Flat Spin (26 page)

M
orning overcast had given way to wispy cirrostratus and anemic sunshine by the time we left the coroner’s office. An afternoon storm was moving in. Maybe this one would bring real rain.

Czarnek said he wanted to interview Bondarenko’s widow and wanted me to go with him.

“She knows you,” the detective said. “She might be more willing to talk with you there.”

I didn’t relish the idea of having to be there when he informed her that her husband was dead, and told him as much. Czarnek offered to buy me lunch in exchange. The best Italian food in Los Angeles, he said. Who was I to say no?

We took surface streets skirting the Golden State Freeway up to the working class enclave of Lincoln Heights on the eastern fringes of Chinatown, a five-minute drive. To the north, the undulating peaks of the San Gabriels wore a fresh dusting of white. The snow line ran in precise parallel to the dun-colored elevations below, as if some giant artist had drawn it with a straight edge across the south face of the mountains. Czarnek wheeled across opposing traffic lanes and into a small lot next to an Italian deli made of cinder blocks. Two unmarked detective cars and four LAPD black and whites were already parked there.

An Italian lady who looked to be about as old as Mrs. Schmulowitz sat on a stool behind the cash register. She smiled at Czarnek as we walked by like she knew him. The tables were covered with red and white checkered plastic cloths and occupied by cops hunched over sausage sandwiches and plates heaped high with steaming pasta primavera, all talking and laughing. A few glanced at us as we walked in, nodding politely to Czarnek, then sizing me up as if to say, “Who’s the perp?”

We waited inside the door for a spot to open up.

“Popular place,” I said.

“We get a discount, half off,” Czarnek said. “Used to be, a cop couldn’t pay for a meal in this town, but those days are long gone.”

Two bellied detectives vacated a table in the rear near the kitchen and ambled past, toward the cash register. The one who wasn’t paying the check rolled a toothpick out of a dispenser on the counter.

“Where’s that crazy partner of yours?” he said to Czarnek.

“Mental health day.”

“How’re things up in Valley Bureau?”

“Can’t complain,” Czarnek said.

“Beats working for a living.”

“Does most days.”

“Keep your powder dry, Keith,” the detective said as he pushed open the door.

“You do the same, Manny,” Czarnek said.

The old lady behind the cash register handed us each a plastic laminated menu and gestured toward the open table. There was a plastic potted geranium on it and a candle in an old Chianti bottle, its sides caked with dried candle wax like frozen, multicolored waterfalls. We waited until the busboy finished wiping down the tablecloth, then sat.

Czarnek spat his gum in a paper napkin. The waitress waddled over with two green plastic water glasses and a red plastic basket lined with a green paper and piled with warm garlic bread. I ordered the eggplant. Czarnek went with chicken piccata and a side of fried mozzarella sticks.

“Those things’ll kill you,” I said of his choice in appetizers.

“Hey, I quit cigarettes. You gotta croak of something.” He got out a pen and a thin reporter’s notebook. “I need to know what you know about this Russian connection to Echevarria,” he said.

I told him what I knew of Bondarenko’s ties to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, of Carlisle’s plans in Kazakhstan with Tarasov, the Russian oilman, and Tarasov’s own purported ties to Russian intelligence. I told him about Janice Echevarria’s husband, Harry Ramos, and the possible interest Ramos shared with Tarasov and Carlisle in the Kashagan oil field. I described the nonchalant way in which Carlisle had reacted when I told him I knew that Echevarria had been to Kazakhstan a week before his death, and Carlisle’s flip-flop, how he’d first paid me to brief the LAPD on Echevarria’s true work history, then demanded I stop asking questions.

Czarnek looked up from his notepad.

“How much did he pay you?”

“Twenty-five large.”

The detective sat back in his chair like I’d just informed him the Tooth Fairy wasn’t real. “Jesus,” he said, “if
that
were to ever make it into open court . . .”

I ate some garlic bread and licked the olive oil off my fingers.

“Why do you think Carlisle wants you to back off ?” Czarnek said.

“Theory one: He’s afraid my digging around might blow his chances of scoring big in Kazakhstan. Theory two: He’s somehow involved with Tarasov in Echevarria’s murder.”

“What about Baskin Robbins’ murder?”

“That’s theory number three.”

I didn’t volunteer my theory number four: that Carlisle feared I might incriminate his daughter and assistant, Miles Zambelli, in an ongoing murder investigation. While I doubted that Savannah’s one-night stand prompted Zambelli to kill Echevarria in some kind of jealous rage, I couldn’t very well tell Czarnek about their tryst without implicating them both. I may have been bitter over what my ex-wife had done to me years before, but I wasn’t that vindictive. I let it go.

“Carlisle’s personal assistant banged your ex-wife,” Czarnek said matter-of-factly. “That’s why Echevarria walked out on her. But I assume you knew that already, right?”

“Savannah must’ve told you.”

“She told me about her father paying you to talk to us, too.” Czarnek reached for the bread basket. “I don’t see Zambelli capping Echevarria. Not the type, not on paper, anyway. Now, this Russian, that’s a different story. Echevarria’s son, too. We got multiple witnesses that put the kid at Echevarria’s apartment the night before. They were arguing, him and his old man.”

“The kid was in Oakland the night of the murder,” I said.

“So he says,” Czarnek said.

The waitress brought our meals. Czarnek insisted it was the best chicken piccata he’d ever eaten. My eggplant tasted like something Jeffrey Dahmer might’ve kept in a Tupperware bowl in his freezer.

S
IXTEEN

A
nya Bondarenko took the news of her husband’s death stoically, like a spouse who understood intuitively that the man she’d married years before was not destined to share with her the journey into old age. “At least,” she said, pouring herself more vodka, “he was not found fucking other woman.”

Czarnek asked if she or her late husband knew or had ever heard of Pavel Tarasov. The name rang no bell, she said, nor did Arlo Echevarria, or Gil Carlisle.

“What about Harry Ramos?” I said.

“Who?”

“Harry Ramos.”

“Harry Ramos . . . Harry Ramos.” Gennady Bondarenko’s widow lit a Virginia Slim and let the smoke settle in her lungs, giving her time to run the name through the Rolodex in her head. “I know this name,” she said.

She crossed from behind her late husband’s desk to the office safe from which she extracted a file folder with what looked to be various business-related correspondence. She licked her thumb and carefully perused each document before finding the one she was looking for, then handed it to me without comment.

It was a month-old letter thanking Gennady Bondarenko for his interest and possible investment in a limited partnership that was acquiring drilling rights in the “exciting” Kashagan oil field of Kazakhstan. The letter was cosigned by the partnership’s legal counsel, Miles Zambelli, and its resident business agent, Harry Ramos. I gave it to Czarnek to read.

Anya Bondarenko took another drag from her cigarette. “This Harry Ramos, he comes to see Gennady. Very fancy. Big song and dance. ‘We will make millions in this oil. Buy big house next to J.Lo,’ he tells Gennady. Gennady says we will invest our savings in this oil. I say, ‘No, this is very, very bad idea.’ We should buy Quiznos franchise in Tarzana. We fight. Back and forth. All night. Gennady will not listen. Then, he tells me he must go to see somebody on Fairfax. One hour later, he is back, his face white, the blood gone. He tells me, ‘Forget the oil. We will buy the Quiznos.’ But now . . .” Tears filled her eyes.

I asked her who her husband went to see that night. She shrugged.

“Gennady never said.”

T
he Hollywood Freeway was anything but free. Czarnek tuned his car radio to a news station with traffic reports every ten minutes. The radio let us know all about road conditions in south Orange County and east to the Inland Empire, but not word one on why the 101 was a parking lot. Gridlock in central Los Angeles at any given hour of the day apparently had stopped being news long ago.

“Might as well be in goddamn prison,” the detective said, chewing the hell out of his gum, fingers strumming the top of his steering wheel impatiently.

Fed up, he switched on the car’s flashing police lights and spun the wheel hard, wedging his unmarked Crown Vic between the stationary traffic to our left and the barrier wall to our right, its segmented concrete dividers streaked with scrape marks left by other, lesser drivers who’d tried the same maneuver and failed. We drove the shoulder that way for nearly a mile, exited onto Beverly Boulevard, and took surface streets into the hills, up to Savannah’s house.

Czarnek dropped me off outside the gate. He said he and his partner would be taking a hard look at Harry Ramos, Zambelli and Tarasov as suspects in the homicides of Echevarria and Bondarenko.

“I still don’t see it,” Czarnek said as I got out of the car.

“See what?”

“All that spook shit you told my partner and me about when we were up having lunch in Rancho Bonita. Government agent. Taking out high-value targets. Doing the Lord’s work. I mean, I’m looking at you and there’s a disconnect there. You don’t look the part, you or Echevarria. James Bond, now
he
looked the part.”

“James Bond wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.”

Czarnek smiled. “Behave yourself, Logan.”

“Fair skies, Detective.”

He drove on. I pressed the intercom button on the speaker box beside the gate.

“Yes?” The voice sounded young and Latina.

“Cordell Logan to see Ms. Echevarria.”

The gate buzzed and swung open. I walked up the drive. There was a metallic silver S-Class Mercedes parked in front of the house. The woman whose voice I heard on the box was waiting for me on the front steps. She said her name was Alameda Guzman, Savannah’s housekeeper. Mid-twenties. Big horsy smile. Size 00 jeans. Glossy black hair down to the small of her back.

“Mrs. Echevarria has told me much about you,” she said.

“All lies.”

“She’s with a patient right now. Would you like to come in and wait?”

“A patient. Right.”

“Actually, we were just finishing up,” Savannah said, emerging from the house.

You would’ve never guessed from her ebullient mood that her life at that moment was anything but perfect. With her was a baggy-eyed, olive-skinned man in his mid-forties who looked like a walking billboard for Brooks Brothers Friday Casual. His yellow, monogrammed, button-down shirt was tucked into a pair of indigo, dry clean-only jeans with knife-edge creases. He was toting an eel skin briefcase in his left hand.

“Cordell Logan,” Savannah said, making introductions, “Danny Katz.”

Katz’s grip wasn’t a handshake; it was a Herculean test of wills. His eyes held steady on mine as he tried to crush my fingers.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Logan.” The accent was South African.

“Mr. Katz,” I said, squeezing harder.

He gritted his teeth, smiling through the pain, and finally let go, hoping Savannah didn’t notice him rubbing the circulation back into his hand.

“Danny’s a new client,” Savannah said proudly. “He needed help with some time-management issues, to get his priorities squared away and his life back on track. So I told him, ‘Sounds to me like what you need is a life coach.’”

“That or a nagging ex-wife,” I said.

Savannah smiled but it looked more like a death threat.

I asked how they met.

“We were at the Beverly Center,” Danny said. “I was backing out of a space and accidentally scraped her bumper. I left a note apologizing, with my number. I felt so terrible.”

“He not only covered the repairs to my car,” Savannah said, “he insisted on giving me free dry cleaning for a year. Danny owns a dry-cleaning shop.”

“Seven actually,” he said, correcting her.

“Seven? Wow. How do you stand that kind of excitement?”

Katz didn’t appreciate my humor. “And what is it that you do, Mr. Logan?”

“Me? As little as possible.”

He smiled thinly, turned to Savannah and shook her hand. “A most productive meeting. I trust we can do it again soon.”

“Anytime. Call me.”

He nodded curtly to me, eased himself into his Mercedes and drove away. Alameda went back inside. Savannah’s hands were on her hips. She was pissed at me. So what else is new?

“Why do you have to be such an overbearing dick all the time?”

“How long have you known this guy?”

“I don’t know. A couple weeks. So what?”

“He just
happens
to run into your car and leaves you a note? You don’t know what his story is, Savannah. He could be anybody. Who else are you planning to let just waltz in here—Jack the Ripper?”