Her surprisingly youthful cheeks were tear-stained, and she cried out to them, “Help me! Oh, please help me load this thing! And then get out!”
There were two detectives working overtime at Hollywood Station that night. One was Andi McCrea, who had been given the job of finishing what she’d started innocently a few weeks ago as a stand-in for the absent sex crimes detail. But she didn’t mind a bit because that was the first time in her career that she had solved a double homicide without knowing a damn thing about it.
The kid from Reno was in Juvenile Hall awaiting his hearing. But more important, his forty-year-old fellow killer, Melvin Simpson, a third-strike ex-con from the San Francisco Bay Area who had been in Reno on a gambling junket, was going to be charged with capital murder.
Now detectives in Las Vegas were also interested in Simpson, since it was discovered through his credit-card receipts that he’d also been in their city for a week. With no means of employment he’d had enough money to gamble in both places, and it turned out that a high-tech engineer from Chicago who was attending a convention had been robbed and murdered at a rest stop outside Las Vegas on the day that Simpson had checked out of his hotel.
The ballistics report hadn’t been completed yet, but Andi had high hopes. Wouldn’t this be something to talk about to the oral board at the next lieutenant’s exam. It might even rate a story in the L.A. Times, except that nobody read the Times anymore or any newspaper, so there was no point getting excited about that part of it.
The other detective working late that night was Viktor Chernenko, a forty-three-year-old immigrant from Ukraine, one of two naturalized citizens currently working at Hollywood Station, the other being from Guadalajara, Mexico. Viktor had a mass of wiry, dark hair that he called “disobedient,” a broad Slavic face, a barrel of a body, and a neck so thick he was always popping buttons.
Once when his robbery team was called to a clinic in east Hollywood to interview the victim of a violent purse snatching, the receptionist saw Viktor enter and said to a woman waiting in the lobby, “Your cab is here.”
And he was just about the most dedicated, hardworking, and eager-to-please cop that Andi McCrea had ever encountered.
Viktor had immigrated to America in September 1991, a month after the coup that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, at a time when he was a twenty-eight-year-old captain in the Red Army. His exit from the USSR was unclear and mysterious, leading to gossip that he’d defected with valuable intelligence and was brought to Los Angeles by the CIA. Or maybe not. No one knew for sure, and Viktor seemed to like it that way.
He was the one that LAPD came to when they needed a Russian translator or a Russian-speaking interrogator, and consequently he had become well known to most of the local gangsters from former Iron Curtain countries. And that was why he was working late. He had been assigned to assist the robbery team handling the “hand grenade heist,” as the jewelry store robbery came to be called. Viktor had been contacting every émigré that he knew personally who was even remotely involved with the so-called Russian Mafia. And that meant any Los Angeles criminal from the Eastern bloc, including the YACS: Yugoslavians, Albanians, Croatians, and Serbs.
Viktor was educated well in Ukraine and later in Russia. His study of English had helped get him promoted to captain in the army before most of his same age colleagues, but the English he’d studied in the USSR had not included idioms, which would probably confound him forever. That evening, when Andi twice offered to get him some coffee, he had politely declined until she asked if she could bring him a cup of tea instead.
Using her proper name as always, he said, “Thank you, Andrea. That would strike the spot.”
During his years in Los Angeles, Viktor Chernenko had learned that one similarity between life in the old USSR and life in Los Angeles-life under a command economy and a market economy-was that a tremendous amount of business was transacted by people in subcultures, people whom no one ever sees except the police. Viktor was fascinated by the tidal wave of identity theft sweeping over Los Angeles and the nation, and even though Hollywood detectives did not deal directly with these cases-referring them downtown to specialized divisions like Bunco Forgery-almost everybody Viktor contacted in the Hollywood criminal community had something or other to do with forged or stolen identity.
After several conversations with the jewelry store victim, Sammy Tanampai, as well as with Sammy’s father, Viktor was convinced that neither of them had had any dealings, legitimate or not, with Russian gangsters or Russian prostitutes. Sammy Tanampai was positive that he had heard a Russian accent from the woman, or something similar to the accents he’d heard from Russian émigrés who’d temporarily settled in cheap lodgings that his father often rented to them in Thai Town.
It was during a follow-up interview that Sammy said to Viktor Chernenko, “The man didn’t say many words, so I can’t be exactly sure, but the woman’s accent sounded like yours.”
The more that Viktor thought about how these Russians, if they were Russians, had gotten the information about the diamonds, the more he concluded that it could have come from an ordinary mail theft. Sipping the tea that Andi had brought him, he decided to make another phone call to Sammy Tanampai.
“Did you mail letters to anyone about the diamonds?” he asked Sammy after the jeweler’s wife called him to the phone.
“I did not. No.”
“Do you know if your father did so?”
“Why would he do that?”
“Maybe to a client who wanted the kind of diamonds in your shipment? Something like that?”
And that stopped the conversation for a long moment. When Sammy spoke again he said, “Yes. My father wrote to a client in San Francisco about the diamonds. He mentioned that to me.”
“Do you know where he mailed the letter?” Viktor asked.
“I mailed it,” Sammy said. “In a mailbox on Gower, several blocks south of Hollywood Boulevard. I was on my way to pick up my kids at the day-care center. Is that important?”
“People steal letters from mailboxes,” Viktor explained.
After he hung up, Andi said, curious, “Are you getting somewhere on the jewelry store case?”
With a smile, Viktor said, “Tomorrow I shall be looking through the transient book to see if many homeless people are hanging around Hollywood and Gower.”
“Why?” Andi asked. “Surely you don’t think a homeless person pulled a robbery that sophisticated?”
With a bigger smile, he said, “No, Andrea, but homeless people can steal from mailboxes. And homeless people see all that happens but nobody sees homeless people, who live even below subculture. My Russian robbers think they are very clever, but I think they may soon find that they have not pulled the fuzz over our eyes.”
One of the reasons given for putting Budgie Polk and Mag Takara out on the boulevard on Saturday night was that Compstat had indicated there were too many tricks getting mugged by opportunist robbers and by the whores themselves. And everyone knew that many of the robberies went unreported because tricks were married men who didn’t want mom to know where they went after work.
Compstat was the program of the current chief of police that he’d used when he was police commissioner of the NYPD and that he claimed brought down crime in that city, even though it was during a time when crime was dropping all over America for reasons demographic that had nothing to do with his program. Still, nobody ever expressed doubts aloud and everybody jumped onboard, at least feigning exuberance for the big chief’s imported baby, pinching its cheeks and patting its behind when anyone was watching.