Dead Write: A Forensic Handwriting Mystery (3 page)

“But what’s going to happen to me? You know I can’t go back to the Sorensen Academy after . . .” The girl’s voice began to tremble and she shut her mouth tight, determined not to let anyone see her cry.

Claudia gave her shoulders a quick squeeze, knowing she wouldn’t accept anything that might look like sentiment. “I’ll be gone only a few days. You know I’m not going anywhere without making arrangements for you, kiddo. And we can talk on the phone every day.”

Annabelle shrugged, feigning indifference. “I don’t care. I’ll just go stay with my friends.”

Muzzling the temptation to argue that the gang-bangers Annabelle used to hang out with were not her friends, Claudia said, “I’m going to ask Pete if you can stay with him and Monica so you won’t miss any school. I thought it might even be fun for you two.” Pete was Claudia’s brother. His daughter Monica and Annabelle were best friends and classmates.

“Pete hates me.”

“That’s not true and you know it. He just doesn’t understand some of the things you’ve been into in the past. But he let Monica go to Six Flags with us last week, didn’t he? And it was cool, wasn’t it?”

Annabelle smiled at the memory, but she quickly wiped away the smile. It wouldn’t do to let on that she had enjoyed herself. They had spent the day at Magic Mountain in Santa Clarita at Jovanic’s suggestion. He had expressed the view that after the all-too-real terrors that Annabelle and Claudia had experienced together, amusement park screams would be liberating. Watching Annabelle and Monica navigate the rides like other rambunctious fourteen-year-old girls in the park, posturing for young dudes who played it casual and pretended not to notice, Claudia had to admit that he was right.

“That was pretty fresh,” Annabelle conceded. “But I know Pete won’t let me stay at their house. I could stay here.”

“Here? You want me to leave you here on your own? I don’t think so.”

“What about Joel?”

“As in, you stay here with Joel? Like that’s gonna work. Not! For one thing, it would be totally inappropriate. For another, I wouldn’t trust the two of you not to kill each other.” The moment it was out of her mouth she wished she could take it back. Talk of killing could no longer be taken as a joke.

But Annabelle wasn’t listening. A calculating look had stolen into her eyes. “I could watch him for you,” she said. “I could make sure he’s not hooking up with that girl—his partner, while you’re gone.”

“Alex. His partner’s name is Alex. And no, you’re not gonna keep an eye on him. You’re gonna stay under the radar and out of his face. Got it? He doesn’t need watching and I don’t need you to spy for me.”

The pout was back. “If he was
my
boyfriend, I wouldn’t want him hanging out with someone who looked like her. Those tight T-shirts she wears, all stretched over her gigantic boobs . . .”

“Annabelle!”

The girl caught the warning tone and backed off with a smug look, satisfied that she’d gotten a rise.

“I’m going to call Pete now,” Claudia said. She pointed a finger at the girl. “See if you can stay out of trouble for the next five minutes, okay?”

“Okay, but I know he won’t let me stay. Pete fuck ing hates me.”

It wasn’t until she had boarded the flight to New York that Claudia was able to appreciate how much the responsibility of caring for Annabelle had been weighing on her. It was ironic that buckling herself into the seat belt gave her a sense of freedom—something that she recognized had been missing for weeks.

Since the murder and everything that had happened afterward, the constant vigilance she’d had to maintain over her emotions had taken a toll. Fighting tears that stung her eyelids without warning. Biting back angry words Jovanic hadn’t earned. She needed some time away from the sidelong glances of appraisal that he thought she didn’t see. The physical space would be therapeutic, she told herself. Some distance from Annabelle’s problems would be a welcome break, too. The girl had a twisted history and she was as immersed in it as she could be.

They had met the previous fall when Claudia was invited to be a guest lecturer at the private school where Annabelle was a student. The headmistress had asked her to design a program of graphotherapy for the girl—handwriting exercises done to music, which were intended to help level out the shaky emotional ground that had taken Annabelle to the brink of suicide. As they’d worked together, the two of them had formed a close bond, made stronger by shared tragedy.

A wave of fatigue washed over her and she leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes. She loved Annabelle like a daughter, but there was no denying the girl was a handful. Watching the receding tarmac through the aircraft porthole, Claudia felt a surge of gratitude toward Pete, who had agreed to allow Annabelle to stay with him and Monica despite his misgivings. As a widower, he tended to be overprotective of his daughter, who was innocent for her age, which Annabelle wasn’t.

As the plane climbed to altitude, Claudia’s thoughts shifted to Grusha Olinetsky. The matchmaker had been as slippery as an oil slick, avoiding any direct questions about the mistakes Andy Nicholson was supposed to have made.
Why?

She gave a mental shrug. What did it matter why? The new account promised to pay well, she would have some time to herself, and at the end of the assignment, she would enjoy a romantic reunion with Jovanic. And yet . . .

Their parting kiss when he had dropped her off at LAX had a distinctly perfunctory flavor. She wondered whether it was a reflection of his disagreement with her decision to accept the assignment. Or had there been something else on his mind?

Claudia arrived midafternoon at her hotel in Manhattan’s Theater District under skies boiling with thunderheads. After a long day of travel, she was looking forward to a quick shower and a change of clothes before meeting with Grusha Olinetsky.

Opening the door to her tenth-floor hotel room, she was disappointed to find it only slightly larger than a jail cell. She had hoped for something a little nicer. The furniture was institutional and not particularly good quality. The bedspread was an unattractive orange and yellow polyester ribbing with matching drapes. In defiance of the NONSMOKING ROOM sign on the dresser, the lingering odor of cigarettes made it smell like an ashtray.

Maybe if she’d been a client rather than a consultant, she would have warranted nicer accommodations. Claudia plugged in the laptop and hooked into the hotel’s wireless connection to check business e-mails that might have arrived while she was en route. Her friend Kelly, who was an attorney, had tried to talk her into a BlackBerry, but she’d held out. She didn’t want to be
that
accessible.

While the computer was booting up, she switched on the air conditioner blower to freshen the stale air, and tugged open the drapes. The window gave on an uninspiring view of Forty-eighth Street: construction cranes raising steel I beams up the side of the office building opposite; down on street level, camera shops and pizzerias; a human tsunami flooding the sidewalks.

Unzipping her suitcase on the double bed, she gave herself a pep talk.
At least the Internet connection works. And the bathroom has a new-looking marble coun tertop. And it seems reasonably clean.

Not quite trusting the dresser drawers, she left her lingerie in the suitcase and hung up her clothes: black silk suit, gray knit turtleneck dress, a dressy outfit in case she went out to dinner, a few other items she could mix and match. Taking Annabelle and Monica with her on a hurried shopping trip to Nordstrom and Macy’s, she’d spent some of the advance Grusha Olinetsky had paid through PayPal.

It’s the big city
.
You have to dress the part.

After showering, Claudia touched up her makeup and got into the navy Anne Klein jacket and slacks with a cream-colored shell. She pinned a white enamel fountain-pen brooch onto her lapel, clasped around her neck the gold chain that Jovanic had given her for her birthday, stepped into imitation snakeskin pumps. A quick inspection in the mirrored closet door told her she looked good. She fetched her briefcase and rode the elevator back down to the lobby, ready for her meeting with Grusha Olinetsky.

The clouds had broken while she was inside and the air was damp with a steady drizzle. Her first visit to the Big Apple in years and she felt about as welcome as a case of measles. If Jovanic were with her, she knew she would be seeing the city through different eyes.

The taxi driver was on his cell phone as she climbed into the backseat, chatting to someone in a foreign language. Listening to his accent, Claudia guessed he was Eastern European. He rang off, asking over his shoulder where she was going as they joined the traffic on Forty-eighth Street.

She read him the address from the Post-it note she’d written it on. “About how far is that?”

“Distance? Mile and quarter maybe. How long? Ten, fifteen minutes.”

She sat back in the seat. The taxi smelled like some kind of meat—lamb, maybe, and onions. Strong, but not unpleasant. Savory enough to make her hungry for something more than the dry turkey sandwich she’d eaten on the flight across country.

The taxi wove through the traffic and turned onto Broadway where the lights were already bright in the gathering dusk. Times Square, the Coca-Cola sign, the endless advertisements, the theaters. It all made her wish again that Jovanic were with her.

“Where are you from?” she asked the driver, to distract herself from her thoughts.

“Belorussia,” he said, flicking a glance at her in the rearview mirror. “You know where it is?”

“Yes, some of my boyfriend’s family come from Minsk. The rest are Croatian.”

The cabbie took a closer look at her in the rearview. His voice warmed up a few degrees. “Minsk is capital of Belorussia.”

“How long have you lived over here?”

“Twenty years.”

“A long time. I’m actually on my way to meet someone from your country.”

“
Da
? Maybe I know him. I know lot of Russians in neighborhood.”

“It’s a her, not a him. She’s a matchmaker—Grusha Olinetsky.”

The sound the driver made in his throat was the guttural equivalent of an eye roll and reminded her of Jovanic’s reaction when she’d told him about the matchmaker. “
Akh, Olinetsky. Noo kanetzna, da da, ya iyo znayoo.
That one! She call herself baroness
. Da
, I know Olinetsky.
”

“You know her personally?”

He shook his head. “People talk about her. She’s friend of yours?”

“No, it’s business.”

“In Russia, last name would be Olinetskaya,” the cabbie offered, warming to his subject. “Husband would be Olinetsky. When a woman come to United States, she keep her husband’s name, drop -
aya.
So, Olinetskaya become Olinetsky. See?”

“I just learned something new,” Claudia said. Had Grusha been married when she emigrated to the U.S.? She wondered where Mr. Olinetsky might be now.

“Grusha,” the cabbie mused. “Comes from
old
Russia. You don’t hear that name no more.”

“Really? I didn’t know that.”

“Maybe her father read Dostoevsky.”

“Why’s that?”

“The name. From
Brothers Karamazov.
Grushenka was beautiful girl. Everyone is in love with her.”

Claudia smiled. “What did you do back in Russia?”

The cabdriver snorted. “I was schoolteacher. Grow up under Communists. Came here to make better life. So now I drive cab.” He hesitated for a beat. “This Olinetskaya, I hear something . . .” He broke off.

“What have you heard?” Claudia pressed. “Oh, come on, that’s not fair. You can’t not tell me after a start like that.”

She met his eyes in the mirror. His slid away and he gave a quick shake of his head. “
Nyet.
Just stupid gossip. Look, here is address for you.”

End of conversation.

Okay, so maybe he didn’t believe Grusha was a baroness. Neither did Claudia. What else might he have been on the verge of saying?

The cab had stopped outside an attractive building with a redbrick exterior that dated from early in the twentieth century. She handed the driver a twenty and waited for her change, her curiosity unsatisfied, and got out into light rain. The coolness on her face was refreshing after the stuffiness of her room and the hodgepodge of odors in the taxi.

She took her time crossing to the arched doorway that bore the address of the building where Grusha Olinetsky ran her business—one of the many industrial lofts around the city that had been renovated into office buildings. On the ground floor was a store-front that faced the street. Manicured dwarf trees in clay pots were spaced a few feet apart in front of the plate glass windows. Claudia entered the modernized lobby and found
Elite Introductions
on the touch screen directory. The dating club was located on the building’s top floor. Loft 14.