The White Van

by Patrick Hoffman

  “Where’s the money?” said Elias. He figured they could end this if she just answered that question. “Where’s the money?” he asked again with his dry mouth.

  Trammell slowly took his hand away from her face. All three of them were breathing heavily.

  Trammell pushed the gun into her neck like he was going to kill her with blunt force. Elias would later remember this gesture and wonder if it marked the absolute point from which there could be no going back.

  “Okay,” she said quietly. Trammell pulled the gun back an inch. “Okay.” They waited. “She made me do it,” said Rada Harkov in her thick accent. “They said I pay. I didn’t want to. They made me. It’s not my idea.”

  “Who is she?” asked Elias.

  “Sophia,” she said in an exhale of breath.

  Elias watched as the woman bucked up onto her hands and knees. Trammell rose up like he was riding her. Elias watched Trammell’s spine go round, then flat, and he watched Rada Harkov, suddenly strong, rise up.

  Trammell lifted and then drove all his weight into her and they both went toward the front door. Trammell had his left forearm against the back of her neck and he landed with all of his weight on her. Elias heard the sound of her neck popping loud like a branch, and then the sound of the air leaving her lungs like a cough. Her legs went stiff and then soft. She made a clucking noise as she fought for breath. Her neck was broken. Trammell scooted back, then stood up. They watched her twitching. She twitched and gagged for an eternal moment until Trammell grabbed a pillow from the couch, turned her over by her shoulders, and put it over her head and held it down. She shook and shook and then stopped moving.

  He took the pillow off her face. She lay there. The room was dark except for the orange-pink streetlights coming in through the window. Trammell stood over the body and nudged her shoulders with his hand like he was waking her from a nap. Elias realized he had his own hands on his head and he lowered them. It seemed to Elias that they were suddenly in a different room: the sofa had floral patterns, the lamp was crystal, the coffee table was glass, and there was a gas-burning fireplace.

  Trammell bent down near her head and listened for breath. “She died,” he whispered. He looked at Elias and asked if they should leave.

  “Let’s think. Let’s think,” said Elias. “We gotta get rid of the body. Did we leave anything? Did we bring anything in, that we need to take out?”

  “The crowbar.”

  Elias walked over to Rada Harkov and bent down and checked for a pulse. Even with his gloves on he could feel heat coming off her neck. He closed her eyes. He could smell perfume in the air. Even in the dark, her hair was bright red. She still had keys in her hand. He wanted to throw up.

  Trammell sat down on an armchair and put his face in his gloved hands. Elias stared out the front window at the street.

  “Let’s just burn the fucking house down,” said Trammell. It sounded like he was crying.

  Elias tried to list the options in his head: they could burn the house down; steal the TV and make it look like a robbery; drive her somewhere and bury her; drive her off a cliff in her own car; bury her in the backyard; put her in the car and burn the car up. Nothing felt right.

  “We need to calm down and think,” said Elias. “Just take a second and slow down and think.”

  “I’m calm,” said Trammell. It was true, he did appear calm.

  “What the fuck happened? Did you break her neck?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I felt like a little pop.”

  “Okay, so we got a broken neck. Now think. Grab her and let’s take her to the bathroom, we’ll take her and strip her and put her in the shower and make it look like she slipped on the bathtub floor. It happened once at Southern,” said Elias. “Did she scratch you?”

  Trammell looked over his hands and his forearms. “No.”

  “Did you punch her?”

  “No.”

  “Did you bite her?”

  “No.”

  “What’d you do when she opened the door?”

  “I grabbed her and put her in a choke hold. You saw it.”

  Elias looked at Trammell and tried to ascertain the state of his mind. He didn’t understand what happened.

  “Did you bruise her neck?” Elias asked. “Did you bruise her?” he repeated, hoping in some way that by answering the question Trammell might come to realize what he’d done.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “Fuck.” Elias went and peeked out the front window. He got on his knees and looked at her. He got up and closed the blinds and turned the living room lights on, and said to Trammell that this was her routine. He turned the TV on. He examined her neck.

  “I don’t see anything—nothing. Come on, pick her up,” said Elias. He stepped to the front door and locked the dead bolt. Trammell lifted her by the underarms and Elias took her legs. They carried her to the bathroom and set her down on her back and turned the light on. The walls were bright pink. She was lying on top of a shaggy blue bath mat. Elias’s eyes went to a tangle of red hair in a trash bin.

  He pulled off her coat. “Fuck me,” he said as he started to unbutton her blouse. Threads popped as he pulled her shirt up over her head. He lay her body back on the floor and looked at her.

  “She just attacked me,” said Trammell.

  Elias reached under her back and struggled with the bra. His fingers were shaking. It finally came off. He held his breath and tried not to look at her breasts.

  He stood up. “Okay, take her pants off,” he said to Trammell.

  Trammell, businesslike, bent down and took her belt off.

  “You’ll have to put the belt back on them—take the pants off—leave the belt in,” said Elias.

  Trammell shook his head no, and set the belt on the floor. “She shit herself,” he said.

  Elias went to the kitchen and returned with a plastic trash bag.

  “Take them off,” said Elias, gesturing at her.

  Trammell started to take her pants off from the top but didn’t get far. He had to struggle with them, and inch them down a little at a time toward her feet before he was able to pull them all the way off.

  “Why are we doing all this?” asked Trammell.

  “She’s taking a shower. Check her pockets,” said Elias.

  He did. There was nothing.

  “Put the pants in here,” said Elias, holding open the white trash bag. “Her underwear, too.” Trammell pulled off her soiled underwear and put them in the bag. Elias tied the bag and put it on the floor.

  They stepped back into the hallway. Elias looked at Trammell. His eyes were red and filled with tears. His face was slack. He was looking at his feet. He seemed younger, like a teenager. He looked up at Elias and with sudden anger said, “What the fuck you make us come here for?”

  “I didn’t say do that,” said Elias, raising his gloved hands in a calm-down gesture.

  “You saying it’s my plan?” said Trammell.

  “It’s not your plan. Calm down.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “We’re just following leads. Now, if you wanna end this thing and make a call to the San Bruno police department, call the homicide unit, fucking San Bruno whatever, I got your back one thousand percent. But if not, if you don’t want to call them, then we have to think like champions. You hear me?”

  Trammell nodded his head. His face looked like the face of a man who did not know how he ended up where he was.

  “Okay, it’s five till ten, okay? Twenty-one, fifty-five,” said Elias, looking at his watch. “We gotta clean up—we gotta get that lady into the shower, we gotta fucking think about what mistakes we’re making, and we gotta sneak our asses out of this place.” Elias slapped Trammell on the shoulder. “Come on, snap out of it, partner.”

  For a moment Elias reflected on the fact that he had become the composed older partner; he had taken on the role that Sheehan played with him. He felt a small
rush of pride.

  He knelt down next to Rada Harkov’s body. He took her right hand in his gloved hand and checked under her nails. They seemed clean. He checked her left hand. He looked at her neck for bruises and didn’t see any, except for a faint blue one on the back of the neck where, presumably, she had broken it. He looked over her face. It was so strange that she could be dead. Her makeup was thick and she had blue eye shadow and red lips.

  “Okay, bud, give me a hand.”

  They lifted her up and set her into the tub. Her body relaxed into it. They stepped back and Elias turned the water on, thought about it, and turned it back off. “We’ll wait to do that,” he said.

  Elias looked around the bathroom. “You come home and take a shower, what do you do?” He seemed to be talking to Rada Harkov.

  He walked out of the bathroom and Trammell followed. “You walk into the house”—he sounded like a lawyer making closing arguments—“you walk in and take your coat off. Grab her coat from the hallway,” he directed Trammell, pointing toward the coat.

  Trammell left and came back and handed it to him. Elias checked her pockets and put the coat on an armchair. He bent down and cleaned up her purse, which had fallen on the ground. Inside the purse was her cell phone. Trammell watched as Elias pressed buttons and breathed through his nose and looked at the call history list. “Grab some paper from her office,” the older man said. Trammell returned with the paper.

  Elias instructed Trammell to write down the names and numbers as he read them off. He was looking for Russian-sounding names; he found someone named Dmitri Komar. He spelled the name and gave Trammell a number in the 415 area code. He found a Gregory, a Hilda, a Lexi, and then in S’s, he found what he was looking for. “Sophia—bingo, that’s our girl, that’s where the money’s at. Sophia, 415-610-1649. You got it?”

  “Got it.”

  Elias looked through the rest of her call history and didn’t see anything noteworthy.

  He turned toward Trammell and started up again. “She comes in, she leaves her coat, she puts her phone right here.” He put the phone down on the coffee table. “She turns on the TV—already did that. She walks into the kitchen.” They walked into the kitchen. “She goes to the refrigerator, she opens it. She grabs a bottle of chardonnay, pours a glass.” Elias pulled the cork from a half-full bottle, poured some into a glass, and set it on the table. Then he poured the wine from the glass into the sink and looked at Trammell, who seemed to be in a trance. Elias walked to the bathroom and touched the empty glass to Rada Harkov’s right hand, then, to her red lips. He raised the glass and looked at the little red mark of lipstick and wondered whether the crescent was upside down or not—it didn’t really matter, lipstick was lipstick. He looked at himself in the mirror and returned to the kitchen. He filled the glass halfway up again and set it back down on the counter. “She drinks wine,” he said. He raised the bottle, and without touching his lips to it, he poured some wine into his mouth.

  “Okay,” he continued, “I take some leftovers and I set them here next to the wine, but first I want to take a little shower, so . . .”

  They went to the bedroom. Elias threw her shirt and bra into the hamper. “Drawer,” he said, pointing at the drawer. “Grab some clean underwear, can’t have her be all . . . you know, in the hamper,” he finished, pointing at it. Trammell went to the chest of drawers and opened up the topmost compartment and looked at the underwear. He hated Elias. He didn’t understand this. He felt so tired. He looked at Elias and considered strangling him, but instead picked up a new pair of underwear and placed them on the hamper. Elias lifted a white bathrobe off a hook on the door and stepped out of the room.

  They walked back to the bathroom and Elias hung the bathrobe in its place. “There,” he said. Elias took a deep breath. Despite everything, he was enjoying himself. He couldn’t help it. He was scared, he felt sick, he was mad, but he also hadn’t felt so good in a long time. He felt euphoric. I’m the composed one, he thought. He breathed in and looked around. His eyes settled on the window he had come in through. With the light on he could see how the wood had splintered where the latch had given way. He stepped to it and again set the latch back as well as he could. He then grabbed a tube of toothpaste from the sink and squeezed some white paste onto his gloved finger and smoothed it into the splintered part of the sill. He added some more. It looked, at least to the glancing eye, as though it had never been damaged.

  Elias stepped back and examined his work. He turned and looked at Trammell and raised his eyebrows, as though he were saying, “Not bad, right?” Trammell answered by looking away.

  Elias then turned his attention to Rada Harkov’s body. He stared at her. “We gotta deal with her makeup,” he said. The showerhead was detachable and he took it off and turned the water on and aimed a weak stream at her face. “Grab me a pot from the kitchen—keep your gloves on—a spaghetti pot.” Trammell turned and walked to the kitchen.

  When he came back Elias took the pot from him and set it under the spigot in the tub and filled it with warm water. He lifted the pot and poured half of it over the dead woman’s head. He grabbed a wooden bath brush and scrubbed her face with it. Poured water on her head again and filled the pot and poured it once more, and then began to scrub her face almost violently.

  “Don’t fuck her up,” said Trammell. His rage was growing.

  Elias took some shampoo from the edge of the tub and lathered up her red hair. “She was washing her hair when she slipped and fell.” He dabbed little clouds of shampoo on her hands. “There,” he said.

  He set the showerhead right and turned it on. A stream of water fell down onto Rada Harkov’s body.

  “Fucking SOB of a night,” said Elias.

  3

  Two weeks before the bank robbery, the man who had met Emily in the bar, the man who had taken her to the hotel, drugged her, and driven her to the bank, “the Russian” (his real name was Benya Stavitsky), had received his final warning on missed payments from another Russian, a moneylender named Yakov Radionovich. Benya had fallen behind on a loan that originated sixteen months earlier on friendly terms at $15,000 and had grown in further loans, interest, and theft to reach the unfriendly level of $120,000.

  Benya was forty-five years old. He was from Moscow. He bought and sold Chinese merchandise at the Alameda Port. He would take these goods and sell them at a small profit to vendors in different Chinese suburbs—Fremont, Antioch, Richmond, San Jose. If a shipment of Chinese soccer balls ended up sitting at the port, he was one of the people who (through a third party) would bid on it. He fancied himself a businessman, but essentially he was a black market trader.

  The original loan of $15,000 had been taken out in order to buy a thousand cartons of Zhong Nan Hai, Red Sun Edition cigarettes, at a cost of $12,000. The extra three thousand was for rent and car payments. He’d planned on selling the cigarettes for $20,000. Benya had known Yakov Radionovich socially around San Francisco, and had heard people say that Radionovich loaned money. He was also familiar with rumors suggesting that Radionovich was a gangster.

  Radionovich was an ugly man: his face sagged, it was peppered with moles, he was bald, skinny, and tall. His appearance made him seem more bureaucratic than criminal, but whenever Benya had encountered him at weddings or family celebrations, he had always acted rather nicely. The Russian community in San Francisco was large in number, but small in how one would always seem to run into the same people.

  It was at one of these family gatherings that Benya Stavitsky worked up the courage to ask Radionovich if they could speak about “a small piece of business.” Radionovich touched Benya lightly on the arm and looked at him as if he had just received both good and bad news; his eyes went over Benya’s face like a man reading print. He then he pulled out a business card from his jacket pocket and told Benya to call on Monday morning.

  After that first exchange Benya had walked toward the bar feeling especially uplifted, thinking in Russian: That was easy. He also
felt like people at the party were watching him admiringly, as though they recognized two important men discussing important business.

  They met the following Monday at Nefedovna’s Tea Room on Balboa Avenue. Radionovich must have been family with the owners; the restaurant was closed, but the doors had been left unlocked, and Radionovich—smoking a cigarette and talking on a cell phone—was waiting outside.

  Benya arrived at the meeting nervous. Earlier, he had stood alone in his living room and practiced his presentation, practiced the way he was going to carry himself during the meeting, how he was going to ask for the loan. This proved unnecessary. After making many inquiries into the health of this acquaintance or that, Radionovich had simply asked how much money Benya wanted. Benya answered by saying, $15,000.

  The deal was swift and informal. Radionovich gave Benya a piece of paper with the address of an office in Daly City and told him to come there the next day.

  And so, the next day, an uncharacteristically hot one, Benya went to the office on Hillside Boulevard, in Daly City. It was a gray building in the midst of other gray buildings. There was an American name on the door, O’Brien & Associates. The name was printed on the glass, and behind the glass was a dusty plastic door shade. Not knowing whether to knock or just enter, Benya opted for the latter.

  An electric bell rang somewhere. There was no receptionist working. Radionovich came from the back, smiling with his hand stretched out, ready to shake. Benya began to take his jacket off, but Radionovich told him not to bother.

  After exchanging pleasantries, before they could even sit down, the $15,000 was given to Benya in the form of fifteen money orders, each one written for $1,000. There was only the amount written on it, no payee, and Radionovich made sure to point this out, telling Benya not to lose it, because “any soul” could pick it up and cash it if he did. Benya felt a tinge of trepidation as the money was handed over, but he dismissed it as irrational, and put the money orders into the breast pocket of his coat. He asked about interest and Radionovich winced. “No interest for the first two months, after that twenty to thirty-three percent of the loan, per month—typical,” he said with a shrug. Benya suppressed a smile. Two months? He offered to write up a receipt, but Radionovich waved the idea off.