She was a foot away from me. She put a hand up to my face, touched my cheek. I felt her fingertips against my skin as though from a mile away. She said, “You’re going to have to talk to me, sweetie. This isn’t going to work otherwise.”
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.
“Miranda-” The words wouldn’t come. Everything was wrong. If Miranda was here, was alive, then who…? “Jocelyn. You killed Jocelyn.”
She shrugged. “I’d be dead now if I hadn’t.”
“And Lenz. You killed them both.”
“Look, if we’re going to have this conversation, let’s sit down.” I didn’t move. “You want to stand? Fine, John, we’ll stand.” She leaned against the refrigerator, crossed her arms over her chest.
“How could you do it?”
“Do you mean how could I or how did I? Are you disgusted with me, or just confused?”
“Both,” I said.
“It’s not so hard, baby. Really, it isn’t. You do what you have to do to get by. But you’ve learned that, too, haven’t you?”
“What happened to you?” I said, in a small voice.
“To me? What about you? All these years, I always pictured you down at NYU thinking great thoughts, reading – I don’t know, ancient Greek history or something. I figured you’d be a professor, or maybe a scientist – or, or, I don’t know, you’d go into politics, I’d turn on the news and there you’d be, running for mayor of New York. I’ll tell you, it made it easier when I was dancing in every cheap dive across the South. At least one of us was doing better, you know? I certainly didn’t picture you doing this. Working with drug dealers, breaking into people’s apartments. Chasing after strippers with blood on their hands.”
“You were going to be a doctor,” I said.
“I was going to be a lot of things.” She came forward again, gently pushed me out of the doorway so she could step through. “At least let me turn off the TV.”
I caught her arm as she passed, stepped out into the living room with her. “What,” she said, “you don’t trust me? I’m not going to do anything.” She kept her hands high as she went to the couch, picked up the remote control, and turned the TV off. “See?” She sat down. “Now you.”
I sat across from her. It was beyond comprehension. That she was here at all, that I was, that we were sitting across from each other like old friends catching up after years apart, all while Susan lay in the hospital, clinging to life, and Jocelyn lay in the morgue, half her face blown away, deliberately misidentified to the police by Lenz. On one level, it all finally made sense – the pieces fit. But on another, it made no sense at all.
“It was you dancing at the Wildman,” I said. “Not Jocelyn. Danny Matin said it was you and so did the bartender, and it wasn’t because she looked like you, it was because it was you.”
“Yeah, it was me.” She lit a cigarette, held the pack out to me, dropped it on the coffee table when I didn’t react. “I’m not proud of what I did there, but I did it.”
“But why did you use her name?”
“I couldn’t use mine – not to set up a robbery. And they won’t hire you in a strip club these days without seeing ID. I had an old ID of Jocelyn’s from when we were dancing together. The picture was close enough.”
Close enough. And when the burglars she’d recruited were caught and tortured and killed, and she’d needed someone to die in her place on the roof of the Sin Factory, Jocelyn had been close enough for that, too. Jocelyn, who was still in love with her, and who came running, bringing flowers no less, when Miranda had called her out of the blue offering a reconciliation. I thought about the message on the answering machine – Miranda hadn’t set herself up accidentally, she’d set Jocelyn up, very deliberately.
“How did you get Lenz to go along with it?” I asked.
“What choice did he have? He’s the one who’d told me about the buy in the first place. He shouldn’t have, but the man couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He just had to brag. And thank goodness. If he hadn’t, I’d have been working at that dive for nothing, not to mention fucking him for nothing.” She put on an expression of mock sympathy. “I’m sorry, sweetie. You didn’t think I’d been saving myself for you, did you?”
“Hardly,” I said.
“I remember the day he came home from that bar and said Khachadurian’s son had been in and had told everyone they’d caught the men who’d robbed his father. Wayne was so happy. He told me, ‘Those sons of bitches got what they deserved.’z” She took a long drag on the cigarette. “You know what Khachadurian did to them?”
“Yes,” I said, “I know what he did.”
“Well, I had to give Wayne the bad news. I told him, ‘If we don’t do something and fast, you and I are going to be in the same boat as those sons of bitches, because I’m the one who told them about the deal, and you’re the one who told me.’ I thought he was going to have a heart attack, drop dead right there.”
She waited for me to say something, but I didn’t know what to say.
“Wayne had two choices,” she went on. “He could go to Khachadurian, explain what had happened, and beg for mercy, in which case the best he could hope for was that maybe they’d just kill him instead of cutting out his eyes first, or he could agree to help me. And let’s not forget that if he helped me, he also got half the money. And he got me. All he had to do was identify her body as mine and then let me stay at his apartment until the heat died down.”
That wasn’t quite true. He could identify Jocelyn’s body as Miranda’s, but the word of a two-time convict might not be enough for the police. And while expanding shells pumped into the back of a person’s head could do a lot to interfere with either a visual or a dental identification, they couldn’t change one person’s DNA into another’s. If the police picked up anything at Miranda’s apartment for a comparison, Miranda needed to know they’d get trace amounts of Jocelyn’s hair and skin, not hers. Even a drop-out pre-med would know that.
Meanwhile, Miranda needed to have clothing to wear while she was in hiding, but she couldn’t empty her apartment without making the police suspicious. Fortunately, there was a simple solution to both problems: the afternoon of the murder, Miranda could take Jocelyn out on the town, and while they were away from both apartments, Lenz could come down to Avenue D, fill a big, rolling suitcase with Jocelyn’s clothing, hairbrush, toothbrush, and so forth, and then go to Miranda’s apartment and swap the contents of the suitcase for the things Miranda needed. That’s how Jocelyn’s baseball cap had ended up hanging on the inside of Miranda’s door. The clothing in Miranda’s dresser had been Jocelyn’s, too, or at least the things on the top of each drawer had been. The luggage cart had never had money in it – just Jocelyn’s things on the way in and Miranda’s on the way out.
And the paper band behind the dresser? Maybe it really had fallen there by accident, and just gone unnoticed by everyone until Little Murco turned it up.
“You’re lucky,” I said. “Once everyone thought you were dead, it would have been simple for Lenz to kill you for real and just keep all the money for himself.”
“Sure,” she said, “if he’d known where the money was.”
“How could you keep it hidden while you were staying at his apartment?”
“Oh, John, come on, I’m not that stupid,” she said. “I didn’t keep it at the apartment. I put it in a safe deposit box. Or I should say Jessie Masters did, since that’s who the bank thought it was renting to.”
And that explained why she hadn’t left the city after killing Lenz – the murder had taken place on Friday night, and a bank wouldn’t let her get into her safe deposit box until Monday morning. Yes, all the pieces fit now. It had all been constructed so carefully, right from the start. I thought back to what Susan had said that first night at the Derby about how Miranda had told her in the dressing room that she was afraid that Murco was going to kill her. It was a perfect way to set the stage for her apparent death the next day. There might be some dispute later about who’d killed Miranda, but not about whether it had actually been Miranda who’d died. She’d put it all together masterfully.