Hollywood Station (43 page)

Inside the office, Cosmo Betrossian had pain in his left arm that far exceeded anything he'd suffered this night either from Farley Ramsdale or the killer dog. Cosmo had a through-and-through wound in the biceps that had chipped the bone before exiting, and it burned like liquid fire.

The Georgian was sprawled across Dmitri's desk, spurting blood from an arterial penetration in the neck. But his chest wounds were even more devastating.

Dmitri was sitting back in his chair with a hole in his forehead that was actually a coup de grfce delivered by Cosmo as Dmitri lay dying, having fired the round that wounded Cosmo.

The thundering sounds from the pit below Dmitri's office had actually muffled the sound from the patrons' area, and everyone rocked on. From time to time Ilya gazed across the dance floor, wondering why Cosmo had not returned.

Cosmo hoped he didn't faint before he got down to Ilya with the stacks of money inside his shirt against his skin. The money felt good. He was about to put his gun back into his waistband, but thinking that an employee from the kitchen might have heard the shots, he held the gun in front of him with his one good hand and opened the door.

In such confined space it sounded to Fausto like automatic weapon fire that he'd heard in Nam. Budgie later said that it sounded to her like one huge explosion. She couldn't differentiate the separate weapons firing.

Cosmo Betrossian got off exactly one shot, which hit the wall above their heads. He in turn was shot eighteen times with nine rounds missing him, probably as he was twisting and falling. All five cops shot him at least twice, with Fausto and Budgie scoring the most hits.

This being her first shooting, Andi McCrea later said during the FID investigation that it truly was like a slow-motion sequence. She could see, or thought she could see, hot shell casings ejecting into the air from various pistols and slapping against her face.

The Oracle said that in forty-six years, this was the first time he'd ever fired his weapon outside of the police pistol range.

Budgie had the most interesting commentary. She said that in such close confines, all the muzzle blasts and gun smoke had created a condition that, with her mouth wide open and sucking air, got her chewing gum full of grit.

The pandemonium that followed was worse than what occurred on the night of the patio stabbing. The customers did hear the roar of the multiple gunshots from the upstairs hallway. Budgie and Fausto ran down the stairs to grab the manager and anybody else who looked like he might know what the hell had happened upstairs to cause the original gunfire. The Oracle made urgent calls on his rover.

By the time Viktor Chernenko pulled up in front, people were pouring from the front door and running for their cars. The parking lot was in such chaos that the cars in the back of the lot could not move. Headlights were flashing and horns were honking. Viktor bulled his way through emerging hysterical customers and took the stairs two at a time.

When he got to the scene of carnage, he said to the Oracle, "One of these Russians may be the one I am looking for! Maybe the one who shot Farley Ramsdale!"

The Oracle, who was pale and had the worst heartburn of his life, said, "A busboy told us the one in the chair is the owner. The one lying across the desk is a bartender. The one we shot . . ."-and he pointed to the ragged, bloody heap lying in the corner just beyond the door-"I don't know who he is. He killed the other two."

Viktor said, "You have latex gloves?" and when the Oracle shook his head, Viktor said, "Hell with it!" and pulled Cosmo's wallet from his back pocket and ran back down the stairs, his hands stained by Cosmo's blood.

When he got to the sidewalk in front he could hear sirens wailing as patrol units were arriving from all directions.

"Come with me!" Viktor yelled to Wesley Drubb, who had just leaped from their car as Nate was double-parking it.

Wesley followed Viktor to the parking lot, where Viktor looked inside each and every car with his flashlight as the cars took turns trying to funnel out of the narrow driveway. Most cars had couples in them or single men. Less than ten percent of the cars were driven by single women, but for every one that was, Viktor's flashlight beamed squarely into the driver's face.

He was starting to think that he'd been wrong when he got to the last row of cars, but then he saw a big blond woman with huge breasts behind the wheel of an older Cadillac. Viktor turned to Wesley, his flashlight on Cosmo's driver's license, showing Wesley the name. Then he shined his light on the Cadillac and said, "Please get a DMV on this license plate! Very fast!"

Viktor hung his badge on his coat pocket, walked up to the driver's door, and tapped on the window with his flashlight, his pistol in hand concealed just below the window ledge. And he smiled.

The woman rolled down the window, smiled back at him, and said, "Yes, Officer?"

"Your name, please," Viktor said.

"Ilya Roskova," she said. "There is a problem?" Then she looked to see if the queue of cars was moving, but it was not.

"Maybe," Viktor said. "And is this your car?"

"No, I borrow this car from a friend. She is a neighbor. I am so stupid I do not even know her family name."

"May I see the registration?"

Ilya said, "Shall I look in glove box?"

"By every means," Viktor said, shining his light on her right hand as well as the glove compartment. His gun coming up a bit higher.

"No," she said. "No papers in there."

"This car belongs to a woman, then?"

"Yes," Ilya said. "But not to this woman who sits before you in traffic." Her smile broke wider, a bit coquettish.

Hollywood Nate and Wesley came running back, and Wesley whispered, "Cosmo Betrossian. Same as on that driver's license."

"So you know the owner of the car, then?" Viktor said to Ilya.

"Yes," Ilya said cautiously. "Her name is Nadia."

"Do you know Cosmo Betrossian?"

"No, I do not think so," Ilya said.

Viktor raised his pistol to her face and said in Russian, "You will please step from the car with your hands where we can see them at all times, Madame Roskova."

As Wesley handcuffed Ilya's hands behind her back, she said, "I shall be calling my lawyer immediately. I am completely full of outrage!"

When they were transporting her to Hollywood Station, Nate said to his partner, "Well, Wesley, what do you think of your misdemeanor division now?"

Chapter
TWENTY

AT 3 A. M. Ilya Roskova was sitting in the detective squad room, which was more crowded with people than it ever was during daylight hours. There were Force Investigation Division people, there was the area captain, there was the Detective Division commander-everyone had left their beds for this one. And the Gulag had more LAPD cars and personnel swarming around than they ever had customers during happy hour.

What was known so far was that the diamonds found on the desk at the Gulag under the body of the Georgian bartender matched descriptions given by Sammy Tanampai of his jewelry store inventory. The serial number on the Beretta 9-millimeter pistol used by Cosmo Betrossian to kill Dmitri and the Georgian proved to belong to the weapon taken from the surviving security guard during the ATM robbery.

Viktor Chernenko, the man who had been instinctively correct from the beginning, was told that, along with the captain, he should be prepared to speak to the media in the late morning after he got some much-needed sleep. Viktor predicted that ballistics would show that the bullet that killed Farley Ramsdale came from the same Beretta, and that Farley Ramsdale must have been an accomplice to the robbery and had a falling-out with Cosmo Betrossian.

There was a person in the squad room, being guarded by Budgie Polk, who knew if Viktor was correct in both theories, but she wasn't talking. Ilya's wrist was handcuffed to a chair and she'd said nyet to every question asked, including whether she understood her constitutional rights. Everyone was waiting for Viktor to find time to try an interview in her language.

Andi McCrea along with the others who had participated in the officer-involved shooting were being separately interviewed by FID and were scattered among several of the station's offices. Andi was the third one finished, and when she came back into the busy squad room, she played the videotape that had been seized along with the other evidence from the desk of Dmitri.

When she watched the video with Brant Hinkle looking over her shoulder, they nodded, satisfied. The stabbing of the student was caught vividly. The identity of the assailant was unmistakable.

"He'll cop a plea when his lawyer sees this," Andi said.

After packaging the videotape for booking, she looked at Ilya Roskova, sitting in the chair glaring at her stoic guard, Budgie Polk, who had been interviewed for one hour by FID.

Andi pulled Viktor aside and said, "Have you gotten any information out of her?"

"Nothing, Andrea," Viktor said. "She will not speak at all except to ask for cigarettes. And she keeps wanting to go to the bathroom. I was just going to ask Officer Polk to take her."

Andi kept eyeing Ilya, looking particularly at her lower body squeezed into that low-rise red skirt, as tight as Lycra. She said, "Let me take her. Where's her purse?"

He pointed and said, "Over there on the desk."

"Does she have cigarettes in there?"

"Yes."

Andi went to the desk and picked up the purse, then walked over to Ilya Roskova and said, "Would you like us to take you to the bathroom?"

"Yes," Ilya said.

"And after that maybe a cigarette?" Andi said.

"Yes."

"Take the cuff off her, Budgie," Andi said.

Budgie unlocked the handcuff and the prisoner stood, massaging her wrist for a second, prepared to accompany the cops.

As they started to walk, Andi opened the purse and said to Ilya, "Yes, I see you have cigarettes in -" Then the purse dropped from Andi's hand onto the floor.

Ilya looked at Andi, who just smiled and said "I'm sorry" but made no effort to pick up the purse.

Ilya angrily bent over to pick it up, and Andi stepped forward, put her hand on Ilya's shoulder, and forced her down into a full squat with one hand, reaching down toward the purse with her other, saying, "Here, let me help you, Ms. Roskova."

And when Ilya was held in the squatting position for a few seconds, making a fish mouth, a diamond hit the floor. Then another. Then a ring with a four-carat stone plinked against the floor and rolled across the squad room, stopping when it hit Viktor's shoe. Diamonds were shooting from that "safe place" where she'd promised Cosmo to hide them.

Andi reached under Ilya's arm and raised her up, saying, "We'll let you pee in a urinal and we'll be watching. And Viktor, I think you better put on gloves before you pick up the evidence."

"Bitch!" Ilya said, as the two women, one on each arm, led her to the door.

"And you can use our bidet," Budgie said. "Like the one I have at home. It's called a sink. You jump up on it, but we'll keep the stopper in."

Brant Hinkle said to Viktor, "I think she might talk to you now."

"How did Andi know?" Viktor marveled.

"She noticed right away and told me. No panty line, no thong line, nothing. She guessed that Roskova might want to get rid of them in a hurry first chance she'd get at privacy."

"But the trick? To put her down in that position? How did she know that trick?"

"Viktor, there're some things you and I didn't learn at detective school that women just know," Brant Hinkle said.

When Andi and Budgie returned with the cache of diamonds, Budgie said, "I'm sure glad I didn't have to remove the evidence. I can't even clean out my rain gutters for fear of spiders and other crawly things."

Late the next day, after getting five hours' sleep in the cot room along with a wardrobe change driven to the station by his wife, Maria, Viktor Chernenko completed his investigation by supervising a thorough search of the car and apartment of Cosmo Betrossian, as well as the house of Farley Ramsdale.

They found Cosmo's Lorcin .380 pistol and the Raven that Ilya had carried during the ATM robbery. At Farley's house they found some stolen mail, a glass pipe for smoking meth, and the usual litter and detritus that are found in the homes of tweakers. There were a few articles of women's clothing, but it appeared that Farley Ramsdale's companion had disappeared.

Viktor and two other detectives inquired at every house on both sides of the street but learned nothing of value. The next-door neighbor, an elderly Chinese man, said in barely understandable English that he had never spoken to Farley and never noticed a woman. The neighbor on the other side was an eighty-two-year-old Romanian who said that she only saw the man and woman coming in late at night and that her night vision was so bad she'd never recognize them in the daylight.

Interviews of other, mostly elderly, residents on the block were equally fruitless. Even when Olive's old mug shot was shown to them, nobody could say that she looked very familiar. She was the kind of person, it seemed, who would live and die on the streets of Hollywood utterly invisible.