The Pretender's Gambit

Chapter 3

“Hey, bro, you can’t just hold us here forever. We know our rights. You can’t arrest us if we didn’t do anything. And this is our home anyway. You can’t even be here if we don’t want you here. We could make you wait in the hallway.”

The speaker was the younger of the two Russian men sitting on the ratty pale green couch that looked like it had been scooped up off the street. The rest of the furniture was ill-matched and just as unkempt, spreading across three different styles and at least thirty years. None of the pieces were collector’s items.

Cigarette smoke hung like a cloud in the air. European symphonic heavy-metal tracks spun through the iPod dock on top of a television, showing a futuristic military video game paused in midaction. Something was blowing up but Annja wasn’t sure what it was.

She stood behind Bart with her hands in her jacket pockets and didn’t say anything. Although a police investigation wasn’t something she regularly took part in, she’d seen plenty on television, and she’d watched Bart in action a few times. She felt safe, and she was definitely curious.

The two Russians were obviously related and it showed in their features—the same eyes, the same facial structure. One of them was thin and lupine-faced and maybe twenty, wearing a concert T-shirt, and the other looked slightly older and was beefed up and overweight, like a martial arts fighter who’d been hitting the borscht and beer too often. The younger guy had long dark hair and a spotty beard while the older one was shaven bald and wore a dark beard with lime-green tints.

Based on the look of their apartment, and the stench, and their lackadaisical nature, both of them were delinquents and probably a total waste of time.

“You know your rights?” Bart looked impressed.

The younger brother nodded and fist bumped his brother. They waggled their fingers like the fist bump had caused an explosion. “You bet we do, bro. We know our rights back and front, and you can’t just arrest us.”

“What would I arrest you for?”

“Nothing, bro.” The young one wiped his hands in front of him like he was cleaning a slate. “We ain’t done nothing. The police chick outside—” he pointed through the door, indicating the hallway “—she said she just wanted to ask us some questions. Next thing we know, bro, here you are.”

“You mean Officer Falcone said she wanted to ask you questions?” Bart asked.

“I didn’t get her name, bro. Maybe that was it.” His eyelids hung heavily and he moved too loosely to be completely sober. “It was that police chick out there.”

“Call her Officer Falcone. She won’t be happy with ‘police chick.’ Trust me.”

“Officer Police Chick called you down here, bro? That’s what you said, right? That’s why you’re here?”

Annja didn’t know how Bart kept his composure. She was getting frustrated just listening, unable to get the memory of the murdered man out of her mind. Bart sighed in annoyed acceptance. “Yes. She did.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think?”

The guy wrapped his arms around himself. “She said my uncle got killed.”

“Great-uncle,” the brother said quietly. “You forget, Maurice was our great-uncle on Ma’s side. Her mother’s brother.”

“Okay, then, our great-uncle. Only, if you ask me, he isn’t so great. He’s just this old guy. Kind of bossy. Too bossy. Likes to tell people what to do.” He looked at Bart. “That true, bro? Somebody killed our great-uncle?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“You sure? ’Cause he was kinda old. Coulda just died.”

“He didn’t just die.”

“Maybe he killed himself.”

“No. That didn’t happen.”

“Then I don’t know what to tell you, bro. You got me.”

“I just have a few questions I’d like to ask,” Bart said.

“I’m through answering questions. Through talking about my great-uncle, too. You can’t arrest us, so you gotta go.” He pointed to the door. “I’m revoking your apartment privileges.”

Bart took out his cell phone, poked it for a second, then showed it to the younger man, revealing the mug shot there. “Demyan Koltsov. Is that you?”

The guy straightened up then, squinted and shrugged. “I don’t know. Is it?”

“Well, I can arrest you on suspicion of being Demyan Koltsov, take you downtown to fingerprint you and verify that, yes, in fact, you are Demyan Koltsov, and then lock you up.”

“Lock me up?” Demyan’s eyes widened. “For what, bro? I didn’t have nothing to do with that old man getting killed!”

“For lying to a detective in the performance of his duty, for starters. It also says here that Demyan Koltsov is wanted for FTA regarding a weed bust.”

Demyan waved that off. “Those are bogus charges, bro. I was entrapped. And that failure-to-appear rap? I told the judge I couldn’t be there that day, bro. I had a doctor’s appointment. Had a note and everything.”

“I’m not interested in an FTA. That’s not my business. I want to talk about your great-uncle.” Bart put his phone away. “So either you talk to me about Maurice Benyovszky here, or I cuff you and take you downtown to deal with that FTA. We can talk about your great-uncle while you’re getting booked.”

Demyan looked at his brother. “Can you get me out of jail, Yegor?”

The older brother frowned and shook his head. “I don’t have any money. Why you come asking for money from me when you know I ain’t got any? You’ll just have to stay in jail until I find out if Ma has any money. And if she will bail you out.” He lowered his voice into a whisper. “You didn’t pay her back for bailing you out on that weed bust.”

Demyan sighed like he was the most put-upon man on the planet. “This ain’t my night, bro. My girl’s two-timing me with her ex. I lost my part-time job at the pizza place—”

“I don’t think you can say you lost that job when you never showed up for a shift,” Yegor said.

Demyan pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. “Man, they texted me and told me I was fired.” He shook his head sadly. “That would have been a sweet job. I’d have been driving around, delivering pizza, everybody glad to see me.”

Yegor clapped his brother on the shoulder with a big hand. “You don’t have a car. The car you had was my car, and it got impounded, remember?”

“Hey.” Bart’s voice turned sharp, a pure cop tone that made both of the younger men focus on him instantly. “Either we talk about what I want to talk about or I’m taking you in.”

Yegor shot Bart a look of sad surprise. “Me? Why you arrest me?”

Bart nodded at Demyan. “Him I got on the FTA. You I got for outstanding traffic warrants. Now, are we going to talk?”

“Sure, sure.” Demyan smiled and nodded. “I hereby invite you back into our apartment. We’ll talk about anything you want.”

“You said you worked for your uncle?”

“We did. Me and Yegor. On account of my mom, she’s Uncle Maurice’s niece or something?” Demyan looked at Yegor.

Yegor thought about it and nodded. “Yeah. Her mom is sister to Uncle Maurice, so we’re great-nephews. I think that’s how it works.”

“Anyway,” Demyan said, “we got this job from the old guy on account he don’t know how to do computers. Me and Yegor, we know computers. Know video games. All the tech. Uncle Maurice went into business for himself, started buying stuff from storage places. Things that people run off and leave on account they can’t pay the rent on the storage no more?”

Bart nodded.

“People run off and leave some weird stuff, bro. I’m telling you. Me and Yegor, we’ve pulled stuff outta some of them storage units you’d think come from Mars. Had this one guy was sewing different parts of dead animals together. Saw where he’d put a bat head and wings on a cat, bro. That was messed up.”

Bart started to take a note, but Annja shook her head.

“It’s called rogue taxidermy,” she said. “Probably not anything for you to get concerned about. People do it to create curiosity pieces for collectors of the weird.”

“People don’t get any weirder than a cat with a bat head and wings, bro.” Demyan shook his head. “Sickest thing I ever saw. Gave me nightmares. Sometimes I still get them.”

“What did your great-uncle do with the stuff he got from the storage units?” Bart asked.

“Pieced it out and sold it, bro. What else you gonna do with stuff like that? A lot of it was junk we just dumped. Never know what you’re gonna get outta one of them things.”

“Where did he sell it?”

“Online, wherever he could find somebody that wanted something. Me and Yegor dragged some of them things around to pawn shops and swap meets. Man is all about making a dollar. He pays me and Yegor chump change, though.”

“He pays for the apartment we’re living in,” Yegor said quietly.

“Oh, yeah. He does that, too.” Demyan looked at his brother. “Only if he’s dead, he ain’t gonna do that no more, is he?” He frowned. “Who’s gonna pay the rent if Uncle Maurice is gone?”

Yegor shrugged and looked unhappy.

“Hey, Demyan.” Bart snapped his fingers. “Focus.”

Demyan looked at Bart, had to narrow his eyes a moment, then looked again. “What?”

“If you guys put the stuff up on the computer for your uncle, who managed the sales?”

“Me and Yegor. We boxed stuff up, carted it to the post office. Uncle Maurice wasn’t gonna do it. Man had no skills when it came to tech and he sure wasn’t gonna walk to the post office every day. Knew good stuff from the bad in storage units, though. Man could turn a dollar.”

Bart pulled up a picture of the elephant on his phone. “Tell me about this.”

A wide smile split Demyan’s face. “Oh, yeah! The elephant! I remember the elephant!”

“Uncle Maurice said he was gonna make bank on it,” Yegor added. “Said he had a bunch of different people bidding on it the first day we put it up.”

“Do you know who bought it?” Bart asked.

“No.” Yegor shook his head. “Uncle Maurice took care of all that. Me and Demyan just pulled stuff out of the storage units, sorted it out, boxed it when it sold, then lugged it to the post office after Uncle Maurice wrote the address on it.”

“Should be information on who bought it on the website, bro,” Demyan said.

“Maybe you could show me that,” Bart suggested.

* * *

DESPITE BEING PARTIALLY dazed and suddenly realizing he might be homeless or moving at the end of the month, Demyan got around on the computer just fine. Annja figured it was because he played his video games night and day, a stack of them barely hid behind a giant pink plastic pig bank that had suffered a permanent appendectomy and stood open and mostly empty.

“Here, bro.” Demyan waved at the laptop computer that he set up on the scarred coffee table covered in burn marks.

A website entitled Maurice’s Super-Good Things showed on the screen. The site had cheap theatrics, fireworks and a slideshow showing some of the stuff that Benyovszky had featured for sale.

“Me and Yegor named the site,” Demyan announced proudly.

“Yeah.” Yegor nodded.

“Great,” Bart said. “Now show me the elephant.”

Demyan’s fingers flicked across the keyboard and brought up the picture of the elephant. “Here you go.”

“When did the sale close?”

Squinting at the monitor, Demyan tapped a few more keys. “A guy calls himself the Idaho Picker.”

Bart frowned. “That’s not his real name.”

“No. That’s his handle on the site.”

“Can you get me his real name?”

“Sure.” Demyan tapped some more, bringing up other screens of information. “Says his name is Charles Prosch.”

“Do you have an address and phone number for Mr. Prosch?”

“Yeah.” Demyan tapped keys again.

Chapter 4

Annja cycled through the items Benyovszky had up for sale on his site. He had a lot of merchandise, most of it was furniture, exercise equipment, clothing and assorted electronics, computers, video-game consoles and DVDs. She also took notes on the storage companies Benyovszky regularly bought defaulted units from, and managed to track the elephant back to a company called Illya’s Storage, which appeared to cater to the Russian neighborhood. Benyovszky had kept good notes, and his nephews had entered all of the information. At least, they had evidently entered a great deal of the details in the database.

Bart was on his cell phone doing background work on Charles Prosch.

“You’re pretty good on that computer, bro.” Sitting on the couch, Demyan smiled at Annja as she worked the keyboard.

Bro? Annja let that pass because Demyan still referred to Officer Falcone as “police chick,” too, and she didn’t intend to become “computer chick.” “I am.”

“You could probably make somebody a good secretary.”

Annja resisted the impulse to show Demyan how much fun a punch in the nose could be. Instead, she tried to ignore him.

Demyan sucked at his teeth and smoothed his mustache with his fingers. “If you want, maybe I can make some calls for you. Check around. See if there are any openings for secretaries. I know a few people. I could hook you up with a sweet job.”

“Thanks. But I already have a job.”

“What?” Demyan grimaced. “You got too much class. You ain’t no police chick.”

“No, I’m not.” Annja looked at the guy, pinning him with her gaze. “Which means I don’t have to play by police rules or be nice when someone says something insulting.”

Demyan broke eye contact and looked away, but only for a moment. Then he found something new to talk about. “You know who might have killed Uncle Maurice, bro?”

“Who?” Annja pulled up the bid page and looked at the other names listed there. Few of them were real names, but Bart and his digital police investigators would be able to track them down and put actual identities to online handles.

“His old cronies. Some of the other guys that were part of the Potato Bag Gang.”

That caught Annja’s attention and she stopped what she was doing. “The Potato Bag Gang? What’s that?”

“Mafia wiseguys.” Demyan touched the side of his nose and winked. “Uncle Maurice was part of the original Russian organized crime guys that came over when communism started going bust.”

Bart put his phone away and crossed the room back over to Annja. “Back in the 1970s, Russian criminals, some of them, first started turning up in Brighton Beach. Those guys tended to be con artists, not hardcases. One of their main schticks was selling antique gold rubles to buyers who thought they were getting a great deal. They told the buyers that they couldn’t get caught with the rubles, couldn’t exchange them to a legitimate market, so they had to sell them at a loss. Only when the victims opened the bags those con artists gave them, they only found potatoes, not rubles. So those guys became known as the Potato Bag Gang.” He grinned. “Don’t tell me I knew something you didn’t.”

“You did, and it’s not that hard to do. History and culture are huge. There’s no way I can know it all.” Some days that bummed Annja, knowing that she couldn’t know everything. She usually distracted herself from that by learning something out of the ordinary. “But I also think the Potato Bag Gang is interesting. I’ll have to look into it at another time. Did you get hold of Prosch?”

Bart shook his head. “Not yet. I left a message, but it’s still early out in Idaho.”

“Idaho? The state of Idaho?” Annja couldn’t remember Idaho even being mentioned on the pages she’d sorted through. “You’re not just saying that because of the Potato Bag Gang.”

Bart grinned. “Yeah. Surprised me, too. Prosch lives in a town in the middle of nowhere named Bonner’s Ferry. The town’s supposed to have like ten thousand people in it. Compared to New York, it’s a ghost town.” He checked the time on his watch. “I’ll call again in the morning.” He looked at Annja. “I can have an officer take you home. Save you some cab fare.”

“What are you going to do?”

“It’s three o’clock. I’ve got a report to file and information to collect, then I need to wait for a decent hour to call Prosch. I’m going to go down to the diner at the corner and camp out. See what turns up.”

“Want company?” Annja wasn’t prepared to let go of the mystery that had been brought into her orbit, and Bart was a friend. It had been a long time since they’d had the excuse to hang out together.

“This isn’t your thing, Annja. I feel bad about asking you to come see what you had to see earlier. I just needed answers if you had them.”

“I’m thinking I could go through Benyovszky’s files and get a better idea of the kind of business he was doing. If that would help.”

Bart hesitated, then smiled. “It would. I don’t want this to be more of an inconvenience than it already is.”

Annja stood. “It won’t be. An inconvenience would be me going home and not being able to sleep because I’m wondering what this is all about. Somebody killed that poor old man for a reason. I’d like to know why.”

“That’s the problem.” Bart’s eyes held a glint of bitter sadness. “Sometimes even when you know the answers, you don’t understand them. People kill each other for the stupidest, most selfish reasons you can imagine.”

Demyan leaned forward to insert himself into the conversation. “I’m telling you, bro, you need to listen to me. It was probably one of them old-time gangsters Uncle Maurice sometimes hung around with.” He leaned back on the couch. “Them guys, they would sit and talk about the old days, and not one of them with two nickels to rub together. They were jealous of the business Uncle Maurice, Yegor and me had going. We were making money, bro, and they wanted some of it. Uncle Maurice said that elephant was the biggest score he’d ever pulled down.”

“Did he tell people about that?” Bart asked.

Demyan shrugged. “Yeah, a few people. Some of those old guys, sure. He wanted them to know when he got a fat score. Liked to rub it in and tell them they should be doing their own business when he was drinking down at The Red Bear Bar.” He paused and rolled his shoulders. “Did you see how much he got for that elephant, bro?”

“I did,” Bart replied.

“So…how much?”

“He didn’t tell you?”

Demyan scowled. “Like I said, Uncle Maurice didn’t tell me and Yegor anything except go empty out this storage unit and bring the stuff here. Put this stuff on the website. Box these things up. Go to the post office with this. That pretty much covered it. He was supposed to be training us, but he didn’t.” He pursed his lips. Evidently the pleasant buzz he’d had earlier was fading. “Never once did he tell me and Yegor that we were doing a good job, you know? He coulda done that. Coulda showed a little appreciation. That wouldn’t have been so hard, bro.”

Bart shook his head in ill-concealed disgust. “The man is dead. He put a roof over your heads and kept the two of you in enough cash to mostly keep you out of trouble. Have some respect.” He headed for the door and Annja fell in behind him.

“Not all the weed we could smoke, bro,” Demyan said softly. “We coulda smoked a lot more weed.”

Annja put a hand on Bart’s shoulder and kept him moving.

Outside in the hall, Bart walked over to Officer Falcone, a young brunette with dark hair and eyes.

“Something I can do for you, Detective?”

“I can do something for you, Officer Falcone.” Bart hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “There are warrants out on those idiots in that apartment.”

“I didn’t know that. We didn’t background them. I was just told they were the dead man’s nephews and we were supposed to hold them for you.”

“Well, I’m telling you now they’ve got warrants out for them. Grab your partner and take those two imbeciles downtown. There’s an FTA on the little one and traffic holds on the big one. That’ll give you guys a couple small collars and a reason to get in out of the cold tonight.”

Falcone smiled. “Thank you, Detective.”

Bart waved the thanks away. “Don’t mention it. Take your time booking those two clowns. I want to be able to find them if I need to for the next forty-eight hours.”

* * *

CALAPEZ SPOONED THE last of the Greek yogurt from the plastic container while Pousao watched the building on the other side of the street. Finished with his meal, he glanced at his watch and discovered it was 4:14 a.m. They had been in the dead man’s apartment for over four hours. The morning coming, they would have to move soon. He could already hear neighbors moving around in the other apartments. Early morning activity, footsteps and snatches of hurried conversation, sounded out in the hallway.

Pousao stood and shifted slightly, then pushed his chin toward the window. “Hey. That woman, Annja Creed, she’s leaving the building with one of the cops.”

Calapez crossed the room and gestured for the binoculars the younger man held. When Calapez had them, he trained his view on to the street, picking up the archaeologist instantly. She stood out in the crowd. She and the detective pushed through the reporters outside the perimeter set up by the police officers.

“Do they have the elephant?” Pousao asked.

“I don’t know.” Feeling more tense now because he knew Sequeira would not accept losing the object, Calapez watched as Annja Creed and the detective entered a small diner.

“They are not going far.” Pousao rotated his head on his shoulders and the effort produced cracks. “What do we do?”

“What we’re doing now. We wait. We watch. Going back to Sequeira without the elephant would not be good business.” Calapez handed the binoculars over to his young associate, then went back to raid the dead man’s refrigerator again. He opened the door and peered inside. Nothing looked good. The deceased obviously didn’t dine in much. Frustrated, he closed the door again. “I will go over to the diner and bring us back something to eat. Maybe I will find out what they are talking about, or where the elephant is. While I am there, you keep watch.”

Pousao nodded and returned to his vigil.

Calapez waited at the door till he heard silence, then let himself out. If the police did not have the elephant, he had to figure out where it had gone—soon.

Chapter 5

Hours later, Annja stifled a yawn and looked through bleary vision at the list of storage units and buyers she had compiled. The sorting program on the software made building that list easier, but there were still a lot of names. Benyovszky had been in business for himself for eleven years.