Two Asian guys entered the lounge, ignoring the No Smoking sign and feigning ignorance when the security guard told them to put the cigarettes out. The waitress came back with their orders and Helayne got busy mixing their drinks. "They stare as if they've never seen boobs before, but they're good tippers," the waitress said.
I toyed with the idea of waiting for Helayne to finish, but the drinks and the hour were conspiring to get me in the sack. Tomorrow I'd face Oksana and ask her about the Crawford brothers.
The phone rang at around 3:30 A.M. I must have just fallen asleep because I woke up with a start, the way you do when you're afraid you've nodded off in an inappropriate place like the theater or a meeting. I looked around trying to remember where I was and where the hell that obnoxious noise was coming from. I knocked over the lamp and a water bottle reaching for the phone and caught it on its sixth ring.
"Hello," I mumbled into the dead air. "Lucy, is that you?" I turned on the light and saw the last drops of a two-liter bottle of water trickling into my Nikes.
"Do you know a woman named Lucy?" someone asked, surprised.
"Who is this?" I raised myself up on my elbows, waiting for an answer.
"It's me. Oksana. The bartender?"
"Oksana, it's . . ." The numbers on the digital clock were magnified and distorted by the overturned bottle; I shoved it aside. "It's three-thirty. What is it?"
"I need you to help me find out what happened to Nick," she said.
"I have no idea what happened to Nick." I sat on the edge of the bed and shook the water out of my shoes. "Do you know a woman named Lucy?" I asked.
She paused, as if she was deciding how much to tell me. "We can't talk on the hotel phone. Will you meet me at the casino?"
"Now?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"The night Nick was killed, he left the bar to meet a woman named Lucy."
Seventeen
My sneakers were soaked, so I slipped into the only other shoes I'd packed—the heels I brought to wear with my leather pants. As I dressed, I started to feel like a hooker making a house call, but it was either my nice outfit or cargo pants with heels and that would have been too weird, even for me.
Unlike his counterpart at Titans, the parking attendant at the casino was cheerful and energetic; at that hour of the morning it was downright creepy to be so perky.
"Welcome to happy Hunting Ridge, ma'am." He said it as if "happy" was part of the casino's full name. "Have you been with us before?"
I wanted to tell him that I wasn't with Hunting Ridge and would probably never be and that the last time I was out at 4 A.M. it was with a flashlight and I was looking for slugs, but this time I was meeting a probably delusional woman who thought she knew something about a murder and a kidnapping. But I decided to spare both of us. I forced a toothless smile and fished out a five, hoping for a better reaction than I'd gotten from the attendant at Titans.
"Don't bury it. I won't be long," I said, handing him the folded bill. "Know where the Coyote Café is?"
"Yes, ma'am." He beamed, eager to be of service. I couldn't remember the last time five dollars had provoked such a rapturous response. "Straight in, past the Chilulhy sculpture, then make a left. Have a lucky stay!"
Jeez, what did they put in the water here?
If I was expecting to see glamorous model types and men in tuxedos playing baccarat and passing the shoe, I would have been sorely disappointed. I'd been to Vegas plenty of times when I was in the television business, and although it had changed dramatically in the years since, there was still a frisson of rat-pack glamour if you looked hard enough for it.
Not at Hunting Ridge. The exuberant use of wood, slate, and river stones gave the place the look of an upscale lodge with incongruously placed slot machines and designer boutiques—Chanel and Cavalli sharing space with Squanto and Sacajawea. There were any number of ways to leave your money there.
The Coyote Café's sandwich-board menu was bordered with a blanket pattern and offered, among other things, Chippewa chips and Navajo pancakes. I didn't know where the Chippewas came from, but we were a good two thousand miles from any Navajos. Oksana was behind the sign, pacing and chewing her nails. Then she spotted me.
"It's too crowded in there," she said, walking over to me. "Come this way."
"Oksana. I'm running on fumes. What's all this about? What do you know about my friend Lucy?"
She pulled me over to a bench near a diorama of a Native American village. Every few minutes one of the resin natives offered resin corn to a resin settler who looked suspiciously like Brad Pitt.
"Was she your friend?"
A chill crept through me. "What do you mean, was she?"
Eighteen
Oksana played with a pack of cigarettes but didn't open it. She fiddled with her flat, dirty blond hair, the scarf that was wrapped around her neck three or four times, and the hem of her skirt.
"Hector told me your name and I Googled you. The newspaper article said you helped solve a crime once. Is that why you're here?"
"The police solve crimes. I'm a gardener. I have to be honest with you. I'm not here because of Nick, I'm only here because you mentioned someone named Lucy. She's the person I was waiting for the night I met Nick in the bar."
Oksana shook her head back and forth like a petulant child.
"What do you mean, no? I know what I was doing there."
"The other woman met Nick . . . and now he's dead."
Nick had gotten two phone calls after I left and Oksana had heard him speak to someone he called Lucy. He said he'd meet her.
"He made a joke about older women and then he left. That was the last time I ever saw him." Older women? Lucy was thirty-five. I guess if you were Oksana's age, that was old.
She looked around again, as if she expected someone to be listening over her shoulder. I dropped my voice just in case.
"Why are you doing that? Who else would care what we're talking about?"
"There are people."
Now she was weirding me out. "Do you by any chance know a couple of guys, the Crawford brothers?" I asked.
Oksana nodded. "They're natives. They were friends with Nick."
Maybe Lucy met all three of them. But why wouldn't she have text messaged that, instead of . . . two brothers?
"Did you see them last night at the hotel?" I asked.
"No, they can't come in. They picketed some cheesy Indian display the Mishkins put up outside the hotel. Worse than this one," she said, pointing to the marginally distasteful one right near us. "Rachel got the cops to kick them out and a judge to say that they couldn't come back. I don't think Nick liked it either. He told me that's what he and the Mishkins argued about."
"Are you sure?"
"Nick said they were greedy."
"Do you know what he meant?"
She shook her head and looked around again.
"Who are you expecting to see?" I asked, exasperated.
Wide-eyed, she leaned in and whispered the name.
"Sergei."
Nineteen
Sergei Russianoff was an entrepreneurial Ukrainian who had helped Oksana out of the orphanage in Kiev, where she grew up. After she watched her stepfather and mother drink themselves to death, Oksana and her younger brother went to live with their grandmother, but the old woman could only afford to look after one child and for practical reasons she chose the little boy. That sent Oksana to the orphanage until she reached the age of seventeen, when all residents were booted out, sometimes into the arms of mobsters or predators.
Russianoff was neither. He recruited girls in Kiev to come to the U.S. to work in his various small businesses in Connecticut.
"I'd visited with a host family in Connecticut when I lived in the orphanage. American families would take us for three weeks. We would get off the plane with a plastic bag that held one change of underwear. For those three weeks we had everything . . . as much food as we wanted, television, toys. Some people bought
us clothes or books. One time I stayed with a couple that had a dog. It was like a dream. Then we got shipped home and we woke up. Most of the time any gifts we were allowed to take home were stollen by the older kids. When Sergei said I could live in Connecticut, it was as if he told me I was going to Hollywood to be a movie star."
She didn't become a movie star. Sergei trained her to be a dog groomer. For the first time since I'd met her, she smiled, and it made her look like the young girl she still was.
Russianoff had a house in Bridgeport where they'd all lived. At times there were as many as twelve of them. Oksana said it was like the orphanage only they had better clothing and didn't have to go outside to smoke.
"Another older girl, Sveta, and I would drive around and give dog baths in the back of a van." Now I knew where Sveta had gotten her training. I must have felt like a big old Great Dane to her.
I'd seen other dog-grooming vehicles tooling around Springfield and thought the idea was ingenious. But Sergei's company had had a few mishaps. The owner of a golden retriever that had gotten a particularly bad haircut sued. She didn't win, but things went south after that.
"The dog's coat grew back, she didn't have to ruin him," Oksana said.
We walked through the casino's arcade, absentmindedly looking into shop windows, although most of the shops were closed.
"Did you get paid?" I asked.
"We got an allowance."
What a guy. In addition to the mobile dog-grooming company, Sergei had a small bar, a housecleaning service, and an employment agency. But apparently his big dream was to open a skating rink. Not just a place where suburban kids would go to flirt and drink hot chocolate on a Friday night, but a full-scale facility where coaches and former champions would go to train.
Oksana lowered her voice. "He borrowed a lot of money. He thought he could get a famous skater like Viktor Petrenko to endorse it, but it didn't work out. I think Petrenko opened his own place."
"So what happened?" I asked.
"Now he has to pay the mortgage on a big empty building that he can't sell, with a secondhand Zamboni that doesn't work."
That could be a problem—not much call for Zambonis on eBay. So Sergei got into other businesses. Oksana didn't elaborate, but the other businesses sounded suspiciously like an escort service and small-scale loan-sharking. She said she didn't want to work for him anymore and I wasn't surprised. When some housecleaning clients started to miss items from their homes Sergei caught the attention of the local authorities. Nothing was ever proven, but now he was on their radar.
"I shouldn't be talking about this. I would never do anything to hurt Sergei. But he is nervous that I will." She looked pretty nervous herself.
She wrestled with how much more to tell me. Her tiny face screwed up until she looked like a toddler about to break into a tantrum, but she held back.
The roommate had dropped her off at the casino and had just started her shift, so Oksana asked for a lift home. It was nearing five and I had passed the point of being up late and was now up early, so I said sure. I was disappointed Oksana hadn't seen Lucy at the hotel, but at least I could follow up on the Crawford brothers.
Surprisingly, there was still a decent-size crowd at the casino—stragglers, Ambien zombies, groups of guys that might have been bachelor parties, sleep-deprived vacationers, and more than a few manic souls still looking for that lucky slot machine with their name on it—more people than Titans probably had on a holiday weekend in the summer.
We made our way back to the lobby. Then Oksana spotted two men at the end of the long hallway and visibly stiffened. She pulled me into one of the Native American boutiques in the casino that was still open—turquoise jewelry 24/7.
One of the guys was skinny with long, greasy blond hair. I couldn't see the other one that well because the resin Native Americans had gone into their timed routine again, handing out fake corn and receiving fake trinkets from the fake settlers. All I could make out was that he was a large man wearing a leather jacket.
Oksana was slim enough to hide behind a rack of oversize fringed bags while I pretended to be shopping for silver cuffs. She stood stock-still until the men passed.
"Are they gone?" she whispered, terrified.
I nodded. Now I was as paralyzed as she was. The heavy one was the Michelin Man.
Twenty
The Michelin Man's name was Vitaly. His skinny friend was Marat and could have been the guy I saw smoking outside of Titans. In happier times Oksana had innocently asked them their last names and they had told her that anyone who needed their last names to find them could go screw themselves. Charming.
"Why are they following you and why in the world would the fat one have been following me?" I asked.
"We can't talk here," she whispered.
I thought she was being melodramatic but who knew? I told the salesclerk we were trying to avoid some creeps who weren't taking no for an answer and asked her to look outside to see if the two men were still there. Once she was convinced that we weren't plotting to rip her off, she did it. Then she pointed to a house phone, where I called the valet to get my car. Oksana took off her scarf, borrowed my quilted jacket, and bought a two-dollar bandanna with a dice and feathers pattern on it. She tied it around her head in a makeshift disguise and we walked out of the shop expecting to feel a hand on our shoulders at any moment.
By the time we got to the entrance we were breathing easier. My car was already there and we took off for the trailer park, where Oksana and her roommate lived. It wasn't far but Oksana took me by the back roads and I tried to imprint the turns and landmarks so I'd be able to get back without her.
"Isn't there a more direct way?" I asked, faintly irritated.
"This is the way Nadia comes. It's the only way I know," she said.
"All right, we're out of there. Now why is Sergei having his men follow you and why would they have been following me? This can't be about some petty thefts from last year."
"Vitaly protects Sergei. Sergei is somehow involved with the Mishkins' investors. I don't know how, but the night Nick was killed, I overheard him tell someone on the phone he could make it uncomfortable for people if they didn't find a way to cut him in. Vitaly was at the bar. He also heard what Nick said." She looked down at her nail-bitten hands and tore off a piece of cuticle. I waited for the other shoe to drop.
"What else?"
"I might have told him Nick had mentioned an older woman. He might have thought I meant you."
Older woman? When did I join the ranks of older women? I was in my thirties, for Pete's sake. What was I supposed to do, flick my hair and inject the word like into every other sentence?
"Did you tell Vitaly about Lucy's call?"
"I may have," she said quietly.
And now Nick was dead, my house had been ransaked, and Lucy was missing. But why?
We were on a poorly lit road riddled with enough potholes to make it seem like an obstacle course. "Oksana, are we getting close?"
"The building up ahead on the left, that's the manager's office. He's never there, and the gate is always open. Just make a left and turn into the park." So much for a gated community.
Oksana used the word park loosely. In the near dark I could make out rows of similarly shaped trailers reminiscent of overseas shipping containers and vintage diners. Occasionally one would stand out because of its outlandish paint job, or the disemboweled vehicle on the rectangle of outdoor space each tenant had a right to—I tried to remember them as breadcrumbs to help me get out of there after I'd dropped her off.
The only sign of vegetation was a few rows down, an aluminum Christmas tree one of the occupants had placed outside of the trailer, bits of tinsel still attached and fluttering in the early-morning breeze despite the fact that it was mid-March.
"Turn right at that tree."
I had a feeling if the tree was moved Oksana wouldn't know how to get home any more than she knew how to get there from the casino. It was all done by
rote. We pulled up to the double-wide and she got out.
"Look after yourself," I said.
Twenty-one
I zigzagged out of the trailer park using the landmarks I'd remembered—a peace sign made of minilights, a kids' jungle gym, and finally the aluminum Christmas tree close to the entrance. I used the same strategy when I left the pockmarked road that had led to Oksana's, trying to make my way back to the casino.
It should have been easier as the sun was coming up, but it wasn't. Buildings and things I hadn't seen thirty minutes earlier materialized and made me doubt my route selection. A convenience store came up on the right, a small gray shack that looked like a prefab army building with a blue neon Miller sign I would have remembered. It confirmed that I'd missed my turn. I hung a U-turn to slowly retrace my steps.
Jeez, it was a huge hotel—I could faintly see it in the distance through the morning haze—I just couldn't seem to find the road that led there. I crawled back and stopped two hundred yards ahead of a turn I didn't make, just in time to see a silvery blue sedan take a left and pull onto the long stretch of road that led to the trailer park. I hadn't seen another vehicle since Oksana and I had left the casino and I was startled by the appearance of another car.
I told myself it was probably another waitress or pit boss who'd just finished his shift at the casino. All the same, I killed the lights and rolled into a hidden driveway. If the driver of the other car looked in his rearview mirror all he'd see was a dark bump behind a hemlock tree, not a nervous woman wondering if the two men who'd just driven by were Ukrainian mobsters.
All I could see were shadows. The driver's silhouette was the larger of the two. But that could have been anyone—a woman in a fur coat, a guy in a down jacket—it didn't have to be the Michelin Man. And just because he was on the road to Oksana's place didn't mean he was headed there. But I felt sure it was the men we'd seen at the casino, and they were looking for Oksana, or the two of us.
The Big Dirt Nap db-2 Page 10
