“She is ambitious girl. If she is hooker, is her business.”
A noise coming from the deck outside drew Davie’s attention to the door. She turned and scanned the shadows, but the crescent moon provided too little light for detail.
Again, she focused her gaze on Marchenko. “And when she ran away he tracked her down and killed her as a lesson to his other girls.”
The Russian downed the second shot of vodka. “Grigory is businessman. He did not harm this girl.”
“Then who did?”
He wagged his finger. “I tell you. In one, maybe two days.”
“What makes you think I won’t find the killer myself?”
He picked up the cheroot and sucked it back to life. “Because you are not Russian.”
“Here’s what I think: you don’t know shit.”
“My people do not trust police, only other Russians. I help you. Only you. Is big deal. I make you famous.”
“What do you want in exchange?”
“You and your LAPD stay away from Grigory Satine. Two days.”
“Why two days? Is that how long it’ll take you to finish whatever business you have with Satine with enough wiggle room to skip town and leave me with nothing?”
His expression was devoid of emotion. “We Russians keep our promises. This girl, she have boyfriend who gets her pregnant. When he finds out, he wants her dead.”
Davie had no reason to trust Marchenko, but she kept her tone neutral. “Was he one of her johns?”
He shrugged. “I hear he is big important man.”
She figured he couldn’t be talking about John Bell, who by all accounts was a wannabe screenwriter and an all-around loser. “His name?”
“People in Russian community look for him. They will find, but not yet.”
Davie walked toward the door and glanced outside. “Where’s Satine? Why doesn’t he speak for himself?”
“He is away on business.”
“You keep track of him like you’re his personal assistant.”
The dim light in the room made Marchenko’s frown seem puckered and shrewd. “I am only tourist.”
“Just blew into town to visit Disneyland, right? What’s the real reason you’re pinch-hitting for Satine?”
“I do not want trouble with your LAPD. We Russians are blamed for everything. We are not perfect, but no Russian murdered this girl. You give me two days, I give you name of killer. After, if you want, I take you also to Disneyland.”
If the Brit had found a way to hack into police radio communications, Marchenko might know Satine was under police surveillance. Maybe he hoped his offer to find Anya’s killer would stall the investigation. Meanwhile, he could broker a business deal with Satine to arm local gangsters. Afterward, he’d pull up anchor and disappear. Even if she had the power to delay Quintero’s investigation, making a deal with the Odessa mafia, even to solve a homicide, was something she couldn’t do.
Davie checked her watch. Twelve forty-five. If she didn’t check in with Vaughn in fifteen minutes, Marchenko would definitely have trouble with the LAPD.
“I have a better idea,” she said. “We’ll both look for Anya’s killer. Whoever finds him first gets a pair of mouse ears and a front row seat to the Main Street Electrical Parade.”
Marchenko eyed the vodka bottle and then poured himself another drink. “You Americans always the same. We talk glasnost, you talk guns.”
The Brit had said Marchenko meant her no harm, but people lied. She calculated how long it would take her to hit the bottom of the San Pedro Channel with an anchor tied around her neck.
Marchenko smiled. “Is okay. I forgive you.”
He reached inside the plastic bag that was beside him on the couch. Davie’s hand tensed on the butt of her .45 as she watched him pull out a red beaded evening bag in the shape of a heart. She recognized it from Andre Lucien’s description as Anya’s missing purse. Pasha Kozlov had confirmed that she had left the purse at the Volga Bakery the night she disappeared.
“Where did you get that?”
“After New Year’s party, Grigory stay at hotel. One, maybe two days. Later, he go to his car. He find purse inside.”
“You’re saying he was set up?”
He shrugged. “Like I tell you, we Russians are blamed for everything.”
Marchenko handed Davie the purse. There was a bald spot on the flap where a thread had broken and beads were missing. Inside the purse were three twenty-dollar bills, a lipstick, and a silver locket. She wondered if it was the necklace Anya never took off, even when she was sleeping. She pried open the heart with her fingernail and noticed the mechanism meant to hold a picture in place had been torn off, as if somebody in a hurry had removed whatever was inside. She wondered who it had been—Anya or her killer.
31
It was just before one when Davie left Viktor Marchenko’s yacht. She checked her phone for messages. Vaughn had called a dozen times. She didn’t want to listen to a lecture so she sent him a text, letting him know she was okay. His answering text consisted of two words she considered sweet talk between partners: Fuck you.
She could have waited until morning to interview John Bell, but she was juiced with adrenalin and eager to move forward on the case. She picked up her car at the Santa Monica airport and made her way to Bell’s apartment in Westchester.
Bell didn’t respond to the knock on his door. She wondered if he had passed out in front of his computer or if he’d stumbled to the market for another fifth of research bourbon. She knocked again, louder this time. Still nothing. She walked toward the side of his unit but saw no lights from where his bedroom would be. The prospect of a stakeout wasn’t appealing, but she would wait all night for Bell to return if that’s what it took to find out why he had lied to her about not seeing Anya after she left the apartment complex Saturday night.
Toward the rear, a six-foot metal fence surrounded a swimming pool. A faint glow radiated from the window of a building a few feet from the pool. The hum of machinery told her it was where the filtering system was housed. A shadow passed through the light from the window. She remembered that Bell had filed several burglary reports for thefts from the apartment’s pool cabana. She decided to find out who was inside.
Davie followed a path along the fence until she came to a gate with a keypad. The gate was locked. The fence wasn’t impossible to scale as long as she outmaneuvered the row of spikes at the top. She weighed the element of surprise versus ten minutes of online shopping in case she had to replace her damaged pantsuit and found a foothold in the railing. She slid down the other side and landed on the concrete below.
As she approached, she heard Bell’s voice, loud and angry. Through the window, Davie saw him reading from pages held together by brass-colored brads. It looked like a screenplay, maybe the one about the detective who was afraid of guns. Bell had on the same plaid bathrobe he’d worn during their first interview. He wasn’t wearing a hat, which exposed a long strand of hair sprouting from one side of his head, enough to cover his bald spot in an artful comb-over. He was leaning against a waist-high piece of equipment attached to a chimney that extended through the roof.
There must have been a leak in the system because water had pooled on the floor. A screwdriver lay idle near a tubular machine with bubbling liquid visible through a plastic cover. It appeared someone had tried but failed to fix the problem.
The motor’s hum masked her footsteps as she opened the door and stepped inside the building. “Mr. Bell.”
Bell whipped around, dropping the screenplay to the floor. His hand grasped at his chest. His hair flopped onto his cheek. It looked like the ear of a basset hound.
“You,” he said.
“We need to talk.”
There was a tremor in his voice. “I told you everything I know.”
Davie kept her tone
calm and controlled. “Except the part about Anya Nosova calling you the night she disappeared. Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”
He pulled his bathrobe tight around his body. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
She stood by the open door. If he decided to rabbit, she would be there to stop him. “You borrowed your high school buddy’s Olds and picked her up at the Edison. A photo of Anya getting into the car was captured on the hotel’s surveillance camera.”
His voice was barely audible over the machinery noise. “I was only trying to help her.” At least he’d dropped the flirty banter from the first interview.
“You may have been the last person to see her alive. You lied to the police about a homicide investigation.”
“I didn’t lie. I was protecting Anya.”
Davie stood with her feet apart and her arms crossed. “There are three things you should know, Mr. Bell: you’re in trouble; that trouble is bigger than any trouble you’ve ever been in before; and the only way out of that trouble is through me.”
Bell slid to the floor in front of the pool equipment. His head collapsed into his hands. It was a bit of drama, but Davie let him have the moment.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Sorry doesn’t cut it.”
He looked up. His face was ashen, highlighting the dark crescents under his eyes. “When you came to my door asking about Anya, I freaked. I didn’t know she was dead. I figured she didn’t want to be found, that she’d run away to start a new life.”
“With the father of her child?”
He nodded. “She told me they were getting married.”
“Why did she call you that night and not him?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I would have done anything for her.”
“Because you were in love with her.”
His eyes were moist. “She wasn’t interested in me except as a friend. That’s life, I guess. I didn’t know she was dead until I saw the newspaper. Foul play, it said. So Philip Marlowe.”
“Why didn’t you call me when you saw the article?”
“I was going to.”
Davie raised her voice. “When, Mr. Bell?”
His jaw fell slack. “My heart’s sort of broken right now. Some days I can barely get out of bed.”
Davie knew the feeling, but she wasn’t about to tell him that.
“What did Anya say when she called Saturday night?” she asked.
For the first time, Bell noticed his screenplay lying near his thigh, soaking up water. He rescued it from the puddle and swiped the stack of pages across his bathrobe. “She was hiding from a creep named Grigory Satine and needed a lift home.”
“Where did you take her after you picked her up at the hotel?”
“I dropped her at Andre’s apartment. I wanted her to stay at my place for the night, just to make sure she was safe, but she said no. I figured she wanted to be with her new boyfriend. She probably called him as soon as she got inside.”
“Who was he?”
Bell rolled to his knees and braced one hand on the pool equipment. “I never met him. Obviously, he never came to Andre’s apartment.”
“She must have talked about him. What did she say?”
He placed the screenplay on top of the machine and stood. “He could have been the dictator of a banana republic for all I know or just some rich guy getting a little on the side. Anya wanted a man who could protect her. I got the impression she thought this boyfriend could do the job. He was older than she was but in good shape, from what she told me.”
“How much older?”
He shrugged. “I’d guess at least over thirty.”
“Sounds like you didn’t think much of him.”
“I didn’t think he acted like somebody who was planning a wedding. I don’t think he even loved her. He bought her stuff, but it was all cheap crap except for a silver necklace he gave her. Even that wasn’t Tiffany.”
“Was it shaped like a heart?”
He nodded. “She never took it off. Andre was so clueless he never once asked where she got it.”
“Did you see her leave with the boyfriend after you brought her home?”
“What I told you before was true: I never saw her again. After I dropped her off, I took the car back to Jerry. We had a couple of drinks. I sort of passed out on his couch. I didn’t wake up until noon the next day. I walked home.”
Davie recorded Forrester’s contact information in her notebook. She could find him using DMV records, but getting the details from Bell saved time.
“Anya’s boyfriend must have taken her on dates,” she said. “Did she ever say where?”
Bell stared at his soggy screenplay. “He took her out to eat a few times, mostly out of town. She was cagey about naming the restaurants. For all I know, they had Quarter Pounders in the car at some Pacoima drive-in. It was like he didn’t want them to be seen together. I asked her if the guy was married, but she said no. He was single. He was also stupid. She was so beautiful. I’d want everybody to know she was mine.”
“What else did Anya tell you?”
Bell tried to pry the wet pages apart, but the paper disintegrated in his hand. “He liked sports. Once he took her hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains because he liked to make love under the stars. She hated doing it on the hard ground, but she didn’t tell him that, only me. I listened because I loved her, but it felt like a knife in my gut when I thought about someone else touching her.”
“Sounds like you hated him. Maybe you hated her a little too. I understand how it could have happened. She told you too much, you couldn’t stand it anymore. If you killed Anya, you need to tell me now.”
Bell seemed crestfallen. “Have you ever loved somebody, detective? I mean really loved them.”
“This isn’t about my love life, Mr. Bell.”
“Then I guess you wouldn’t understand how I felt about Anya. No man could have ever loved her the way I did. I would have taken a bullet for her. I would never, ever have done anything to harm her.”
Bell’s words sounded like screenplay dialogue, but his passion seemed genuine. Still, his love for Anya didn’t eliminate him from the suspect list. Davie had to corroborate his alibi with Jerry Forrester before that happened. If necessary, she would impound Forrester’s car and have it tested for trace evidence.
If Bell was telling the truth, at least he had provided her with information about Anya’s mystery boyfriend. In her head, Davie ticked off what she knew about him: older than thirty, physically fit, someone who wanted to keep Anya under wraps, possibly because he would be put in jeopardy if people learned he was dating a hooker. He was a cheapskate, so maybe he had a wife who managed the finances and would be suspicious if she saw any unusual credit card charges.
She wondered where Anya had met the guy. Was he a john? Had they connected at one of Satine’s parties at the Edison? Cal Rogers had told Davie that Satine entertained everyone from business leaders to politicians. She thought about the LAPD business card left at the Volga Bakery. It seemed unlikely that anyone in law enforcement would attend a party hosted by a guy rumored to be a member of the Odessa mafia, but she couldn’t exclude the possibility. Whoever the boyfriend was, his identify had been kept a well-guarded secret—one that Anya Nosova had taken to her grave.
“If your story doesn’t check out, I’ll be back.”
Bell held his hands palms up. “All I have left is the truth. I’ve lost everything else.”
Davie figured that line would likely make it into the script if it wasn’t already there. The odds were against Bell’s screenplay ever making it into theaters, which seemed like one more let-down in an already long list. Failure had a way of spreading like the plague, and she didn’t want to be in its path if the wind veered her way.
She turned to leave and then stopped. “Wh
y are you out here this time of night?”
“I can’t do a read-through in my apartment. Tenants complain about the noise.”
“What about Anya? Did she complain too?”
Bell didn’t respond. He squeezed his eyes closed and then resumed sorting through his soggy pages. Davie left him like that and headed to the station.
The property room was closed at that time of night, but she filled out the form to book the heart purse into evidence and then locked it in her desk for safekeeping. After that, she headed for home.
32
An alarm pierced the silence of Davie’s darkened bedroom. It was an incoming call on her cell. She glanced at the clock. Three digits glowed blood red. 4:10 a.m. The caller ID read blocked, which meant it was probably work related. The phone felt heavy as she fumbled it to her ear, knowing good news seldom came at that hour of the morning.
She muttered a groggy, “Who’s this?”
“Get your ass out of bed. I have something you’ll want to see.”
Davie recognized the gravelly voice of Det. Reuben Quintero. She didn’t attempt to mask her irritation. “You know what time it is?”
“Time for coffee, hotshot. We just served search warrants on three locations connected to Grigory Satine, including an apartment in Marina del Rey. And guess what? It was full of hookers and one of them knows your vic.”
Davie swung her legs off the bed and planted her feet onto Alex Camden’s Turkish rug. Her body felt stiff from the horseback ride the day before, but only slightly so. “Where are you?”
“Got a pen?”
She grabbed her notebook from the nightstand and jotted down an address on Lincoln Boulevard. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
The Bora Bora apartment building was ten stories high with lanais jutting from the façade where plants, folding chairs, and beach bikes were stored. Davie figured Satine chose the location because the marina attracted young people who might be less concerned about men parading through the hallways at all hours of the day and night.
Pacific Homicide Page 17
