“We, as in you and Lech Walesa?”
“That is right. Solidarnosc!, yes?”
“Miric, you were nine.”
“No matter, is in the blood, yes?”
Less than a minute and Nikki had this guy down. A time-filler. An amiable who talks and talks but says nothing. If she kept up the ballet, she’d be there hours and come out with a headache and no information. So corral him as best she could, she decided.
“Do you know why we picked you up?”
“Is this like speeding ticket and officer asks you to tell him how fast you are going? I don’t think so.”
“You’ve been arrested before.”
“Yes, number of times. I think you have a list in there, right?” He nodded his long nose to the file on the metal tabletop in front of her and then looked at her. His eyes were set deep and so close together they almost crossed. Calling him a ferret might be complimentary.
“Why did you go to the Guilford day before yesterday?”
“The Guilford, on West 77th? Very nice building, that. A palace, yes?”
“Why were you there?”
“Was I?”
She slapped the flat of her hand down on the table and he jumped. Good, she thought, let’s change the tempo. “Let’s cut the bull, Miric. I have eyewitnesses and photographs. You and your goon went to see Matthew Starr and now he’s dead.”
“And you think I had something to do with this tragedy?”
Miric was a slippery one, a true slimebag, and, from her experience, the ripest type for divide-and-conquer. “I think you can be helpful here, Miric. Maybe whatever happened to Mr. Starr wasn’t your doing. Maybe your pal…Pochenko…got a little more excited than he was supposed to when you went to collect your debt. It happens. Did he get too excited?”
“Whatever you are talking about, I don’t know. I had an appointment to see Mr. Matthew Starr, of course. Why else would they allow me in such a wonderful building? But I went to his door and he did not answer.”
“So your statement is that you did not see Matthew Starr that day.”
“I don’t feel I need to repeat when I say so clearly.”
This guy had been through the mill too often, she thought. He knew all the moves. And none of his priors, though numerous, involved violence. Scams, cons, and bookmaking only. She shifted back to Iron Man. “This other man, Pochenko, he came with you?”
“The day I did not see Matthew Starr? He did come. You know that already, I bet, so there you go. You have good answer from me.”
“Why did you bring Pochenko to meet with Matthew Starr? To show him the wonderful building?”
Miric laughed, showing a tiny row of ocher teeth. “That’s a good one, I’ll remember that.”
“Then why? Why take such a big guy like that?”
“Oh, you know in this economy many people want to rob you on the streets. I sometimes carry sums of money and one can’t be too safe, yes?”
“You aren’t convincing me. I think you’re lying.”
Miric shrugged. “Think what you like, is free country. But I say this. You wonder if I killed Matthew Starr and I say, Why would I? Bad for business. Want to know my pet name for Matthew Starr? The ATM. Why would I pull plug on ATM?”
He gave her something to think about. Nonetheless, when she rose, she said, “One more thing. Hold out your hands.” He did. They were clean and pale, as if he had spent his days peeling potatoes in a washtub.
Nikki Heat compared notes with her crew while they moved Pochenko from his holding cell to Interrogation. “That Miric’s a piece of work,” said Ochoa. “You see critters like that covered in sawdust in bitty cages when you raid meth dealers.”
“OK, we agree on the ferret profile,” said Heat. “What do we come away with that’s useful?”
“I think he did it.”
“Rook, you say that about everyone we meet on this case. May I remind you of Kimberly Starr?”
“But I hadn’t seen this guy before. Or maybe it’s his muscle. That is what you guys call them, muscle?”
“Sometimes,” said Raley. “There’s also goon.”
“Or thug,” said Ochoa.
“Thug’s good,” continued Raley. “So’s badass.”
“Meat,” from Ochoa, and the two detectives alternated euphemisms in rapid-fire succession.
“Gangsta.”
“G.”
“Punk.”
“Bitch.”
“Gristle.”
“Knucks.”
“Ballbuster.”
“Bang-ah.”
“But muscle works,” said Ochoa.
“Gets it said,” agreed Raley.
Rook had out his Moleskine notebook and a pen. “I gotta get some of these down before I forget.”
“You do that,” said Heat. “I’ll be in with the…miscreant.”
“Vitya Pochenko, you’ve been a busy boy since you came to this country.” Nikki turned pages in his file, silent-reading as if she didn’t already know what was on them, and then closed it. His jacket was full of arrests for threats and violent acts, but no convictions. People either shied away from testifying against Iron Man or they left town. “You’ve gotten away clean. A lot. People either really like you, or they’re really afraid of you.”
Pochenko sat looking straight ahead with his eyes fixed on the two-way mirror. Not nervously checking himself, not like Barry Gable. No, he was fixed and focused on a point of his choosing. Not looking at her, not like he was even there with her. He seemed deep in his own mind and nowhere else. Detective Heat would have to change that.
“Your pal Miric mustn’t be afraid of you.” The Russian didn’t blink. “Not from what he just told me.” Still nothing. “He had some interesting things to say about what you did to Matthew Starr at the Guilford day before yesterday.”
Slowly, he unhooked his eyes from the ozone and rotated his head to face her. As he did, his neck twisted, revealing veins and tendons strung deep into bulky shoulders. He stared at her from underneath a thick ginger brow. At this angle in the downcast lighting he had a prizefighter’s face with a telltale nose that curved in an unnatural flatness where it had been broken. She decided he had been handsome once before the hardness. With the brush cut, she could picture the boy of him on a soccer field or lofting a stick in a hockey rink. But the hardness was what Pochenko was all about now, and whether it came from doing time in Russia or learning how not to do time, the boy was gone and all she saw in that room was what happens when you get very, very good at surviving very, very bad things.
Something like a smile formed in the deep creases at the corners of his mouth, but it never came. Then he spoke at last. “In the subway station when you were on top of me, I could smell you. Do you know what I’m talking about? Smelling you?”
Nikki Heat had been in all sorts of interrogations and interviews with every stripe of lowlife in God’s creation and those too damaged to make the list. The wiseguys and the crazies thought because she was a woman they could rattle her with some leering porn-movie trash talk. A serial killer once asked her to ride in the van so he could pleasure himself on the way to the penitentiary. Her armor was strong. Nikki had the investigator’s greatest gift, distance. Or maybe it was disconnection. But Pochenko’s casually spoken words, along with the entitled look he was giving her, the intrusion of his casualness and the threat carried in those amber resin eyes, made her shudder. She held his gaze and tried not to engage.
“I see you do know.” And then, most chilling of all, he winked. “I’m going to have that.” Then he made wet air kisses at her and laughed.
Then Nikki heard something she had never heard in the Interrogation Room before. Muffled shouting from the observation booth. It was Rook, his voice smothered by soundproofing and double-pane glass, hollering at Pochenko. It sounded like he was shouting through a pillow, but she heard “…animal…scumbag…filthy mouth…,” followed by pounding on the glass. She turned over her shoulder to look. Hard to be nonchalant when the mirror is flexing and rattling. Then came the dampened shouts of Roach and it stopped.