Two O'Clock Heist: A Rebecca Mayfield Mystery (The Rebecca Mayfield Mysteries Book 2) (10 page)

Before long, Richie reached Mulford Alley, where Rebecca lived.

Vito leaned against the truck, smoking a cigarette. He was built like a fire plug with a heart as big as his waistline. In his late forties, he had receding black hair, hang dog brown eyes, and a generous nose and mouth. He always wore the same tan car coat with bulging pockets filled with food and all kinds of other things. Even Vito probably couldn’t remember what was in them.

Richie stopped and Vito got into the passenger seat. “What do you think of that spot?” Richie asked.

Vito had parked the truck at the very end of the street rather than taking up the red-painted sidewalk. “It’ll work okay until the neighbors get curious or until your girlfriend finds out what’s inside.”

“She’s not my girlfriend.” Richie drove towards North Beach.

Vito smirked. “Oh, yeah? Coulda fooled me.”

Richie scowled. “Anyway, she’s not staying in her apartment at the moment. She’s involved in a bad situation.”

“I think I got an idea where she’s stayin’, right, boss?” Now, he was grinning ear-to-ear.

Richie cast him a death glare. “I’m being helpful. That’s all.”

Vito shrugged. “Like I said, coulda fooled me.”

Richie drove them to The Leaning Tower Taverna on Columbus and Vallejo.

Shay was already waiting when Richie and Vito arrived. They always sat at the back booth. If someone else was there when Richie called to say he was on his way, that someone else would be moved. That was just the way it was.

Shay’s full name was Henry Ian Tate III, but for reasons never explained, he called himself Shay—which Richie thought was better than using his initials: HIT III. Richie knew women found Shay attractive, but he was surprised at the stab of jealousy he had felt over the way Rebecca all but drooled when she first met the guy.

Shay had a cup of herbal tea in front of him. Richie never saw him eat, which was kind of freaky since Richie’s other friends loved good food as much as he did.

Vito, for instance, ordered a liver, pepper, mozzarella, and onion sandwich with a beer. It was enough to make Richie want to cry over the boring green salad with skinless grilled chicken and iced tea, no sugar, he had ordered. Somehow, being around Rebecca made him want to eat better and not let his health or weight get out of control like he had a few years back
after his fiancée died and he spent his days and nights boozing it up and doing everything he shouldn’t. If it hadn’t been for Vito and Shay, he’d be six feet under by now. He owed those guys big time.

He even went to a gym now and then, God help him. He knew Rebecca regularly went to keep fit for duty. One look at her and a guy could tell she was well-toned. Very well-toned, in fact.

Richie told Shay and Vito about his uncle’s wine and his troubles with the ABC. It turned out Shay was already on top of the situation.

“Here’s what’s going on,” Shay said. “Some of your
goomba
friends are putting other labels on the wine.” Shay wasn’t Italian, so when he used the word
goomba,
it was not a compliment. “Then they charged forty-eight to sixty-four dollars a bottle.”

“What?” Richie nearly choked on an arugula leaf.

“You heard me.”

“Are they f’ing crazy?” Richie would have pounded the table except he didn’t want to cause a scene. “They were supposed to pour the goddamned wine into their goddamned carafes as the friggin’ house red. Then nobody would much care, and if it was especially good—which it is—so much the better for business.”

“They decided it was too good for house red.”

“Jesus H.—”

“Don’t swear that way, Richie,” Vito said. “Your mother made me promise to stop you. She said it’s bad karma.”

Richie scowled at him, unsure whether it was stranger that his mother talked about ‘karma’ or that Vito repeated her words.

“The problem was at Al Fenook’s place,” Shay continued. Al’s real name was Alfonse Tarantino, but he used a lot of
fenook
in his cooking, which was the Calabrese word for fennel seeds—and slang for something else. “One of Al’s regular customers happens to be a sister of one of the bigwigs in the ABC. She told him about the great wine being poured, but that bottle labels looked funny and peeled right off. All she wanted was to know where she could buy some. Anyway, the ABC honcho got curious, sent a couple of his goons to sniff around. They figured out the problem right away. Al was in trouble, and only got off the hook by sending them in your direction.”

“Damned whiny little weasel!” Richie muttered.

“
Mamaluk’
!” Vito added.

“I can’t sell to them anymore—not any of them.” Richie shoved the tasteless salad away and hurled himself back against the booth seat, arms crossed. “If they’re doing that, we could all get busted. Now, what am I supposed to do? I’ve got some two hundred fifty cases left. That’s what, three-thousand bottles? For cryin’ out loud!” 

“I could talk to them,” Shay said, his tone icy cold.

“Don’t do that. They’re friends. Or should be.” Richie ran his hand over the back of his head as he thought a moment. “They were supposed to be doing me a favor, but they got greedy. I’ve got to think what to do. All I know is, I can’t sell them any more of this stuff. How was I supposed to know Uncle Silvio’s wine was so damn good?”

All three brooded over their drinks.

“Enough of this,” Richie said. “Next problem: Shurik Charkov.”

Richie gave his friends a little background, explaining how Rebecca wanted to find her murdered friend’s live-in boyfriend, a Russian named Yuri Baranski who worked in the city.

Since
Richie knew a guy who might help, he had called Nicolai Gridenko. Nicolai said he’d check around, and while he was looking into the Golden Gate Garage, a place operated by the mob, who should wander in but Rebecca Mayfield herself. Nicolai called Richie to get her out of there.

“
The next day, Rebecca came across Shurik Charkov’s name,” Richie continued. “Nicolai says Charkov is a boss in Russian syndicate, not very big or important, but he’d like to be. That makes him dangerous. Rebecca has no idea who he is.”

Vito blanched and even Shay winced a tiny bit at this news.

“You going to tell her?” Vito asked.

“From what I’ve seen of her,” Shay said, “that’ll only make her more interested in tracking him down, not less.”

Richie nodded. “That’s true. I don’t know what to do. Maybe if she pays more attention to what happened in Sausalito itself, she’ll back off the Russians. Somehow, we’ve got to make sure she doesn’t get on Charkov’s radar any more than she might be already.”

CHAPTER 10

Rebecca no sooner walked into Homicide than a call came in that sent her and Sutter to the home of Harlan Stegall. She and Sutter were the on-call team that week, so every case that came in landed on their laps.

They found Mr. Stegall, age
32, lying dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs, atop a mosaic tile floor. The paramedics thought he must have fallen head first down the stairs and landed with such force his spinal cord snapped, resulting in nearly instantaneous death.

Rebecca was dubious. The movies that showed someone sneaking up from behind and giving a person’s head and neck one hard twist, causing the victim to immediately drop dead, were just that—movies. Tearing a spinal cord in a young, healthy male took tremendous force.

“It looks like an accident to me,” Sutter said.

“Let’s have the medical examiner take a look,” Rebecca said. “Something here doesn’t feel right.”

“You’re pushing, Mayfield,” Sutter said. “I think your Russian troubles have you paranoid. The guy fell. Look at the wife. She was the only one in the house, and she’s a wreck.”

Rebecca studied Lyndsey Stegall. She sat in the living room with a female neighbor who kept handing her Kleenex, and patting her arm. Lyndsey was young, pretty, and distraught.

Harlan Stegall’s parents had been called, and they were on their way over.

“Keep the parents outside,” Rebecca said to the officers guarding the scene. “I don’t want anyone else in here until we’re sure this isn’t a crime.”

“What makes you think it is?” Sutter exclaimed, sounding exasperated.

“Because young men don’t die that easily.”

“But it is possible. Bad luck happens.”

“True,” she said. “And I want to make sure that’s the case here.” She couldn’t help but think of the shoddy police work going on in Sausalito over Karen Larkin’s murder based on “assumptions” being made. She could do better.

The ME came in, and looked at the Stegall. He did appear to have broken vertebrae, but she needed to do an autopsy to determine the extent of the damage.

As the body was taken away, Rebecca and Sutter studied the staircase and upper landing, trying to determine what had caused the man to fall. They could see nothing, but people were known to trip over their own feet, or to simply miss a step.

Rebecca sat and tried to talk to the wife, but she was so upset, there was no communicating with her at this point. And although Rebecca had to take a statement, it wouldn’t hurt to wait until after the results of the autopsy.

In early afternoon, Rebecca returned to the Hall of Justice. She was walking past Homicide’s front office when the executive assistant waved at her to stop. “Oh wait. Here she is now. Please hold a minute,” Helen said into the phone, then faced Rebecca. “You have a call. Line 3.”

Rebecca continued to her desk and picked up.

“You cannot hide, Inspector. We know where you are.” Then the phone went dead.

The male voice had no discernible accent, but the words had been carefully enunciated. Someone obviously saw her enter Homicide. She wondered if the person also knew she was staying at Richie’s.

She was startled out of her thoughts by Lt. Eastwood beckoning her into his office. “The CSI found no prints or other evidence of anyone with a record in your apartment. They found a number of different prints
, but no
criminal
matches to them.”

“Okay,” she murmured.
She knew what he was getting at. She had dated a few cops, and several had been in her apartment, even in her bed. Nothing had come of those relationships.

“The young man burned in your car fire has no record. He claims he was just leaning against it talking to friends when it burst into flames. That doesn’t explain, however, why the driver’s door was flung open. Also, the crime scene investigators said the car had definitely been rigged to catch fire when someone turned on the ignition. They’re all but certain the kid jump started it.”

She rubbed her temple. “Perhaps, but everyone says he’s a good kid. Let it go. If he did anything wrong, he’s been punished enough.”

Eastwood scowled. “The CSI also said the device wasn’t a bomb, so i
t wasn’t intended to kill. But if you had been seated in the car with your seat belt on and then started the ignition, you would have been badly burned before you got out.”

His words, delivered so coldly, rocked her.

“We’ve found no reason to think this was anything but a targeted action against you personally,” he added. “If it was the Russians, they were giving you a warning—for now. We can’t act against them yet because we have no proof. We’ll keep looking, but I must caution you to be very, very careful. Don’t push them.”

She swallowed hard, thanked him for his concern and warning, and left.

Somehow she managed to get through a meeting with one of the assistant DA’s preparing for trial on a case in which she had been the arresting officer. But she found it impossible to concentrate after Eastwood’s words. They were worse than seeing her house trashed because, once Spike was found, no permanent damage had been done to her home except for furniture. But the burning car could have been quite different.

Since no new calls to investigate had come in, and she was waiting for Harlan Stegall’s autopsy, she reached for an older case, one of three she wasn’t ready to give up on. Something about the investigations bothered her and she didn’t want them classified as “cold cases” yet. She had a good record for closing homicides, and kept these cases on the corner of her desk so they wouldn’t be forgotten. She hated giving up on anything, ever.

Just as she would learn who killed Karen Larkin, no matter what it took.

She was
rereading the file when Inspector Paavo Smith came over and sat in her guest chair. He was tall, about 6’2”, and good-looking. Like Rebecca, he was 34 years old, but with more years in Homicide. His hair was dark brown, his cheekbones high and angular, and his nose had a slight bend where it had been broken more than once. Large, pale blue eyes were his most striking features, and they zeroed in on her now. She had an idea what was coming.

“What’s going on, Rebecca?” Paavo asked.

She wondered how much she should tell him. Truth be told, the house she should be living in was his. From the time she met him, her first day in Homicide, her heart had skipped a beat. No, more than a beat. She was still half in love with him. But he had fallen for a woman who seemed completely wrong for him in every way—Richie’s cousin, Angie. Ironically, everyone who knew the two inspectors believed the right woman for Paavo was Rebecca. Truly, the world was a comedy of errors, and she was the butt of the joke.