Martin glanced over at him with a sheepish smile. Just having the man around was disconcerting: McGuin suffered from a rare physical disability in which the vertebrae of his spine immediately below the skull were fused together, causing his head to face directly downward. In conversation he compensated by leaning back as far as possible and rolling his eyeballs toward the bridge of his nose; talking to him was like talking to a turtle. Ordinary movements were difficult, and he was always bumping into things. Still, McGuin was one of the best investigators who had ever worked with the department. Maybe because he was always looking at the floor, he caught little clues — faint scuff marks, bits of hair, tiny bloodstains on a stair landing — that other people missed.
Martin finally got the file together and tried to hand it off to the investigator. McGuin shook his head, a curious side-to-side movement that seemed to involve his whole torso.
“I don’t have time to read the whole damned file,” he said. “I want to know what you know.”
Disappointed, Martin carefully put the file back on his desk and summarized the police report as best he could.
On the night of September 5 the defendant, Alexei Sergeyevich Smerdnakov, was seen entering Club Naked Party at 9th and F Streets downtown in the company of the victim, Katerina Volovnaya, and a group of unidentified foreign men, probably Russians. Once inside, the entire party proceeded downstairs to the club’s VIP room, where they danced and drank vodka and beer for approximately an hour and a half. According to witnesses in the club, Katerina danced with Smerdnakov. Then for some reason a loud argument ensued, and he left her on the dance floor and went by himself over to the bar. She proceeded to dance with several of the men in their party in a very provocative manner, finally pulling the front of her dress down to expose her breasts.
At this point, witnesses said, Smerdnakov became enraged. Allegedly he dragged Katerina by the hair to a dark corner of the VIP room, removed his necktie, twisted it around her neck, and pulled it tight. This happened quickly; so much force was used that her esophagus was crushed in a matter of seconds. Smerdnakov let the body drop where it was and went upstairs to continue his dancing. He was arrested in the crowd on the main dance floor when police arrived thirty minutes later. The Russians who had come in with the couple left hurriedly by a fire door immediately following the incident and had not yet been located. The actual strangulation was witnessed by patrons and employees of the club. Police had taken statements from several of these witnesses.
McGuin didn’t say anything for a few minutes after Martin had finished his account. With his head bent he appeared to be meditating. He was an Irishman and like most Irishmen, a drinker. Martin had heard that he drank Guinness through a straw. Finally McGuin reared back and rolled his eyes.
“Are you aware the grand jury has handed down a murder one indictment on this?”
“That means nothing,” Martin smiled weakly. “You know how it is: the grand jury could indict a ham sandwich if it wanted to.” “Manslaughter might be a possible plea,” McGuin said, ignoring the stale joke. “But most likely you’re looking at murder two. The guy dancing afterward is going to look bad to a jury. Maybe you can say he was so drunk he didn’t know. Something like that. How drunk was he?”
“Not very,” Martin said. “Apparently he only had two drinks the whole time and appeared sober. That’s according to the bartender. Of course he had been drinking before. He may have been a little drunk, yes. But he wasn’t incoherent.”
McGuin wagged his head up and down, and Martin couldn’t shake the idea that here was a turtle wearing nicely polished shoes. “How about an insanity plea?” McGuin said. “Any history of psychiatric treatment?”
Martin plucked a bit of lint off the cuff of his shirt. He was getting a little annoyed with this approach. “I didn’t ask you up here for legal advice,” he said. “I’m a lawyer, you know. My client insists he’s innocent — as in not guilty. He says he was in the bathroom taking a piss at the time of the murder.”
McGuin let out a short laugh like an exclamation. “Huh! That’s a good one!”
“Nevertheless, that is our position,” Martin said coldly. “We’ve got to find witnesses who saw him go into that bathroom. We’ve got to question the witnesses who say they saw him strangle Ms. Volovnaya. Mr. Smerdnakov thinks it was one of the men they came in with. He hardly knew them. They had met just a few hours before at a bar in Adams Morgan.”
McGuin shrugged, and his shoulders folded up like an accordion. “So you actually believe the man’s innocent?”
“I do,” Martin said.
“Let me tell you something.” McGuin shifted uncomfortably on the boxes. “Do you know anything about your client?”
“I know what’s in the police report,” Martin said quietly. “I know what he told me himself.”
“Well, let me fill you in. This Alexei Smerdnakov’s a well-known son of a bitch, member in good standing of the Russian mob. Everyone, the FBI, the DEA, they’ve been after him for years.”
“That’s none of my business,” Martin said. “I’m his defense attorney, not his conscience. I don’t care what Mr. Smerdnakov did last year or the year before that. I care only what happened on the night of September fifth. And that’s what I want you to find out.”
When McGuin was gone, following his shoes into the corridor, Martin leaned back in his chair and stared out at the thick-leaved magnolia tree stirring in the wind. The happy congregation of birds was hours away, at dusk. It was quite hot for early October, in the low eighties. The air-conditioning in the building produced only a faint, cool rattle; the windows did not open. Just now crowds of interested parties — criminals, cops, lawyers — moved up and down the sidewalk past the hot dog stands in front of the Moultrie Center all ready to tell their own version of the truth about some terrible incident to a half-attentive judge. Suddenly Martin felt overwhelmed. Across Indiana Avenue, the scaffolding of the Superior Court, empty of construction workers for the lunch hour, stood idle in the sun.
On January 10, 1984, two Grushnensky Syndicate soldiers met Alexei Smerdnakov at Kennedy Airport. He carried an overnight bag with a single change of clothes and twenty thousand dollars in cash in a money belt around his waist. Two Cuban cigars were wrapped in tissue paper in the inside breast pocket of his thin coat. He had come from Vladivostok just forty-eight hours before: he couldn’t speak a word of English. The soldiers introduced themselves by their gang aliases — Borodin and Kutuzov — put him into the passenger seat of a battered 1972 Ford LTD, and drove out to Brighton Beach, breaking every speed limit on the way as a matter of principle.
There, in the small back room of a Russian restaurant called the Kiev, they gave him a MAC-10 semiautomatic machine pistol with two banana clips of ammunition. Then they brought out three bottles of vodka and a carton of Marlboros and drank and smoked and waited for darkness. It was four in the afternoon. At ten-thirty that night, vodka bottles empty, carton half gone, sky over the Atlantic showing a frozen black, Borodin led Alexei out the back door of the Kiev into a blind alley that cut down the center of the block. Rats scuttled about in the garbage here, foraging for restaurant scraps. Halfway down, a rectangle of faint red glowed from a small window in a steel door. An extinguished Chinese lantern hung over the blackened lintel.