Текст книги "Flat Spin"

Автор книги: David Freed

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

“Suicide bombers who don’t know they’re suicide bombers,” Czarnek marveled. “What will they think of next?”

“Back in the day, nobody in their right mind wanted the job,” I said. “Now, they grow on trees. Amazing what seventy-two virgins’ll buy.”

* * *

Morning overcast had given way to wispy cirrostratus and anemic sunshine by the time we left the coroner’s office. An afternoon storm was moving in. Maybe this one would bring real rain.

Czarnek said he wanted to interview Bondarenko’s widow and wanted me to go with him.

“She knows you,” the detective said. “She might be more willing to talk with you there.”

I didn’t relish the idea of having to be there when he informed her that her husband was dead, and told him as much. Czarnek offered to buy me lunch in exchange. The best Italian food in Los Angeles, he said. Who was I to say no?

We took surface streets skirting the Golden State Freeway up to the working class enclave of Lincoln Heights on the eastern fringes of Chinatown, a five-minute drive. To the north, the undulating peaks of the San Gabriels wore a fresh dusting of white. The snow line ran in precise parallel to the dun-colored elevations below, as if some giant artist had drawn it with a straight edge across the south face of the mountains. Czarnek wheeled across opposing traffic lanes and into a small lot next to an Italian deli made of cinder blocks. Two unmarked detective cars and four LAPD black and whites were already parked there.

An Italian lady who looked to be about as old as Mrs. Schmulowitz sat on a stool behind the cash register. She smiled at Czarnek as we walked by like she knew him. The tables were covered with red and white checkered plastic cloths and occupied by cops hunched over sausage sandwiches and plates heaped high with steaming pasta primavera, all talking and laughing. A few glanced at us as we walked in, nodding politely to Czarnek, then sizing me up as if to say, “Who’s the perp?”

We waited inside the door for a spot to open up.

“Popular place,” I said.

“We get a discount, half off,” Czarnek said. “Used to be, a cop couldn’t pay for a meal in this town, but those days are long gone.”

Two bellied detectives vacated a table in the rear near the kitchen and ambled past, toward the cash register. The one who wasn’t paying the check rolled a toothpick out of a dispenser on the counter.

“Where’s that crazy partner of yours?” he said to Czarnek.

“Mental health day.”

“How’re things up in Valley Bureau?”

“Can’t complain,” Czarnek said.

“Beats working for a living.”

“Does most days.”

“Keep your powder dry, Keith,” the detective said as he pushed open the door.

“You do the same, Manny,” Czarnek said.

The old lady behind the cash register handed us each a plastic laminated menu and gestured toward the open table. There was a plastic potted geranium on it and a candle in an old Chianti bottle, its sides caked with dried candle wax like frozen, multicolored waterfalls. We waited until the busboy finished wiping down the tablecloth, then sat.

Czarnek spat his gum in a paper napkin. The waitress waddled over with two green plastic water glasses and a red plastic basket lined with a green paper and piled with warm garlic bread. I ordered the eggplant. Czarnek went with chicken piccata and a side of fried mozzarella sticks.

“Those things’ll kill you,” I said of his choice in appetizers.

“Hey, I quit cigarettes. You gotta croak of something.” He got out a pen and a thin reporter’s notebook. “I need to know what you know about this Russian connection to Echevarria,” he said.

I told him what I knew of Bondarenko’s ties to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, of Carlisle’s plans in Kazakhstan with Tarasov, the Russian oilman, and Tarasov’s own purported ties to Russian intelligence. I told him about Janice Echevarria’s husband, Harry Ramos, and the possible interest Ramos shared with Tarasov and Carlisle in the Kashagan oil field. I described the nonchalant way in which Carlisle had reacted when I told him I knew that Echevarria had been to Kazakhstan a week before his death, and Carlisle’s flip-flop, how he’d first paid me to brief the LAPD on Echevarria’s true work history, then demanded I stop asking questions.

Czarnek looked up from his notepad.

“How much did he pay you?”

“Twenty-five large.”

The detective sat back in his chair like I’d just informed him the Tooth Fairy wasn’t real. “Jesus,” he said, “if that were to ever make it into open court…”

I ate some garlic bread and licked the olive oil off my fingers.

“Why do you think Carlisle wants you to back off?” Czarnek said.

“Theory one: He’s afraid my digging around might blow his chances of scoring big in Kazakhstan. Theory two: He’s somehow involved with Tarasov in Echevarria’s murder.”

“What about Baskin Robbins’ murder?”

“That’s theory number three.”

I didn’t volunteer my theory number four: that Carlisle feared I might incriminate his daughter and assistant, Miles Zambelli, in an ongoing murder investigation. While I doubted that Savannah’s one-night stand prompted Zambelli to kill Echevarria in some kind of jealous rage, I couldn’t very well tell Czarnek about their tryst without implicating them both. I may have been bitter over what my ex-wife had done to me years before, but I wasn’t that vindictive. I let it go.

“Carlisle’s personal assistant banged your ex-wife,” Czarnek said matter-of-factly. “That’s why Echevarria walked out on her. But I assume you knew that already, right?”

“Savannah must’ve told you.”

“She told me about her father paying you to talk to us, too.” Czarnek reached for the bread basket. “I don’t see Zambelli capping Echevarria. Not the type, not on paper, anyway. Now, this Russian, that’s a different story. Echevarria’s son, too. We got multiple witnesses that put the kid at Echevarria’s apartment the night before. They were arguing, him and his old man.”

“The kid was in Oakland the night of the murder,” I said.

“So he says,” Czarnek said.

The waitress brought our meals. Czarnek insisted it was the best chicken piccata he’d ever eaten. My eggplant tasted like something Jeffrey Dahmer might’ve kept in a Tupperware bowl in his freezer.

SIXTEEN

Anya Bondarenko took the news of her husband’s death stoically, like a spouse who understood intuitively that the man she’d married years before was not destined to share with her the journey into old age. “At least,” she said, pouring herself more vodka, “he was not found fucking other woman.”

Czarnek asked if she or her late husband knew or had ever heard of Pavel Tarasov. The name rang no bell, she said, nor did Arlo Echevarria, or Gil Carlisle.

“What about Harry Ramos?” I said.

“Who?”

“Harry Ramos.”

“Harry Ramos… Harry Ramos.” Gennady Bondarenko’s widow lit a Virginia Slim and let the smoke settle in her lungs, giving her time to run the name through the Rolodex in her head. “I know this name,” she said.

She crossed from behind her late husband’s desk to the office safe from which she extracted a file folder with what looked to be various business-related correspondence. She licked her thumb and carefully perused each document before finding the one she was looking for, then handed it to me without comment.

It was a month-old letter thanking Gennady Bondarenko for his interest and possible investment in a limited partnership that was acquiring drilling rights in the “exciting” Kashagan oil field of Kazakhstan. The letter was cosigned by the partnership’s legal counsel, Miles Zambelli, and its resident business agent, Harry Ramos. I gave it to Czarnek to read.

Anya Bondarenko took another drag from her cigarette. “This Harry Ramos, he comes to see Gennady. Very fancy. Big song and dance. ‘We will make millions in this oil. Buy big house next to J.Lo,’ he tells Gennady. Gennady says we will invest our savings in this oil. I say, ‘No, this is very, very bad idea.’ We should buy Quiznos franchise in Tarzana. We fight. Back and forth. All night. Gennady will not listen. Then, he tells me he must go to see somebody on Fairfax. One hour later, he is back, his face white, the blood gone. He tells me, ‘Forget the oil. We will buy the Quiznos.’ But now…” Tears filled her eyes.

I asked her who her husband went to see that night. She shrugged.

“Gennady never said.”

* * *

The Hollywood Freeway was anything but free. Czarnek tuned his car radio to a news station with traffic reports every ten minutes. The radio let us know all about road conditions in south Orange County and east to the Inland Empire, but not word one on why the 101 was a parking lot. Gridlock in central Los Angeles at any given hour of the day apparently had stopped being news long ago.

“Might as well be in goddamn prison,” the detective said, chewing the hell out of his gum, fingers strumming the top of his steering wheel impatiently.

Fed up, he switched on the car’s flashing police lights and spun the wheel hard, wedging his unmarked Crown Vic between the stationary traffic to our left and the barrier wall to our right, its segmented concrete dividers streaked with scrape marks left by other, lesser drivers who’d tried the same maneuver and failed. We drove the shoulder that way for nearly a mile, exited onto Beverly Boulevard, and took surface streets into the hills, up to Savannah’s house.

Czarnek dropped me off outside the gate. He said he and his partner would be taking a hard look at Harry Ramos, Zambelli and Tarasov as suspects in the homicides of Echevarria and Bondarenko.

“I still don’t see it,” Czarnek said as I got out of the car.

“See what?”

“All that spook shit you told my partner and me about when we were up having lunch in Rancho Bonita. Government agent. Taking out high-value targets. Doing the Lord’s work. I mean, I’m looking at you and there’s a disconnect there. You don’t look the part, you or Echevarria. James Bond, now he looked the part.”

“James Bond wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.”

Czarnek smiled. “Behave yourself, Logan.”

“Fair skies, Detective.”

He drove on. I pressed the intercom button on the speaker box beside the gate.

“Yes?” The voice sounded young and Latina.

“Cordell Logan to see Ms. Echevarria.”

The gate buzzed and swung open. I walked up the drive. There was a metallic silver S-Class Mercedes parked in front of the house. The woman whose voice I heard on the box was waiting for me on the front steps. She said her name was Alameda Guzman, Savannah’s housekeeper. Mid-twenties. Big horsy smile. Size 00 jeans. Glossy black hair down to the small of her back.

“Mrs. Echevarria has told me much about you,” she said.

“All lies.”

“She’s with a patient right now. Would you like to come in and wait?”

“A patient. Right.”

“Actually, we were just finishing up,” Savannah said, emerging from the house.

You would’ve never guessed from her ebullient mood that her life at that moment was anything but perfect. With her was a baggy-eyed, olive-skinned man in his mid-forties who looked like a walking billboard for Brooks Brothers Friday Casual. His yellow, monogrammed, button-down shirt was tucked into a pair of indigo, dry clean-only jeans with knife-edge creases. He was toting an eel skin briefcase in his left hand.

“Cordell Logan,” Savannah said, making introductions, “Danny Katz.”

Katz’s grip wasn’t a handshake; it was a Herculean test of wills. His eyes held steady on mine as he tried to crush my fingers.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Logan.” The accent was South African.

“Mr. Katz,” I said, squeezing harder.

He gritted his teeth, smiling through the pain, and finally let go, hoping Savannah didn’t notice him rubbing the circulation back into his hand.

“Danny’s a new client,” Savannah said proudly. “He needed help with some time-management issues, to get his priorities squared away and his life back on track. So I told him, ‘Sounds to me like what you need is a life coach.’”

“That or a nagging ex-wife,” I said.

Savannah smiled but it looked more like a death threat.

I asked how they met.

“We were at the Beverly Center,” Danny said. “I was backing out of a space and accidentally scraped her bumper. I left a note apologizing, with my number. I felt so terrible.”

“He not only covered the repairs to my car,” Savannah said, “he insisted on giving me free dry cleaning for a year. Danny owns a dry-cleaning shop.”

“Seven actually,” he said, correcting her.

“Seven? Wow. How do you stand that kind of excitement?”

Katz didn’t appreciate my humor. “And what is it that you do, Mr. Logan?”

“Me? As little as possible.”

He smiled thinly, turned to Savannah and shook her hand. “A most productive meeting. I trust we can do it again soon.”

“Anytime. Call me.”

He nodded curtly to me, eased himself into his Mercedes and drove away. Alameda went back inside. Savannah’s hands were on her hips. She was pissed at me. So what else is new?

“Why do you have to be such an overbearing dick all the time?”

“How long have you known this guy?”

“I don’t know. A couple weeks. So what?”

“He just happens to run into your car and leaves you a note? You don’t know what his story is, Savannah. He could be anybody. Who else are you planning to let just waltz in here – Jack the Ripper?”

Buddhists don’t believe they’re punished for their anger. They believe they’re punished by their anger. At that moment, I was being punished by both. I unloaded on my former wife like a drill instructor addicted to Red Bulls. Wasn’t she the one who said she was getting strange phone calls and afraid someone was shadowing her? Wasn’t she the one who said she feared for her safety and mine?

“You have no situational awareness,” I said, “and that can get you killed.”

“You’re being irrational.”

“I’m being irrational? Who showed up unannounced at my apartment armed like Annie Oakley because they were so goddamn scared? You act like it was all a bad dream. Everything’s peachy once more in the fairy-tale land of Savannah Carlisle Echevarria.”

“Danny Katz is a dry cleaner. Let me repeat that: a dry cleaner. Not a murderer.”

“Did I or did I not instruct you to lock your doors?”

“You’re not my boss, Logan! We’re divorced, remember?” She stormed inside her sumptuous house, slamming the door behind her.

I paced the front lawn, trying to chill out. She was right about one thing: I was irrational. All that morning, when I wasn’t staring inside charred human remains at the coroner’s office and helping the LAPD with investigative leads, I’d been thinking about Savannah. She said she’d be waiting for me when we parted company outside the West Hollywood jail. In my anticipation and excitement, I had somehow gotten it into my horny schoolboy head that “waiting for me” meant more than it apparently did. Not that I ever expected her to meet me at the door naked. Then again, maybe I did. Hey, I’m male. But the one thing I definitely hadn’t expected was being greeted by an alleged dry cleaning magnate who resembled any number of Mossad and South African field agents of questionable loyalty who I used to cross paths with all the time. Maybe that’s what set me off, the way Katz looked. Hell, he probably was who he claimed to be – a nice, hardworking dry cleaner. Took pride in his work. Got the tough stains out.

I could’ve told her that I was sorry, but I knew that would be a giant time-waster. The Savannah I’d been married to was the kind of woman who took her time forgiving and forgetting – time being measured in weeks and sometimes months, depending on the perceived degree of transgression. Nothing in her behavior suggested to me that she had changed since our divorce. I was in for the cold shoulder, the silent treatment. I didn’t need any more of that. I got more than my share from Kiddiot.

Alameda emerged from the house to ask if I wanted a cold drink. What I wanted was a lift back to Rancho Bonita. She said she’d convey my request and went back inside. I could hear Alameda’s singsong words, muffled through the walls of Savannah’s nouveau riche villa paid for with her daddy’s money.

“You want to go back to Rancho Bonita?” Savannah said as she flung open the front door moments later and charged down the steps toward me. “Go on! Leave! Get out of my sight.”

She hurled her car keys at me, turned and marched back up the steps. The front windows rattled from the concussion of her slamming the door behind her.

I wished in that moment there was a way to rewind time. If only I’d checked the “Sorry, Can’t Make It!” box on the RSVP to the wedding of my old academy roommate instead of the box that said, “We/I’d Love To Come!!!” If only I had ducked out of the cathedral before the reception, before the buffet line, before divine providence compelled me to glance up from the sushi rolls I was piling on my plate and across the crowded catering hall – clichéd, I admit – there to meet the gaze of the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. If only I had gone and sat down and enjoyed my postnuptials nosh, or chatted up the minister or the bride’s mother. But by that point, I was on autopilot. Savannah Carlisle was engaged in conversation with some nerdy civil engineer doing his best to impress her with all the thrilling details of his latest highway drainage project. She was sipping a Manhattan and trying not to look bored as he blathered on.

“I came over here to ask you if you wanted a drink,” I said to her, ignoring the engineer, “but I have to tell you something right up front: I’m a little concerned.”

“Concerned about what?” she said, like I was about to ask her to donate one of her kidneys to me.

“Hey, buddy, we’re talking here,” the engineer said.

“We were just wrapping things up,” Savannah said to him with a polite smile.

The guy got the hint and retreated to the buffet table. She turned back to me.

“Concerned about what?” she repeated.

“Where all this is headed.”

She gave me a sideways glance. Intrigued but trying not to look like it. “Excuse me?”

“We talk, have a couple of drinks. You give me your number after I get up the nerve to ask for it. I wait the requisite number of days, then call. We go catch a flick, maybe grab a burger afterwards, get past all those pre-game sexual jitters, jump in the rack, and quickly develop one of those deeply satisfying emotional relationships that transcends the mere physical. We realize in short order that this thing has soul mate written all over it, so we decide to cohabitate. Next thing you know, we’re shopping for rings and swapping ‘I do’s.’We buy us a little house in the ’burbs. Picket fence, gardenias, the whole nine yards. You want a family, I want my own airplane, but, hey, what I want more than anything is to make you, the love of my life, happy. So we get pregnant. Now I’m resentful as hell of all the time you’re devoting to little Cordell junior. The romance fizzles. We knock out another kid or two, hoping to save the union, only now I’m putting in sixty hours a week to pay for all the violin and karate lessons, and the new minivan, and the snazzy granite countertops you just had to have. You’re so busy arranging play dates for the kids and playing chauffeur – when you’re not whipping out gourmet dinners that I’m too exhausted to eat after work because I’m slaving like a dog – that you start to let yourself go. Pretty soon, you’re wearing muumuus which, as everybody knows, are a big turn-off for any male who isn’t native Hawaiian. So, to cope with our nonexistent sex life and my male ego that requires constant reinforcement, I bed my buxom personal assistant which, of course, you find out about because I completely suck at lying.

Now we have to explain to our children the definition of ‘community property’ and why Thanksgiving at Daddy’s and Christmas at Mommy’s is really super-fun. It’s just so goddamn tragic. So here’s the deal: if you do decide to talk to me, let’s just keep the whole thing strictly carnal, OK?”

Savannah’s lips curled in a sly smile.

“Roses,” she said, “not gardenias. Preferably yellow.”

We talked until dawn. Two months later, we were hitched.

If only…

I bent down and picked up the car keys she’d thrown at me. A breeze had kicked up out of the west. What few clouds there were in the sky were high and gossamer thin. I would have preferred flying home. My ex-wife’s luxury sedan would have to do.

* * *

The sign said forty miles to Oxnard. The Jag was on cruise control. Traffic was sparse. I sang along to Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “Let It Ride” turned up as loud as it would go. Nothing like a kickass road song and an unclogged stretch of highway to forget what ails you. I belted it out, not giving a damn whether any of my fellow motorists saw me or not.

My phone buzzed. I turned down the radio. Lamont Royale, Gil Carlisle’s right hand man, was on the line. He was curious to know whether the tip he’d passed along, about Janice Echevarria’s engagement ring and the death threat she’d allegedly made against Arlo, had borne fruit.

Janice may have been upset that Arlo Echevarria stole her ring, but she didn’t have him killed for it. Of that I was fairly confident. I was less certain about what role, if any, Janice’s second husband, Harry Ramos, had played in Echevarria’s death – and in that of Gennady Bondarenko. It was Ramos, after all, who had pitched Bondarenko on the merits of an oil venture in Kazakhstan in the weeks before Bondarenko’s death – the very same venture that my former father-in-law, his legal advisor, Miles Zambelli, and Russian business partner, Pavel Tarasov, were now pursuing. The murders of Echevarria and Bondarenko were unquestionably linked – forensics had shown they’d been shot to death with the same gun. But I wasn’t about to get into all of that with the right hand man of the guy who, quite possibly, had orchestrated both slayings.

“Are you asking out of personal interest, Lamont, or on behalf of your boss?”

“Mr. Carlisle has no idea I’m even talking to you, Mr. Logan. I consider him and his daughter family. I’m just trying to help.”

“The police are looking into it,” is all I said.

“Would you know whether they’ve ruled out Mr. Carlisle or Mr. Zambelli as a suspect?”

“They haven’t ruled out anyone at this point, so far as I know.”

“OK, well, whatever. I just thought I’d ask. Like I said, I’m just trying to help, that’s all.”

My phone chirped – a text message from Micah Echevarria. It said, “kneed too talk ASAP.” Proper grammar. The first casualty of the Digital Revolution.

Royale promised to let me know if he came up with any other information. He started to tell me how generous Carlisle had been to him, how he’d saved him from a life on the streets, when we were disconnected. Unreliable cell phone reception. The second casualty of the Digital Revolution.

I returned Micah Echevarria’s text message with a phone call.

“The fucking LAPD’s saying I shot my own father!” he shouted over the phone. “Some detective named Czarnek. I already told them I was in school that night, but he says everybody they’ve talked to was too wasted to remember me being there. It’s fucking bullshit, man!”

“Why tell me all this? I’m the guy you told to go perform a particular carnal act on himself, which, by the way, I’m fairly sure is impossible.”

“Look, I’m sorry, OK? I was pissed. You jumped me and choked me out. What was I supposed to say?”

Micah Echevarria said he’d had time to reflect. We’d watched meerkats on TV together. He liked meerkats. I seemed to as well. Perhaps it was possible that I wasn’t the complete turd he thought I was upon first impression.

“Anybody who likes animal shows can’t be all bad,” he said.

“My cat loves animal shows and he’s beyond bad.”

“Yeah, but he’s just a cat.”

“Good luck telling him that. He thinks it’s his world; we all just live in it.”

“I need you to talk to the cops. Get ’em off my fuckin’ back.”

“They say they have witnesses who saw you at your dad’s place the night before he was shot.”

The kid cleared his throat. “So what? Don’t mean I fucking shot him.”

“You said you hadn’t seen him in a long time. You lied to me.”

“I lied because you came fucking busting into my house! Plus, you said you and my old man were friends. What was I supposed to do? Give you a fucking hug? He abandoned us, OK? He abandoned my mom.”

I told him that I’d seen the clip he’d posted on YouTube. His poem about Echevarria struck me as heartfelt, I said.

“So you’ll tell the cops I didn’t do it?”

“You drove all the way down from Oakland to LA to see your father the night before he died. I need to know why.”

“I wanted to talk to him about a business proposition.”

“What kind of proposition?”

“Are you gonna help me or not?”

“What kind of business proposition?”

He blew some air. I waited.

“A weed dispensary,” Micah said.

“You wanted your father to bankroll a pot shop?”

“For medical purposes. Dude, it’s perfectly legal. Prime location, low overhead. You can make serious bank. He was good for it. He had the coin. That fine bitch he hooked up with after he dumped my mom, she was fucking rich, man. But he wouldn’t listen to me. He said it was a stupid idea.”

I toyed with the notion of setting the kid straight – that “fine bitch” who married his father used to be married to me – but what would’ve been the point?

“So you argued with your father,” I said.

“Yeah, we argued. But that don’t mean I capped him. He told me go talk to my mother if I wanted money. I told him I already did. She thought it was a stupid idea, too. For once, they agreed on something. He tells me I need to get a job, go work for a living for once in my life. Same thing she said. I told him he could go eat his fuckin’ money and rode back up to Oakland. Couple days later, my mother calls and tells me he got shot. I fucking partied all night, man.”

I could hear a diesel engine behind him, revving, and the hiss of air brakes. He was outside a truck stop somewhere. I asked where he was calling from. He said Nevada.

I glanced up in my rearview mirror. A small white car was coming up fast in the left lane. A Honda. With a rear spoiler.

“If you’re innocent, why are you running?”

“I ain’t running,” he said. “I just don’t want to be trying to clear my name from inside a jail cell, that’s all.”

“No such word as ain’t,” I said. “Stay put. I’ll be right back.”

I set the phone down on the center console and watched the Honda converge. Adrenaline sluiced through my veins, a metallic taste on the edges of my tongue. I reached under the driver’s seat where I’d stashed my revolver and wedged it for quick access between my right thigh and the seat cushion. I needn’t have bothered. The white car whizzed past me – a Honda with a yellow Lab riding right seat. The dog yawned as he motored by. I grabbed up the phone. By what manner, I asked Micah Echevarria, did he propose that I get the police off his back?

“My old man said something that night I went to see him,” Arlo’s son said, “something I didn’t tell the cops.”

I waited.

“He said a friend of his got killed. Some guy he used to work with.”

“I need a name, Micah.”

“He didn’t say a name. The guy was from Arizona somewhere. That’s all he said.”

“Did your father mention anybody named Bondarenko?”

“No.”

“What about a guy named Pavel Tarasov?”

“He didn’t talk names, OK? Just that some friend got killed. He said he couldn’t give me any money because he had to pay for a plane ticket to the funeral. But, see, what I’m saying is, if his friend gets killed, then he gets killed, it ain’t me doing ’em both, you know what I’m saying? It’s more like a, you know, one of those things. What do you call it?”

“A conspiracy.”

“A conspiracy. Exactly.”

I told him I’d talk to the police and see what I could do.

It was hard for Micah Echevarria to say thank you. He did anyway.