With that sentiment hanging in the air, I told them both about Martin Kobb.
31
At three o’clock that afternoon I was summoned to the chief’s office. Alexa met me in the hallway as I came off the elevator.
“Tony came through,” she said.
“Great.”
She nodded, but looked worried. We walked down the hall to where Broadway and Perry were seated in the chief’s outer office with Lieutenant Cubio.
Cubio always reminded me of a Latin street G—short and dangerous, with a dark complexion and spiked black hair. But he spoke four languages and had thrown himself in front of more than one pissed-off superior to protect his troops. He was a Glass House legend and Detective Division fave.
The three men stood as we arrived. Bea Tompson, the hawk-faced guardian of the chief’s time and space had already announced us.
Tony came to the door with his jacket off and motioned us inside. The office was spacious, but sparsely decorated. His gray metal furniture was all from the Xerox catalog and was pushed up against the walls giving the room the look of a dance studio. A huge window that looked out over the city dominated the east wall.
“I read your briefing,” Tony said, facing me. “You guys sure you wanta do this? Homeland plays rough. They can skirt my authority pretty easy. I might not be able to cover you if it gets nasty.”
“Yes sir. We want to do this,” I said, glancing at Broadway and Perry who both nodded in agreement.
“Okay. Armando, gimme your take,” Tony said. “What’s really going on with these humps over at Homeland?”
“Sir, I’ve told you about the embassy and consulate leaks, but bad as that is, in my opinion it’s just a symptom, not the disease. There’s more at stake here than just leaks or who killed this Israeli national. It’s also more than some foreign embassy rogues going off the reservation. Something dangerous is shifting the ground, and we’re completely in the dark. We gotta find a way to get in the game or risk being set up and embarrassed.”
Tony looked at me then held up my case notes. “Your brief says you think there may be a roving bug planted on the three of you. Is that right?”
“That’s what Roger and Emdee think.” We told him about finding the transmitter on the Fairlane and our suspicions that it was planted by the feds.
“Man, I’ve got a big problem with that whole new roving bug idea,” Tony said. “How do you supervise it?” He looked at Alexa. “You got an electronic sweep going on our shop? Computers, phones, everything?”
“Yes, sir. Sam Oxman in the Electronic Services Division is handling it. Top priority. I had him sweep your office first thing this morning. So far he’s found nothing.”
Tony looked at us for a long moment, rocking back and forth on oxblood loafers that were shined to a diamond brilliance.
“Okay, good,” he finally said. “I’m gonna authorize you guys to work on the Martin Kobb murder. I agree something ain’t right here. I’ll tell ya this much. If we find bugs in this building, I’m gonna go ballistic. If the FBI or anybody else in the Justice Department is planting bugs on a sister agency, then all bets are off. Whatever happens from this point on, only the six of us will be involved. I want everybody to keep your phone and e-mail communications to a minimum, and if you do use ’em keep it vague. Talk between the lines until our electronic sweep is complete. Also, we’ve got some new scrambled SAT phones in ESD. They’re state-of-the-art and can’t be breached. Lieutenant Scully will get one for each of us. We gotta assume we’re wide open here. Only discuss the case outside this building or on those secure ESD phones.”
“Sir?” I said, and Tony turned to face me.
“I need to be reassigned off the Fingertip task force. Agent Underwood has me on files and communications. I’m not supposed to leave the building.”
“Pissed him off, didn’t ya?” I didn’t answer, so Tony said, “Okay. You’re reassigned. Where’s your partner? You probably want him on this with you.”
I looked over at Alexa.
“He’s on medical leave right now. I don’t think he’s currently available,” she said.
“Alright. Shane, you’re temporarily reassigned to CTB. You’ll work out of their offices under Lieutenant Cubio’s supervision. That’s it,” Tony said.
We waited in the hallway outside the chief’s office while Alexa remained behind for a short operations meeting.
Cubio was frowning. “I don’t like R. A. Virtue,” the lieutenant said. “Never trust some asshole who uses initials instead of a name. Besides that, he’s got a very unique take on the law.” Not exactly news to three cops who just spent ten hours locked up in the Tishman Building.
The chief’s door opened and Alexa came out. “Okay, it’s done. I’ll notify Underwood.”
I headed down to CTB with Roger, Emdee, and Armando.
“You really think somebody has a wire inside this division?” the lieutenant asked, as we entered his office. He started scanning the walls as if some high-tech bug might actually be beeping there, ominously.
“Could be,” Broadway said.
“Then let’s get outta here until ESD finishes with this floor.”
He led us down to the lobby and half a block away to an outdoor restaurant. We sat on hot metal stools in the late afternoon sun and ordered coffee.
“One thing I want you guys to know,” Cubio said. “Whatever is happening with Homeland, there’s still a dead patrolman in the mix. When a brother officer gets shot somebody’s got to pay the price.” His face hardened. “Kobb’s murder might be ten years old, but somebody has to go down for it.”
32
The next morning, while Broadway and Perry ran an extensive background on Davide Andrazack, using something they referred to as covert resources, I visited the Records Division on the third basement level of the Glass House and started digging out the case notes filed by the two sets of detectives who worked on Kobb’s murder. In 1995 nobody filed old cases on computer disks so there was a ton of paper.
The two primaries who caught the original squeal were Steve Otto and Cindy Blackman from the Internal Affairs Division. Back then IAD handled all cop killings. Under the current scheme, police officer shootings were investigated by Homicide Special. Otto and Blackman were finally replaced after the ’01 reorganization, and Al Nye and Salvador Paoluccia from Homicide Special got the case.
That was before I was transferred here, but I knew Sal from my time in the Valley. He had a good sense of humor, loved baseball, was a popular guy, but was sort of a screw around. He was no longer assigned to Homicide Special.
I found a desk and started plowing through the reams of case notes. Otto and Blackman were thorough and meticulous. Detective Blackman had neat handwriting with a slight, backward slant and she drew cute, feminine circles over her Is, something I’m sure heckling fellow officers had broken her of by now. Otto printed in bold, angry, slashing strokes. You could tell a lot about detectives from their paperwork. It was apparent from the thorough nature of their notes that they had desperately wanted to clear this case and had worked it vigorously.
In 2001, Paoluccia and Nye took over. By then it was officially a cold case—a grounder that had rolled foul. Nobody wanted it because there wasn’t much chance it would ever be solved. Sal and Al had done what is known commonly in police parlance as a drive-by investigation. Their notes and case write-ups looked slap dash. What it amounted to was they had blown it a kiss and moved on. Kobb’s wife had left L.A. after his death and gone back to Iowa. She died a year later of ovarian cancer.
Even though I knew Detective Paoluccia, I decided I’d skip getting in touch with Sal and Al and would contact the more thorough team of Otto and Blackman.
As I paged through Detective Blackman’s background notes some interesting things caught my attention. First and foremost, Martin Kobb was a second-generation Russian-American. His original family name, before it was shortened, had been Kobronovitch.
First I find
Andrazack, a dead Russian dumped in the river. Then ex-KGB agent Stanislov Bambarak comes limping into his funeral on swollen ankles to make sure Andrazack’s actually dead. Now I find out Kobb was Kobronovitch, and was killed outside a Russian market ten years ago with the same gun that got Andrazack. Way too claustrophobic and way too many Russians. I made a note to follow up on that.
Next I read Blackman and Otto’s initial piecing together of the incident. It was pretty much the same as the case summary, but with a few more details. Kobb had been shot off-duty in the parking lot of a specialty market in Russian Town at around 7:50 P.M. on June 12, 1995. A Monday night.
According to his family he liked to cook old-country style. He had gone grocery shopping and stumbled into a burglary in progress. Yuri Yakovitch, owner of the Russian market, who everybody called Jack, had apparently left the cash register where he normally worked, and gone to the loading dock to supervise a vegetable truck delivery. Yakovitch said he was in the market alone because his regular stock boy was ill. He thought he had a pretty good view of the front of the store and his cash register from the loading dock, but he somehow missed the burglar and Kobb when they entered the market.
The burglar had a gun, but apparently ran, leaving the money behind, when Kobb pulled his off-duty weapon. They ended up in the parking lot where Kobb was shot in the northeast corner. He died next to a fence that backed up to an adjoining Texaco station.
Yuri, a.k.a. Jack Yakovitch, stated he hadn’t seen the burglar, but had heard a single shot and ran through the market into the parking lot, where he found Kobb dying. He never saw a getaway car.
The lack of any witnesses stymied the investigation. Because a cop died, the case remained active until ’98 when it was officially marked cold.
Given the dearth of material, there was actually damn little here to work with. Since the case was unsolved, I really hadn’t expected much. But I knew for the most part, we would be coming at this through the Andrazack killing anyway.
I made copies of the top sheets and the crime scene diagrams and handed all the rest of the material back to the clerk. I also put in a written request for the murder book, which had been sent back to Internal Affairs Division where the case originated.
Next I decided to take a run out to the corner of Melrose and Fairfax and get a look at the crime scene. Maybe Yuri Yakovitch still ran his market there.
Over the last two days, the temperature in L.A. had switched from cold and damp, to hot and dry. Sometimes in January, just to remind us that we shouldn’t have built this town in a desert, God cranks up his Santa Ana winds. They come whistling out of the east and drive the mercury up into triple digits. Today was one of those days; bright, hot, and clear, but with air so full of pollen that antihistamine sales would quadruple.
I dialed the main LAPD switchboard from my car and asked the operator to find me department extensions for Steve Otto and Cindy Blackman. Otto wasn’t listed, so he might have retired or left the job, but there was an extension on file for Cindy Blackman. I called and found out she was now stationed in the Central Bureau, Area 13, which by the way, was good old Shootin’ Newton. She was new in Robbery Homicide, but wasn’t at her desk, so I left a message for her to call me.
As I drove, I let my mind crawl back over the festering mound of guilt that I will loosely label My Zack Problem. I didn’t want to leave him parked in the psych ward at Queen of Angels, yet he seemed far worse to me the last time I saw him. I was really worried and searching for some middle ground. I remembered that the LAPD had a psychiatric support unit located somewhere in the Valley. It existed to help suicidal cops or those with drinking problems. I made a mental note to call and see if I could get Zack some help there.
By the time I arrived at the corner of Melrose and Fairfax the air conditioner in my new gray Acura had cranked the interior temperature down to a brisk sixty-eight degrees. I sat in the car with the engine running and pulled out Otto and Blackman’s crime scene sketches of the area. They detailed a layout of the market in 1995, including the spot where Martin Kobb’s body was found near the Texaco station. Now as I looked at the actual terrain, nothing was the same. The corner had been completely redeveloped. A giant Pay-Less Drugstore took up the entire area. The Texaco station was also gone, folded into the huge drugstore complex.
I stepped out of the car into a blast furnace of hot, late morning wind and hurried into the air-conditioned drugstore. Nobody working there was older than twenty-five. Memories were short.
“Only been here since April, dude,” one guy told me. “We get a lot of turnover.”
“The boss here is a jerk,” a young girl added. “Nobody puts up with that Barney for long,”
None of them remembered the old Russian market. Nobody remembered Yuri “Jack” Yakovitch, or a policeman named Kobb who had given it up in the parking lot ten years ago.
As I trudged back to the car and tossed my coat into the backseat, the name Vaughn Rolaine flashed in my memory again, along with a vague notion of where I’d heard it. My house? The backyard? I made a frantic grab for the recollection and missed, coming up with a handful of nothing. The memory slipped quickly back into the tar pit that sometimes serves as my mind.
33
Cindy Blackman called me right after lunch and we agreed to meet for coffee in an hour at a Denny’s halfway between the Newton precinct house and Parker Center. She turned out to be a tall, slender redhead in a tan pantsuit. After introducing herself, she slipped into the window booth and dropped her purse on the seat next to her.
“I swear traffic is getting to be a bigger bitch every year,” she said. “I don’t know which is worse now, the four-oh-five or the seven-ten.”
In L.A. this is good opening dialogue. We bond over our hatred of freeway traffic. Cindy was a Detective II and since she was in IAD back in ’95, that meant she had at least fifteen years on the job. But she looked about eighteen. Her red hair was done in twin braids and freckles sprinkled the bridge of her nose. An impish smile hovered at the corners of her mouth like a child on the verge of a prank.
The waitress took our orders. Because it was so hot, we both asked for Cokes. After a few minutes of Who Do You Know, where we discovered we’d once had the same, humorless, iron-fisted captain in the Valley, I got into it.
“Looks like you and Detective Otto were all over this case,” I said, setting her notebook on the table between us.
“Didn’t help much.” A frown darkened her bright demeanor; not accepting the compliment, or giving herself much credit.
“As I said, I’m on it now. Third time could be the charm.” I smiled, trying not to sound like I was sweeping up after a bad job.
“I hope you do better than Steve and me, or Sal and Al.”
The Cokes came and we tore the paper off our straws.
“I dropped by that crime scene address. The Russian market’s not there anymore.”
“Yeah, I know. They put up a monster drugstore.” She frowned again. “I hope you can solve it. The Kobronovitch family were nice people. Came over here from Minsk. American dream and all that.”
Cold cases usually don’t get solved because somewhere along the way the investigators have accepted a particular construct of facts that turns out to be false. The trick is to look for tiny holes in logic, and once you clear them away, hope they’re hiding bigger problems.
“If you think back through the case,” I said, “what fact or idea did you come across that jarred your sensibilities before you finally accepted it?”
She sipped her Coke. “That’s an interesting question. What jarred me? Anything? Doesn’t have to be crime related?”
“Yeah, anything.”
She thought for a minute, then smiled. “Well, this is stupid, but Kobb’s wife said he liked to cook Russian dishes and that’s why he went shopping. But it was a Monday and Yuri’s market was all fresh food. Fish, vegetables, everything right from the boat or the garden. Marty Kobb was working patrol, and with a baby coming
, he’d been putting in a lot of overtime. His wife said he was coming home after ten o’clock almost every weeknight, only taking Saturday and Sunday off. So I’m thinking, who goes to a market to buy fresh fish and veggies on a Monday night if they’re working late all week and can’t cook until Saturday? It just didn’t hit me as quite right. I like to cook and I wouldn’t shop five days ahead of time.”
She paused, thinking about it. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean he wouldn’t do it. Maybe he was planning on freezing the food or surprising his wife by taking Monday night off from work to cook. I don’t know. It just felt a little strange. Is that the kind of thing you mean?”
“Exactly.” I wrote it down, but didn’t have a clue how to use it.
She sat thinking some more, then remembered something else. “His aunt was so distraught when we interviewed her, she almost couldn’t talk to us. She would start to say something and then she’d break down into tears. I know families can be close, but an aunt doesn’t usually get that emotional. She was an immigrant who didn’t speak very good English, but they lived a few blocks from the Bel Air Country Club on Bellagio Road. It was a very nice house—not a mansion exactly, but nice. I remember thinking these people were doing pretty well, coming over from Russia and all. My parents were born in L.A. and we didn’t have anywhere near that nice a house.”
“What was her last name?” I asked. I had skimmed some of the notes but didn’t remember seeing anything about an aunt.
She hesitated. “Damn, what was her name?” She snapped her fingers. “I think it’s in here.”
She reached for her spiral notebook and started flipping pages. “Jesus, look at this. I was actually circling my I’s back then. What a ditz.” She finally found the page she wanted. “Yeah, here it is, under V.R. That’s my shorthand for victim’s relative.” That’s why I’d missed it. “Her name was Marianna Litvenko. Her husband was deceased.” She looked up from the notebook. “Not very earth-shattering stuff, is it?”
I wondered if the Litvenkos had a big house because Mr. Litvenko had a Russian mob connection. I thought Minsk was somewhere up by the Black Sea. But I didn’t know Russian geography very well and wondered if it was anywhere near Odessa. Back in ’95, Little Japanese was just getting the Odessa Mob started in L.A., so Blackman and Otto wouldn’t have thought to check Kobb’s uncle to see if he was in Russian Organized Crime.
Cold Hit Page 16
