Death of a Dancing Queen, page 4
Billie started heading toward the stairwell, anxious to grill Tommy about black eyes and parking decks, when she thought of something else. “Where are her parents?”
“Huh?”
“Jasmine’s parents?”
Nuri shook her head as if waking herself up from a deep sleep. “I don’t know. Central America.”
“Does Jasmine have a US passport?” asked Billie.
“I don’t know,” Nuri replied, and she sounded on the verge of tears. “Why is that important?”
“Just a question.”
Nuri blinked several times, her face dawning with a realization. “You think she went to visit her folks?”
Not exactly. Maybe Tommy was onto something. Jasmine could’ve been targeted and sent to an ICE detention center, especially if she wasn’t under DACA’s protection and was working unlawfully. But saying that aloud might freak out Nuri even more, so instead, she smiled reassuringly. “It’s quite possible that she decided to go on a last-minute trip.”
Nuri dropped her shoulders. “I hope you’re right.”
Billie headed toward the stairwell.
“But not tell me?” Nuri added.
“Maybe it was an emergency,” Billie said as she turned around. “Maybe she didn’t have a chance, and when she got down to Honduras, there was bad cell service or she lost her phone.”
Nuri bobbed her head several times as if that was a totally believable reason and not just bullshit that Billie made up on the fly.
“There’s something else,” said Nuri. “Last week, maybe ten days ago, a black car was parked outside the coffee shop where I work.”
“Make? Model?”
“Nondescript. Town car. Buick? I don’t know.”
“Did you see the driver?”
She shook her head. “The windows were tinted. Like illegally tinted.” Then she bit her lip. “But it was weird, you know? It just sat in the lot. It didn’t leave until Tommy came and picked up Jasmine.”
“That is weird,” Billie said, adding it to her notes. Weird but hopefully easy to figure out. She handed Nuri a business card. “Call me if Jasmine turns up.”
Nuri nodded. “I will.” Then she read the card, squinting. “You’re a private investigator?” Her face relaxed. “Don’t know why I thought you were police.” She waved a hand over Billie’s face. “You obviously don’t look like a cop.”
“Plenty of women are in law enforcement,” she countered.
“Most of the Jewish girls on campus are like, marketing majors and stuff.”
Billie frowned.
Nuri flicked the business card. “Sorry, I saw the name, Levine, and I just figured –” She added quickly, “I meant it as a compliment. Takes a lot of smarts to get a business degree. They’ll never be poor a day in their life.” Laughing awkwardly, she added, “Not like me.”
“Why would they work?” Billie stared at Nuri as she tucked her notebook away. “When they could just marry a doctor.”
Billie turned around, rolled her eyes, and headed toward the stairwell.
CHAPTER SIX
Billie headed to the first floor and knocked on Tommy’s door. No answer.
She pressed her ear to the thick metal, trying to discern any noise that might prove someone was inside but hiding out.
She heard nothing.
She sent him a text, requesting a chat. He didn’t respond to that either.
Billie decided to wait him out. She retreated to the lounge by the elevator and dropped onto a beat-up sofa. There she had a perfect view of the soda machine and lobby entrance. When Tommy returned, she would spot him immediately.
To kill time, she took out her cell phone and scrolled through Jasmine’s Instagram account. Her preliminary search had revealed a slew of hazy photos of Jasmine and Tommy, their arms draped around each other, their gazes cloudy and unfocused, their mouths pink, raw, but smiling. Cigarettes burned in ashtrays. Pilsner glasses littered coffee tables. They looked like two college kids in love. No different than any other twenty-something couple. No different than Billie and Aaron once upon a time.
Billie’s finger flicked up the screen. Jasmine’s account slowly segued into memes about serial killers and promotion for her Murder Girls podcast merchandise, but even that slowed to a blip. One photo showed Jasmine standing next to a Black girl, her arm draped over her shoulder, in front of an old-school chalkboard that read SLEUTH SQUAD in crisp print.
Who was this girl? She continued to scroll. She found her again, standing tall in the center of a big group of women wearing Safety Brigade badges.
The Safety Brigade was a group of students who escorted other students, mostly women, around campus for protection. Safety in numbers and all that. Billie had been a member for a year.
She found the girl a third time in a photo taken inside Jasmine’s room. The girl was wearing headphones. The caption read, “Me and Tasha brainstorming.”
Meanwhile, Tommy barely registered in any of the later pics. It was simply Jasmine and her friends.
As Billie sank further into the cushions, she imagined Jasmine revising her relationship status to It’s complicated then Single.
This all seemed so pointless. Jasmine was clearly shaking Tommy off. But why ignore the best friend? Unless Jasmine was no longer interested in sharing a podcast mic with Nuri “All Jews are accountants” O’Brien. Billie felt confident that Jasmine would soon emerge from her cocoon after she overcame whatever nervous breakdown she was having.
Billie wouldn’t want Jasmine’s life – the girl was clearly overbooked and overwhelmed – and that was saying something since Billie’s life mostly sucked.
She was tempted to end Tommy’s contract, except she was being paid, and money gave everything purpose. Besides, this was her job now. If Billie wanted to eat or put gas in her car, she needed to work these cases as if her life depended on them.
Just then, a man crossed her path. He was tall, with shorn dark hair and a clipped beard to match. He wore denim – not designer – clothes, work boots, and a scowl. He was youngish, although the facial hair made it hard to pinpoint his age.
He definitely wasn’t a student. So who was he? Someone’s boyfriend? Someone’s weed dealer?
The guy adjusted his sleeves, and Billie spotted the tattoo – a cross above a row of skulls.
She recognized the tattoo immediately. It was the identifying symbol for the Torn Crosses, a neo-Nazi skinhead gang known for trafficking heroin and meth – and, sometimes, women. Their numbers had been declining for years, but they were still listed as an operating hate group. They were dangerous. Hella dangerous.
They were also the Goff crime family’s biggest headache.
The last thing a Jewish girl needed was to deal with Nazis.
What business did he have here? A Torn Cross in a Kentwell dormitory? Only time any of them would ever see academia. Most of the members didn’t make it past fifth grade, which was how they got sucked into lives of extreme hate in the first place.
How did he even get inside the building?
She waited until he rounded the corner before scrambling from the worn sofa cushion. She followed him for a minute and then ducked into the trash chute vestibule. Peeking around, she watched as he hit Tommy’s door with a fist.
The hallway became eerily quiet, like when forest creatures disappear before a wildfire.
Tommy Russo had not said anything about associating with Nazis.
The guy pounded on the door again. “Open up, shithead. I know you’re in there.”
She guessed they weren’t friendly.
The guy rattled the handle and pressed his hand to the door as if trying to test its thickness, but that was useless. The dorm doors were made of reinforced steel. He bent down and examined the lock, his brow furrowing.
Seriously, dude, you’re wasting your time.
He removed a gun from the waistband of his pants, and Billie’s eyes went wide. She slid her cell phone out to text Nicole. She needed to get an alert out to the student body – put the campus on lockdown. Then he hit the doorknob with the butt of his gun, and the handle came off in chunks.
How the fuck?
The door swung open. A scrawny guy stood on the other side, his eyes bugging out, his mouth opening and closing like a fish. Tommy’s roommate, Billie presumed. “What the hell, man?”
Quickly, he was yanked onto his toes by the collar of his shirt.
“Tell your junkie boyfriend to stop hiding from us. We always collect. Colfer isn’t playing.” He dropped the roommate roughly and shoved him away.
The poor kid stumbled backward and fell on his ass and elbows.
Billie ducked back into the trash chute, but it was too late. She was made. He passed by, casting Billie a cursory glance before he sized her up and laughed.
She didn’t find him funny. No Torn Cross member had ever made her chuckle except when they got nabbed in an FBI sting. She found that hilarious.
She did, however, wonder what he intended to collect on. And what would happen if Tommy couldn’t pay up? Because Colfer Dryden, leader of the Torn Crosses, was notorious for disappearing his enemies. His ideologies were a joke, but rival gangs and the FBI took him seriously.
Billie realized then that she had been hoping that Jasmine had simply skipped out on Tommy – after all, she had good reason. But if he was mixed up with skinheads, maybe Jasmine had become collateral damage.
When Billie went outside, she passed students enjoying the sunshine. Nothing but smiles and laughter and friendly jabs to the arm. She wondered if they knew how good they had it, living in their protective collegiate bubble.
Billie wondered how protective that bubble was for Jasmine.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Later that afternoon, Billie pulled her crumbling car into the Malta Club parking lot. It was early enough that the neon sign of a martini glass with legs in place of a skewered olive hadn’t been turned on yet. Although the placard outside boasted a $9.99 wing buffet that had started an hour before, she had no intention of staying to eat.
One Yelp reviewer had said that if the Hustler Club ate a giant kosher meal and burped up a strip joint, it would be the Malta Club. Billie thought that was both specific and oddly accurate.
The Malta Club was owned and operated by Neil Goff, head of the last remaining Jewish crime syndicate in the Northeast, if not the entire US. It wasn’t a distinguished role. Jewish mobsters were dinosaurs, their extinction on the horizon, and Neil was clutching his power as if he was dangling off a cliff.
He was also Aaron’s dad.
The Goffs had emigrated from Odessa at the height of the pogroms and made a name for themselves bootlegging during Prohibition before moving on to smuggling black-market goods during World War II. In their heyday, the Goffs had been so powerful it was said that even Bugsy Siegel owed them a favor. Eventually, like the Italians, the Goffs turned to racketeering until too many of their men ended up in East Jersey State Prison, including Sol Goff, the original “Goffather.” He’d been a king for a little while until he got sent up.
Last Billie had heard, the Goffs were dabbling in diamonds and cryptocurrency.
That had been Aaron’s idea. A last-ditch effort at relevancy. Except their criminal empire was nothing more than a strip-club front for money laundering, so small it wasn’t even a blip on the FBI’s radar. The feds needed to focus their resources on the big players: the Russians, the Brazilians, and the Chinese.
Traffic had just started to ease on Route 17 when Billie got out of her car. The sky was that shade of cobalt blue that briefly made her forget it was early November.
She closed her eyes for a split second and sighed, but she couldn’t go home now; this was what she had signed up for. Or what she had signed Tommy Russo up for when he scribbled his name on the client retainer contract.
She went inside.
Her eyes struggled to adjust to the club’s dark interior. A brunette with a nose piercing was wiping down the bar and singing along to Lady Gaga while a redheaded dancer was wrapping her legs around the fireman’s pole on the raised platform. She wore a black G-string, heels, and nothing else and was performing for an audience of one – a middle-aged man with a Santa-sized gut whose dollar bills were clutched between thick, wing sauce–stained fingers.
Behind her, a drag performer in a pink wig and false eyelashes was raising a microphone to accommodate her six-two frame. She glanced up the minute the door closed behind Billie and hollered, “Belinda Levine, is that you?”
Billie smiled. “Yes, Mama Ree.”
Descending the stage in platform heels, Mama Ree enveloped Billie in a hug. Then she pushed her away for inspection. “Let me take a good look at you. You do somethin’ different with your hair? Highlights?”
Without thinking, Billie pushed the bangs from her face. “Same dirty blond, just shorter.”
“You look damn fine, girl. How long has it been?”
“Two years.” Billie had come here the night she graduated college to break up with Aaron and drown her sorrows in mojitos. Mama Ree had been kind enough to hold her hair back while she hurled up her guts behind the dumpster.
Billie chuffed herself up like a rooster. “I’m working as a PI now.” She dug her cell phone out of her coat pocket and swiped through the texts. She held up the photo Tommy Russo had sent her when she had asked for Jasmine’s most recent picture. “I’m searching for this girl.”
Mama Ree squinted through her spidery lashes and then pulled a pair of reading glasses out of her cleavage. She perched them on the tip of her nose. “My seniority keeps me from hobnobbing with the dancers.” Mama Ree was Malta Club royalty, having worked the drag circuit for years in the eighties before Neil discovered her floundering in some dive on the Lower East Side. He then made her an offer she couldn’t refuse – her own show with no pesky club owner telling her what to do – and she had been Neil’s artistic director ever since. “You sure she’s missing?”
“According to the boyfriend,” said Billie.
“Strung-out child?”
“Yup.” Billie glanced around, suddenly anxious that Aaron might be lurking in the shadows, but last she’d heard, he was in Israel.
“He’s not here,” said Mama Ree with a quirk of her eyebrow.
“I wasn’t –”
“Uh huh.”
Billie exhaled then smiled. No sense in refuting the obvious. “If you didn’t know Jasmine, who did?”
Mama Ree called to a dancer adjusting her breasts in the corner. “Shonda, come here, darlin.’” Then she whispered, “They got into it a few times.”
Shonda sighed but did what Mama Ree had asked because no one went against Mama Ree. Shonda wore a neon-orange bikini and nothing else. Her brown skin was powdered in glitter. Her black hair lay in long, thin braids down her back.
Billie held up Jasmine’s photo. “What do you know about this girl?”
Shonda cast a glance at Mama Ree, who nodded encouragingly.
“Pfft. Tonta,” Shonda said with an eye roll. Spanish for dummy.
“Me or Jasmine?” asked Billie.
Shonda mimicked shooting a pistol at Jasmine’s photo. “La Hondureña.”
“How so?”
“I listened to her true-crime podcast.” She made air quotes around the last part. “Girl was careless.”
“Okay,” Billie said, drawing out the word like a piece of taffy. “Can you elaborate?”
Again, Shonda shot a nervous glance at Mama Ree. Nothing was said or unsaid without Mama’s permission. Mama Ree gestured for Shonda to get on with it.
Shonda stood with her hands on her hips. “She did a bunch of episodes about Neil Goff.”
Fuck. That got Billie’s attention. “Anything in particular?”
Shonda shrugged. “Just talking up his alleged high crimes and scandals. It was reckless. I mean, he’s her boss. Plus she let that boyfriend hang around. He got into it with Matty.”
“Really?” It was Neil’s unspoken rule that the dancers did not let their romantic lives intersect with their professional ones. It was bad for business if the customers saw the dancers cozying up to the partners they actually had sex with before hopping onto the laps of men who had no shot of going home with them. “Ruins the fantasy,” Neil had said.
“Anyway, she’ll stay missing if she knows what’s good for her,” said Shonda.
“Shonda!” Mama Ree snapped.
“What? It’s not like everyone doesn’t know.”
“Know what?” asked Billie.
“Enough,” Mama Ree said with annoyance. Then to Billie, she said, “You need to talk to Matty. Let him answer the rest of your questions.”
“All right.” Malta girls knew that if they wanted to keep their jobs (and their heads), they had to also shut their mouths about club business.
Billie smiled despite the acidity churning in her stomach. She was a pro, so she could do this. She and Matty went way back. Besides, Aaron wasn’t here. He wasn’t even in the country. And even if he was, they were done.
Billie had taken a guillotine to that relationship.
“You can go to his office. You know the way, sugar.” Mama Ree winked at Billie and then kissed both of her cheeks.
“Thanks,” said Billie before heading toward the inky curtains that hid the dressing rooms.
“Don’t be a stranger,” Mama Ree called as she futzed with the mic stand.
“I won’t,” Billie lied, and then she caught it – the side eye. Mama Ree was holding back.
The partition fell behind her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Matty’s office was down a dark hallway and past the staff restrooms. On the walls hung framed photos of the Malta’s more prestigious visitors. Unlike Nagel’s, which only got C-listers to eat there, the club had attracted the likes of movie stars and singers and a few members of the Sopranos cast, who had scribbled Bada Bing on their headshots in gold Sharpie, which was the most Jersey thing Billie had ever seen. There were even a few pictures of Bergen County’s finest, their arms draped around Neil Goff as if he was their best friend. In one of those photos, Billie spotted Gramps’s buddy, Ken Greenberg, who had been retired from the force for close to thirty years.
