Flame Out (7 page)

I
SPENT THE NEXT FOUR HOURS LEARNING UKRAINIAN PROFANITIES
.

“
Suka
,” Famka, Vera's friend from grade school called her. Neither Hale nor I spoke Ukrainian, but we guessed by the way she spat out the word that it wasn't a compliment. Everyone on the list had spent most, if not all, of their lives in the United States. They spoke flawless English, talking about the neighborhood, their home, their family, and even the TV shows they liked in uninflected English. However, the mention of Vera got them back in touch with their roots, and out came the Ukrainian word for “slut.”

“Beautiful woman, so beautiful she had no kindness in her. She slept with my husband.” Famka met our eyes frankly. “He was no great loss. He could not keep jobs, and ran around with loose women. Like Vera. Vera's husband, Taras, it killed him, her and her . . . drunken behavior.”

“You knew Taras?” I asked.

“A bit. His sister, much more. Natalya was almost like mother to him. Not like huggy, kissy mother,” the way she twisted her mouth
made clear Famka's distaste for hugging and kissing, “but like mother bear. Strong, and fierce, and protective.”

I'd seen Natalya's mama-bear routine with Dave, petting him and then smacking him around when he got “brainless.” I wouldn't have described Natalya as fierce, however.

“No, it's true. She's a fifteen-year-old girl, an orphan with a two-year-old brother, and she gets them plus Maxim and Jake Medved and their mother over the border. My sixteen-year-old granddaughter plays shooting video games all day, thinks she's tough, but she doesn't know anything. Judge Medved, he always says he'd be dead without Natalya since his mother was a saint but a mouse and would have waited patiently at home for the Red Army to return so they could shoot her in the head and conscript the boys. Natalya got them all into Germany.”

“The Red Army were shooting their own citizens?”

“They didn't consider the Ukrainians citizens. Half of us were ready to join the side of the Nazis.”

A shocked look must've passed my face. “It wasn't ideological,” she said offhandedly. “The Soviets starved the Ukrainians, and then sent the Black Raven to grab us in our beds in the night. We thought the Nazis would be an improvement.” She rolled her eyes. “Boy, were we wrong. Anyway, it's good she got her brother and the Medveds onto the American side at the end of the war because she found her way here and saved even more lives. Between her and Maxim, er, Judge Medved, no one ever went hungry. Natalya's garden overflowed, she said, but I suspect she would go without food rather than let others starve, and she could arrange a doctor to visit, help you with paperwork you needed for immigration.”

“Paperwork?” Hale asked.

“Yes, fixing IDs or writing letters for people who didn't have strong English. She'd arrange for what you needed, and then Judge Medved, he'd give you all the things you wanted—a job or maybe a
loan for a car.” She paused. “They couldn't aid Vera, though. She was beyond help from the day she was born.”

“Were you aware that we found her in a barrel in the basement of the Sleep-Tite factory?” Hale asked Vera's old friend? Enemy? It was hard to tell.

“I know.” She stuck her chin out. “You know I didn't work there, right?”

ONCE SHE GOT THE OBLIGATORY PROFANITIES OUT OF THE WAY
, Olga, a woman Vera worked with at the factory, gave us more information. She claimed Vera was absent from work the night she disappeared.

“Vera was the laziest woman alive, always ducking out for a smoke,” Olga said. Now fifty-nine, Olga had been a few years younger than Vera, and had worked in the factories until she was disabled. She claimed that the heat from the factory had left her lungs sounding like she smoked three packs a day, two more packs than the one she smoked during our visit.

Olga took a drag on her cigarette. “But the rules that applied to the rest of us didn't apply to her. She disappeared for a few hours one night, and our team got written up for missing production targets. I complained to my supervisor, and he told me to take it up with the owner himself, Bernie Lawler, if I had a problem. He said he wasn't going to put his neck on the line.” She sat back in her chair. “I never brought it up again.”

“Who was her supervisor?” I asked.

Olga didn't say anything for almost a minute, before slapping her head, ash from her cigarette sprinkling across her and the chair. “Now I remember. Ilan Petrovich. He died back in the eighties. Killed himself.”

“Killed himself?”

“Yeah, he couldn't get work after Sleep-Tite closed. Couldn't support his family.” She shrugged. “You do what you have to do.”

“THOSE WERE HER FRIENDS?” HALE ASKED AS HE DROVE US
through the winding streets of the Island.

“And to think their opinions have mellowed. Imagine how they felt thirty years ago.”

Hale laughed. “The only folks we can exclude as suspects are dead.”

“Well, the dead and Dave.” I flipped through my notes, trying to decide who to visit next.

“We did pretty well back there,” Hale said.

“Hmm?”

“As a team. We worked well together. You got some great questions in there—”

“And you had my back.” Before Hale could take a victory lap, I pointed to a street coming up. “Wait. Wait. Make a right up here.”

Hale turned without question. As we drove to the north edge of the Island, the houses grew bigger. On the left, the lots backed onto the Hudson River; they must have beautiful sunrises. On the right, the houses were set far back from the street, shaded by tall oak and maple trees. We parked in front of a line of privet hedges that grew high and almost wild, obscuring the house from the street.

Hale leaned over me to get a better view. I could smell his cologne faintly, tobacco and sandalwood, so subtle it had to be expensive. “What've we got here?”

“The house where Bernie Lawler murdered Luisa.”

We got out and walked to the driveway, cut off from the road by a rusty chain with a faded N
O
T
RESPASSING
sign attached.

The house had cedar shingles, most faded or fallen off, giving it a mangy dog quality. It was big, but not as gargantuan as the McMansions popular in the nineties, and without their Mediterranean accents.

“Can I help you?” A slight man limped toward us, carrying a pair of hedge clippers. “That's private property you're on.”

“We're the police,” I said and pulled out my badge. “Do you take care of the property?”

“A bit. Judge Medved, he asks me to keep it from being an eyesore. Elda Harris owns it, but she don't care about maintaining it.”

“So Elda owns this,” I said. “She doesn't mind the work you're doing?”

“We can't go inside or nothing, just keep the hedges clipped and the lawns mowed, what she said was OK after the city fined her a couple thousand bucks for not maintaining her property. That's too rich for even her.” The man shifted from foot to foot, nervous in a way that made me suspect he had some jail stretches in his past. “If you want to get in, I don't got the keys.”

“No need for a visit right now,” I said, “We may have to come back.”

As we waved good-bye, Hale said, “So the Lawlers—or should I say Medveds?—that family is an interesting bunch. If I understand correctly, half the clan plays cops and the other half are robbers. On the one side you have Bernie and Jake. The one that did a stint in prison?”

“That's him.”

“And on the side of good you have Deirdre, Bernie's sister, a lawyer who represented him on his appeals, and Judge Maxim Medved.” Hale rolled through a stop sign but I didn't protest—out at the edge of the Island there was very little traffic. “Both of whom seem to have escaped the taint of having convicts at Christmas dinner. The judge still on the bench?”

“No, he stepped down five years ago.”

“Those crony guys usually are more about scratching the right people's backs than making good law.”

“He wasn't a lawyer,” I said.

“What?!”

“You don't have to be in New York. My dad gave Judge Medved high praise, calling the judge ‘reasonable' on the bench. But the politics part . . . the machine isn't as lockstep as it once was—Republicans occasionally win, and no one drives people to the polls anymore—but back then Dad thought the judge crossed a lot of lines.”

Hale came to a complete stop at Ontario Street. Traffic crossing the river from Hopewell Falls to Troy was heavy here, and we almost missed the bar, the car behind us beeping when Hale made a sharp turn into the lot.

Hale looked at the two-story house, white aluminum siding stained with rust, a glassed-in porch on the second floor. He frowned. “This is Jake's bar?”

I walked to the wooden door and, like Vanna White, underlined “Jake's,” pasted on in square sticky letters. The door was unlocked, and we pushed inside.

I blinked twice to let my eyes adjust to the dark room.

A voice came out of the gloom. “Got a membership?”

A young man stood behind the bar, his long blond hair falling past his chin, obscuring his face. With a layer of fat over an already big frame he must have been handy in a bar fight. He washed glasses, his thick fingers pushing a rag into a glass before dunking it into clean water and picking up a second.

“A membership?” Hale said. “Is this a country club?”

“A social club.”

“Are you Jake?” Hale asked.

“Brian. Jake's son. But don't tell me how you're long-lost friends of his to try to get around rules.” He tucked his bangs around his ears with a wet hand, and I could see his face: handsome, with pale blue eyes and a straight nose.

“You need a membership here. Five dollars, and we give you a card, and you show it when you come in.”

“We're not going to drink,” I said.

“No exceptions. You still need a card.” Brian gently placed the clean glass on a rack.

“No, we're the police. We're here investigating the murder of Vera Batko.”

He stopped, picked up a towel, and dried his hand. “Lucas's mom, who got killed. The one I hear stories about.”

“From whom?” Hale asked.

“The old guys, mostly. Call her a good-time girl, making a fool of herself with booze and men. They even say stuff in front of Lucas. He doesn't give a shit.” He heaved the rack of glasses to his left. “Me, I'd kill a man before letting him talk about my mother that way, dead or alive.”

I walked up to the bar, a dark oak marked with cigarette burns and water rings, but unsticky, a nice surprise. “Can you give us the names of the people you heard talking?”

“Sure thing,” he said. “Or hang around for an hour or two. They'll be in sooner or later.”

“How 'bout your dad?” Hale said. “He around?”

“Pop's in the office.” The young man gestured toward some swinging doors. “Gimme a sec.”

The windows were blacked out with heavy shades, blocking most of the light, but efforts had been made to decorate, with scenes of mountains and beaches mounted on poster board, the corners curved up and splitting. Several Ukrainian beer signs hung behind the bar, and the hallway was lined with pictures of softball teams spanning back thirty years, the beer guts under the “Jake's Social Club” black jerseys giving the impression they were not the most competitive team.

“June.” Hale crooked his finger at me. I walked over to where Hale was looking at a picture of a young army recruit, blond and blue eyed. He was wearing his combat camouflage uniform, with the tans, browns, and grays of the desert, “B. Medved” on a name tape attached to the slanted pocket.

“The guy in the kitchen?” I asked. He bore little resemblance to the man in the picture, who had hair shaved close under a cap and a hopeful look on his young face.

Hale pointed at the insignia Brian was wearing in the picture. “A Crab. Part of the Fourth Brigade, First Armored Division.” He paused. “The boy was responsible for clearing explosives.”

“Explosives that could have caused a fire like the one in the factory?”

“No,” Hale said. “With his expertise he would've done a better job.”

The front door swung open, and the daylight was almost blinding. An older gentleman wearing a three-piece suit stood in the doorway, a cloth bag swinging from his hand. He had a lined face and huge eyebrows that seemed to be making up for his retreating hairline.

“May I help you?” he said.

“Jake Medved?” Hale asked.

“I am Judge Maxim Medved. Jake would be my brother.” From behind us hinges creaked, and Jake emerged through the swinging doors, as tall as his son but wiry, muscle mass gone with age.

The judge walked forward slowly, embracing his brother and kissing his cheek.

“Am I interrupting business, brother?” He asked, squinting at Hale and me.

“Police officers, right?” Jake frowned “Been a long time since I had a visit from you. Here about Vera, right?”

The four of us took seats around a table in the far corner.

“I'm June Lyons, from the Hopewell Falls PD, and Hale Bascom—”

“Before we start,” the judge said, despite the fact that we already had. He handed the bag to his brother. “Natalya made your favorite soup. Beef borscht.”

Jake opened the bag and smiled. “She even included sour cream.”

“She has always taken care of us,” the judge said to me, winking
conspiratorially. “A container waits for me in the car.” Without looking, the judge called over his shoulder. “Brian!”

The young man moved from around the bar faster than I would have expected of someone with his build. Only when he approached our table did I realize he was limping. One foot was in a scuffed suede military boot, and the other was prosthetic.