Beating the Babushka Read online

  Nearly fifty thousand Russian immigrants lived and worked in San Francisco. The ten thousand or so that spoke only Russian at home had clustered in the Richmond and Sunset districts, where they had forged a tight-knit community. A surprising number worked in the medical industry as doctors, orderlies, nurses, and in medical supply stores. Though Soviet healthcare had eroded along with the rest of the country’s infrastructure, the system had been large enough to have employed a great many men and women, training them sufficiently to get a decent job in the United States.

  Most families were either Jewish or Russian Orthodox, both religions having flourished in exile and survived underground during the Soviet era. They had faith and a work ethic that would put the Puritans to shame. The Major had neither.

  He’d come to the store earlier in the day and told the owner he was going to borrow it.

  The owner was in his late fifties and had a family, but when he was younger and working in a Moscow factory, he had known men like the Major. Men who pretended to be your co-workers but were really KGB, men who smiled to your face but lied behind your back. Men with dead eyes who took pleasure in pain. The store owner left without a word, leaving the front door open and the keys behind.

  Ursa shuffled through the orthopedic maze, the man with the box in tow. When they reached the back room, the man squinted through a haze of smoke at the Major, who was smoking an unfiltered cigarette, flicking the ash onto a cracked tile floor directly below a no-smoking sign. The squint didn’t do anything to change the man’s expression, which seemed to be a permanent scowl. He had large black eyes set too deep for his narrow face and small mouth, sinking beneath a wave of black hair that hung over his eyebrows and past his collar. His crooked teeth flashed in a feral smile as he greeted the Major.

  “I am Marik.”

  The Major didn’t respond, just gestured toward a folding card table against the back wall, which Ursa had cleared earlier with one sweep of his arm. Manila folders and stacks of paper were strewn across the floor.

  “Show me,” said the Major.

  Before carrying the long box over to the table, Marik glanced over at Ursa. The giant had moved behind him and was leaning against the door, watching him with open disdain. Ursa didn’t know Marik but didn’t let that get in the way of his contempt. Marik was a little man acting the tough guy, a soldier in the mafiya looking to earn his stripes. Ursa knew men like Marik in Russia and they were all weak, selling their souls and betraying their comrades for a little cash or out of fear of the gulag. Ursa had never broken, but after years behind bars, he’d seen almost everyone crack. He realized the only man with a will to match his own was the Major, the man who had caught him, tortured him, and sent him to the gulag. Ursa could respect his enemies but not his friends. He stared until Marik broke eye contact and returned his attention to the Major and opened the box.

  The rifle was almost four feet long, half the length taken up by a barrel that protruded from a worn, wooden stock like a bayonet. A short magazine extended from the square receiver just below the trigger, a capacity of five rounds. A short telescopic sight sat on top, a military mount with tapered edges. The shoulder stock looked skeletal, with sections carved out to reduce weight. The gun looked deadly just sitting in the box.

  “Just as you ordered,” said Marik, unconsciously rubbing his hands together.

  The Major picked up the rifle with his left hand and stroked the length of the barrel with his right, his eyes following every contour with a look that bordered on lust. There was a long, uncomfortable minute before he set the rifle down and focused on Marik.

  Reaching into his coat pocket, the Major took a white envelope and tossed in onto the table. Marik almost grabbed it in mid-air but managed to restrain himself, though he tore it open immediately and riffled the bills with a hungry look that matched the Major’s from a moment before.

  “There is more,” said the Major.

  That got Marik’s attention. He jammed the bills into his jacket pocket. “Another delivery?”

  The Major shook his head. “I want you to get dirty.”

  Marik smiled nervously and glanced at the rifle. “I can’t shoot that thing.”

  “Leave that to me,” said the Major. “This job, it is nothing.” He reached into his coat and produced another envelope, this one fatter than the first.

  Marik licked his lips. “What do you want me to do?” Behind him, Ursa’s face twisted into a malicious grin. The Major returned the smiled but kept his eyes on Marik.

  “I want you to go for a drive,” he said.

  Chapter Sixteen

  When in doubt, bribe the guy in uniform.

  Golden Gateway Apartments consisted of four white towers crowding the skyline behind the Ferry Building. As with most destinations in San Francisco, there was no parking except for the street, and all the meters were taken, so Cape spent the next five minutes trying to convince the doorman to let him park behind the police cruiser. It took ten dollars to settle the discussion, a bargain compared with the pay lot five blocks away.

  Grace was waiting in the lobby of the north tower wearing a black T-shirt and jeans over leather boots. A simple silver chain hung around her neck, and her dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She wore lipstick but no other makeup, as far as Cape could tell. She smiled when she saw him, but her expression was pure anxiety.

  “I got your message,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  “Are you staying here?” Cape asked, ignoring her question.

  “Yes. The studio put me, Tom, and most of the senior production team here—maybe twelve of us in all. The director, cinematographer, assistant director, and most of the cast are staying at the W Hotel, and the rest of the crew at the Hyatt a few blocks away.”

  Cape nodded and led her toward a bank of elevators. The nearest door stood open, the arrow glowing in anticipation of the next passengers. A happy chime sounded when Cape pushed the button for the eighteenth floor, the number Beau had given him.

  “What floor you staying on?”

  “Sixteen, but I’m in the west tower.” She turned to force eye contact, which Cape had studiously been avoiding. “What’s going on?”

  Cape said it plainly, watching for a reaction. “There’s a chance Tom was involved in drugs.” He didn’t have to watch very carefully.

  “Bullshit!” Grace flung her hands out from her sides. “You think that wouldn’t be obvious during a shoot?”

  Cape held up a hand. “I didn’t say using.”

  Grace was incredulous. “You’re suggesting he was dealing drugs?”

  The elevator stopped. Cape noticed they’d only made it to the fifteenth floor. The towers were over thirty years old, their age showing once you stepped beyond the newly renovated lobby. Cape glanced at the elevator’s inspection certificate and saw it was expired. A short woman with blue-white hair and a cane stepped between them and smiled, reaching out slowly to push the button for sixteen. Everyone smiled but said nothing during the faltering ascent to the next floor. After the doors closed again, Cape put a hand on Grace’s arm.

  “Look, you hired me to find out why someone might have killed Tom. Now we’re about to walk into a crime scene. There will be cops there, including some I don’t know. They’re going to ask you questions—that’s what cops do. We can turn around and leave if you want, but I thought you’d want to see for yourself.”

  Grace breathed through her nose, a smoldering anger still visible in her eyes.

  “Now is not the time to protest Tom’s innocence,” said Cape gently.

  Grace nodded as the elevator doors opened. “Thanks for the advice.”

  About thirty feet and three apartments to the left, two uniformed cops stood before an open door. Cape gave them his name and the officer on the right disappeared inside, emerging a minute later.

  “Mind your step,” he said. “It’s tight in there.”

  Cape let Grace enter first. Both of the door cops swiveled their heads and tr
acked her progress without being too obvious about it. Cape waited until she’d cleared the short hallway and then stepped inside, glancing back at the uniforms.

  “If you guys even think about checking out my ass, you’re in big trouble.”

  The apartment was a studio with a walk-in kitchen and a small bathroom off the hallway. It was claustrophobic even for San Francisco—maybe fifteen by fifteen—but the view almost made up for it. Directly across from the entrance, two sliding glass doors opened onto a small balcony overlooking the bay. Even from the hallway, Cape could see from the Oakland Bay Bridge all the way to Alcatraz.

  A total eclipse occurred as Beau stepped from the kitchen and greeted Grace. His move revealed three men standing around the refrigerator, the nearest smoking a cigarette and knocking ashes into the sink. Cape recognized him from Narcotics division, a guy named Brewster. He was tall and skinny with red hair and freckles—a gangly, unimposing figure for a police detective. Vinnie stood to his left, immaculate in a pale green suit. The third man Cape didn’t recognize, but the camera around his neck, tape recorder in his pocket, and harried expression suggested Forensics.

  Beau didn’t bother to make introductions. Instead he gestured to the right of the sliding glass doors, where a Sony TV sat atop a stand that also held a DVD player and a video playback machine that took three-quarter inch tapes instead of the standard half-inch videocassettes played on a VCR. To the right of the television was a stack of round film canisters about fourteen inches in diameter and two inches wide. Instead of the brushed silver Cape had seen in the past—in old movies about making movies—these were heavy industrial plastic, black with bright yellow latches on the sides. There were maybe twenty canisters in the stack.

  “You know what those are?” Beau directed his question at Grace, his tone mild.

  Grace nodded. “Sure. Those hold the raw footage we ship to L.A. for processing, before it’s sent back for dailies.”

  “Dailies?”

  “The film we shoot every day on the set,” replied Grace. “You see, there’s a video playback on the set so we can track our progress—we shoot simultaneously on film and digital video.”

  “Why both?”

  “The most expensive mistake in production is thinking you got something on camera and then finding out later that you blew it. You have to get the talent back, secure the location again—you’re starting over. So you watch the video as you go, but you don’t really know what you captured on film until you see the dailies. The film from each day’s shoot is shipped to Los Angeles every night for processing, then video or DVD transfers are shipped back. They’re watched on machines like this one, so the producers and director have a sense of what they captured on film the day before.”

  “Okay.” Beau nodded slowly. “Was Tom in charge of sending the film to L.A.?” Cape watched Grace carefully. He’d known Beau long enough to know there were no idle questions.

  “Now that you mention it, no.” Grace looked at the film canisters and frowned, as if suddenly realizing how out of place they were. “A production assistant would’ve handled that. Tom would have the DVDs, but not the film.” She took a step forward, but Beau extended his arm.

  “Allow me,” he said, kneeling next to the television. “Detective Brewster took the liberty of opening these earlier.” Beau gingerly lifted the lid off the uppermost case.

  Inside there wasn’t a scrap of film. Twelve neat packets of aluminum foil filled the canister, each wrapped tightly into a triangle like a pizza slice. The packet in the two o’clock position had been sliced open, revealing a pale brown talcum. Cape exhaled slowly as Grace gasped.

  “Not a bad way to move heroin from one city to another,” said Vincent, leaning over the kitchen counter.

  Beau stood up. “Nothin’ serious in terms of quantity, but enough to keep a man in Italian loafers for a while.”

  Grace’s knees buckled but she caught herself. Her lips moved but no sound came, her eyes fixed on the film canisters. Cape could feel the magnetic pull of the cops in the room watching her for a reaction. He caught Beau’s eye and held it. Beau nodded and Cape took Grace by the elbow and steered her onto the balcony. He pulled the sliding glass doors shut behind them, then leaned against the railing and looked down, not saying anything.

  The drop to the street was enough to cause vertigo, so Cape shifted his gaze to the water, where a massive container ship navigated the uncertain depths of San Francisco Bay. The bay was two hundred feet deep in some areas and as shallow as six in others, but it all looked the same on the surface. You never could tell.

  Cape kept looking at the water as he spoke. “How long were you involved with Tom?”

  Grace laughed—a short, sad flutter against the wind. “That obvious?”

  Cape shrugged. “Well, I am a detective.”

  “Now you’re being sweet.”

  “Yeah, it’s obvious. It’s understandable you’d want to do the right thing for a friend and colleague—I’d like to think I’d do the same. But some of your reactions have been…”

  “Emotional?”

  Cape shrugged.

  Grace watched the wake from a ship fan out, lifting smaller boats far behind it. “We got involved on our last picture, maybe a year and a half ago. I’d just ended a four-year relationship, he was recently widowed. We were working together day and night to finish a movie, traveling together.”

  “And?”

  “The production wrapped, and we decided to call it off,” she said. “That was nine months ago.”

  “Just like that?”

  Grace shrugged. “We worked too closely together—it felt claustrophobic.”

  “To him or you?”

  “Calling it off was my idea. I’ve been told I have a problem with commitment.”

  “By whom?”

  Grace almost smiled. “You want a list? Where should I start, with my mother or the ex-boyfriends?”

  Cape turned his back on the view so he could face her. “I need to know more about Tom.”

  Grace brushed a stray hair out of her eyes. “If you mean more about what’s inside that apartment…” Her voice trailed off until she found it again. “I don’t believe it. Money wasn’t a problem, believe me. You work just one of these mega-productions and you’re doing great, and Tom produced a movie every eighteen months.”

  “Sometimes it’s not about the money.”

  Grace stepped directly in front of Cape, nearly pinning him to the railing. Her hair smelled of lavender. His didn’t.

  “It’s just not Tom. He wouldn’t do this. I don’t know how else to explain it.”

  “You notice any changes in his behavior recently?”

  “The police asked me that when I went in for questioning.”

  Cape nodded toward the glass doors. “They’re going to ask you again in about five minutes. So what’s the answer?”

  “I didn’t think so before.”

  “But now?”

  “I don’t know.” Grace shook her head in irritation and the wind caught her hair, whipping it behind her. In profile she looked more sad than angry. “Since he died, I’ve heard some of the crew making comments.”

  Cape remained silent.

  “Like he seemed distracted lately, preoccupied. He was working too hard, not getting enough sleep. He was stressed out, short-tempered.”

  “And you didn’t notice?” asked Cape, thinking the cops inside would be asking the same question.

  Grace looked down for a minute before answering. Cape wondered if she was visualizing the jump from the Golden Gate Bridge.

  “The truth is we didn’t spend much time together, and almost never alone. Remember, we were working on different parts of the movie.” Grace looked up from the street below. “Tom was the kind of guy who’d deal with his own problems, not whine about them. And I think Tom was always putting on a good face, you know?”

  “You mean for you—because of your past relationship. Don’t worry about me, I’m doing grea
t…that sort of thing?”

  Grace nodded. “I think I took that for granted when we were together. He was always there for me, and when he needed me to be there, I wasn’t.”

  “Not answering the phone isn’t the same as turning your back on a friend,” said Cape. “You’re here now.” Cape shut himself up before he started sounding like Dr. Phil and turned to face the glass doors. He wanted to give her absolution but knew Grace was the only one who had it to give. She’d have to figure that out on her own, and the cops were waiting.

  Grace caught the body language. “Time to go back inside, huh?”

  Cape nodded. “I’ll find out what’s going on. I work for you, remember.”

  “Technically you work for the studio,” said Grace. “They’re the ones picking up the tab, and they may not want this to go any further, now that drugs are involved. I want to find out what happened to Tom—they want to protect their movie.”

  “You’re the one who hired me.”

  Grace smiled and slid open the doors. Inside, the room was unchanged, except Brewster and the Forensics guy were gone. Beau sat on the sofa and Vincent stood at the kitchen counter, scribbling something on a pad.

  Beau gestured toward an overstuffed chair facing the couch and Grace took a seat. Cape leaned against the sliding doors and kept his mouth shut. The questions were short and pointed, and the answers shed no light whatsoever on the case.

  They wrapped it up after fifteen minutes. “We’re gonna need a list of contacts in the crew, people working with Tom who might know something or may have been involved. You okay with that?”

  Grace nodded. “If it helps catch the killer.”

  Beau didn’t say anything, which said something to Cape. He knew the drugs made the case more interesting—hell, it made it an actual case—but he also knew the drugs didn’t prove that Tom was murdered. The drugs might be the reason Tom jumped, especially if he thought he was losing control of the situation. Who wanted to tell his daughter he was going to the big house for drug trafficking?