Flat Spin

by David Freed

  “Forget it.”

  “That crack you made,” he said, “about cutting somebody’s hands off. I’m just curious. What was that all about?”

  “Me flapping my gums.”

  The image of Gennady Bondarenko’s charred carcass flashed through my head. According to the coroner, Bondarenko’s hands appeared to have been removed by a power tool equipped with a reciprocating blade. Like a Sawzall. Robbie Emerson had shot himself soon after arguing with a man who’d purchased such a saw. According to his widow, Emerson had called Arlo Echevarria the night before he died to warn him that someone was out to get him. Echevarria and Bondarenko had been murdered with the same handgun. I was never a whiz at higher math, but I needed no algebraic equation to figure a possible common denominator in the deaths of all three men:

  The guy who bought the Sawzall.

  All I needed to do was find him.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Darkness had descended on the Valley of the Sun by the time I persuaded Ted the Home Depot manager to give me the name and account number of the guy whose stolen credit card had been used to purchase the power saw. Ted expressed concern about violating privacy laws and what his superiors at corporate headquarters might say if they knew that he was passing along confidential information to a non-cop like me. I’d like to think I won him over by my undeniably charismatic persona alone. But my having flown close air-support missions in the Gulf, helping clear the way for ground pounders like Ted, probably had more to do with it than anything else.

  I hoped that the card’s owner might have some inkling as to how it ended up in the hands of the man on the videotape who’d exchanged words with Robbie Emerson, but my hopes sagged after Ted gave me the cardholder’s name: Richard Smith, with no middle initial. Ted said he didn’t have Smith’s address. I’d have to get that from American Express. The chances of Amex complying without a court order, I knew, were zero. The chances of locating someone with so common a name without an address of record, I also knew, were less than zero.

  I was too tired to make the drive back to Los Angeles. I found a Best Western just off the freeway with free HBO and a complimentary continental breakfast for forty-nine bucks a night. Not bad. There was a Taco Bell conveniently situated across the parking lot. I enjoyed a Burrito Supreme value meal, stole a handful of napkins if only to keep in practice, then walked back to my room. Come morning, I’d return to California, pass along to the LAPD what I’d learned about Emerson and his possible connection to Echevarria’s murder, and get back to being a failing flight instructor in serious shit with the FAA.

  My room was spartan but clean. The motel’s walls were thankfully stout enough that with the TV turned up, I almost couldn’t hear the couple next door going at it like libidinous Sumo wrestlers. I took a long shower, toweled off, and stretched out on the bed to think.

  Aliens-obsessed Emma Emerson may have been a few yards shy of a first down, but her micro-expressions—those involuntary, almost imperceptible facial movements we all make that can inadvertently reveal hidden emotions—told me she was telling the truth about not knowing who’d been issuing cashier’s checks in her name all those years. It sounded like Kremlin standard operating procedure to me. “Palm oil,” the Russians call it, relatively small amounts of money paid to a prospective intelligence asset for non-sensitive, often open-source information. The asset figures he’s pulling a fast one over on his handlers. After all, he’s trading on “secrets” that aren’t really secrets. No harm, no foul. Then, one day, his handlers take him aside and give him a choice: Do exactly as we say from now on or we will let the FBI know that you’ve been on our payroll, and you will go to prison for a very long time.

  I knew that Gil Carlisle’s new prospective business partner, Pavel Tarasov, had reputed ties to Russian intelligence. I knew that Carlisle had hired Echevarria to check out Tarasov’s background. Robbie Emerson, according to his widow, had purportedly warned Echevarria that Russians were after him. Now both Emerson and Echevarria were dead. Was it possible that the Russians had Emerson by his short hairs? Did they make demands on him that he couldn’t meet? Is that why he wrote, “I can’t do it, I’m sorry,” before putting the gun to his head?

  Nearly a week had elapsed since my meeting with Carlisle in Las Vegas, when he’d claimed that Echevarria’s investigation of Tarasov’s background had turned up nothing incriminating. But the manner in which he’d said it—rubbing his eyes, running his hand across his mouth—suggested deceit. What, if anything, was my former father-in-law hiding?

  The couple next door was still banging around like walruses in heat. There was nothing on TV. I decided for lack of anything better to do to dial up Carlisle and find out what he really knew. Problem was, the battery on my phone was nearly dead, and I’d left my charger back at Savannah’s house. I’d have to use the room phone. I might as well have been calling Saturn for all I knew about what the call was going to cost me. What the hell. It’s only money. At that moment, anyway, thanks to Carlisle, I had plenty.

  Lamont Royale answered the phone. Carlisle wasn’t in. He and Pavel Tarasov, Royale said, were out having dinner and drinks, mapping business strategy.

  “Is there something I can help you with, or a message you’d like to leave?”

  “Just have him call me back if he gets in before midnight.” I gave Royale the number and the extension to my room.

  “Area code six-oh-two. That’s what, Arizona?”

  “I’m in Phoenix.”

  “I could never live there,” Royale said. “Too hot in the summer.”

  “Right. Like Vegas is the North Pole.”

  He laughed politely. “I’ll tell Mr. Carlisle you called. Have a wonderful evening.”

  The grunting and moaning emanating from the love fest next door sounded like Chewbacca from Star Wars times two. I turned off the lamp and tried to sleep.

  The free continental breakfast was the usual assortment of stale donuts, soggy Danish, dry cereal in little boxes, mealy apples, overripe bananas, a machine dispensing watery fruit drinks, and coffee that tasted like you could strip antique furniture with it. My fellow travelers and I sat in the motel’s dining area and ate in glum silence, avoiding eye contact.

  I was polishing off a Styrofoam bowl of Raisin Bran when Pavel Tarasov walked in. With him were two knuckle draggers in black leather jackets, both working hard to look like the badasses they wanted everyone to think they were. I sat back a little, pressing into the seat back, making sure my revolver was still wedged under my shirt in the small of my back, just in case.

  Tarasov muttered something to his bodyguards. They hovered in the lobby while he sat down in the chair across from me and surveyed my meal.

  “Why do you Americans insist on calling it ‘continental’ breakfast? On which continent beside your own would people eat such garbage?”

  “Americans invented the Oreo—and the deep-fried Oreo,” I said. “We’ll eat anything.”

  He smiled. “Mr. Carlisle said I might find you here. The number you called him from, the motel phone, I had my people look up the address and fly me down in my Gulfstream.”

  “Nice bird. I’m prepared to trade you straight across. Your jet for my Cessna. I’ll even throw in the headsets. They’re vintage.”

  Tarasov wasn’t smiling anymore. “Mr. Carlisle tells me you’ve been quite a busy man.”

  “The same can be said for you, running around, killing people.”

  “I have no idea what you are talking about, Mr. Logan,” Tarasov said, his voice pitching slightly higher.

  Either he was lying or a possible alumnus of the Vienna Boys’ Choir.

  He said he didn’t know Gennady Bondarenko or anything about Bondarenko’s murder. Ditto Robbie Emerson. He denied any links to any Russian intelligence agencies.

  Breaking eye contact when answering a question conveys possible deception. With each answer, Tarasov held my eyes unwaveringly, like someone who’d been trained in counter-interrogation techniques.


  “I am an honest businessman, Mr. Logan, and you are ruining my business. You will stop or you will be dealt with accordingly.”

  “Are you threatening me, Mr. Tarasov?”

  He stood and stared down at me coldly.

  “As you cooked the porridge, so must you eat it.”

  “You Russians definitely have the market cornered on obscure proverbs, but I hate to break it to you: Americans don’t eat porridge. We’re all too busy eating deep-fried Oreos.”

  There’s a condescending smirk people convey when they think you’ve made a grave mistake. Pursed lips. A subtle side-to-side shake of the head. These were Pavel Tarasov’s gestures as he looked at me.

  “A pleasure to see you again, Mr. Logan.”

  I watched him walk out of the hotel with his two bodyguards, finished my Raisin Bran, and turned in my room key to the matronly clerk working the front desk.

  Savannah’s Jaguar was parked in the shade, around the corner from the motel’s office. I spent the better part of an hour examining the car for hidden explosives, then drove back to California, checking the mirrors frequently, my gun within easy reach.

  Savannah was standing in her driveway in a black string bikini, wet from a swim. Her top begged to be untied. I fantasized about slowly undoing the towel wrapped about her hips. She was a vision. Goddamn her.

  “How was traffic?”

  I climbed out of her Jaguar and tossed her the keys. “You live in Southern California, Savannah. How do you think traffic was?”

  A six-hour drive under normal conditions had taken nine, courtesy of a jackknifed big-rig that had shut down Interstate 10 in both directions east of Palm Springs.

  “Find anything of interest in Phoenix?”

  “Nothing worth mentioning.”

  “Nothing is ever worth mentioning with you, is it, Logan?”

  “I need to borrow your bathroom.”

  She followed me inside. She would’ve followed me into the toilet had I not shut the door.

  “I let you stay in my house. I cook for you, loan you my car. This is how you treat me?”

  “Do you mind? I’m trying to concentrate in here.”

  She growled with exasperation on the other side of the door and stomped away.

  After relieving myself, I made my way to the guest room, plugged in my phone recharger and checked my voice mail. There were two messages from some investigator named Bob Ayling at the FAA’s Flight Standards District Office in Van Nuys, wanting to set up a meeting to discuss my incursion of the Vice President’s airspace, and no less than twenty calls from television, radio, and newspaper reporters, all seeking to interview me for the same reason. My name, obviously, had been leaked. They could all take my fifteen minutes of infamy and shove it for all I cared.

  I returned the FAA guy’s call. He wasn’t in. I left word on his machine. I called Czarnek. He wasn’t in, either. My phone beeped with an incoming call. I hit the green button.

  “Skeeter’s Towing Service.”

  “Logan?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Marvis Woodley.”

  “I don’t know any Marvis Woodley.”

  “You was by my house last week. Took my twelve-gauge away fro’ me. Remember?”

  Echevarria’s nosy neighbor, Mr. Clean. He of the shotgun in my face.

  “How could I forget. What can I do for you, Marvis?”

  “He’s here, man. Just down the block.”

  “Who’s down the block?”

  “The killer! The dude that capped Arlo.”

  A squatter had broken into a bank-owned foreclosure down the street from his house and was now encamped there full-time, Woodley said. When he ordered the squatter to leave, he ordered Woodley to fuck off, then shoved a pistol in his face.

  “I know I seen this dude somewhere before, right? So I go home and I’m sitting there. All of a sudden—damn!—that’s the fool that shot Echevarria! Same weird-ass walk, same arms. Same fuckin’ dude! I’d swear it on a stack of Bibles.”

  “So call the LAPD.”

  “Fuck that. I didn’t talk to them racist motherfuckers before they stomped Rodney King and I ain’t talkin’ to ’em now.” No, Woodley said, he was going to apprehend the killer of Arlo Echevarria himself. A citizen’s arrest. With me backing him up.

  “It’s a dumb idea, Marvis. A dumb, dangerous idea.”

  “The hell you talking, dangerous? I seen the way you handled that shotgun, man. You got dangerous in your damn blood.”

  I told Woodley there was not one scintilla of evidence suggesting even the remote possibility that Echevarria’s murderer had been a homeless squatter. What’s more, I said, murderers typically do not move in down the street from the scenes of their crimes where they could easily draw attention from nosy neighbors of the Marvis Woodley variety.

  “You can look it up,” I said. “It’s all in Miss Manners’ Crazy Mad Dog Killer Handbook: Socially Acceptable Ways to Murder People and Get Away with It for Fun and Profit.”

  There was a pause. Then Woodley said, not sure whether to believe me, “There’s a fucking book?”

  Savannah appeared in the doorway. She’d changed out of her swimsuit and into jeans and a madras blouse.

  “I’m trying to make a point here, Marvis. Whoever you saw down the street, whoever you think you saw, it’s not the guy who killed Arlo.”

  “Who’re you talking to?” Savannah demanded.

  I tuned her out.

  “You said you and Arlo was buddies, ain’t that what you told me?” Woodley said. “Arlo was military. I was military. You was military—I could see it on you, OK? Military don’t leave a buddy behind. Ever. You know that, man.”

  “I know a detective. I’m happy to pass along your number to him.”

  “I just told you! I ain’t talking to no fuckin’ LAPD—and I won’t tell him where the guy’s at, neither. Now, the way I see it, you got two ways to go. You can get your ass over here and back me up, or you can leave a buddy behind and live with that. There it is. What’ll it be, troop?”

  Marvis Woodley’s logic was as ill-formed as his ambitions to collar Echevarria’s murderer independent of the police. This was no battlefield. We weren’t at war. Whatever bonds Echevarria and I once forged in combat were broken long ago. And yet, on some level that defied logic, Woodley’s sermon resonated. Much as I tried to deny it, part of me did feel like I was abandoning a former fellow go-to guy, however loathsome he may have turned out to be. I felt guilty for reasons I couldn’t explain. If you’re Buddhist, you know that there’s no place for guilt. There’s no place for even feeling guilty about feeling guilty. But that’s how I felt. Guilty as sin.

  “I’ll get back to you,” I told Woodley and hung up.

  “Who was that?” Savannah asked again.

  “Arlo’s next door neighbor. Thinks whoever killed him moved in down the street.”

  “Are you serious?”

  I shrugged. “He won’t talk to the cops. Wants me to back him up so he can make the arrest himself .”

  “Why would he want you to back him up?”

  “Because he’s a fruitcake, Savannah.”

  “I want to go over there.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “What if it’s the guy, Logan?”

  “It’s not the guy, Savannah.”

  “But what if it is?”

  There was no use arguing with her. There never was.

  “Even if it’s not him, I want to see where Arlo died. I’ve never been there.”

  “You can see where Arlo died after you drop me off at the bus station.”

  I started gathering up my stuff. She looked at me disbelievingly.

  “You’re going home?”

  “I did what you wanted me to do, Savannah. I did what your father wanted. More than I probably should have. I’m done with this.”

  “Fine. Do whatever you want.” She curled up on the bed, her back to me, sulking.

  Part of me w
anted to lay down beside her, to press myself into her and hold her like I once did. Another part wanted to scream at her for messing with my head. Love and hate. Yin and yang. I closed my eyes and practiced calming breaths, striving in vain for the tranquility and humility of the Zen master I aspired to be. Accompanying Savannah to see where Echevarria died and convincing Marvis Woodley to call the cops would take an hour at most, I told myself. No biggie. Then I’d be gone, back to Rancho Bonita to resolve my issues with the FAA and back in the air, back to my life. Maybe someday that life would have a place in it for Savannah Echevarria. Agreeing to do what she wanted me to do in this one instance, I realized, couldn’t hurt my chances of that happening. Brownie points, I believe the Buddha called them.

  “If I agree to go over there with you, will you take me to the bus station?”

  “I’ll take you all the way to Rancho Bonita if you want.”

  “The bus’ll be fine.”

  I called Marvis Woodley back and told him I was on my way over.

  “Hooah. I knew you’d come around, motherfucker!”

  “Hooah,” I said tepidly and hung up.

  “Thank you for doing this,” Savannah said.

  I wanted to put my fist through something but didn’t.

  Savannah stood on the sidewalk and quietly cried outside the place where Echevarria spent his last days. Why are people always drawn to places of violent death like murder scenes? Is it the quest for ultimate intimacy, the desire to share in that final awful moment when life ends, to perhaps glimpse whatever there may be waiting beyond? I don’t know what Savannah was hoping to find or what she saw as she gazed at the dumpy little tract house where Echevarria’s life came to an abrupt end. Whatever it was, she wasn’t saying.

  I asked if she wanted to have a look inside. She shook her head no.

  Marvis Woodley spotted us and came over from next door. I made introductions. He told Savannah he was sorry for her loss.

  “Best neighbor I ever had,” he said.

  “Logan says you have information on the man who shot him.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Marvis lowered his voice and said he’d mapped out a plan to capture the suspect. Did we want to go inside to discuss it?