Flat Spin

by David Freed

“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 smile
d 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.