by Gorg Huff
Unfortunately, the consulting detective part also meant that if you had something to hide from the police, you didn't want them talking about it.
He kept hold of her arm and pulled her along the counter to the gate, then dragged her behind it, through a door, and down a short hall to a small room. The room had no windows and two beds. It had a door much like the door to Nikola Vetrov's room with the same locking bar. He threw Miroslava at one of the beds and pulled the door closed with a bang.
Now Miroslava noticed the locking mechanism wasn't the same. Both were wood bars about an inch thick that were held in place by wooden brackets attached to the door and doorframe, but her captor locked the door by sliding the bar. And there were no semi-circular scratches on the doorframe or door above the locking bar. And she remembered that there was a blocking piece on Vetrov's door. He couldn't unlock the door by sliding the bar.
From the beginning, Miroslava's plan had been to first find the killer, then ask them how it happened that the door was locked from the inside. Now she thought she wouldn't need to. Though, this man's wife . . . no, two beds, and he was at least forty . . . probably daughter, would need to explain what happened.
"Killing me won't protect your daughter."
"Shut up. Just shut up. I need to think."
I need a gun, Miroslava thought, something small and light that I can hide. She looked around the room. It was small, and not well lit. While the guest rooms had the Coleman style lanterns and windows with glass in them, these rooms had no windows and the older wick lamps without even a glass chimney. The beds were hay-filled sacks on low platforms, and the whole room was less than half the size of Vetrov's.
"Do all the guest room doors have the locking bars modified the way Vetrov's was, or did he do his special?"
"What? What are you talking about? What does Vetrov's door have to do with anything?"
"Not much, I suspect," Miroslava said, "but it looked like it did."
He leaned against the door and stared in confusion at Miroslava on his daughter's bed. Confusion was good. It was better than fear by a long shot.
"Why do you want to talk to Melica?"
"To confirm. I thought it was a bar girl, but I guess this is a full service hotel."
"Melica is not like you. She's a good girl."
That was anger. Not good. Anger and fear were things she didn't want this man feeling. It was also a bit of a surprise. Russia wasn't the England of Miss Marple, where a girl's "goodness" was focused on her virginal status. But maybe it was in this family? Russia, after all, wasn't all one thing and everyone in Russia didn't think the same way. If anyone should know that, it was Miroslava, who thought like no one else she'd ever heard of until she read—or more accurately, had been read to—about autism or spectrum disorder. "I wasn't condemning her or you. And I don't think she did anything wrong, but I need to talk to her to understand what happened."
"Didn't do anything wrong?" the man shouted. "She killed him."
"I thought so," Miroslava said. "I want to know the details of how it happened."
"Who else knows?"
"Ah . . ." Miroslava stopped. She wasn't a skilled liar. It wasn't something that she could do at all unless forced. And she'd never been able to do it convincingly. Back at the Happy Bottom, it was mostly some other girl who did the talking. Which meant that Miroslava got smaller tips. And here, there wasn't anyone telling her what she had to say.
What she wanted to say was "Just me" because that was the truth. Vasilii would suspect, if she disappeared. If Pavel had any clue what she suspected, Melica, her dad, and the rest of the staff of the hotel would be being questioned. Not rigorously questioned, but questioned and their answers compared to get to Melica, who might well be rigorously questioned. After all, Vetrov was an important person. And Melica, "good girl" or not, wasn't. And when unimportant people killed important people, justified or not, the cops wanted someone to blame.
And that was why Miroslava had come here alone. Because if it turned out, as it apparently had, that the maid killed Vetrov, she hadn't decided yet if she was going to tell the cops. After all, while she wasn't any good at lying, she was very good at keeping her mouth shut. Let the case remain unsolved. That wouldn't help her reputation any, but she didn't care that much about her reputation. She did care some, because if the cops didn't call her in she wouldn't have mysteries to solve and she liked solving mysteries, just like Sherlock.
All those thoughts flitted through her mind in moments. And what finally came out was, "I haven't decided whether to tell the cops yet. That's why I need to talk to your daughter. To understand exactly what happened, so that I can decide."
"But if you disappear . . ." Melica's father, whose name Miroslava didn't know, said desperately.
"It might buy you a little time, but not much. And it would be murder, not self defense." She looked at the man. "Are you willing to murder me?"
"I have to protect my daughter."
"Then let me talk to her."
"Why should I trust you?"
That was a very good question, and Miroslava didn't have a very good answer. She knew he could trust her at least not to turn over Melica if it was self defense, not unless she had some way of protecting the girl from the USSR's legal system. Because, even if under The USSR's laws, everyone was, in theory, treated equally, Miroslava knew it wasn't true in fact. "Because it's your best option, your best chance of saving your daughter." It was true, but would he believe her?
As she watched the man out of the corner of her eye, she thought he might, not because he trusted her, but because, now that he was thinking, not reacting in terror, he was unwilling to kill her in cold blood.
He was still dithering, but Miroslava didn't think he was going to try to choke her to death. Then there was a knock on the door.
"Papa? Why aren't you at the desk? Are you all right? Mister Gorelov wants his tickets. What tickets?"
"Let me talk to Melica while you go take care of Mister Gorelov's tickets."
✽ ✽ ✽
Papa, whose name Miroslava still didn't know, was seeing to the tickets and Miroslava was looking at a girl of about fifteen or sixteen, whose face looked like a raccoon right now, complete with the double black eyes and a nose that should be rebroken and set if the girl was ever going to look right or breath properly again. That it was self defense was obvious.
"Tell me from the beginning. How did you come to be in his room?"
"I was bringing the new bowl for the water chair." Another piece of furniture in the room was a toilet which consisted of a wooden chair with a double hinged top. The whole top could be lifted to put the lid on the porcelain pot. The smaller lid was put down to place the bottom in the right place to do their business. The lid to the pot kept the odors from filling the room, and prevented slopping when the bowl was replaced on a daily basis. It was standard fare in the better hotels, and one of the chambermaid's jobs was to collect up the old ones and place the new ones each day.
"Very well. What happened first?
"Well, I'd put the old bowl on the cart."
"No. From the beginning. Was the door open?"
"No. I knocked and Mister Vetrov said come in, so I tried to pull the door open, but it was locked. I said 'the door's latched' and he said 'wait a minute.' Then there were noises and he opened the door. The cart doesn't fit through the doors very well, so I usually just go in and fetch the old pot and put it on the cart, then bring the new pot into the room."
"And this time?"
"Just like always. I checked and it was used, so I took it to the cart and got the new one. I put it in the chair and was going to leave, but Mister Vetrov had pulled the door closed. He was standing there by the door with a glass of vodka in his hand. And he was grinning at me. He said 'Have a drink,' and pushed the glass at me. I shook my head and backed away.
"He followed me, pushing the glass at me, and I kept backing up. Papa doesn't even like it when I drink small beer."
"Go on," Miroslava said, confused again by the father's attitude.
"He had me backed into a corner, and was pushing the glass into my face, and I could smell the vodka from the glass and on his breath. He'd been drinking a lot, and I batted the glass away. It fell on the floor and broke.
"He grinned then, and said he was going to have to punish me for breaking his glass. I tried to get by him, and he hit me in the face." She pointed to her broken nose.
"Everything got all blurry for a few minutes, but he threw me onto his bed and went back to the sideboard to get another drink.
"I tried to get up, but my head hurt and I fell back on the bed. And he came over. He grabbed me, he ripped open my shirt, and fell on top of me. I tried to get away, and my hand found the gun under his pillow. It was one of the new pistols, but I didn't know that. All I knew was that it was something hard. I pulled it out from beneath the pillow and I hit him with it."
"Where?"
"I don't know. The head or maybe his shoulder. I was just trying to get away. Anyway, he reared back and I rolled off the bed onto the floor, then scrambled away."
So far this was fitting, but from the wound and the bullet in the wall, Miroslava knew that the gun was shoulder high on Melica when Vetrov was shot. It wasn't fired by anyone crawling on the floor. She nodded for Melica to continue.
"He was trying to get up. I don't know if it was because I hit him in the head or because he was drunk, but he fell back on the bed and I got up. Then he shouted 'Hey, that's my gun. You give that back,' and he got up. I turned to face him and I held up the gun, to try and get him to back up. But he just kept coming and, well, the gun went off, and he looked at me, and staggered after me. I turned and ran for the door. I don't know how I got the latch open, but I pushed open the door. I didn't want him chasing me, so I slammed it closed and leaned against it to keep it closed. I heard a thump, but it wasn't against the door. I would have felt that."
It fit the facts. When Melica leaned against the door, it let the locking bar fall into place, latching the door from the inside. In a way, Pavel was right about the too clever by half embassy bureau spy. But the too clever spy was Vetrov himself. And he wasn't trying to obscure his murder. He was trying to hide his key.
It was actually quite a clever trick. How do you pick a lock that you don't know is there? Unlike the normal locking bars in the hotel, Vetrov's was hinged on the door side so that it rotated up. That caused the marks scratched in the door and door frame. It had to be tight or it wouldn't stay up while you were closing the door. Miroslava imagined that Vetrov had to jiggle his door a bit to get the bar to fall into place, and to open it, he just slid a knife in under the bar and lifted.
"Anyway," Melica said, "I stood there for a bit with my back pushed up against the door, and he didn't bang into it to force it open and, well, I was scared. I didn't know what to do and I felt . . . I don't know what I felt. But I put the gun in the chamber pot and, holding my blouse closed with one hand, I pushed the cart back down the hall."
"Why didn't the police notice your face when they fingerprinted you?"
"It was the next day. The bleeding had stopped, but the bruise hadn't turned color. My face was just a bit red. It didn't start to look like this until last night. That's when Papa realized that something had happened and made me tell him."
"And what did you do with the gun?"
"It was still in the chamber pot when I emptied it into the big barrel out back to go to the chemical plant."
"Have they been by to collect it yet?"
"No. They come by tomorrow."
Normally, Miroslava would go see Pavel, and Pavel would assign a beat cop to go through the big barrel of crap. But if she did that, the cops would want to know how she knew where the gun was. And tomorrow, when the people from the chemical plant started their sorting process separating out the various useful bits, they would find the gun and that would point right back at Melica. All of which meant that Miroslava was going to have to go dig through a big barrel of shit to find the gun. And she had to do it before the chemical plant people came by in the morning to fetch it.
Ufa, almost from the beginning, had had strict and rigorously enforced rules about sanitation. And these days those rules were aided by the fact that the chemical plant paid for the crap and urine. Not much, but for a business like the hotel, it helped.
"I'm going to need a pitchfork."
"Why?"
"Because if that gun is found in your barrel, it's going to lead right back to you. I need to fish it out of the barrel."
✽ ✽ ✽
Out behind the hotel, with a three-tined pitchfork in hand, Miroslava pulled open the lid of the chest-high wide barrel. It didn't smell good, but Miroslava was used to bad smells and wasn't overly bothered. She lowered the pitchfork into the barrel and searched for something hard. It wasn't that difficult to find. The barrel was only about three-quarters full. However, getting the pitchfork under the gun wasn't easy because the angle was wrong. Eventually, she managed to push the gun up against the side of the barrel and wedged it between the pitchfork and the side of the barrel, and lifted it up the side. She only dropped it twice before she got it up out of the muck and then she had to grab it with her bare hand because it was about to fall again. A bucket of water to rinse off the gun, her hands, and the pitchfork left them, if not clean, at least closer to it.
With the gun wrapped in yesterday's newspaper, Miroslava departed, still unsure what to do about Melica.
Chapter 4
Location: Room 22B, Ufa Dacha
Date: 10:45 AM, May 12, 1637
Ilooked up when Miroslava came in, her sleeves wet and carrying a bundle wrapped in newspaper.
"What happened?" I asked. "And what's that?"
"I don't want to talk about it, at least not yet," Miroslava told me. "Vasilii, would you get my spare clothing and put it in the shower room?"
I was curious, but didn't want to press her. Miroslava now owned two complete outfits, both the same. The one she wasn't wearing was either waiting to go to the laundry or back from it. That was at least moderate wealth in the USSR at this time. The carding, spinning, and weaving machines from Grantville were all new tech, and while the cost of cloth had gone down, most people owned one set of used clothing and one conglomeration of rags to wrap themselves in while washing their clothes. The closets full of clothes that were talked about in my books were a thing of another century, or of the very rich. I was among the rich, if not the very rich, but Miroslava had frugal, not to say parsimonious habits, developed over a lifetime of poverty.
Even her old clothing from before we met was stored away, just in case.
Curious, but willing to wait, I gathered up the clothing and put it in one of the dressing rooms off the shower and went back to that damned condenser unit. It wasn't until days later that I learned what was going on.
✽ ✽ ✽
In the shower, Miroslava washed herself and the pistol, carefully removing the caps, powder, and shot from the unfired cylinders in the revolver. This was neither the easy nor the preferred method to empty the pistol. The preferred method of emptying a caplock black powder revolver was to fire the thing empty, but after soaking in urine for a day and a half, that was no longer an option. In this case instead, using a small metal hook, she had to pull the bullet out of each unfired chamber of the cylinder and then wash out the soaked black powder and thoroughly clean and dry the whole thing, as well as the barrel. Miroslava did the washing part as part of her shower and dried herself and her gun with the towels from the shower room.
And all the time she was doing that, she was considering what to do about Melica. One thing she wasn’t going to do was turn her in.
She considered consulting Madam Drozdov, but she knew that Madam Drozdov would just tell her to give Melica to the police. Finally, she hit on Dominika. Dominika might tell her the same thing, but she might also know someone Miroslava could trust. Dominika and Zia Ivaneva Chernoff at le
ast had the connections now.
Location: Chernoff House, Ufa
Chernoff House was half the second floor of a hotel while the permanent residence was under construction. And so far construction hadn't started, because, well, Dominika had only been the guardian of Larisa Karolevna Chernoff for a week. In that week, she'd visited the palace twice, which news was all over Russia thanks to the radio telegraphs.
When Miroslava reached the suite, she was met by a pair of armed retainers. They were polite, and when she showed them her Dacha photo-ID, one of them went to Dominika to see if she would be allowed in. It was less than a minute later that Dominika came to the door and took Miroslava's arm and—after explaining to the guards that Miroslava was a dear friend and known to the czar—personally escorted her into the private rooms, where the wet nurse was feeding little Larisa Karolevna.
"Thank God you're here. I'm scared all the time," Dominika whispered into her ear as they walked. "I'm sorry about the touching. I know you don't like it much, but we need to show the guards who you are."
Once she had Miroslava seated, she finally got around to asking, "What brings you here? I heard you were investigating that embassy man's murder?"
Miroslava looked at the wetnurse and recognized her. She was Raisa, another girl from the Happy Bottom, children being an occupational hazard of working there. Dominika noticed Miroslava's glance and said, "Raisa, why don't you take the baby into the other room for a bit?"
Raisa, dressed better than Miroslava had ever seen her, did so.
"Okay," Domininka said. "What's this all about?"
"Okay?"
"I don't know what it means, but Anya says it all the time," Dominika said.
"Anya? The woman who runs the Dacha?"
"Yes. She's the most powerful peasant in Russia. She's a personal friend of Natasha Gorchakov and the czarina, and she started out as one of us. Now what's this all about? I know you, Miroslava. You don't come visiting just to visit."
"It's about the death of Nikola Vetrov. And it wasn't a murder, not really. The girl was just trying to get away." Miroslava wasn't a talker, but she had spent the last several years hearing all the girls at the Happy Bottom exchanging their stories. And she knew that Dominika had been a victim of much the same thing that Melica had. She just hadn't found a gun or a means of getting away. It was that event that had shifted Dominika's life from peasant girl about to marry a peasant boy to dancer in the Happy Bottom.