The Alibi Man

by Tami Hoag

  “Don’t fuck with me, Boris!” Landry shouted, jabbing a finger at him. “Don’t fuck with me!”

  Landry went back to the bar and ordered another vodka. He looked around at the crowd. “What the fuck are you looking at?”

  They seemed grudgingly impressed with him now. Still wary, still uncooperative, no doubt, but there was a little respect where there hadn’t been. That was the only way he was going to get anywhere with this crowd.

  He took his vodka and tossed it back, hoping he wouldn’t just puke it up there and then. From inside his sport coat he pulled out a photograph printed from Irina Markova’s computer and held it up.

  “This is Irina Markova,” he said loudly. “She was found murdered today. She was Russian. Some of you might have known her. And I’m gonna work my ass off to find and apprehend her killer and make sure he never sees the light of day again.”

  “If anyone here has anything to tell me, I’m leaving my card on the bar. And if anyone can tell me where to find Alexi Kulak, I need to know. If he doesn’t come to claim the body in three days, she gets buried in a pine box in potter’s field.”

  That was a lie, but Landry didn’t care. He needed to know what he needed to know. He turned back to the bartender and put the picture of Irina down on the bar. She was sitting in a horseshoe booth, sandwiched between two well-dressed, wealthy men who had probably never set foot in a place like this. Her smile was dazzling. There seemed to be no connection between this girl and the corpse he had left lying on a slab in the autopsy suite.

  The bartender was looking at the picture too, his expression pensive.

  “The guy choked her, then strangled her with a garrote. Raped her, tortured her,” Landry went on, embellishing for maximum effect. Gitan hadn’t been able to say for certain whether the girl had been sexually assaulted. There were no obvious signs of torture. “Sick bastard even did her after she was dead. And then he dumped her in a canal so the fish could eat her eyes out.”

  The bartender’s mouth trembled as he stared at the picture.

  “You don’t want to rat out the piece of crap who did this?” Landry said. “Me, I’d give the cops my own brother’s head on a platter if I knew he did something like this. But then, I’m not a Russian.”

  He tossed half a dozen business cards and a twenty-dollar bill on the bar and gave the bartender a little salute. “Dos vidaniya.”

  The vodka was starting to kick in as the adrenaline ebbed. He walked out the back door, turned, and puked. There was no one back there to see him. He leaned against the building and took a couple of deep breaths. He just needed a moment, a little air.

  One of three things could happen now. No one would come out. Someone would come out, maybe talk to him, maybe not. Boris would come out and beat the shit out of him.

  He rubbed his hands over his face, lit a cigarette to get the taste of vomit out of his mouth, wondered if Elena was sleeping. Then he cursed himself for wondering. There was no getting close to her. She just wouldn’t allow it. He should be glad she’d cut him loose. It pissed him off that he wasn’t.

  He wasn’t exactly Mr. Share My Feelings himself. It was a wonder they’d lasted as long as they had. They were like a pair of porcupines, the two of them.

  Still, he felt like a bastard for what he’d said to her at the scene. If there was anything Elena wasn’t, it was a quitter.

  The door opened and a woman came out. Stacked, teased hair, too much makeup, skirt up to her ass. She stopped, posed with her profile to him, lit a cigarette, and blew a stream of smoke up at the moon.

  Landry waited.

  “Damn,” she said, looking at him. “My cigarette went out. Do you have a light?”

  He walked over, flicked his lighter. She looked up at him from under her brows as she took a deep drag.

  “That’s something,” she said on the exhale. “You kicked Gregor’s ass. About time someone did.”

  “It wasn’t that hard,” Landry said.

  She gave a coquettish laugh and batted her lashes. “You sure you’re a cop?”

  “That’s what it says on my ID.”

  “My name is Svetlana. Svetlana Petrova. You’re looking for Alexi?”

  “You know where to find him?”

  She made a pouty frown and shrugged a shoulder. “In hell, I hope.”

  “You’re not a fan?”

  “He’s a pig.” She turned her head and spat on the ground. Class.

  “What’d he do?” Landry asked. “Fuck you and dump you?”

  The fire in her eyes told him yes. “Hey!” she snapped, hitting him in the chest with the heel of her hand. “No guy dumps me! I tell him take a hike. He’s cheap, and he fucks around with whores.”

  Landry bit his tongue and looked at the door. It was only a matter of time before someone else came out.

  “Was one of those whores Irina Markova?”

  She made a sour face. “She led him around by his dick. He made a fool of himself.”

  “You think maybe he got sick and tired of that? Maybe he decided to teach her a lesson?”

  The thought had not occurred to her. “Alexi? Kill her?” She warmed to the idea quickly. “Maybe… He could have. He has terrible temper.”

  “Did he ever knock you around?”

  She hesitated and glanced down, then back. Whatever she was about to say was probably going to be a lie. “Yes. Many times. But I hit him back.”

  “So maybe you just want to make trouble for him.”

  She tried to look innocent, something he was sure she hadn’t been in about two decades. “What trouble? I don’t tell you nothing.”

  “No? Then I might as well go.”

  She reached out and caught hold of his lapel as he started to turn away. “You give up too easy.”

  “I’ve got a murder to solve,” he said. “I can’t stand here and play grab-ass with you, honey. If you’ve got something to say, say it.”

  She frowned and pouted again. “You’re no fun.”

  “Yeah, people tell me that. Was Kulak here tonight?”

  “Earlier, for a couple of hours.”

  “What was his mood?”

  “Pissed off. He’s always pissed off.”

  “When was the last time you saw Irina Markova?”

  The sour face again. “I don’t know. I don’t look for her.”

  “Was she here Saturday night?”

  He could see the sudden turning of the wheels in Svetlana’s brain. She narrowed her eyes and fought the start of a smile. “Yes,” she said. “Saturday night.”

  “Around midnight? One o’clock?”

  “Yes. Yes. I looked at my watch. I saw them arguing.”

  Landry turned and started for his car. Svetlana hustled after him, the high heels of her shoes clack-clack-clacking on the concrete.

  “What?” she said.

  “You’re a liar. Irina Markova wasn’t here Saturday night. I don’t want you if you’re going to lie to me. You’re wasting my time. You haven’t given me one damn thing I can use.”

  “Okay, okay. I tell you where he lives. You have paper? Pen?”

  Landry handed her one of his business cards and a pen from the inside pocket of his coat. She put the card on the hood of his car, scribbled across it, and handed it back to him. He squinted at it.

  “This had better be legit,” Landry said.

  “I swear. And it’s a big secret. Hardly anybody knows. Not even cops. Not even feds.”

  “And this is his phone number?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, looking up at him, moving a little too close. “Is my phone number. Call me. I’ll show you how to have fun.”

  Landry stuck the card in his breast pocket, got in the car, and drove out of the lot, leaving his informant standing there hot and bothered. Some mope coming out of that bar was going to be a lucky man tonight.

  Chapter 16

  “What are you doing in my house?” I asked, wondering what I could get my hands on to use as a weapon. May
be I could hit him in the head with the stone soap dispenser, except I couldn’t reach back far enough to get it without him seeing.

  “You know Irina,” he said.

  “What if I did?”

  He looked dazed, maybe psychotic, or ill. For all I knew, he had killed her.

  “She liked you.”

  I said nothing. His eyes wandered away from me for a second. I eased a couple of inches to the right.

  “Did you know Irina?” I asked.

  He looked at me again. “I loved her.”

  Still a 50/50 chance he had strangled her. Maybe better. Nothing could drive people over the edge of violence more than love. He loved her but she didn’t love him. He loved her but she cheated on him. He loved her obsessively and wouldn’t let her go. There were a dozen scenarios.

  “Did you know her in Russia?” I asked, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, inching a quarter step ahead.

  “She was best friends with my little sister, Sasha.”

  That name rang a bell. Sasha Kulak. The friend of Irina’s who had committed suicide because of Tomas Van Zandt, the horse dealer Irina had attacked in the barn.

  Kulak. Alexi Kulak. Russians…

  “She spoke fondly of Sasha,” I said, slipping the fingers of my right hand into the drawer behind me. He didn’t seem to notice.

  “Did she speak of me?” he asked. Inside his open jacket I could see the handle of a gun.

  “Irina was a very private person. She didn’t talk about her personal life very much.”

  Tears filled his eyes. He appeared to be in a great deal of pain. “I was a ghost to her in this life she led. She shut me out.”

  This wasn’t sounding good with regard to motive. My fingers fumbled over something in the drawer. I grabbed hold. A small pair of scissors.

  He turned in the doorway and leaned against the frame, eyes closed, his face red as he fought tears.

  “What do you want from me?” I asked.

  He wiped a square hand across his eyes. There were tattoos on the back of his hand. Prison tats?

  When I was a narc, the Russians had taken over a substantial chunk of the heroin trade in South Florida. Rumor had it they had gotten in bed with the Colombians to edge into the cocaine market. They hadn’t ventured into crystal meth then. Meth had still been—and still was—the bastion of white trash.

  Alexi Kulak. Russian mob? Had that been Irina’s second job? The job that subsidized her lifestyle among the rich and famous?

  “She is dead,” he said. “Murdered.”

  He had taken hold of his emotions and locked them away somewhere. I could see him change, grow calmer, focus.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “She told me about how you helped that little girl.”

  A year before, Molly Seabright, twelve going on Methuselah, had come to me, mistakenly believing I was a private investigator, to ask my help in finding her missing sister.

  “You know these people she ran around with,” he said. “These rich American playboy sons of bitches.”

  “No,” I lied. “I don’t know them.”

  Kulak pinned me with a look that made me feel like an insect on a display board. The energy coming from him now was focused and intense. “You know them.”

  I said nothing.

  “I want to know which one killed Irina.”

  “I’m not a private investigator, Mr. Kulak.”

  He stepped into the bathroom, suddenly aggressive, intent on intimidating me. “I don’t care what the fuck you call yourself. I need to know who killed Irina.”

  “That’s a police matter,” I said. I couldn’t back away. I was already against the vanity.

  Kulak reached his hand up and grabbed me across the lower half of my face. I came underhanded with the small scissors and jammed it into his belly. I felt the blade hit a rib.

  He howled and staggered back, looking down in astonishment as his shirt turned red with his own blood.

  I clasped my hands together and swung at him from the side, hitting him hard in the cheekbone and temple.

  Kulak staggered backward, stumbled, and fell.

  I started to jump over him, but he caught me by one ankle, and I went down, my teeth biting deep into my lower lip. The taste of blood filled my mouth. I kicked at him to free myself. Arms and legs scrambling, I tried to pull myself forward, got to my knees, got my feet under me.

  As I tried to lunge forward, Kulak caught me by the back of my neck, shoved me into a wall, and held me there with his own body weight.

  “You bitch! You stabbed me!”

  “Yeah. I hope you die of it!”

  Kulak started to chuckle, then laugh, then laughed harder. “You are like Irina, I think.”

  I hoped not. I didn’t want to think about water creatures nibbling at my face as I lay dead in a drainage ditch.

  “You,” he said, dead serious once again. “You will be my eyes, my ears, my brain. They will accept you. You are one of them.”

  “I don’t work for you,” I said. “I want to know who killed Irina, but I don’t work for you.”

  He turned me around and held me up against the wall by my throat. My toes were barely touching the floor. He looked like it wouldn’t matter to him one way or the other if he crushed my larynx.

  “Yes, Miss Estes,” he said softly. “I’m afraid that you do.”

  I didn’t argue. His voice and demeanor made me go cold beneath the sweat of fear and adrenaline. His eyes were flat and black, like a shark’s. I swallowed hard beneath the weight of his hand around my windpipe.

  He brought his face very close to mine and whispered, “Yes, you do.”

  Chapter 17

  The sun was not yet up when I left my cottage and went to the horses. I fed them, then went outside and sat on the same bench Landry and I had occupied the evening before. It seemed that weeks had gone by since then.

  I had thought long and hard about Alexi Kulak. Most sane people would have called Landry and spilled the whole story, then got on the next plane to places unknown. Most sane people would have thought that the fact I didn’t want to do that spoke volumes about the state of my mental health.

  Alexi Kulak was a criminal. He was volatile and dangerous. The fact that he had loved Irina only made him more so. I had done some homework on him after he left—as I sat at my computer with an ice pack wrapped around my throat.

  The Russian mob was nothing to mess around with. The fact that relatively little had been written about Kulak told me he was smart. No one needed to tell me he could be ruthless.

  Even so, my gut told me to keep it to myself. I wanted to find Irina’s killer. Kulak and I had that in common. If I could come up with results, he had no reason to hurt me. If I ratted him out to the cops, I was likely to end up in the trunk of a junker car going into the crusher at Kulak’s auto salvage yard.

  If Irina’s murder had something to do with her connection to Alexi, then through him I would have access to a part of Irina’s life Landry wouldn’t be able to touch.

  That’s what I told myself, even though I knew full well Kulak wouldn’t have come to me if Irina’s death had to do with him. That was the reason I gave myself for making a deal with a devil. There were others lurking in a dark corner of my mind. I refused to bring them to the surface.

  I showered and dressed and made myself as presentable as I could. There was nothing to do about my fat lip but tell a lie to explain it. A short vintage Gucci scarf around my neck hid the bruises the ice pack had failed to prevent.

  Billy Quint should have been a sea captain a hundred years past. It had been almost that long since I had met him when I was working Narcotics and he headed an OCB (Organized Crime Bureau) undercover team working the port of Fort Lauderdale along with the DEA. The teams from the individual agencies had a mutual agenda—to crack a drug-money laundering scheme that had been taking large sums of U.S. currency out of the country on cargo ships bound for Panama. The connection to Palm Beach County had been wh
at had come back on the return trip: cocaine. Lots of it. Quint lived in a bungalow along the intracoastal waterway, south of Lake Worth. Retired, not by choice. He had refused to speak to me over the phone. OCB guys learn early on to take every precaution possible. They have to deal with deadly animals every day, and they don’t all survive. So I wasn’t surprised when Quint wouldn’t speak to me. Old paranoia dies hard. Especially for someone who almost didn’t make it out of the game alive.