Big Money (Austin Carr Mystery) (28 page)

“I swear.” She raised her right hand as if the gesture would sway him.

Jonathan’s next thought was that he should be doing other, more important things—like preparing for Cramer’s deposition—rather than waste time bickering with this can of gasoline from the past.

“Do you understand the risk I’ve taken to come into this country? He’s my nephew, and he apparently drowned a week ago.”

Jonathan didn’t want to be outright rude, but everything coming from her was suspect.

“How do you know it’s him?”

“I just do—it will take too long to explain. His body is here for certain.” Her voice shook, and her gaze turned frosty. “You have to trust me, if only this once.”

“Trust you?” The thought of that unsettled him. It reminded him of Dino, who’d used the same phrase each time he’d roped in a new client. Yes, the best client, he’d often brag. This case will bring in millions. It’ll let us have offices with real views of the city. We’d each have our own secretary. Believe me.
Trust me
. Jonathan had counted the losing cases by the number of times he’d heard Dino profess those words. The mental echo pulsated like a brightly illuminated porn shop sign. It was a clear indication Dino didn’t trust himself. And an equally clear clue Mariya was also full of it.

She grabbed the sides of her head and growled. “I helped you find your brother, didn’t I? And I protected you, and got rid of the man responsible for his death. You could at least do something for me in return.”

Jonathan had expected her to use that card. How could she not? She’d rescued him from a debacle in the cold, dreary Russian capital. The cerebral images once again scrambled his thoughts. Studying her face, he sank deeper into the memories of the ordeal. The unbearable pain returned. The pain of finding Matt—a dying Matt. He’d hoped to forget the details forever. But Mariya’s voice—and the way she’d said the word
brother
—made him all of a sudden nauseated. He clenched his jaw.

“Please.”

She looked into his eyes intensely, waiting, perhaps wishing, pleading, and feigning a gentler look than the one she’d usually carried. Her eyes began to water. And then a tear streaked down her cheek. He’d never thought she was capable of it. She was cunning enough to act this out, he cautioned himself. But he wasn’t sure. He met her gaze—and calculated as lucidly as possible—seeing perhaps for the first time this Russian troublemaker finally reveal a sliver of compassion.

She dug into her purse and retrieved a tissue. She delicately dabbed the corner of her eyes with it, careful to leave her makeup intact.

“I want to be left alone.”

Mariya squinted, squeezed her purse with both hands, and butted Jonathan’s shoulder with it. For a small purse, it sure felt heavy—and he guessed why.

“I came a long way!” Her voice cracked. “I want to tell his wife, his mother, his children, what happened, to give them closure—the same closure you found ten years ago. You should understand this. And they’re poor, from a small town in Siberia, so they can’t come here. I don’t know anyone else here who could help.”

Jonathan scanned the parking lot, unsure if she was really alone. A half-empty lot in broad daylight was hardly a scary place except to someone already afraid. To someone who’d been tracked down. And nothing she’d said so far had attenuated his fear. “Go to the morgue yourself. It’s at Tulane and Broad.”

She grabbed Jonathan’s wrist and jolted him toward her. “I’m here illegally. The last thing I’m going to do is walk into a government office. The FBI is still looking for me. If it’s money you want, I’ll pay you—”

“Stop!” The thought of taking anything from her, be it money or praise or affection or chocolates or anything else, riled him up.

“I beg you.” Mariya stepped closer. Closer yet. She threw the purse strap over her shoulder and raised her hands to his collar.

Jonathan looked up at the blue sky blotched by small, charcoal-colored clouds. A refreshing, long breath laced with the scent of her sweet perfume vented his lungs. He didn’t repel her embrace, but the awkwardness crept through her grasp, the timid squeeze strengthening with each passing second. She pressed her head into his chest, her solid grapefruit-sized breasts planting into his ribs. Surely now she’d feel his racing heartbeat, he thought, anxious that she’d sense his fear.

“I’m not the same woman. And now, I’m sad and need to know what happened to my nephew.”

“What’s his name?” Jonathan didn’t look down.

“Igor.”

Jonathan imagined an enormous, toothless beast from Siberia with biceps the size of a bear’s thighs.

“Igor what?”

“Yakin. He was a good, kind, honest man. A father. A dedicated worker, with a hard life.” Mariya squeezed Jonathan even more tightly into her hold, her palms pressed flat on this back.

He stood motionless. He pondered reciprocating her hug, if anything out of pure human impulse, out of kindness or empathy, but her gesture contrasted sharply with every vibe he’d ever gotten from her. It mattered little that no woman had held Jonathan with such closeness in over a year. It mattered even less that she’d momentarily effaced her hardened warlord persona. Her act, whether genuine or fabricated, would not pierce his armor. He couldn’t allow himself to trust her. At least he recycled the warning to himself again and again as he lingered motionless in her embrace.

“One day,” Mariya said softly, “I will tell you many things that will surprise you. But now, I need this favor from you.”

His back was drenched with sweat, as much from the heat and muggy air as from her uncomfortable clasp. An entire minute passed, silently, her arms still wrapped around him. His hands drooped to his side. He began to feel a weirdly soothing aura. Something comforting. He quizzed himself. It was obvious. She was part of his past—intertwined in a momentous and tumultuous piece of history, albeit brief. She embodied that reality in her very existence. A history he both abhorred and secretly valued that very instant in her proximity. He felt his resistance fade, as if witnessing it from outside his body. What harm could she really do? She was not in Russia, after all, but rather on his turf.

He closed his eyes. He reached his arms around her shoulders, his hands over her back. She wore no bra. Her hair smelled of lilac, not sulfur. Her heart was also racing. It brought back the images of the night he’d first met her. He’d tracked her down at a Moscow hotel. And he remembered how attractive she was the moment he laid eyes on her. But that was long ago.

“Only on one condition.” He moved back, gently peeling her hands off him.

Peering up at his face, she asked softly, “What?”

“You don’t lie to me.”

Her poker face returned. She didn’t answer right away. Her lips stayed as straight as a hyphen, until she said, “
Horosho
.”

Identifying a corpse at the coroner’s office might be simple enough
, he thought. But what gave him pause was going on behalf of Mariya, a woman associated with an unsolved murder, among other unpleasant liabilities. He weighed the risks some more. “Fine, I’ll find out what I can.”

Mariya’s face lit up.

“What does he look like?”

“Dark hair, dark eyes, not tall...and you will recognize him by a tattoo—a snake wrapped around an anchor. It should be on his right arm.”

Jonathan sighed.

“
Spasibo
, my old friend.” Mariya pulled out a receipt, jotted something on it and handed it to him. “My mobile number. Please ask them all the right questions, as quickly as possible. I must go, now.”

Jonathan felt strangely relieved that he’d agreed to help but wasn’t sure why. Perhaps the guilt of having said no would have been too unpleasant, even knowing who this woman was.

“Please undo what you did.” He handed her the keys.

It didn’t take long for her to again amaze Jonathan with her resourcefulness. She popped open the hood and quickly dug into a space behind the battery. She grimaced, appearing to struggle with something, pulling hard at whatever was buried in there. A few more tugs revealed a black tube the size of an empty paper towel roll, with a coiled wire dangling from one end.

“Done.” She slammed the hood shut, rubbed the dirt off her hands, and got behind the wheel. The engine started instantly. She stepped out and grinned.

“Don’t do it again, or I’ll kill you,” Jonathan said with a seriousness meant to confuse or amuse her.

She raised her brow and chuckled.

He took out his cell phone and scrolled through some names until he found the one he could count on for help.

Back
to TOC

Here’s a sample from J.L. Abramo’s
Chasing Charlie Chan.

LENNY ARCHER

When Lenny Archer managed to open his eyes, the first thing he saw was a small black circle with a white spot at its center. As he began to focus the circle became deep red and he recognized the white object. A tooth. Lenny probed the inside of his mouth with his tongue and found the space where the molar and a few of its neighbors had once been. And he could taste blood. Lenny realized he was face down on the floor and made an effort to move. The pain in his lower abdomen was unbearable. He shifted his gaze to the significantly larger red pool that spread from the floor up into his shirt below his waist. Archer let out a ghastly sound, part animal moan and part angry prayer.

“This mope is still breathing,” said Tully.

“Put him out of his fucking misery.”

“Maybe he’ll tell us where he stashed it.”

“If he was going to spill, he would have talked before you knocked his fucking teeth out,” said Raft. “The guy is a fucking mess. Kill him. You’d be doing him a favor.”

Lenny Archer tried to remember where he was, remember what he’d been doing before taking a bullet in the stomach and a kick in the face. He wondered if it really mattered.

Archer remembered sitting at his desk looking over the notes Ed Richards had handed him and hearing the noise in the hallway outside his office door. Midnight, too late for a social call and long past business hours. Archer had instinctively placed the notes in the fold of the newspaper on his desktop and quietly slid open the top drawer. Lenny pressed the remote switch to start the office tape recorder and he pulled out his handgun. And he listened.

Silence.

Archer rose from his chair and moved to the door, his gun in hand, intending to check the hall. He slowly turned the knob, the door knocked him to the floor and his weapon discharged. Then another shot and the terrible pain in his abdomen and the crushing blow to his head.

Archer thought he heard voices, in his mind or in the room, debating his fate. He seemed to remember questions.
What did Ed Richards tell you? What did Richards give to you? Who else did Richards talk to? Who did you talk to?
And each time he had failed to respond he could remember
another blow to the face. And then blackness.

Lenny looked in horror at the pool of blood growing larger at his waist. The voices were louder now.

“You’d be doing him a favor,” Raft said.

Tully pressed the gun barrel against Lenny’s head.

“Bingo, Richards’ notes,” said Raft.

Tully looked over to the desk. Raft held the notes in one hand and he tossed the newspaper at Lenny with the other.

“Shoot the motherfucker already,” said Raft.

“We’re still not sure who else knows about this.”

“The sooner you kill this fuck, the sooner we can get to Richards. And trust me; Richards is going to spill his guts.”

An hour earlier, Tully and Raft had followed Richards to the parking lot of a donut shop on Fifth. The shop was closed for the night. Richards pulled up next to the only other car in the lot. They watched from a distance as he climbed out of his car and moved to the driver’s window of the other vehicle. Ed Richards passed some papers through the window, quickly returned to his own car and drove off.

“Follow the other car,” Raft had said.

“What about Richards?”

“We know where Richards lives, he can wait. Let’s see where this guy goes, who the fuck he is and what he knows.”

They followed the second car to a building on Fourth Street and waited for the driver to enter. When they saw the light go on in a second story window, they left their vehicle and moved to the front entrance of the building.

“Fucking private dick,” said Raft, checking the names on the mailboxes.

“There are two of them,” said Tully.

“Not tonight. Whoever this one is, he’s alone up there. Let’s go and check his ID.”

Tully and Raft stood in the hallway outside the office for a minute, unsure about how to play it. They had pulled out their weapons.

“Sounds like he’s coming this way,” Tully said.

They heard the footsteps and watched the door. When the knob began to turn, Raft slammed his shoulder into the door. A shot went off. They stepped into the doorway and saw the man on the floor, a gun in his hand. Tully fired a round into the man’s stomach and then quickly moved to kick the man square in the mouth.

Raft found the wallet in Lenny’s jacket pocket.

Lenny Archer knew he was a dead man. Tully held the barrel of the gun against Lenny’s temple.

“It’s not too late, Leonard,” Tully said. “We call for an ambulance and you survive this mess. All you need to do is help us out a little.”

Lenny Archer could feel the life spilling out of the center of his body.

“Is your partner in on this?” Tully asked.

“No.”

“You wouldn’t lie to us at a time like this, would you, Leonard?”

“No.”

“Any last words?”

Archer closed his eyes, felt the lightness in his head and saw the bright light behind his eyelids.

“Life is a carnival,” Lenny Archer said.

Tully pulled the trigger.

JAKE DIAMOND

I met Jimmy Pigeon on the set of a film shoot on a Los Angeles sound stage. All I knew about private investigators was what I had found in the Hollywood movies I was desperately trying to break into.

Nick Charles, Philip Marlowe,
Sam Spade.

After arriving in LA in pursuit of fame and fortune, I had managed to land several small film roles. Very small. Always a low budget crime melodrama. Always a second-string petty criminal or thug. If it was a prison movie—a man framed and incarcerated for a crime he didn’t commit—I would be the slow-witted convict at the far end of the mess hall table eyeballing the hero’s mashed potatoes as he laid out plans for escape. If it was a heist film—an FBI agent negotiating the release of hostages following a failed bank robbery attempt—I was the gang member lurking in the background listening stupidly while the boss and his right hand man argued the destination of the getaway jet. On the film shoot where I met Pigeon, it was kidnapping. A private eye was employed by a prominent politician to locate his young daughter being held for ransom. The abductors had strongly advised the girl’s father against involving the police. I played the role of the kidnapper with the fewest lines.

Jimmy was a genuine private investigator engaged as a consultant for the production. Pigeon’s job was to help the actor playing the PI in the film look more like a real private eye than an actor playing one, which was nearly an impossible task. I watched Jimmy closely while we were on the set together, his character, concentration, style and charisma. I talked with him about his work as often as he would allow between takes, studying his every move as if I would one day be competing for the lead role in
The Jimmy Pigeon Story
. And then something entirely unexpected and unexplained occurred. I found myself much more fascinated with the notion of
being
a private eye than with the idea of portraying one. On the final day of shooting I found the nerve to ask Jimmy what he thought of my wild impulse. Pigeon invited me to visit his Santa Monica office to mull it over.

A week later, Jimmy was sitting at his desk looking at me as if he wasn’t sure where to begin or whether or not to begin at all. I sat opposite Pigeon in what he informed me was the
client chair
. I was learning already.

“Well, if nothing else,” Pigeon finally said, “Jake Diamond is a perfect name for a PI. Did you come up with it yourself?”

“Gift from my parents,” I said. “How about yours?”

“James C. Pigeon,” he said. “Since day one.”

“C?”

“Not important,” Jimmy said. “Why do you want to give up acting? Believe me, it’s a lot more glamorous than what I do. And certainly more lucrative.”

“There’s not enough glamour to go around,” I answered, “and I’m weary of waiting for some to get around to me. I wondered if you ever considered taking on a partner.”

“Had a few.”

“And?”

“How about this, Jake,” Jimmy said. “I’ll tell you the story of my last partner and then you tell me if you want to leave the bright lights of Hollywood for the dark alleys of Southland.”

As he was making his offer, Pigeon had pulled a bottle of bourbon and two small glasses from a drawer in his desk and began pouring.

“Sounds fair,” I said as he passed me a glass.

“There’s not too much about fair in this particular story, Jake.”

Jimmy took a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket, lit one and dropped the package onto the desk between us.

“Light up if you like,” Jimmy Pigeon said.

And he began.

JIMMY PIGEON

Jimmy Pigeon sat up in his bed. His eyes were leaking like a faucet. He grabbed a roll of toilet paper from the bedside table. It had replaced the empty tissue box sometime during the night. Pigeon sopped up the tears running down his cheeks. His right nostril was packed as solid as a car full of clowns. Jimmy considered trying to blow his nose but he was afraid of what might spill out of his ears. He had hardly slept all night, the plop plop fizz fizz cold and sinus cocktail he had guzzled before crawling into bed had him up to urinate every thirty minutes. He had arrived home late the previous night from a rare vacation, visiting his sister and her family in South Carolina. Six dreadful days. Everything down there, from the family station wagon to the family kitten, was covered in layers of fine yellow dust. By day two the pollen had settled on his shoes, had found refuge in his nose, mouth and eyes. By day three he could barely breathe. His sister, her husband and the kids seemed unaffected, immune, adapted, empirical validation of some Darwinian theory. Pigeon dried his face again and made his way to the bathroom. He adjusted the water to a few degrees below scalding and he stepped into the shower, making a plaintive wish for an unobstructed nasal passage.

Ninety minutes later, Jimmy took the short walk from his apartment to the office. He looked out at the brown haze hovering over downtown Los Angeles in the distance. It was a sight for sore eyes. As he turned onto Fourth Street he spotted two uniformed officers planted at the front entrance to his office building. Pigeon pulled a business card from his wallet and he quickened his pace. One of the young patrolmen stopped Jimmy at the door.

“Can I help you, sir,” he asked.

“Just trying to get to work,” Jimmy said, carefully offering the officer his card.

“Please wait here, sir,” the officer said. He turned and carried the card into the building.

“Something happen?” Jimmy asked the second uniform.

“Officer Sutton will be right back, sir,” the cop said and then nervously added, only for something to say, “there was a high pollution warning this morning.”

“Love it,” Jimmy said, taking in a deep breath for the first time in nearly a week.

The uniform returned his attention to the street.

A few minutes later, Sutton was back.

“Would you please come with me, Mr. Pigeon,” he said.

Jimmy followed Sutton into the building and up to the second floor.

The building superintendent stood in the hall, pale as a ghost. He looked at Jimmy and then turned his eyes away. At the office door, Jimmy immediately noticed the crack in the opaque glass pane which ran diagonally across the hand painted words.
Archer and Pigeon, Private Investigation.

Sutton pushed the door open. Jimmy’s eyes went to the floor. Lenny Archer, his face nearly unrecognizable, lying in what seemed an ocean of blood.

Pigeon sadly looked away and surveyed the room. It had been turned upside down. File cabinet drawers open, papers scattered everywhere. Two men in white lab coats dusting for prints. Two plain clothed detectives staring back at him. The older of the two starting toward him.

“Are you okay, Mr. Pigeon,” the detective said. “You don’t look very well.”

Allergies
, Jimmy thought to say,
aversion to violent death.

“When did this happen?” Jimmy asked.

“I can’t say. The call came in a few hours ago. The medical examiner is on his way. We’ll know more after he takes a look. Do you feel up to a few questions?”

“Give me a moment,” Jimmy said. “I need some air. Can we talk outside?”

“Sure. We’ll be down in a few minutes.”

Jimmy walked back down and out of the building. He passed Sutton and the other uniform at the door. They had nothing to say. He walked twenty feet from the entrance, leaned against the building and lit a cigarette.