Londongrad (6 page)

“When?”

“You want exactly when?”

“Yeah.”

I held back on the picture Gloria had sent to my phone. It felt obscene, as if the dead girl was trapped in it the way she had been trapped inside the duct-tape shroud.

If I was getting squeamish, I was getting too old for the job. Death needed respecting, but if you were on the job, you did whatever it took. Otherwise, you got out.

What I wanted right now was out of here. The music, the heat, the crowd were driving me a little nuts, maybe because I was sober. You can’t do clubs sober. You need the high from booze or pills. I was thinking of beating it, but I followed Dravic into a little office behind the bar, where the walls were covered with framed clippings.

One of the clippings caught my eye, a picture of three girls in a local newspaper, including one with short blonde hair, big smile, long legs, tiny skirt. Jesus, I thought. The girl in the picture on the wall was the same girl in the picture in my phone. The dead girl from the playground.

I pointed to the picture. “You know this girl?”

“Sure, why?”

“What’s her name?”

“Masha,” Dravic said.

I showed him the photograph in my phone.

Instinctively he put his hand over his mouth as if to keep from crying out. “How?”

“You knew her well?”

“I knew her. How did it happen?”

“You have a name besides Masha?”

“He real name was Maria, everybody called her Masha.” He sat down on the edge of the desk, color draining from his face, the skin suddenly gray, drab.

“Masha what?” I said.

“Panchuk. Her husband’s name, I think. I never knew her own.”

“There was a husband?”

“Yeah, for a while. I don’t think she liked him much. I’m not even sure if he was still around the last few months.”

“What else did you know about her?”

“I thought you wanted to know about the blue charm. They’re connected, the charm, Masha?”

“Go on.”

“We give out favors when business is slow, during the week, usually. The girls like these things, evil eyes, they call them.”

“Okay, so tell me some more about Masha.”

“Tall. Blonde. Pretty. Short hair. Crew cut almost. You want the picture?” He reached up to the wall and took the framed clipping down.

“You have one of her alone?”

From a folder on the desk, he got a picture, a color snap, a bad photograph but it was her, and she was tall and skinny, long-legged, wearing a skirt slit to her thighs, big earrings, smiling and posing. She looked very young.

“Can I keep it?”

“Sure.”

“So you knew her pretty well, but you didn’t fucking know she was dead, even though the story’s been on TV already?” I kept my tone even, but I was feeling pissed off with this guy.

“I was upstate at my mother’s in Kingston for a couple days, I did three shifts straight here and then I went up to her place to sleep.”

“Your mother doesn’t have a TV?”

“It was broken,” he said. “Yeah, it’s true. I only got here an hour ago, so I didn’t know anything.”

“Nobody here mentioned it?”

“You’re telling me you people already made her identity public?” asked Dravic. “So how come you asked me for her name? If I knew earlier, I would have called somebody. How did it happen?” His eyes welled up.

I told him.

“My God,” he said, then grabbed his phone, made a call, talked fast, hung up.

“The guy that was on duty before, he said another cop was nosing around earlier.”

“Listen, please, man, I’m sorry I came on so heavy.” I said. “Just please tell me whatever you can.” I had almost lost him by sounding aggressive, and now I changed my tone. You get a lot more that way, and now Dravic offered me the chair, and switched on a fan. It was a tight fit, me, him, the little office piled with crates of booze.

“Masha was here a lot,” he said. “A few weeks ago, she starts pestering me for a job, says she has some fucking bartending certificate, I tell her, it’s not for a kid serving hundreds of crazy people at midnight when they’re already soused and high, you have to scrape teenagers off the floor when they OD on Midori shots and E.”

“She stopped bugging you?”

“I told her I’d give her a tryout. I tried her out, a couple of weeks ago, Tuesday night, easy crowd. She wasn’t bad, but I didn’t like it, I wasn’t sure she was even twenty-one, I wasn’t sure she was eighteen, tell you the truth, she dressed up older and wore a lot of make-up and she had a real grown-up body, but I thought she was a kid, something about her, so I told her, you have to get some real ID if I’m gonna keep you. She was using fake stuff, driver’s license, social security card, but crap, the kind you can buy for sixty bucks. She left. I didn’t hear back.”

“Any rough stuff in the club?”

“We get mostly Russians, but the kind with money, they come to party, show off their moves. No fights. Some tension once in a while, especially when there’s a Ukrainian bunch.”

“Masha got involved?”

“She could work both crowds, she was very good-looking, and sweet. She was a great dancer. I probably have a video someplace from a dance contest.”

“Where?”

“The main office is on the next block over, there’s a house where they keep most of the stuff. I put it there. I might have something else for you.”

“What’s that?”

“She had this little résumé, you know, not much but a couple places she had worked, a few bars, I put it in a file, that any use to you?”

“Plenty.”

“Can you stop back Sunday? It’s quiet Sunday. I could go over to the office and get you the stuff.”

“What’s wrong now?” I said.

“I have to do this when nobody else is around.”

“I need it.”

“Look, please, man, if I try to get anything out of there now, it’ll be a problem, trust me, okay, please?”

He looked frightened. Dravic glanced at the door of the little office. I figured if I pushed him too hard, he’d balk, or somebody else would get in the way, so I pulled back.

“Right,” I said. So, you were pretty nice to her, you gave her a tryout as a bartender, even if she was underage—you had something with her?”

“No,” he said, hesitating just a split second. “She was just a nice girl.”

“And the husband?”

“I didn’t get the feeling he would be happy if she was even talking to other guys, it was like he owned her, she had a tat with his name on it.”

“You saw it?”

“She told me. It was not, you know, visible exactly.”

“You’re Russian?”

“Serbian dad, Russian grandma on his side. My Mom’s a hippie from upstate New York.”

“You speak Russian?”

“My grandmother taught me some.”

“Right. So what else?”

“The Russian girls, they look great, but they can be really chilly, peevish, you know, petulant, like they’d rather be doing some other thing really important, you know, like smoking cigarettes, you know that look? It’s the same everywhere, I met some of them in England when I worked there, just the same fucking thing. Masha was different. She was nice to everyone.”

“How nice? You think Masha was hooking?”

“I don’t know.”

“She wore expensive clothes?”

“Yeah, so what?”

His face tightened up. I wondered if he had been in love with Masha.

I started to go. He put a hand on my sleeve, put it there too hard, clutched the fabric too tight. He was furious, pissed off at me for asking if the girl was a hooker. He kept hold of my arm, and he was solid, muscled, built like a bull.

“Let go of me, man,” I said. “Fucking let go.”

“Yeah, sorry,” said Dravic. “There’s guys, I don’t know, Rumanians, Albanians, whatever, they come in with these girls who are really frightened and you can see the bastard owns them.”

“Serbs?” I wanted to get him riled up, I wanted him to hit me if he had to. It would tell me something about him and the dead girl. He didn’t. He lowered his voice. He understood that I was now a threat to him.

“What else?” I said.

“I mean they keep the girls’ passports. The girls are like slaves. Man, if I have kids and they’re girls, I’m sending them someplace else.”

“Where’s that?”

“Yeah, where?” said Dravic. “Where on earth?”

CHAPTER NINE

After I let Tito Dravic go back to work, I called Gloria and told her the dead girl’s name, I told her about the tattoo, and then I started for the street. I’d had enough of the club, the drunks, the heated-up flesh, the bad music. I was going back into the city, but there was something I had to do first.

As I passed the girls who had greeted Valentina on the street, one of them followed me. Her name was Janna, she said, she had carrot hair and a clinging little blue silk dress that was tight on her ripe burnished body. She was maybe twenty.

“Can we go out for a smoke?” she said. “Would you mind, Mr Cohen?” She was polite, and we went out to the street and over to the canal where the fishing boats were. Crowds of people sauntered up and down, cars honked, people waved American flags. The fourth of July.

Janna offered me her pack of cigarettes, and I took one. I figured if we smoked together she’d relax. She was tense, coiled up.

“You were in because of the girl that died, right?” she said.

“You knew that?”

“Oh, in these clubs talk goes around faster than the ecstasy goes down,” she said. “And Tito has a big mouth. He retails gossip as a way to hang out with us.”

“You don’t like him?”

“He’s okay. He’s just kind of low-class, you know?”

I showed her the picture.

“Masha Panchuk,” she said. “We liked her. We tried to help her.”

“Help how?” I said, and I saw this girl, this Janna, wanted in on the case, that she was curious, nosey maybe. Maybe like Dravic, she wanted to retail the story.

“We knew she needed a job. She didn’t have any family, only a grandma someplace in, I don’t know, Kiev, or somewhere,” said Janna. “There was a guy, a husband? She wanted out. She was just a good kid.”

“You Russian?”

Janna said she had grown up in London, and her parents were both Russian. Her friends in the club had Russian parents, but had been born in Brooklyn. They were at NYU, studying business.

“I don’t want the others to know about this, they’re American girls, they don’t know how anything works, and I don’t want to scare them. You know, I said to one of them, Don’t you long to travel, and she said, well, yes, but I couldn’t go anywhere I don’t feel safe. They’re frightened.”

“Listen, you want to help?”

“Yes.”

“You need to go back in the club?”

She couldn’t tell what I was after. I could see it in her unformed pretty little face.

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Where did Masha buy her clothes, where do girls out here get stuff? Show me.”

“There’s shops around Brighton Beach. Masha liked a lot of glitz.”

“Okay, you want to help, show me. My car’s around the corner.”

She hesitated, and then, rising to the challenge, to what she saw as a dare, she put her smokes in the little purse that dangled from a sparkly chain on her shoulder.

“Sure,” she said and she followed me to my car and got in, and jabbered while I drove back to Brighton Beach, jabbered half frightened, half excited. I could smell the excitement, especially when I hit the gas hard. She lit up another cigarette.

“I knew something was wrong,” said Janna. “She tried so hard to get it right, to dress right, she told me she had lived outside London, as if it gave her some kind of qualification, some kind of status is the word I want. Maybe because my accent is sort of English.” Janna looked up at me. “Everybody loved this girl, boys, girls, everybody, I don’t just mean in a friends way, I mean loved as in wanted, but also liked. She slept with a lot of people.”

“Was she hooking?”

“Probably. But there was this air about her that drew you in,” said Janna. “She said she was twenty-two, I think she was a lot younger, I mean like seventeen, and I’m pretty sure she was illegal. I saw her in the city at some club. You could talk to my dad.”

“You said your dad’s Russian?”

“Yes. Should I call you Detective? I’m sorry, I don’t know what to call you.” She pointed at a side street in Brighton Beach and I pulled into it, and she got out and I followed her to a shop. Even at this hour it was open, but it was a holiday and people shopped late.

“Here,” said Janna. “I know Masha had a dress that she got here.” She pointed at the rack of shiny clothes. The woman who ran the place glared at us. She figured me for Janna’s sugar daddy. Janna pushed the clothes along the rack. When she came to a short dress, pink with some kind of glitter on it, she stopped.

“It’s what I saw her in the last time. One, maybe two nights ago,” she said. “You want me to put it on?”

“It’s okay,” I said, but she had already disappeared into a dressing room.

She reappeared in the dress, plucked a platinum blonde wig off a rack of cheap wigs, the kind you get for Halloween. Imitating girls on a catwalk, in her high-heeled sandals and the wig and the pink dress, Janna strode up and down the room, admiring herself in a mirror.

“So she looked like this,” she said, as if she had cracked a big case. I realized now she was pretty wasted. I should have seen it earlier.

“It’s enough,” I said. “I have to go.”

“I could go with you.”

“Just get your clothes back on, and I’ll take you to the club,” I said and while she changed again, I saw the owner stare at me some more before she picked up her cellphone, dialed and began talking about me to someone at the other end. She was talking Russian. She probably figured me for a guy who came out to the Beach from the city to pick up little girls.

CHAPTER TEN

All the way back to the club, I felt somebody on my tail, somebody watching, following. I didn’t know who the owner of the clothing shop had called, didn’t know if she called local cops, or security people, to say there’s a creep from the city hanging around.

“Why can’t I stay with you?” said Janna. “It’s fun playing detective.”

I thanked her and told her to go back to her friends, realizing that I’d created a loose cannon. I didn’t know the girl. I didn’t know what she’d tell her friends, her parents.