Over Her Dead Body (13 page)

One thing that still piqued my curiosity—the phrasing Mary Kay had used with Amy: “Tell her to please be at her desk at seven forty-five.” It almost sounded as if Mary Kay had been arranging a call or meeting with
another
individual.

I also hoped that by tomorrow I’d have a number for Katya. Not that I expected to learn much more from her than I had already, but there was a slim chance that she had remembered something now that her head wasn’t throbbing and her dizziness had abated.

I dropped my pencil and leaned back in the chair. For a few minutes, I let my mind play with the idea of Robby as the killer. By his own admission, he had arrived at
Buzz
when Mona was back in her office. Perhaps he saw the light and wandered down there to tell her off, knowing that now he had nothing to lose. And then she had hurled a few more insults at him. Indignant, he’d smashed her over the head with the paperweight.

But though that was the easiest scenario to imagine, there were certainly other possibilities that
didn’t
involve Robby. After all, he wasn’t the only one at
Buzz
who had hated Mona. Someone else could have been hanging around last night, someone Amy hadn’t noticed—someone, for instance, with an office toward the back of the floor. And then there were the people at the party to consider. From what I’d learned so far, Kimberly Chance despised Mona, and Eva Anderson’s publicist had been pissed at her. Perhaps one of them had seen Mona leave the party and had slipped away quietly after her.

I wanted to talk to Robby, to find out how he was doing, but he had placed me in an awkward situation today and I thought that it might be best to keep my distance for the time being. I didn’t want to get in any more hot water with the police.

Before long, I could feel fatigue overtaking me, and I used my reserves of energy to make a few more notations in my notebooks. When I finally did go to bed, I slept restlessly, rising periodically during the night to turn off my air conditioner because the noise drove me insane and then back on because it was hot as hell. I would have loved to leave my window open, but for security reasons I had never felt comfortable doing that. My bedroom, like the living room, faces out onto the terrace, which adjoins the roof on the south side—and there was access to the roof from a back stairwell.

Fortunately, I fell back to sleep each time within twenty minutes. I had suffered badly from insomnia during the two years after my divorce, and only recently had it gone into remission.

I didn’t show up at
Buzz
until nearly eleven the next morning. When I’d dragged myself out of bed, I’d discovered a message on my cell phone from one of the cops I’d called and he agreed to meet me for coffee on the Upper East Side. The trip uptown and back ate up over two hours of my morning, and I came away with only one new piece of information: The cops liked Robby for the crime, but so far they had no real evidence linking him to it. His fingerprints had been found on the door frame of Mona’s office, but of course he’d been in there earlier in the day when she’d fired him.

Buzz
was bursting with activity when I arrived, and it seemed on the surface, at least, as if life were almost back to normal. I didn’t think people had put Mona’s death behind them, but they had next week’s issue to produce, and they needed to accelerate to full speed. After all, America was waiting with bated breath for its celebrity news—the bitchfests, the breakups, the butt-ugly clothes, and, of course, the mind-blowing body language revelations.

As I plopped down at my desk, I noticed a note from Lee with Katya’s number. Great, I thought. She’d left it right out there, in a perfect spot for anyone to see, including my little desk snoop, whoever that might be.

I didn’t waste time being annoyed. After quickly checking my voice mail, I called the number, which based on the area code was in either Brooklyn or Queens. A man answered, maybe in his thirties or forties, with an accent similar to Katya’s. I gave my name and said I was calling from
Buzz.

“Why is it that you need to speak to Katya?” he asked warily.

“I need to find out some details about Tuesday night—on behalf of the magazine and also the corporation.”

Okay, granted, I was making it sound like this big official thing, but I was afraid if I didn’t, he’d try to dodge me.

There was a long pause, and then he announced that he was Katya’s brother, André.

“Katya is still not feeling good,” he added.

“I’m so sorry to hear that,” I said. “But it’s very important that I speak to her. It won’t take long, I promise. We just want to make sure she’s okay. And we hope she can provide some information about the attack against Ms. Hodges.”

God, I sounded like a cross between a bureaucrat and a funeral director, but he bit. He told me that she could see me that night at seven. The address he gave was on Brightwater Court, one block east, he said, of Brighton Beach Avenue.

“In Brighton Beach,” he said. “You know, Little Odessa.”

“Sure,” I said, though the only portion of the borough I was really familiar with was Brooklyn Heights.

As soon as I hung up the phone, I turned around to ask Leo for help. He lived in Brooklyn, and I figured he might be able to tell me the best way to reach Little Odessa.

“When did you need to be there by?” he asked.

“Seven.”

“The traffic on the BQE at rush hour is a nightmare, so believe it or not the subway’s probably your best bet for getting out there and back.”

“Is it safe to roam around out there?”

“Well, it’s not
Chelsea,
but you’ll be okay—as long as you haven’t done anything to offend the Russian Mob.”

I had roughly six hours before I left for Brooklyn, and I was going to use the time to gather as much info as possible so that by the end of the day I could begin a rough draft of my piece. Before beginning my interviews with
Buzz
staffers, I left messages for Detective Tate (“Is there any news to report on the case?”), Mary Kay, Kiki, Harrison, and Kimberly. I called Dicker’s office again and said that I would like five minutes of his time, though I was conscious of not wanting to hound him. And I also put in requisitions for photos with the photo department. I figured Nash would want the article to feature shots of people leaving the building after the party, the more famous partygoers—especially Eva—and shots of Mona’s office.

Then I started on my colleagues. Perhaps because I had learned so little yesterday, I had this vague sense that the laws of probability would work in my favor today and I would stumble on a great nugget of info. But it didn’t happen. I came away with absolutely nothing new. Everyone I talked to claimed that they left in the vicinity of six on Tuesday night, just as the others had. Therefore, no one had seen anything. And though it was clear people had mixed feelings about Mona, no one was willing to serve anyone up as a suspect.

In between interviews I checked my voice mail, but that proved just as fruitless. I didn’t even score a meeting with Nash. In midafternoon, Lee apprised me that he was “crazy busy” and would have no time to meet; tomorrow looked more promising. As long as I had her on the phone, I asked her for the name of the hotel Mary Kay was ensconced in. My previous messages had been on her cell, but this time I left a message on her room phone.

When I returned to my desk, I saw that Ryan had materialized. He was glaring intently at his screen and pretended not to notice me. His pale skin seemed sallow today, as if he’d been so busy working on his profile of Mona that he hadn’t bothered with any of the four food groups. Though it was hot as blazes today, he was wearing a T-shirt with a gray hoodie over it, the kind of getup you’d see on a fall day in the East Village. Clearly, if he was due to interview any luminaries in Mona’s life, he wasn’t dressing for it.

By the time I was supposed to leave for Brooklyn, I felt wiped. I’d spent the day interviewing over thirty people and had so little to show for it. And I still hadn’t reached several key sources. I prayed that my interview with Katya would yield something of value.

I’d checked online for directions, and after leaving the building I hoofed over to Rockefeller Center, where I picked up the B train for Brighton Beach.

Though the subway trip may have been shorter than going by car, it still seemed interminable, and just when I thought I couldn’t take one more second, the train rocketed out of the tunnel and up onto an elevated track. I should have realized part of the trip would be aboveground, but I hadn’t been expecting it. We rattled along the track, past endless grim, grimy red-brick buildings. A few seconds later, we pulled into the stop I was looking for: Brighton Beach Avenue.

I climbed down a long, litter-strewn stairway that led to the street and checked out my surroundings. The scene in front of me was so foreign looking that I might as well have stepped out in Abu Dhabi or Bhutan. Nowhere else in America could you find a scene like the one I was gazing at: Brighton Beach Avenue, a four-lane road below the elevated train, was lined with endless storefronts—delis, hair salons, bookstores, dentists, funeral homes, palm readers—all with signs in Russian. People rushed past me, half of them barking words I couldn’t understand into cell phones. The air was filled with the smell of cheese, cooked meat, and cigarettes, and from a deli directly in front of me came the refrains of a woman singing hauntingly in Russian.

I walked for a half block to try to get my bearings. I passed half a dozen street vendors, their tables crowded with everything from pastries to DVDs to ugly argyle sweaters, improbably for sale on a hot summer evening. A little old lady, shopping with a metal cart, ran her thumb over a shabby piece of fabric.

“Are you buying it or not, woman?” the female vendor scolded her in English.

I realized after a minute that people were checking me out, probably because I was so clearly a fish out of water. That wasn’t a good thing. You never wanted to appear out of your element in New York. It made you vulnerable. I wondered, though, if I had much to worry about here. From what I’d read, the way you ended up in trouble in this part of town was when you tried to muscle in one someone’s caviar business.

According to André, Katya’s apartment building was on a street that ran parallel to Brighton Beach Avenue. I walked up to the first intersection and glanced to the right. At the very end of the street I could see only sky behind the buildings, and I realized that the Atlantic Ocean was on the other side and that Brightwater Court must be in that direction.

I took the right, onto a street of short red-brick apartment buildings that were the shade of old bloodstains. Parked cars lined both sides of the road, but there were very few people around, just a couple of men gesticulating wildly to each other as they stepped into a building and another old lady struggling along with a metal shopping cart. When I reached the end of the street, I saw from the sign that it was indeed Brightwater Court. Not knowing which way to go from there, I took a left, only to discover a block down that it was the wrong way. I retraced my steps and headed back in the other direction. The sun was setting now, and the street was eerily quiet after the bustle of Brighton Beach Avenue. There was only the muted sound of traffic in the distance and what I thought must be the gentle pounding of the ocean. Though I couldn’t see it, I knew the Atlantic was behind the buildings on the other side of the street. Everything seemed so alien that it was hard to believe I was only a few miles from Manhattan.

I found the address André had given me, directly across the street from the back entrance of a restaurant. Oceanfront dining, I guessed. The apartment building was seven stories high, brick like the others around it, with a dingy yellow stucco vestibule and lobby. When I swung open the glass door from the street to the vestibule, I was nearly knocked off my feet by the smell of something hot and cabbagey. I found the name Vitaliev on the buzzer and pressed. I waited and pressed again. Nothing. Oh God, please don’t tell me I’ve come all this way for nothing. As I started to rummage through my bag for the phone number, a male voice shot through the intercom, asking who it was.

“It’s Bailey Weggins,” I said.

“Come to the fourth floor,” he told me.

The door to the lobby released and I glanced once over my shoulder before letting it slam behind me. Across the street, near the back entrance to the restaurant, two men leaned against the wall by a sign for valet parking.

The elevator was one of those ancient numbers that groaned every few seconds and moved with the speed of a hippo on land. André answered the door of the apartment, beckoning me into a tiny foyer. He appeared to be in his thirties, about five ten, with shiny, short-cropped dark hair. He was wearing black flat-front pants and a black T-shirt that showed off muscular arms the yellowy white color of an old refrigerator. Around his neck was a chain with a thick gold cross.

“Good evening,” he said. “Katya is this way. Please follow me.” In person, his accent didn’t seem as strong as hers.

He led me into a living room whose small size was exaggerated because it was crammed with oversize pieces of dark furniture, as if a small herd of water buffalo had wandered in to graze. There was a huge chocolate brown sofa, two matching armchairs, and a tall mahogany piece that I believe in my grandmother’s day had been known as a highboy. The room reeked of stale cigarette smoke, and the cabbagey odor was conspicuous here, too—though I couldn’t tell if that was because the vegetable in question had been boiled in their own kitchen or if the smell had simply bullied its way in from the hall when André opened the door for me.

Katya was on the sofa, huddled at the end of it with a moss green blanket over the lower half of her body. She looked so different from how I remembered her, partly, I supposed, because she was out of her blue uniform, and her blond hair was hanging lankly around her face rather than pinned up. She still looked pale and shaken, and I wondered if she was suffering side effects from the concussion.

“Thank you for seeing me, Katya,” I said, stepping closer to her.