Czarnek watched her walk with Marvis Woodley back to his house.
“Good lord,” he said, “that is one gorgeous creature.”
“So was Medusa.”
Czarnek said he would continue to explore the Bondarenko connection, but conceded that the pace of the investigation might be even further slowed. With gang violence exploding in the San Fernando Valley, every detective was working overtime, juggling more cases than they could handle. It didn’t help, he said, that normally knowledgeable street sources within Los Angeles’ Russian émigré community professed to know nothing about the murder of either Bondarenko or Echevarria. I asked him if he’d looked into Harry Ramos’ possible involvement in the case.
“Harry Ramos?”
“Janice Echevarria’s second husband. He was on a business trip to Kazakhstan when I talked to her.”
“Oh, yeah, him. Yeah, he’s supposed to call us when he gets back to San Fran.”
“Let’s go already, for Chrissake,” Windhauser said. “I gotta eat before I pass out.”
“He’s hypoglycemic,” Czarnek explained.
Windhauser glared at me. “You get any other big leads, do us all a favor. Keep ‘em to yourself.”
“I assume this means we won’t be taking any warm showers together anytime soon.”
“You got a bad attitude, Logan, you know that?”
“Better a bad attitude than delusions of adequacy, Detective.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I just smiled. Czarnek tried not to.
Windhauser grumbled something nasty under his breath and threw the car into gear. The two detectives sped off like they were late for the early bird special at T.G.I. Friday’s.
Come to think of it, I was starting to get a little hungry myself.
Savannah was sitting beside Marvis Woodley on his sofa. He shook his head side to side and kept looking down at his hands, rubbing them together.
“I could’ve sworn it was him.”
The hype the LAPD hauled off looked exactly like the man who’d breezed past his window the night Echevarria was killed, Woodley said. All he’d ever wanted to do was square things with Arlo, make amends for all those lies he told him. And now this. Woodley looked like he was about to cry. Rambo rested his furry little head on his master’s foot. Man’s best friend. You can be Saddam Hussein and your dog will love you, regardless. Unlike certain cats.
“You did nothing wrong,” Savannah assured him. “You were just trying to help. Arlo would’ve done the same for you.”
“He told me he wanted to move out of Los Angeles,” Marvis said. “That teacher who got shot the week before over on the next block was the last straw for him. He told me if he ever had the money, he was gonna buy himself his own island up in Washington or somewhere like that and live on it the rest of his life.” Marvis wiped the wetness from his eyes. “I told him, I says, ‘Fool, you can’t live on no island all by yourself. No man can.’ And you know what he says to me? He says, ‘Marvis, I’d live there with my wife if she’d ever take me back.’”
Savannah’s chin quivered. “Arlo really said that?”
“Every word.”
I rolled my eyes.
He and Echevarria had eaten dinner together the night he died, Marvis said. Chinese food delivered from Johnny Wang’s Golden Dragon Asian Bistro, the same joint on Sherman Way where they ordered in for dinner every week or so. Egg rolls, kung pao beef, twice-cooked pork, pork fried rice. They washed all the MSG down with a pint of Jameson and still had room for fortune cookies. Marvis’s fortune that night had been worth saving, he said. He dug the slip of paper out of his wallet and handed it to Savannah. She read it aloud:
“You will meet a man named Wright. He is often wrong.”
Marvis chuckled. “Wright and wrong. Can you believe that?” Then he began to blubber about how he was probably the last man to have seen Echevarria alive. Soon Savannah was blubbering, too.
I went outside and called Mrs. Schmulowitz to see how she and Kiddiot were doing. A “nice young man” from the insurance company had already been by, she said. He’d informed her that a big check would be mailed to her within two weeks so she could begin rebuilding the garage, Mrs. Schmulowitz said. She’d decided to bake a German chocolate cake in celebration. This brought us to Kiddiot who, she said, was doing more than fine in my absence.
“He got up on the counter and helped himself to a big slice of cake. What kind of crazy meshuggener cat likes German chocolate cake?”
“At least he’s eating.”
I told her I’d be back in Rancho Bonita that afternoon to take him off her hands. No rush, Mrs. Schmulowitz said. She and Kiddiot were getting along fine. She repeated her offer to let me use her sofa, but I’d already inconvenienced her enough, I told her. Mrs. Schmulowitz, however, refused to take no for an answer. She launched into a long dissertation about how her first husband had met a bum on the subway in Brooklyn and insisted that they take him in for a few days until the bum could get on his feet, and how he turned out to be a thief who stole Mrs. Schmulowitz’s silver. There was a beep on my phone. Another call coming in. Mrs. Schmulowitz kept droning on obliviously about how the bum refused to leave after taking one bite of her famous blintzes and my phone kept beeping and Mrs. Schmulowitz kept talking until finally I interjected and told her that I would be happy to finish listening to her story when I saw her in person—“OK, I gotta go, Mrs. Schmulowitz”—and signed off.
Detective Ostrow at Rancho Bonita PD was on the other line, coughing and apologizing for sounding like he was about to hack up a lung. He’d been out surfing that morning before work, he said, when a big roller broke the wrong way and he gulped a bellyful of seawater — a “Neptune cocktail” as he put it.
“Gnarly,” I said.
He asked me if I knew anyone who drove a white Honda or possibly a Toyota of the same color, with tinted windows and a spoiler on the back. A couple of neighbors, he said, had seen a vehicle matching that description cruising the alley behind Mrs. Schmulowitz’s garage an hour or so before the firebombing.
I told him about my various close encounters with the mysterious Honda. And, no, I said, anticipating his next question, I didn’t catch the license plate number.
“Well, whoever he is, we’ll find him eventually,” Ostrow said. “That’s the cool thing about being a cop in a community like Rancho Bonita where the crime rate isn’t through the roof. We actually get to investigate stuff, unlike LAPD. Speaking of which, I called Detective Czarnek. He hasn’t called me back.”
“I’ll yank his chain next time I talk to him, which may or may not be in this millennium.” Ostrow urged me to have a great day. I told him to hang ten.
“You’d never know it to look at him,” Savannah said, as she emerged from Marvis’s house, “but that man is a very sensitive soul. He scheduled a session with me so I could teach him a few tools on grief-coping. Sometimes I think I could use some of those tools myself.” She gazed wistfully at the house next door where Echevarria had lived.
“I can catch a cab to the bus station if you want to stand here all day and reminisce.”
Savannah’s eyes flashed. “Does being so insensitive come to you naturally, Logan, or do you work at it?”
An acrid something surged up from my gut and burned the back of my throat. The taste of shame. Instead of affording my ex-wife a modicum of empathy, as any compassionate human being would’ve done under similar circumstances, I’d reverted to the jilted and jealous ex-husband. I needed to work on my Chi or I was coming back as a snail in the next life for sure.
“I’m sorry for being a jerk, Savannah.”
“I’ve come to expect nothing less. Get in. I’ll drive you to the bus station.”