He grinned and answered her in Russian, then hotfooted it to open the door for us.
“I hope you didn’t just offer him a blow job,” I whispered.
She gave me an affronted look. “I said, ‘Hi, how are you?’ ”
“Pardon me. I wasn’t aware you knew any non-obscene foreign words. Where’d you learn Russian?”
“You don’t want to know,” she said, as the hostess approached us with menus.
“Two, please,” I said to her. “Away from the band if possible.”
A four-piece ensemble was playing folk songs that sounded like dirges, but nobody seemed at all depressed. It was a big crowd, happy and red-faced, a mix of Russian nationals drunk on vodka and college students intoxicated by Dostoyevsky. I was looking forward to a Stoli martini myself.
We were seated in a booth in the back directly below a large mirror tilted at a fifteen-degree angle. Terry faced the crowd and I faced the mirror.
“Are we gonna ask around?” I said.
“We should order something first. It’s harder to throw out real patrons for being nosy.”
The waitress appeared, a woman in her forties wearing a red skirt, black T-shirt, and lace-up boots, her hair covered by a flowered babushka. Terry ordered borscht and straight vodka for both of us.
“I wanted a martini,” I complained, as the waitress left.
“You can’t drink a martini here, Ker. That’s for capitalist running dogs.”
We spent the next couple of minutes scanning the room, looking for friendly faces we could approach with our query. I made eye contact with a guy with a Lenin beard and a peaked worker’s cap, and was just about to go over and speak to him, when the waitress reappeared.
She deposited bowls of beet soup with dollops of sour cream in front of us, followed by two large shot glasses of cold, clear vodka. Yum. I could already feel it biting my tongue, searing my throat, and obliterating the microbes in my stomach lining. Sort of a health tonic, really.
“Excuse me,” I said to the waitress. “I have a question—”
Terry cut me off with a raised hand, shaking her head.
“Yes?” the waitress said.
Terry lifted her glass. “Could you send two of these to that table over there?” she said.
The waitress looked around. “Which one?”
“The one with the two women—one black and one white.”
“Sure,” the waitress said, walking away.
I looked in the mirror over Terry’s head and who did I see two booths away? Janice, deep in conversation with a young woman with lush brown hair in a French twist. The woman wore an embroidered peasant blouse with a scoop neck and large silver earrings.
“It’s Janice!” I said. “Is that Tatiana with her?”
“We’ll know soon enough.”
The waitress put two vodkas down in front of Janice and the mystery woman, then pointed in our direction. Janice’s mouth dropped open, and her friend spun all the way around in her booth to see what was going on.
The woman had to be Tatiana. And no wonder she’d been used as a sales tool. She could stun a man senseless at fifty paces. Any woman would gladly pay a million bucks to look like her.
That Hattrick was a genius. Or had been.
Terry got up and walked over to their booth. She spoke to them and shook their hands, and even at a distance I could see a sort of worshipful look on Terry’s face as she gazed into Tatiana’s eyes.
She pointed over at me. Janice gave me an ambivalent little wave, then the two of them picked up their drinks and followed Terry to our table. They sat on the opposite side of the booth, and Terry slipped in next to me.
“Hi, Terry,” Janice said.
“Kerry,” I corrected her. “Hi, Janice.”
“I am Tatiana,” the other woman said with a thick Russian accent.
Her flawlessness was so intimidating that I actually found it hard to look her in the eye. She had a broad face with perfectly honed cheekbones, almond-shaped dark brown eyes, a little rosebud mouth, and eyebrows that arched theatrically but gracefully over her wide-set eyes. I’d never thought of foreheads as being beautiful, but hers was so elegantly proportioned, such a perfect complement to the pointed chin, that it might actually have been the best feature among many. It wasn’t exactly a kind face, but she didn’t strike me as a cold-blooded killer either. I wondered if she was aware of what had befallen Mario in her own apartment.
“I told Janice and Tatiana about Lenore’s accident,” Terry said.
Clever, I thought, using the gossip about Lenore’s mishap as an opening. Everyone secretly enjoys talking about the misfortune of others, whether they admit it or not.
“You hadn’t heard?” I said, and they shook their heads.
“I can’t believe it. Did the dog really eat her ear?” Tatiana said, sounding so much like Natasha Badenov I almost laughed. Deed the dog eet herrr eerrr?
“No, not really,” Terry said. “But they weren’t able to save it.”
“Terrible,” Tatiana said.
“They didn’t notify Dr. Hattrick?” I asked Janice.
Janice looked over at Tatiana. “The doctor’s on an extended leave,” she said.
I was going to ask if the leave involved a suspension of his license, but Terry jumped in first. “So is that a normal . . . I don’t know . . . hazard of a face-lift?” she said. “An ear coming off?”
“Let me put it this way,” Janice said. “I never heard of it happening. But I’m not a medical doctor or a nurse. I guess anything’s possible.”
“Have you ever actually watched a face-lift operation?” Terry asked.
Janice nodded. “Put me off plastic surgery for life, I can tell you that. They won’t get me under a knife.” She leaned in, taking on a ghoulish tone. “You see the person’s face, and they’re unconscious, almost lifeless. Which is damn creepy, their mouth hanging open and their personality just . . . gone. It’s like looking at dead lumps of flesh.”
I quickly slurped a spoonful of soup before I heard the rest of what she was going to say, afraid that afterward I would lose my appetite forever. First dog-poop leftovers, now lumps of flesh on the operating table.
“First they draw lines all over the face, then they start cutting—” Terry and I crossed our legs simultaneously, “slicing off big hunks of skin around the forehead and the side of the face. Then they dig underneath the skin—” she made thrusting motions with a knife, “separating skin from muscle. Then they grab hold of the face and yank it up like it was droopy drawers, and the whole saggy thing goes tight, but it’s still dead.
“Then the doctor pulls out this huge needle and just starts whipping it around the bloody edges with strokes as big as you please. I’m trained as a seamstress, and I thought maybe they’d take their time with it, making careful little stitches like I did when embroidering handkerchiefs, but no siree. You ever see a fisherman repairing his net?”
We nodded and gulped.
“That’s just what it looks like. Jabbing that needle, pulling it through the dead flesh, yanking it tight, over and over again. With those big, sweeping strokes. Then they go for the eye area . . .”
I wasn’t sure if it was the vodka or the face-lift talk, but the room was swimming in front of me. I put a hand on the table to steady myself.
“Wait a sec,” Terry said. “What about the cutting part on the side of the face? Couldn’t the knife slip at that point, slicing under the ear?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Janice said.
“But there’d be blood, wouldn’t there? Wouldn’t somebody notice the ear had been . . . severed?”
“Baby, there’s blood all over, anyway. They just mop it up every now and then and keep right on slicing.”
“What Terry’s trying to get at,” I said, “and I realize this may be touchy because he’s your boss, but do you think that Hattrick was capable of doing something like that on purpose?”
“No,” Janice said. “The man’s simp
ly incompetent.”
“He should not be practice medicine,” Tatiana added.
“Well, he certainly did a good job on you,” I said, feeling more than a touch of envy.
Janice let out an explosive laugh, putting a hand over her mouth to stifle the giggles.
Strange, I thought.
“Are you going to testify in his lawsuits, Tatiana?” Terry said, obviously thinking of the summons we’d intercepted.
Tatiana took her time answering. “I cannot testify,” she said finally.
“Why not?” Terry asked. “If he’s that incompetent, you’d be doing the world a favor.”
“She’s afraid of being convicted,” Janice told her.
“Of what? You didn’t do the operations.”
Janice rolled her eyes. “Of fraud.”
Terry and I looked at each other, then back at the two women across the booth. Something wasn’t making it past our skull bones to lodge in the gray matter.
Janice made a noise of disgust at our naïveté. “Oh, you don’t think you get looks like that from surgery, do you? Get real, honey!”
It took us a full five seconds to comprehend what she was saying, maybe because we couldn’t have imagined anyone being born as beautiful as Tatiana. But of course she had been. Her perfect face had not been manufactured on the operating table.
“Ohhhhh,” I said to Tatiana. “So Dr. Hattrick didn’t do any surgery on you, after all.”
Tatiana leaned her dainty chin on her palm and exhaled. “I was working in video store in his neighborhood. He comes to me and says he will pay me to meet with—” she looked at Janice, “what is word?”
“Prospective?” Janice said.
“Yes, prospective patients,” she continued, shamefaced. “He says they will look like me. He will give them my cheekbones, my eyes, my nose, my complexion . . . I am not proud, but that is what he did.”
“And they bought it wholesale?” Terry said, astonished. “They didn’t even ask to see a before picture or something?”
Janice smirked. “He had a before picture. On his computer. He distorted her face, then told them he fixed her with surgery.”
Well, this was definitely fraud. No getting around it. But I found it hard to believe that Tatiana would bear the brunt of a prosecution. She was just an immigrant getting the best work she could. I said as much to her, but she wasn’t convinced.
“I am not citizen. I have only green card. If I do not have job, I can be deported.” She looked down at her hands, and I noticed she was wearing a gold signet ring with a scrolled P on the third finger of her left hand. A man’s ring.
“I wanted to be actress. Big star,” she said, pronouncing it Beeg starrr. “But they say I have too much accent.”
Oh dear. Another Hollywood casualty. Sometimes I wished that on the signs leading into the city, they’d post the odds of actually making it in the movies.
Welcome to Los Angeles! Population: 6,000,000. Your chances of succeeding as an actress: 10,000,000,000,000 to 1! Registration for dental hygiene school begins in August!
Still, dreams are dreams. And she’d been right to think she had something to offer, physically at least.
“Did you ever think of working as a model?” I said to her.
She nodded. “But I needed green card. Dr. Hattrick got it for me. INS will not like that I got job to defraud.”
“He told the INS that Tatiana was a highly qualified medial technician,” Janice said.
Ah, more lies, and to the government. That wasn’t good. That tended to land your butt—no matter how attractive—on an outbound boat to Greenland.
“Have you had any contact with Hattrick since you left the job?” Terry asked Tatiana.
“No, I hate that bastard!” Tatiana covered her eyes and Janice put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “He’s ruin my life!”
I gave her a minute to get a hold of herself, then turned to Janice. “How about you?” I said. “Are you going to testify?”
She sighed. “My lawyer tells me that if I don’t I can be named as a codefendant in these cases, since I had knowledge of . . . malfeasance.”
“You were in on the meetings with Tatiana?”
“No, but I knew what was going on. That’s not why they want me, though.”
“Why do they want you? That is, if you can tell us.”
“Oh, why not? I’m screwed either way. I’ll either be in prison or on the line for millions in damages I could never pay off if I lived to be a thousand.”
We waited for her to continue.
“I stood in for his nurse during surgeries,” Janice said.
I squinted at her. “But you just said you weren’t a nurse—”
She nodded, eyes open wide. “Uh-huh.”
“You’re not a nurse and you assisted in operations?” Terry said. “Oh. That could be a problem, huh?”
Or it could be a violation of ethical conduct on a par with amputating the wrong foot.
Janice nodded in glum agreement with Terry’s statement.
“But what . . . what happened to the real nurse?” I said. “Surely a doctor in his position could have hired the best.”
“She was disgusted with him and one day she just didn’t show,” Janice said. “Should have had more than one attending nurse in the first place, but I don’t think he could afford it.”
“Amazing,” Terry said.
“Let’s have another drink,” I said. “Waitress!”
I ordered another round of vodkas, wondering how to subtly work Lenore’s message into the conversation. The hell with it, I decided—just come out with it.
“When we saw Mrs. Richling in the hospital she asked us to get in touch with you, Tatiana.”
She pinched her perfect brows together. “Why would she want me? I hardly know this poor woman.”
But you knew her husband intimately, I thought. “She said to tell you she doesn’t have it,” I said.
Terry and I watched Tatiana closely, looking for a flicker of recognition. But her face was blank as copier paper.
“Doesn’t have what?”
Terry shrugged. “We don’t know. She wouldn’t tell us.”
Janice laughed. “Well, that’s fucked up.”
“Yeah, I guess it is. But we promised to pass on the message,” I said. “She wanted you to tell him that she doesn’t have it.”
“Who?” Tatiana said.
“We don’t know.”
Tatiana began a slow burn. “I cannot tell who I don’t know she does not have what I don’t know!”
I held her eyes in a stare-off, neither of us so much as blinking for a full fifteen seconds. “Well, someone evidently thought she had something they wanted,” I said finally. “Because Mrs. Richling’s house was broken into today.”
Tatiana and Janice both sat back in the booth, giving each other a nervous glance.
Terry turned a strand of hair around her finger and pressed into dangerous territory with her next remark. “Lenore thought you might have been involved with her husband, Tatiana. She was even a little jealous of you.”
Janice looked away, focusing her attention on the band.
“Ridiculous!” Tatiana snapped.
“So you’re not seeing Mario?”
“Of courrrrse not. He is nothing to me. Oh, he came to office and gave me big doggie eyes, but I was not interested.”
I knew her indignation was false—after all, we’d heard Mario calling her name upon entering her apartment. We were indeed in the presence of a major acting talent, I decided—Meryl Streep of the Caucasus.
“So if he was nothing to you,” Terry said lightly, “I guess you wouldn’t have blown him away. I guess it was sheer coincidence that he was shot in your apartment.”
Tatiana’s eyes turned to glass and she leaned into Terry. “I did not do it.”
Janice frowned and put a restraining hand on Tatiana’s arm. Tatiana shrugged it off angrily.
“Who did?” Terry said, refusi
ng to let up. “Was it the guy you’re supposed to give Lenore’s message to?”
Janice rose quickly from the booth, dragging Tatiana by the hand. “Thanks for the drinks,” Janice said. “And for the message. I’m sure Tatiana appreciates it.”
Tatiana slid out of the booth after Janice, her rosy mouth turned down. “Yes, thank you so verrry much,” she said.
Terry shoved me out of the booth, then jumped out herself. She got directly in Tatiana’s face.
“You know who killed Mario,” she said. “And you know why.”
Tatiana gave her a tight smile. “You are private investigator? You figure it out.”
She and Janice turned to leave the restaurant. “The police will want to talk to you, Tatiana,” Terry called out, trailing after her.
I caught sight of someone in my peripheral vision—the guy with the Lenin beard, striding across the room in Terry’s direction, ready to restrain her or beat the shit out of her, I didn’t know which.
I threw two twenties down on the table and rushed over to the exit. The bouncer was blocking the door, looking at my sister with murderous intent, no longer taken in by her charms.
Janice and Tatiana were gone.
Comrade Lenin came up behind me. I could feel his breath on my neck, but I didn’t dare turn around.
We were trapped between him and the bouncer. I let my eyes travel around the room. The lively chatter had stopped. All the patrons were watching the unfolding situation wordlessly—a conspiracy of silence. I knew that none of them would come to our aid if things got rough.
“Terry,” I said, quietly. “I think it’s time to go.”
She looked back at me and shrugged casually. “Sure,” she said. “I was going to suggest that myself.”
I felt Lenin back away from me, then the bouncer turned sideways to permit us access to the door, keeping a wary eye on us the whole time.
Terry breezed out the door, with me fast on her heels. To my surprise, we got to the bike unimpeded.
“Well, we tried,” I said to Terry, breathing a sigh of relief.
“At least we delivered Lenore’s message,” she said. “That’s all we had to do.”
Right. We’d delivered the cryptic message to the Russian woman as promised, and we could now wash our hands of Lenore Richling’s dirty dealings with the lava soap of righteousness.
The Butcher of Beverly Hills Page 10
