seen Miranda last, when I’d sent her off on a boomerang voyage from New York to New Mexico and back again, from possibility to disaster and from life to death? I’d have to explain an awful lot if I wanted them to understand what had happened.

And I wouldn’t mind explaining – but right now I couldn’t afford the time. Jocelyn was still in town, but for how long? She was packed and ready to go. She’d just needed to sew up some loose ends, like the troublemaker who was calling all the strip clubs she’d ever worked at and trying to track her down. I’d set Susan on Jocelyn’s trail, and somehow it had gotten back to her. Was it any wonder that Jocelyn had decided to eliminate Susan before leaving the city?

Now, Jocelyn probably just needed to pick up the money from wherever she’d stashed it and then she’d vanish forever. One of the country’s best agencies hadn’t been able to find her the last time she’d gone on the road, and back then she hadn’t had a half million dollars to help her hide.

“We’re looking for a missing woman named Jocelyn Mastaduno,” I said. “Her parents haven’t heard from her in six years and they want to know what happened to her. Susan was helping me make some calls to track her down.”

“What was she doing in the park?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“How did you know she was there?”

“Susan was staying with my mother. She told her she was going to the park, and my mother mentioned it to me.”

“So you went there.”

“I was worried,” I said. “I didn’t understand why she’d gone there, and the park can be dangerous at night.”

Conroy spoke up. “Any idea who might have done this?”

“None,” I said.

“What about this woman you’re looking for, Mastaduno?”

“It’s possible. I just don’t know.”

“How close are you to finding her?”

Pretty close, I thought – if I can get out of here. I fought to keep my voice calm. “I can’t say. We’re not the first agency to work on it. The last one took a year and never found her.”

“Maybe you’re closer than they were.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“If Miss Feuer could tell us who she was meeting in the park, we might have something,” Gianakouros said. “But she’s not going to be doing much talking any time soon. Not with multiple stab wounds in her chest.”