“Chemoz … ?” Broadway said, furrowing his brow, unable to finish the word.
“Means black-ass,” Emdee said.
“Beg your pardon?” Broadway sputtered.
“You ain’t bein’ insulted. Probably was a black dog. So don’t go sending no letter to them pussies at the NDouble-A-C-P.”
“I want dog back!” She yelled.
Perry looked chagrined and took another step back, glancing at me.
“Your witness, Joe Bob.”
I moved forward. “Mrs. Litvenko, we’re police officers.”
I turned to Broadway and Perry. “One of you guys show her your badge.”
They both pulled out their leather cases, and as soon as she saw them, Marianna Litvenko shrank back into her chair like a vampire confronted by a crucifix.
“Ma’am, this is about your nephew’s murder in nineteen ninety-five,” I said.
“I no talk. You go!” she said, her voice shaking.
“Ma’am, Martin Kobronovitch was an L. A. police officer,” I pressed. “This is never going to be over until we catch his killer.”
“No.” Her lower lip started to quiver. “Not again. Please.”
I moved over to her and kneeled down looking into dark eyes.
“Mrs. Litvenko, we’re not here to hurt you,” I said gently.
“Please, I have nothing left. They have taken everything.”
“Why didn’t you tell the detectives who talked to you before, that your husband owned the gas station on Melrose next to the parking lot where your nephew was shot?”
“No good will come of this,” she whispered.
“I know you cared about Martin. The other detective told me how upset you were.”
“Martin is dead. We cannot help him now. We can only save those who still live.”
“Your family was threatened? That’s why you kept quiet?”
She put her wrinkled hands up to her face. “These men, they are gangsteri.”
“Russian Mob,” Emdee clarified. He had retreated to a spot behind the screen door on the porch, where he now stood with Broadway, looking in.
“Mrs. Litvenko, this is America. It’s not the old Soviet Union. We’re not KGB. The police are not your enemy. We’re here to protect you.”
“Did you protect Baba?” she challenged.
“Your husband?”
“Killed. Murdered! Did the police stop that?”
“Ask how he was killed,” Broadway coached through the screen. Marianna looked up, angrily. “They must leave. I will talk only to this one.” She pointed at me.
I walked to the door and looked out through the screen. “Why don’t you guys go get that physical therapy?”
I closed the door on them and turned back.
“Mrs. Litvenko, I want to find out who shot Martin. I know now, he was at the gas station, not the market, when it happened. I understand you’re frightened, but whoever is threatening you, I will protect you. This is America. You’ll be safe. You have my word.”
She shrank further into the upholstered chair and then, the dam broke. Tears rolled down her face. It was as if a decade of anguish was flowing down those wrinkled cheeks. Finally after several minutes, her crying slowed. I found a Kleenex box and gave her a tissue.
“How did Boris die?” I asked.
“He owned six Texacos,” she said, haltingly. “Very smart. He work hard, my Baba. Then one day, the mafiozi come. Boris say one of these men is huge and ugly. They want to buy stations. Boris say, ‘This is Land of Free. We can dream here.’ These men laugh. They tell him he has one week to sell. Boris is very frightened. He tells Martin, who is policeman. But Martin say he can do nothing without proof. Then Baba goes to be checking his two stations in Bakersfield. He is coming home; a big truck swerves and there is accident. Boris only one to be dead.”
“And you don’t think it was an accident.”
She snorted out a bitter laugh. “Martin, he start to investigate after work. He find out man who drove truck is named Oliver Serenko from Odessa. Odessa. This is a place of many evil men. Serenko was never arrested. He just disappeared. Martin, he goes to Boris’s gas station on Melrose. He talk to people, try to find someone who saw the gangsteri. That night, they come again. The manager of our station, Akim Russaloff, he tells me Martin is angry, threatens the men and then the ugly one with the broken face, shoots him.”
“Where is this manager?”
“Disappeared. A week later. Dead.”
She sat quietly now, looking away and remembering. “There was nothing we could do. I could not help Martin then, and I cannot help him now.”
“They forced you to sell all six stations?”
She nodded. “They threatened my sister’s babies. These are men who keep their promises. I had no choice.”
I looked at the guilt in her eyes. That’s why she cried when Cindy questioned her. Martin had been at the gas station because of her. She felt guilty about his death, but could do nothing without risking the lives of her sister’s children.
“Who were they, Mrs. Litvenko? Who killed your husband and your nephew?”
“No. They will kill my grandnieces.”
“You give me their names and I will see that they all get protection.”
I held her hand again. “This has gone on long enough. Only you can make it stop.”
The tears started flowing again. I stayed beside her until she was finished crying. After a few more minutes, she had no more tears.
“Please, Mrs. Livenko,” I pleaded. “It’s time to finish this.”
“Nyet,” she whispered.
Chapter 48
I called Tampa and talked to the chief of police there,” Alexa said. “You were right. Zack had some problems.”
We were standing out on the deck of the safe house. The evening sun was just setting behind a dense wall of brush in the overgrown canyon; sliding below the hills, shining gold on the limbs of a nearby stand of white eucalyptus. Broadway and Perry were in the kitchen opening beers and preparing a plate of crackers and dip.
“What kinds of problems?” I asked, fearing the worst.
“The chief wouldn’t unseal his juvie record, but he remembered the worst of it. A lot of fights, half a dozen D and Ds.”
D and Ds were drunk and disorderly arrests. My own juvie record was three times worse.
“Anything else?”
“Nothing the chief could remember. If he was killing dogs or beating up classmates, it didn’t make it to the booking cage.” She reached into her purse and retrieved some temporary credentials with my name attached. “Here. I figured you’d need these until Personnel gets your new ones made.”
I put them in my pocket without looking at them. No cop likes to lose his badge. It was embarrassing.
Perry brought out the hors d’oeuvre plate and set it on the table with a flourish. It contained a three-by-twoinch block of something covered in brown goo with crackers arranged around the edges.
“I hope that didn’t come out of the toilet,” I said skeptically.
“This here ain’t some possum I scraped up off the highway, Joe Bob. What we got here is a quarter pound a cream cheese with A-1 Sauce. Prime hillbilly cooking.”
“I think I’ll pass,” I said.
Broadway came out on the deck, balancing a tray with beers and four glasses he’d found in the kitchen. All this party formality was because it had finally occurred to these two dingbats that Alexa could actually enhance their careers. As if cold beer and cream cheese would zip them right up onto the Lieutenant’s List.
After the Heinekens were poured, Alexa opened her briefcase and pulled out some folders.
“This is everything from the Russian organized crime databank on the Odessa mob,” she said. “The guys who seem to be currently in charge are the Petrovitch brothers. Samoyla and Igor. They’re both foreign nationals here on long-term visas. Neither of these guys has a wife or family, but that’s pretty standard. Members of the Russian
mafia are prohibited by their criminal code from getting married, seeing or talking to relatives, or even working for a living.” “They’re celibate?” I asked, surprised.
“They can have girlfriends, but no children,” she responded. “They brought a strict thieves’ code over from Odessa. It’s all pretty desperate stuff. Never work, never marry. Never, under pain of death, give truthful information to police. And my own personal favorite; sit in on trials and convocations and be willing to personally carry out all death sentences.”
“Nice,” I muttered.
“The file on the Petrovitches is mostly a lot of surveillance reports and broken search warrants that never came to anything,” she said, handing it over. “Every time OCB thinks they have Iggy or Sammy set up for something, and convince a judge to write the paper, the search always turns up zilch.”
I looked at the file. There was no picture of Iggy Petrovitch, but there was a booking picture of his younger brother, Sammy, clipped on the front of his yellow sheet. If this was the guy who threatened Marianna, no wonder she wouldn’t talk.
He looked massive and his face was a hideous mask of scar tissue, the result of some horrific disaster. Height and weight were listed in metrics courtesy of some European police agency. For the record, he weighed 127.01 kilograms and was 2.032 meters tall. Somebody else would have to do the math, because I don’t get the metric system.
“This guy is right out of a forties horror flick,” I said, showing the shot to Broadway and Perry who nodded, but didn’t take the photo. They knew him from the street.
Alexa continued. “According to the background check from Interpol, Sammy was rumored to have been doing covert incursions and death squad assassinations for some secret branch of the KGB during the Russian war in Afghanistan. Setting bombs in mosques and blowing up buildings. He was driving away from one of his booby traps in Kabul when a Sunni militia man hit his vehicle with an American-made shoulder-fired Stinger. We had some green berets over there advising Afghan warlords. They found him and one of our corpsman patched him up. The world would’ve been a lot better off if we’d just let him die. Now he’s in L. A. and according to our gang squad, Sammy is the Odessa mob’s designated hitter here. He’s dropped ten or fifteen people since he showed up, only we’ve never been able to prove it. Down in Russian Town, this guy’s like the Black Death. They call him Ebalo. It means The Face.”
“Two questions,” I said. “If he was a KGB agent with such a dark past, how does U. S. Immigration and Naturalization let him in here? And since the Petrovitches aren’t citizens and we suspect them of being Odessa mobsters, why don’t we just deport them?”
“Can’t deport them if we can’t prove they’re guilty of anything,” Alexa answered. “The one time we actually tried, it was squashed by INS in Washington with instructions not to pursue our case.”
She leaned forward, picked up a cracker, and spread some cream cheese on it. Then she put it tentatively, in her mouth and chewed. Everybody watched.
“That’s excellent,” she exclaimed.
“Our street Intel puts Iggy and Sammy in L. A. since ‘ninety-five,” Broadway said, picking up the story. “The Petrovitches started out as finger breakers, but were so good at it that within three years, they were promoted to authorities, or brigadiers.”
I must have looked confused so he clarified.
“That’s like an enforcer. In ‘ninety-eight, these two guys staged a bloody coup and took control of the entire L. A. branch of ROC. When I say, bloody, I mean like in, ‘the streets ran red.’ Rumor has it that Iggy is the boss. He was also some kind of covert assassin for the KGB during the Soviet Union. He does the thinking, and Sammy, with his ghoul’s face, does the wet work. During their coup a few years back, we were pulling dead Reds outta every drainage basin in L. A. But like their code instructs, nobody talked or stepped up. We couldn’t prove the Petrovitches were behind the slaughter.”
“Then how can you be certain they did it?” I asked.
“Negative physics,” Broadway said. “Somebody creates a vacuum and you wait to see who rises. The Petrovitches rose like the cream in a root beer float. After they became pakhans, or supreme bosses of the Odessa mob here, everything quieted down again. They started branching out and taking over legitimate businesses, usually by some kind of threat or extortion.”
We all sat and thought about this while a hoot owl, way up the canyon chanted his mournful cry.
“Okay, I’m gonna jump to a not very tough conclusion,” I finally said.
“Get froggy,” Emdee smiled.
“I’ve read some gang briefings, and I understand the Russian mob is very big on gas tax scams. But to run them you need to pump gas, and that means you need to own service stations. The Petrovitches couldn’t strong-arm Boris Litvenko, so they killed him and forced Marianna to sell the six Texacos. Then Sammy shot Martin Kobb when he started looking into his uncle’s death and got too close. A week ago, he gets Andrazack with the same gun. That means Sammy still has that five-forty-five stashed somewhere.”
“Yeah, but how do we find it?” Broadway asked.
I looked over at Alexa. “You could have Financial Crimes open up a gas tax investigation on Patriot Petroleum, I’ll bet a year’s pay it’s a Petrovitch company. Make the warrant for financial records, but tell the judge to write it as loose as he can. It needs to be served on Sammy’s home office as well as his business. Once I get in, I’ll push the edges and see if I can find that pistol.”
“I’ll do my best,” she said. “But there’s no probable cause. I may not be able to find a judge who will write the paper.”
“In the meantime, give the three of us permission to talk to Stanislov Bambarak,” I said. “Sammy’s an unguided missile, but I bet Bambarak’s got big problems with the Petrovitches. The Russians are supposed to be our allies now. Maybe it’s time to put that theory to the test.”
Chapter 49
Stanislov Bambarak agreed to meet us at his house in the Valley at nine the following morning. We arrived in Broadway’s blue Chevy Caprice and pulled into the driveway of a beautiful California Craftsman house on Moorpark Avenue bordered by beds of colorful red and white impatiens brimming behind well-trimmed hedges.
We rang the doorbell, and a few minutes later heard heavy footsteps coming down the hallway, followed by the sound of latches being thrown. The massive wood door swung open and Stanislov Bambarak greeted us in the threshold, holding a long-necked watering can. A wrinkled Hawaiian shirt and stained khaki shorts draped his mammoth body like a badly pitched tent. Watery brown eyes inventoried us carefully.
“Ah,” he finally said, letting out a gust of breath ripe with the tart smell of breakfast sausage. “Da vafli zopas.
“Flying assholes,” Perry translated, and smiled. “You gonna let us in, Stan, or you just gonna stand there and insult us?”
Stanislov stepped aside. Then he held up the watering can and said, “Been feeding my pretties.” This mystifying remark was delivered in perfect tally-ho English, courtesy of some Black Sea KGB spy school where he’d trained so he could infiltrate MI-5 in Great Britain.
Without further discussion, he turned and limped down the hall toward the back of the house. The screen door to the porch was open and he led us across a manicured lawn, past a brand new Weber barbeque with the sale tags still attached. We followed him into a greenhouse that took up most of his backyard.
Glass walls coated with sweet smelling condensation drove the temperature up over ninety. The hothouse shelves were stacked four high, and held hundreds of orchids in every size, shape, and color. A worktable at one end of the shed served as a splicing area where Stanislov was grafting exotic hybrids.
He pointed with pride at a particular plant. “Grew that Pirate King Crimson Glory for the orchid festival in Bombay. Bloody first place.”
I tried to appear interested and impressed, but so far I had absolutely no feel for this guy. So I looked to Roger for help.
“Wha
t can you tell us about the death of Davide Andrazack?” Broadway said, sledgehammering the question with absolutely no preamble.
“I’m a cultural attache working to get the Leningrad ballet and symphony booked into the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for the season. That’s all I’m focused on right now.”
You’re a cultural attache like I’m a proctologist,” Emdee said, showing him a set of brown teeth, but no humor. “You went to his funeral. We got the pictures. So fuck you and your cover story. Keep it up and you’ll be picking pieces of my boot outta your ass.”
I thought they were misplaying this guy, coming on way too strong. Stanislov had diplomatic immunity and wasn’t going to crumble because of threats or fear of an arrest. But maybe that was the reason for Emdee’s performance. Either way, we were already off on this game of bad cop, so I just shut up and listened.
Broadway continued. “For the last month Eddie Ringerman and Bimini Wright have been pulling bugs out of secure computers. They think you and your embassy guys are planting them.”
Stan picked up an orchid. “The only bugs I worry about are mealy bugs and spider mites.” He showed us some outer leaves with holes in them. “Bloody hard to kill what you can’t see.”
“But you could see Davide Andrazack. How hard would it be to kill him?” Broadway challenged.
“Such an unsophisticated question belittles you, Detective.”
“There’s an old rule in murder cases,” Broadway pressed. “A lot of killers seem drawn to the funerals of their victims.”
“I used to have some espionage connections,” Stanislov allowed. “I don’t deny I had a few run-ins with Davide, but it was a long time back. I went because I don’t like crossing people out of my Rolodex unless I’m absolutely certain they’ve actually passed on.
“Sounds like horseshit,” Broadway said.
Stanislov set the orchid down. “Mr. Broadway, you and I have had minimal contact over the three years I’ve been here. I know you believe that I’m some sort of deadly agent, doing bloody what all. But I’m just a boring cultural attache who grows orchids, while trying to foster our Russian culture in America. If sometime, you were to have actual information and not just idle threats, I might make a transaction and trade with you. However, I’m not going to risk my residency in your country because you come over here blathering a bunch of nonsense and accusing me of a clumsy murder that we all know I’m way too smart to commit.”
Cold Hit (2005) Page 23
