“You have the picture?” Tolya asked me.
I gave him a picture I’d had made off the video of The Flowers Show. The man with the gun was in it, but the picture was blurry. Sverdloff put his arm around Olga’s shoulder and sat with her on the cot.
“Come on, Olga,” Tolya cooed and showed her the picture. “Come on honey, come on. I’ll help you. We’ll help you.” He whispered in her ear in the purring Russian he had left on my answering machine. “Tell us. You knew him, didn’t you, this guy? Who is he?”
Tolya was gentle and efficient; he behaved tenderly to her. He was the best kind of interrogator, convincing as a priest, crouched beside her, massive arms around her shoulders as if to protect her. “I promise,” he kept saying over and over. “I will help you. Tell Tolya. Tell me everything.”
She pulled away from him and disappeared into a toilet next to the room. I could hear her puke.
When she came back, she took the picture from Tolya. “I knew him,” she said.
She knew him. Suddenly I understood.
“You knew him in Moscow,” I said.
She nodded.
“What’s his name?”
“He used different names.”
“What’s his goddamn name? You tell me his name, you understand?”
“Give me some time.” Tolya’s hand was on her breast.
I turned away. “I want the name. And she testifies,” I said.
Without waiting for an answer, I turned and left them. The girl was hanging on Tolya’s neck as if for her life.
10
Sunday morning I was back in Brighton Beach when they found Olga’s fingertips in a sealed plastic jar under the boardwalk. I actually went to see Genia, my cousin, but first I made a stop on Church Avenue.
In a laundromat, I found him asleep on a chair tipped back against the wall opposite a row of dryers. Eyes closed, hat pushed forward over his face, he barely stirred. His name was Brunei Dieudonné. A sleepy spaniel lay over his feet.
“Anyone home? Hello?”
“You don’t have to shout, man,” he said, a man waking up from an untroubled sleep. He was Haitian and big, with a sweet face and the ingenuous manner of a charming con man. “What’s up?”
“We need to talk.” I leaned against a washing machine.
“Talk,” he said, as he got up, dragged some wash out of the machine beside mine and hauled it into a dryer. “You got some quarters, man?”
I dug some silver out of my pocket and gave it to him.
“Talk,” he said again, inserting the money into the dryer. He pulled over a rickety bench and we sat side by side and watched the wash go around. The place was full of women doing their laundry and the sour-sweet smell of damp linen mixed with the smell of candied violet breath mints Dieudonné kept feeding into his mouth. Somewhere a radio played and a man read the news in French.
“You work for the security people who do The Flowers Show?”
“Yeah. You a cop?”
“Yes,” I said. I didn’t see the need to inform anyone that I was off the job, not yet.
“You want a candy?”
“No thanks.”
“What you want when I seen ten different cops already?”
“You worked the Teddy Flowers gig the other night. You usually work that show?”
“What night is that?” He delivered a disingenuous smile and ate another candied violet.
“Please. You want to do this nicely or you want to let someone else take over. I’m a very nice guy.”
He shrugged. Cops were a way of life for a lot of Haitians. “Nobody ever told us you got to look at people going out of the studio, you know? What’s the point after they go in? Going in, we say hi, take the tickets. After that, me, I regarding the TV with my dog. We keep a portable in the lobby. Passes the time.”
“You watch The Flowers Show?”
“Most nights now we watch Letterman instead. Better show.” He laughed uproariously. He was a comic. His jowls shook like chocolate pudding.
“What about metal detectors?”
“We don’t use them. Too expensive, they tell us.”
“If I show you, some pictures, could you try a little harder?”
He shrugged again. It was hot in the laundromat and I felt smothered by the smell of wash.
I got out pictures of Ustinov and one of the Ivan. I already knew but I wanted more proof.
He held them up to the light, then turned them around.
He pointed to Ustinov. “This one is the guy got killed. This one’s not so hot. You make it off a video tape?”
“Everybody’s a director.”
“What you want me to tell you? I see a lot of people. Maybe I see this guy. I don’t know.”
“OK. You hear anything. Anything. Give me a call, OK?” I gave him a card with my home number. “OK?”
“OK, OK. Maybe I hear something. I got a friend works over on Brighton Beach. He likes the cooking.”
On the other side of Beverly Road, I left the urban sprawl for the big houses on green lawns where people drank iced tea in the shade, then I doubled back to Ocean Parkway. It was enveloped in Indian summer heat and women in long skirts and wigs, most of them pregnant, stood under the trees and gossiped and men in black hurried to storefront synagogues. It was a scene from another century. For a moment I wanted to drift into it, park my car, sit on the stoop watching the women and kids, smoke a cigarette with the men, crack a joke, read in the numbers and codes of the cabbala the meaning of life, lose myself in a coherent world.
Instead, I went to see Genia. My cousin was unsurprised by the visit, although I hadn’t called her in a year, maybe more. When she opened the door, I saw she was a woman who had given up on surprises a long time ago.
“Hello, Artyom. I will come out.”
Behind her, in the house, I could see the old man, her father.
“Is something wrong?”
“We’ll walk a little,” she said.
“He doesn’t like me because I’m a cop?”
She nodded. Around here no one liked cops.
We walked and I let Genia know I was looking for a new job. I took her into a toy store and let her choose something for the kid, a Barbie, I think, a Barbie bride. The old man didn’t like me. But Genia would tell him what I said and he would sit on the boardwalk with the other old men. The community was tight; the message would be retailed that I was an ex-cop looking for work that paid nice.
“Stay in touch.” I put some money in her pocket. “Be in touch.”
I left her outside the toy shop and went up towards the beach. Up at the Coney Island end, not far from the Cyclone, a small crowd had formed. In the distance I could see cop cars and some blue police barricades. Slowly I made my way, startled by a pack of gulls that burst into the sky suddenly, wings snapping like gunfire. Drawn by the stink of burning flesh, one of the gulls swooped down again onto a grill a woman had going on the beach and snatched a hamburger off it.
Roy Pettus was at the back of the crowd. “Detective.”
“What is it?”
“Bastards.” He was angry. “They cut off her fingertips and put them in a jar. Got rid of the prints.”
“Who was she?” I asked, but I knew. I already knew.
“We found the body under the boardwalk. In a garbage bag. They wanted us to find her. It’s a message.”
“I want to see.”
Pettus looked around. “Come on,” he said.
A couple of hundred yards further along, they were loading a body bag onto a truck. My shoes were full of sand.
“Let him take a look,” Pettus said to the detective in charge.
“Sure, Roy. Whatever you say.”
Pettus unzipped the bag. “You know her?”
“I met her last night,” I said.
Pettus shook his head.
Someone figured out she was going to talk to Tolya Sverdloff and killed her. Olga with the sensational tits and dirty bra got scared because I le
aned on her. I told Roy Pettus about Sverdloff because I wanted something from him in return.
“Do something for me, will you?” I said to Pettus. “Before Sonny Lippert gets wind of this.”
He waited.
“Maxine Crabbe. Let her take a look at the jar. The one with the girl’s fingers.”
“That’s way out of line,” he said, then looked at the sand. “OK,” he said. “I want to know as bad as you. I hope the bastards who did this fry in hell. I just hope to God they took the girl’s prints off after they killed her.”
For about forty-eight hours after I got a good view of Olga’s body parts, I was out of action. I went down with a flu that made my bones ache so bad I could hardly move. I dragged myself to a few appointments I made at the Russian consulate, hoping I’d get something on Gennadi, but I wasn’t in any shape.
By Tuesday, though, I was better. First thing I did was go to see the dentist again so he could finally stick his fingers in my mouth and fix my tooth for good. I lay in the chair while Dr Pelton Crane regaled me with tales of his last ski trip to Taos and I thought how life doesn’t exactly come to a grinding halt because people are dropping dead in Brighton Beach or anywhere else. You get the flu. The dentist overcharges. Women get mad if you’re a jerk. Friends get pissed off if you forget their kids’ birthdays. You get hungry, horny, tired.
In New York, people are always dying, and I think my lieutenant finally wrote me off that Tuesday because there had been six murders inside twenty-four hours and I was still dicking around on leave, as he put it. The lousy heat went on and on and it made people murderous. Over near the river, a gang of kids had gone up to the third floor of a tenement and killed the old woman who kept yelling at them to shut up because they played Tupak on her stoop all night and she was trying to watch Mary Tyler Moore re-runs. One kid was ten. Two blocks away, a crack-crazed man threw his three-week-old baby out the window into a dumpster.
The lieutenant called me and said he needed help, but I said I had other business. I could virtually hear him shrug. Too many excuses. He knew I was considering leaving the department for good. I was almost forty. There was another life I wanted. But even thinking about it was like considering amputation.
Olga was dead; Crowe was gone, so was Zalenko; Saroyan had slipped between the cracks; which left Sverdloff, assuming the other guests on The Flowers Show even mattered, but it was all I had. I had a make on a knife and a photograph made off a video. All I knew for sure even a week after he died was whoever killed Ustinov would be happier if I was also dead. I was moving real slow. It scared me that with the passage of time, the case would go cold. I couldn’t break down doors the way I could when I was official, either. If I didn’t watch it, Sonny would come down on me like a ton of bricks. Just my luck, that night I ran into Sonny Lippert at the Garden.
I had promised Ricky’s uncles I’d go to a Knicks game. They gave up on Rick in terms of sports years ago, so they nab me once in a while. The Garden always stinks of hot dogs and the excitement of these old guys; it’s pretty infectious. “My Uncle Liu dropped dead of a heart attack at the Garden he got so excited during an NBA play-off,” Ricky once told me. “At least he had the dignity to wait till he was near the hot dog stand instead of doing it in his seat.”
Sonny Lippert saw me at the end of his row before I saw him and he made one of the uncles change places. The whole half, he badgered me, keeping his eye on celebrity row, waving at Woody and Spike and all the other suck-ups who were dying for some seven-foot black guy with gold neck chains to favor them with a smile. I hated this part. The slick coaches making moves for the TV, arms raised in salute, bouncing around the sidelines in their Armanis. It was gladiator stuff: everyone wanted blood.
“What the fuck you doing here, Art?” Sonny put his arm along the back of my chair.
“Taking in a game, Sonny. Same as you.” After the Novocaine that morning, my mouth was still stiff as a corpse in full rigor. I drank some beer and tried not to drool in front of Sonny.
“I want you to get your nose out of the Ustinov case. Do you understand? We’re closing in. We got prints. We got the gun. I offered you the gig and you didn’t wanna dance, now I want you off the streets. You mess with this any more, I’m gonna have you disciplined, dig? I’m not having you mess with my case, not you, not Roy Pettus. Oh yeah, I know all that, babe, check it out.” He gave me a sour smile and went off to greet Spike or Woody or some other celeb the starfucking bastard wanted to fawn over.
“I heard it’s not your case any more, Sonny. I hear it’s moved up the ladder,” I said, but he didn’t hear me. I was pissed off, so maybe to spite him, the next morning, I tracked Ustinov’s ghost all over town one more time; there was only one surprise.
11
For twenty years, General Gennadi Mikhailovich Ustinov had kept a charge account at Brooks Brothers. Everywhere his diary said he would be the day he died, Ustinov had been: the Union Square Café with his publisher where a waiter remembered he ate the smoked steak sandwich, the UN mission to see an old friend, public radio, a couple of other interviews, Brooks Brothers. He had made a note to go to Brooks Brothers; he had gone.
“I took care of Mr Ustinov for years. We often shipped shirts to Moscow for him via the consulate. He preferred our Oxford button-downs. The blue was very nice with his eyes,” said a salesman sadly. “He kindly sent me an autographed copy of his book.” He had been in recently, yes, the man remembered. He had come to buy a gift.
“What kind of gift?”
“For a young man. His nephew, I think he said.”
I asked what it was, but the phone rang and the salesman was distracted. After a few minutes, I beat it.
It blew me away that Gennadi had bought me a present. I left without even knowing what it was, robbed of even that. I didn’t care now what Sonny wanted or what creeps I came up against, I had to know why Gennadi died.
I went to Phillip Frye’s office. They said he was out of town, so I went over to the TV studio near the meat market—you could smell the raw meat—and lied my way into Teddy Flowers’ office.
Teddy was on the phone trying to wangle an invite to the White House. He was cool as a cucumber. Most people I like; Flowers I couldn’t stand from the beginning.
You know the kind of person you want to use for a barf bag on a plane? Teddy put my teeth on edge. He was so slick, I felt I could rub up against him and slip right off. Teddy Flowers was the Go Silk of broadcasting. He had a reputation as hardheaded; I guessed Teddy had invented it himself.
Uninvited, I sat on an office chair with a split green leather seat; The Flowers Show went in for the hard news look, you practically expected people to show up in eyeshades. I pulled out a pack of cigarettes.
“Do you mind?” Flowers said. “Secondary smoke.” He hectored me for a while about it. Stupidos are commonplace in his business, but a Teddy is rare.
“I can’t give you much time, but I’d like to help, of course.” Teddy Flowers flexed his pecs. He had on a tight white T-shirt, he wore Topsiders, no socks, and a towel hung around his neck like a boxer after a fight. Before I could open my mouth, he swilled Evian, emptied his mouth in the waste paper basket and started lecturing me again, I can’t remember what about, health care or Newt Gingrich or China. He saw himself as a hawk for truth. I leaned back, lit up and blew smoke in his direction, an eye on the door in case Lily Hanes might pass.
“I never met the general. I was in the Hamptons. We put him on the show because I felt Russia was heating up again. Also a favor to a friend.”
“What friend?”
“A friend in publishing.”
“Phillip Frye, maybe? You two tight? You do each other favors?”
“It’s no secret Phil spent a lot on Ustinov’s book and it was a dud. He needed publicity, I wanted to help.”
“What kind of dud?”
“Phil paid a lot for the book, then he had to kill the juicy stuff, I heard. What I hear is usually right.”
&nb
sp; “Why had to kill it?”
Flowers shrugged.
“Teddy.” A skittish voice came from the corridor.
“My trainer,” Teddy said. “I have to go.”
“Too bad you missed the big night. Great ratings, I heard,” I said.
“I didn’t miss anything. I never do. Now I told you, I’m busy. I know all about you. Sonny Lippert told me. I’m trying to help, but you’re not listening.”
“I’ve been listening for half an hour,” I said. “I want to know how come you use shitty freelance security guards?”
“That’s not my decision. It’s the station. The station takes care of the support staff.”
“What about your own staff?”
“I take care of them. I give everyone a chance. I gave Lily Hanes a chance to do a big show. She blew it.”
“She blew it because a guy got shot?”
“Sure. It was her show. This is the real world. I’m busy. You need me, make an appointment. Call my agent.” He got up and pulled the door open.
“Hurry up, Teddy,” the voice called again.
Lily Hanes looked up. “Hi,” she said without much warmth. She sat in a cubicle, glasses on her nose, cigarette in her mouth, legs tucked under her on an office chair, looking at a TV on a shelf above her, the volume off. CNN ran soundlessly like wallpaper. Lily Hanes’ image came up on the screen.
“I need some help.”
“I’m sorry I freaked out on you. OK? But I’ve got stuff to do.” She glanced up at the set and snapped it off. “Suddenly I’m flavor of the month. Everybody wants me. New York magazine wants to do a cover story. You know what some stylist asks me? Did I take the outfit to the cleaner’s or was the original blood still on? He said blood would be better for the picture. A guy falls dead in my lap and suddenly I’m big time,” she said, more bemused than angry.
“You didn’t answer my calls,” I said.
“I don’t know anything. I told you what I know. Also I’ve been getting some creepy calls. I don’t pick up the phone much.”
Red Mercury Blues Page 8
