The Alibi Man (10 page)

Landry handed her one of his business cards and a pen from the inside pocket of his coat. She put the card on the hood of his car, scribbled across it, and handed it back to him. He squinted at it.

“This had better be legit,” Landry said.

“I swear. And it’s a big secret. Hardly anybody knows. Not even cops. Not even feds.”

“And this is his phone number?” he asked.

“No,” she said, looking up at him, moving a little too close. “Is my phone number. Call me. I’ll show you how to have fun.”

Landry stuck the card in his breast pocket, got in the car, and drove out of the lot, leaving his informant standing there hot and bothered. Some mope coming out of that bar was going to be a lucky man tonight.

chapter
16

         
“WHAT ARE
you doing in my house?” I asked, wondering what I could get my hands on to use as a weapon. Maybe I could hit him in the head with the stone soap dispenser, except I couldn’t reach back far enough to get it without him seeing.

“You know Irina,” he said.

“What if I did?”

He looked dazed, maybe psychotic, or ill. For all I knew, he had killed her.

“She liked you.”

I said nothing. His eyes wandered away from me for a second. I eased a couple of inches to the right.

“Did you know Irina?” I asked.

He looked at me again. “I loved her.”

Still a 50/50 chance he had strangled her. Maybe better. Nothing could drive people over the edge of violence more than love. He loved her but she didn’t love him. He loved her but she cheated on him. He loved her obsessively and wouldn’t let her go. There were a dozen scenarios.

“Did you know her in Russia?” I asked, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, inching a quarter step ahead.

“She was best friends with my little sister, Sasha.”

That name rang a bell. Sasha Kulak. The friend of Irina’s who had committed suicide because of Tomas Van Zandt, the horse dealer Irina had attacked in the barn.

Kulak. Alexi Kulak. Russians…

“She spoke fondly of Sasha,” I said, slipping the fingers of my right hand into the drawer behind me. He didn’t seem to notice.

“Did she speak of me?” he asked. Inside his open jacket I could see the handle of a gun.

“Irina was a very private person. She didn’t talk about her personal life very much.”

Tears filled his eyes. He appeared to be in a great deal of pain. “I was a ghost to her in this life she led. She shut me out.”

This wasn’t sounding good with regard to motive. My fingers fumbled over something in the drawer. I grabbed hold. A small pair of scissors.

He turned in the doorway and leaned against the frame, eyes closed, his face red as he fought tears.

“What do you want from me?” I asked.

He wiped a square hand across his eyes. There were tattoos on the back of his hand. Prison tats?

When I was a narc, the Russians had taken over a substantial chunk of the heroin trade in South Florida. Rumor had it they had gotten in bed with the Colombians to edge into the cocaine market. They hadn’t ventured into crystal meth then. Meth had still been—and still was—the bastion of white trash.

Alexi Kulak. Russian mob? Had that been Irina’s second job? The job that subsidized her lifestyle among the rich and famous?

“She is dead,” he said. “Murdered.”

He had taken hold of his emotions and locked them away somewhere. I could see him change, grow calmer, focus.

“Yes,” I said.

“She told me about how you helped that little girl.”

A year before, Molly Seabright, twelve going on Methuselah, had come to me, mistakenly believing I was a private investigator, to ask my help in finding her missing sister.

“You know these people she ran around with,” he said. “These rich American playboy sons of bitches.”

“No,” I lied. “I don’t know them.”

Kulak pinned me with a look that made me feel like an insect on a display board. The energy coming from him now was focused and intense. “You know them.”

I said nothing.

“I want to know which one killed Irina.”

“I’m not a private investigator, Mr. Kulak.”

He stepped into the bathroom, suddenly aggressive, intent on intimidating me. “I don’t care what the fuck you call yourself. I need to know who killed Irina.”

“That’s a police matter,” I said. I couldn’t back away. I was already against the vanity.

Kulak reached his hand up and grabbed me across the lower half of my face. I came underhanded with the small scissors and jammed it into his belly. I felt the blade hit a rib.

He howled and staggered back, looking down in astonishment as his shirt turned red with his own blood.

I clasped my hands together and swung at him from the side, hitting him hard in the cheekbone and temple.

Kulak staggered backward, stumbled, and fell.

I started to jump over him, but he caught me by one ankle, and I went down, my teeth biting deep into my lower lip. The taste of blood filled my mouth. I kicked at him to free myself. Arms and legs scrambling, I tried to pull myself forward, got to my knees, got my feet under me.

As I tried to lunge forward, Kulak caught me by the back of my neck, shoved me into a wall, and held me there with his own body weight.

“You bitch! You stabbed me!”

“Yeah. I hope you die of it!”

Kulak started to chuckle, then laugh, then laughed harder. “You are like Irina, I think.”

I hoped not. I didn’t want to think about water creatures nibbling at my face as I lay dead in a drainage ditch.

“You,” he said, dead serious once again. “You will be my eyes, my ears, my brain. They will accept you. You are one of them.”

“I don’t work for you,” I said. “I want to know who killed Irina, but I don’t work for you.”

He turned me around and held me up against the wall by my throat. My toes were barely touching the floor. He looked like it wouldn’t matter to him one way or the other if he crushed my larynx.

“Yes, Miss Estes,” he said softly. “I’m afraid that you do.”

I didn’t argue. His voice and demeanor made me go cold beneath the sweat of fear and adrenaline. His eyes were flat and black, like a shark’s. I swallowed hard beneath the weight of his hand around my windpipe.

He brought his face very close to mine and whispered, “Yes, you do.”

chapter
17

         
THE SUN
was not yet up when I left my cottage and went to the horses. I fed them, then went outside and sat on the same bench Landry and I had occupied the evening before. It seemed that weeks had gone by since then.

I had thought long and hard about Alexi Kulak. Most sane people would have called Landry and spilled the whole story, then got on the next plane to places unknown. Most sane people would have thought that the fact I didn’t want to do that spoke volumes about the state of my mental health.

Alexi Kulak was a criminal. He was volatile and dangerous. The fact that he had loved Irina only made him more so. I had done some homework on him after he left—as I sat at my computer with an ice pack wrapped around my throat.

The Russian mob was nothing to mess around with. The fact that relatively little had been written about Kulak told me he was smart. No one needed to tell me he could be ruthless.

Even so, my gut told me to keep it to myself. I wanted to find Irina’s killer. Kulak and I had that in common. If I could come up with results, he had no reason to hurt me. If I ratted him out to the cops, I was likely to end up in the trunk of a junker car going into the crusher at Kulak’s auto salvage yard.

If Irina’s murder had something to do with her connection to Alexi, then through him I would have access to a part of Irina’s life Landry wouldn’t be able to touch.

That’s what I told myself, even though I knew full well Kulak wouldn’t have come to me if Irina’s death had to do with him. That was the reason I gave myself for making a deal with a devil. There were others lurking in a dark corner of my mind. I refused to bring them to the surface.

I showered and dressed and made myself as presentable as I could. There was nothing to do about my fat lip but tell a lie to explain it. A short vintage Gucci scarf around my neck hid the bruises the ice pack had failed to prevent.

Billy Quint should have been a sea captain a hundred years past. It had been almost that long since I had met him when I was working Narcotics and he headed an OCB (Organized Crime Bureau) undercover team working the port of Fort Lauderdale along with the DEA. The teams from the individual agencies had a mutual agenda—to crack a drug-money laundering scheme that had been taking large sums of U.S. currency out of the country on cargo ships bound for Panama. The connection to Palm Beach County had been what had come back on the return trip: cocaine. Lots of it.

Quint lived in a bungalow along the intracoastal waterway, south of Lake Worth. Retired, not by choice. He had refused to speak to me over the phone. OCB guys learn early on to take every precaution possible. They have to deal with deadly animals every day, and they don’t all survive. So I wasn’t surprised when Quint wouldn’t speak to me. Old paranoia dies hard. Especially for someone who almost didn’t make it out of the game alive.

“I thought you were dead,” he said gruffly as I got out of my car and walked toward him.

“I’m like you,” I told him. “I’m too mean to die.”

“Tough nut. You always were.” He rolled down the dock in his wheelchair and tossed some fishing gear into a beat-up dinghy.

“Is that thing seaworthy?” I asked, dubious.

He squinted up at me, one eye closed tighter than the other, a filthy old captain’s hat jammed on his head. It was impossible to decide where his sideburns ended and his ear hair began.

“What’s the difference?” he asked. His voice was full of gravel. He fell into a fit of wet, rattling coughing. When it passed, it took him a moment to get his breath back.

“Are you okay?” I asked like an idiot.

“Lung cancer,” he said by way of explanation, like it was nothing. Like he had a cold. “The devil will catch up with me sooner or later. I’ve dodged him one time too many.”

“I’m sorry to hear it, Billy.”

He shrugged, waved it off. In that moment he looked ancient, even though he wasn’t more than in his late fifties. His useless legs canted off to one side as he slouched in his wheelchair. His skin had a strange yellow cast to it.

I didn’t have to ask him if he was in pain. I knew what it was to have your body broken in ways you shouldn’t have survived—and often wished that you hadn’t.

Quint’s legs had been broken with a sledgehammer by a couple of Russian thugs in the employ of an ambitious mob lieutenant. He had been allowed to live for his value as part of the media circus that followed the brutal attack. Free publicity, advertising to one and all that the Russians were not to be fucked with—by anyone.

Arrests had been made, but nothing stuck. The lieutenant and his henchmen had vanished off the continent, probably literally. No one in the Russian community would talk. The police, the feds—all had been powerless to protect even one of their own.

A middle-aged Filipino woman built like the corner mailbox came out of Quint’s bungalow and trundled to the dock. Her brows lowered and she started in.

“Your breakfast is ready. I don’t make good food so you can turn up your nose like Mr. Hoity-Toity and let it go to waste! Come in and eat!

“You!” she said, pointing at me like Uncle Sam on the recruiting poster. “Come and eat. You’re too skinny. What’s the matter with you, you don’t eat?”

Quint rolled his eyes. “Simi. My keeper.”

“I thought you said the devil hadn’t caught up with you yet.”

He barked a laugh and fell into another coughing fit.

I choked down Simi’s greasy rice, onions, hot-peppers, hot-sausage concoction when she was watching and fed a handful to the Jack Russell terrier under the table when she wasn’t.

“I see you,” she barked, facing away from me at the stove. “You feed that dog, he gets gas. You gonna stay and smell his farts, Missy?”

“Oh, go on with you, woman!” Quint growled. “Don’t you have to go to church?”

“To pray for your soul!” she shouted at him.

“Why the hell would you want me in heaven?” he asked. “You won’t be there.”

I snuck the dog another handful under the table.

They swore and shouted at each other for another five minutes before Simi made a rude gesture and stormed out.

“Is she always like that?” I asked.

“Nah. She’s on her party manners. We’ve got company,” Quint said. He took his plate off the table and put it on the floor for the dog. “I don’t care if he farts. He sleeps in her room.”

I put my plate down too.

“So what brings you, Elena?” he asked. “You didn’t wake up today and think you should, from the kindness of your own heart, go and visit an old cripple.”

“You think so little of me, Billy,” I said.

He laughed and coughed. “Like you said, you’re like me. Spill it.”

“Alexi Kulak. Do you know anything about him?”

He may not have been on the job anymore, but guys like Quint never really get out. They keep their eyes peeled and their ear to the ground. At one time, he had known more about Russian organized crime in South Florida than anyone else. I was betting he still did.

He made a sour face. “Why? You’re not dating him, are you?”

“No. But he was in love with a girl I knew. She was murdered over the weekend.”

“And you’re going to ask me if I think he could have done it? From what I hear, that one could pluck your eyes out and have them for a snack.”

“He didn’t kill her,” I said. “He wants to know who did.”

“So he can cut the bastard’s jewels off and shove them down his throat?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“I can guarantee. And what do you care what Alexi Kulak wants? Did he give you that fat lip?”

“I tripped and fell and bit my lip.”

“Why don’t you just try to tell me you ran into a door?”

“It’s the truth,” I said, looking straight at him.

One advantage gained from my accident and the subsequent nerve damage: I had no problem telling a straight-faced lie. Of course, I had been a pretty good liar long before that.

“And Alexi Kulak wasn’t there at the time?”

“What’s he into?” I asked, pointedly ignoring his question.

“What isn’t he into? He’s a full-service mobster. Hijacking trucks, extortion, shylocking, prostitutes, drugs. This friend of yours, what was she into?”

“Wealthy men. She had expensive tastes.” I shrugged. “The more I find out, the less I feel I knew her.”

“Was she working for Kulak?”

“I don’t know. I got the feeling she led him around like a dog on a leash. But I know she wasn’t buying Gucci handbags with what she made grooming horses.”

“How does a girl like that snag wealthy men?”

“By their libidos, I suppose. She was a beautiful girl.”

“Could Kulak have been using her to get to one of her rich friends?” Quint asked.

“If that was the case, what would he need with me? He would already know whose heart to cut out. He told me she shut him out of that part of her life,” I said.

“The same would be true if she had been working for him in some other capacity,” Quint pointed out. “Those throats would already be cut.

“What made him think you could be useful to him?”

“Apparently, Irina—the dead girl—liked me,” I said. “Though I couldn’t say we were close. We worked together.”

“Doing what?”

“I ride horses.”

“That’s a living?”

“The horse business brought sixty million dollars into Wellington last year.”

“Jesus,” Quint said, impressed. “And you don’t have to get shot at.”

“Not usually.”

“So Kulak knew you’re in that world. Do you run in the same circles as the dead girl?”

“No.”

“Does he know you were a cop?”

“He knows whatever Irina told him. She told him I helped a young girl find her sister last year.”

“What makes me think there’s a lot more to that story?”

“There is,” I said, “but nothing relevant to this.”

“What are you going to do?” Quint asked.

I shrugged. “I want to know who killed Irina too.”

“You didn’t tell anybody on the job up there about Kulak?”

“No offense, Billy, but I’d rather not end up on the business end of a sledgehammer.”

“There’s no guarantee that won’t happen even if you do help him, Elena. He won’t want a loose thread left hanging,” Quint said. “This guy is the real deal. He’s smart, ruthless. Alexi Kulak is as cold-blooded as a snake.

“Do you know how he came into power?” he asked.

“I’m here to learn.”

“The story goes he got off the plane from Moscow, went up to West Palm, where he was supposed to become a lieutenant under Sergi Yagoudin. Kulak, Yagoudin, and another lieutenant met. Kulak cut Yagoudin’s throat from ear to ear. He killed the lieutenant, put the lieutenant’s prints all over the knife. Then he got rid of that body, but he kept the guy’s hands. I hear he still keeps them in his freezer and uses them from time to time to leave prints at crime scenes.”

“If it was only the three of them meeting, how do you know this isn’t just a heartwarming Russian bedtime story?” I asked.

“It’s true” was all he said. He wouldn’t say more. He didn’t need to. “You’re playing with a cobra, Elena. You will get bitten. It’s just a matter of when and how badly.”