Brighton Beach: A Kurtz and Barent Mystery (Kurtz and Barent Mysteries Book 5)

by Robert I. Katz

  “Arnie Figueroa? The Haywards?”

  “She knows nothing about anything. Nothing at all.”

  “Or so she claims.”

  Kurtz smiled wanly. “Yeah.”

  Was it all becoming routine? It occurred to Kurtz that he and Lenore spent a lot of time in restaurants. They had their favorite places and they returned to them often. He thought about what Lenore had said to him, the other night, about the most beautiful woman on Earth and the not-so-lucky guy who was tired of sleeping with her. Was he getting tired of sleeping with Lenore? Could it possibly be true? Were they stuck in a rut?

  He smiled. Maybe it was true, in a faint, distant sort of way, but it was a hell of a rut. God knows, just looking at Lenore nibbling on a dumpling with those full, plush lips almost made him groan out loud. He toyed with the idea of dumping her across the table, yanking her panties off and fucking her brains out, right here. She would pretend to fight him at first and then, overcome by the passion of the moment, fuck him right back. The other diners would applaud. He would then be invited on all the late-night talk shows and probably be elected mayor.

  “Something on your mind?” she asked. Lenore picked up another dumpling.

  “Have I ever told you that you’re very sexy when you eat a dumpling?”

  She grinned. “Not yet.”

  “Very sexy.”

  “Enjoy it while they last. The hot and sour soup is next.”

  Kurtz smiled. “You should slurp it a little. I find that really enticing.”

  She smiled back. “You do enjoy your food, don’t you?”

  He nodded. “Harry and Lew have been talking to the guys on the narcotics squad. It seems that there has been a small but significant increase in drug related deaths, all across the city. It’s not a lot in absolute numbers, but it’s more than it used to be.”

  Lenore nodded.

  “Most of them are low-lives,” Kurtz said. “Nobody that anybody is going to miss, except maybe their mothers, and probably their mothers are just as sick of them as anybody else.”

  “China White? Serial Killer?”

  “A little of both, mixed with heroin.”

  “Where is it coming from?”

  “That’s the question.” Kurtz shrugged. “Probably China.”

  “And of course,” Lenore said, “none of this is any of our business.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  She gave him a somber smile. “It’s good that you know it.”

  “Oh, yeah. These guys would squish me like a bug.”

  Inwardly, Kurtz sighed. He wondered sometimes if he had made a mistake, back in the Army, when he had clerked for CID and his superiors had quietly let him know that he could have a career there if he wanted it, but it would have required a long-term commitment to the military. At the time, he had been tempted but he had reluctantly decided that he didn’t want to be a cop. He knew where he was going: college, then medical school…and now here he was, a surgeon, respected practitioner of the art and somehow, involved once again in some criminal insanity.

  Kurtz had a sense of proportion, a desire that the books balance, that the good be rewarded and the bad be punished. It was like an itch. Injustice had always grated on him.

  The first time, with Sharon Lee, had been a fluke. The second time as well, when Rod Mahoney was murdered, but Kurtz had come to realize, almost with dismay, that he had more in common, deep down inside, with Harry Moran and Lew Barent, than he did with his medical colleagues. Cops, the good ones, were all predators, men and women hunting the hunters of other men. They had no illusions. They understood the quirks and foibles of human nature. They knew that nothing stands between civilization and chaos but the willingness of those like themselves to put it all on the line.

  “Not the most pleasant dinner conversation we’ve ever had,” Lenore said.

  “Sorry.”

  They ate in silence for a little while. Then Kurtz said, “What can you tell me about Arkady Lukin?”

  Lenore sighed. She patted her lips with a napkin. “You think that Steve Ryan was murdered, don’t you?”

  “Think might be too strong a word,” Kurtz said. “More of a suspicion.”

  “And you suspect that Arkady Lukin had something to do with it?”

  “Either him or his brother.”

  “Why?”

  “Why do I suspect that Arkady Lukin killed him or why do I suspect he was murdered?”

  “Either. Both.”

  “I suspect he was murdered because the alternative seems unlikely. He didn’t have enough reason to kill himself. He was planning on changing his practice. It seemed to me that he was looking forward to it. He seemed relieved. I suspect that Arkady Lukin killed him because he wanted Donna Ryan for himself.”

  “Except that Arkady is gay.”

  “How well did you really know him, back when you were kids? Maybe he swings both ways. Maybe he’s willing to make an exception for Donna, with whom he’s been close since childhood.”

  Lenore frowned, evidently not persuaded. “You don’t really know what was going through Steve Ryan’s mind. You had one conversation with him on this subject. Didn’t Bill Werth say that suicide in such situations is common?”

  “He did.”

  “Well, then.”

  Kurtz shrugged.

  “And as for Arkady, if he was going to kill Steve Ryan, why now? If he was so jealous, why didn’t he tell her how he felt? Why didn’t he act sooner? Why would he wait until Donna was married, with three kids?”

  “No idea.”

  “This is basically bullshit. It’s all theory and speculation. It could have happened, but you have no good reason to think so.”

  “And I have no good way of proving it.” He toyed with his food, then sighed and shook his head. “It’s just a feeling.”

  “Feelings are not admissible in court,” Lenore said.

  “No,” Kurtz said. “I suppose not.”

  “So, Barent,” Joe Danowski said. “Let me tell you what we’ve got.”

  Joe Danowski was middle aged and grizzled and wore his suit like he slept in it. He always looked just a bit befuddled, a deliberate act intended to disarm the opposition. He had been a cop for twenty-five years.

  “Give me a second,” Barent said. He went over to the pot of coffee on the cabinet against the wall, re-filled his cup and glanced back at Danowski. “You?” he asked.

  “No, thanks. I’m good.”

  Barent sat back down. “Okay,” he said.

  “Most of this is inference, not evidence,” Danowski said.

  Barent nodded.

  “The Russians, all of them, hire either from recent immigrants, from the first generation born here, who also grew up in the neighborhood, or from their own people back home. They all know each other. We have been unable to place anybody inside any of the local organizations. What we’ve found is that the older and more established an organization is, the more members it has from outside that circumscribed community, which obviously helps us. In the past, we had some luck getting informants on the Italian mafia, the Chinese tongs and the Irish mob, all of which first came to this country in the late 1800’s. Plenty of their members were born in the US, went to school here and thought of themselves as primarily American. It took time, but we were able to get eyes inside. We could tell what they were doing, in a general sense, at least.

  “The newer organizations are tougher. We’ve got nobody inside MS-13, for instance.” Danowski shrugged. “Maybe the FBI does, but I doubt it. Same with the Colombians and now the Russians.”

  Barent nodded again. He knew Danowski. Danowski was the methodical sort. He would work up to whatever it was in his own way.

  “However,” Danowski said, “all of these organizations use local suppliers and they all have local contacts, and those contacts have contacts of their own. It’s impossible to keep everything secret. So here is what we’re sure of: the stuff is manufactured by any number of companies in China. Peony Flower
Trading, in Shanghai seems to be the main source of the alpha-methylfentanil right at the moment. Most of the carfentanil comes from Zhang and Sons, in Chengdu, but it could just as easily have been the other way around.”

  Barent shrugged.

  Danowski nodded. “Yeah. Not that it matters,” he said. “The stuff is legal there. Until their own government decides to crack down, there’s not a thing we can do to stop it, not at that end.

  “From there, it gets a bit hazier. The bottom line is that the stuff arrives in this country as parts of routine shipments, disguised as routine merchandise. It might be inside the tires of a kid’s bicycle, or inside a container of laundry detergent, or maybe half a kilo is stuffed inside the head of a Darth Vader doll. Again, no real way to find out and no real way to stop it.”

  Barent sipped his coffee. Danowski smiled.

  “Javier Garcia, or so we are told, is pissed off.”

  “Not surprising. His guys got whacked.”

  “Yeah. We’ve been able to determine that the guys doing the whacking were brought in from out of town. They weren’t trying to cover their tracks. Quite the opposite. We have local hotel, car rental and gas station receipts, all with the same phony names on the credit cards. They came in, did the job, and left.”

  “Surveillance cameras?”

  “A couple of shots. They’re white. None of the faces are on record.” Danowski shrugged. “Probably disguises. Wigs, contact lenses, cheek inserts, nose putty…”

  “Where are they supposedly from?”

  “Credit card addresses are all from Boise, Idaho. The addresses don’t exist. The credit card numbers were never actually issued.”

  “The whole thing could be a set-up,” Barent said. “Maybe they’re actually local, pretending to be from out of town.”

  “We have surveillance from LaGuardia, two of them boarding a plane to Boise, Idaho, waving at the camera. They’re cheeky bastards.”

  “Any surveillance from Boise?”

  “It shows them getting off the plane and vanishing into the crowd. By now, they could be anywhere.”

  Barent considered this. “We were assuming that it was a rival mob.”

  “A rival mob probably paid for it. That mob is presumably local, but maybe not. If they’re local, they didn’t do it, themselves.”

  “In that case, I don’t understand the motive. They stirred up some trouble, caused a little mayhem but did nothing that would stop the traffic. So, Javier Garcia is pissed. Was that what they were trying to accomplish? Piss off Javier Garcia?”

  Danowski made a faint noise. “Pissing off Javier Garcia is not a good idea. Javier Garcia is no dummy, but it’s the law of the jungle out there. If any of his people get the idea that Garcia is weak or otherwise over the hill, then his people will turn on him. His position won’t last a week.”

  “You mean he’ll be killed.”

  Danowski shrugged. “He’s going to have to strike back. He has no choice, and he can’t wait too long to do it.”

  The next afternoon, as he was running in the park, a large man, his face covered by a ski mask, stepped out from behind a row of hedges and swung at Kurtz with a baseball bat. Luckily, Kurtz caught a glimpse of him from the corner of his eye and jerked to the side. The bat barely grazed his shoulder. It still hurt, though, and his arm went momentarily numb.

  “You piece of shit!” the man screamed. He swung the bat again.

  Kurtz leaned back and ducked. The bat passed over his head. Kurtz stepped in, hammered a punch into the man’s abdomen. It was a hard abdomen, with a lot of muscle. The man groaned, turned with the punch and snapped a kick at Kurtz’ kneecap, which he barely evaded. They circled for a few moments. From the corner of his eye, Kurtz saw a slew of pedestrians watching the fight. Two of these were snapping pictures. At least three others were talking into their phones, hopefully calling the cops.

  Kurtz stepped in, feinted left and threw a punch with his right hand. The guy moved his head to the side, slipping the punch, then he turned and ran, waving the bat at the crowd. The crowd parted and then closed in behind him.

  Kurtz slumped down, breathing deeply.

  “You alright, buddy?” somebody asked.

  “Sure,” Kurtz said. “Never better.”

  “The ski mask is certainly suspicious,” Barent said.

  “No shit,” Kurtz said.

  Barent’s mouth twitched upward. “Unfortunately, none of the pictures are going to do us much good. He was white. We can see that much from his hands. Burly, about six-one, maybe two-twenty. He seems to know how to handle himself in a fight. You were lucky.”

  Kurtz wasn’t feeling lucky. He was feeling pissed off. “Think he’ll try again?”

  Barent shrugged. He scratched his head. “Since we don’t know why he tried in the first place, there is no good way to answer that question.” He hesitated. “You were carrying, right?”

  “Yes,” Kurtz said.

  “Why didn’t you shoot him?”

  “Too many people around. Bullets keep going until they hit something. It wasn’t safe.”

  Barent nodded. “Good. That’s the right answer.”

  “So, now what?”

  Barent hesitated. “All I can do is give you the usual advice: stick to crowded areas. Don’t go out alone.”

  “Carry a gun?”

  “Yeah. That, too. Don’t use it unless you have to.”

  Arnie Figueroa never had liked doctors’ offices. Even as a kid (especially as a kid), waiting for the shot that always seemed to be coming despite everybody’s denials, there was something about the cold, white efficiency that just creeped him out. No help for it, though. If he wanted to get back to work, this was what he was required to do.

  Even the waiting room gave him the shivers. The rows of cheap seats, the TV set in the corner near the ceiling, the scattered piles of old magazines. He could feel his skin crawl. He tried not to stare at the other patients, all of them cops, none of them looking happy. One had a cast on his leg. One had her arm in a sling. One had bruises on his face. Three others had no discernible injuries but all of them seemed glum.

  One in particular caught his attention. Medium height, medium build, short brown hair, hazel eyes, white. There was just something about the guy. So far as he could tell, Arnie Figueroa had never seen him before but he seemed familiar, somehow. Maybe it was the glower. The guy didn’t just look unhappy, he looked mad. Also, he had glanced over at Arnie more than once, apparently sizing him up.

  “Officer Figueroa?”

  He looked up. A pretty, middle-aged nurse clutched a chart and smiled down at him. “The doctor will see you, now.”

  Arnie Figueroa seemed a bit depressed, Kurtz thought, which was not a surprise, considering everything he had been through. The euphoria of finding himself alive was past. The simple satisfaction of being out of the hospital and home had receded. He had been home for long enough to get bored. Kurtz had seen it many times before.

  The exam had gone well. Arnie had made progress, frankly, more progress than Kurtz had ever expected. Too soon to say if and when he might get back to work, but it was looking more likely by the day.

  “What’s bothering you, Arnie?”

  Arnie sighed. “Hard to say, actually. Maybe I’m imagining things.”

  “Oh?” This too, was not surprising. People who suffered traumatic brain injury often did imagine things: people who were never there, events that had never happened…dreams that seemed real. The opposite happened too, of course. Chunks of memory that vanished into bloody mist as a portion of their brain turned into sludge.

  Arnie shrugged. He looked at Kurtz. “So, when can I get back to work?”

  Kurtz pondered his patient’s eager, beseeching face. “I can’t tell you that,” he said, “but you’re making progress.”

  Arnie sighed.

  “Cheer up,” Kurtz said. “You’re getting better. The odds are good. Frankly, I didn’t think I’d be able to say that.”

&nb
sp; “Right,” Arnie said. He sighed again.

  Kurtz grinned. “I’ll see you in two weeks.”

  “Sure.”

  Chapter 21

  “Why are we going to this, again?”

  Lenore smiled. “Because Donna is an old friend and we were invited.”

  Kurtz sighed. He had been trying without success to forget about Russian mobsters and Donna Ryan’s Russian family; and yet here they were, on their way to dinner at Donna Ryan’s, where they would be mingling with Donna Ryan’s family, none of whom he knew except for Arkady and Vasily Lukin…who he didn’t like.

  Kurtz frowned. Lenore, as she usually did, looked serene.

  “I know we were invited, but why did we accept?”

  “It seemed the considerate thing to do.”

  “Oh,” Kurtz said. “Yeah.”

  “Why is this bothering you?” Lenore asked.

  Truthfully, Kurtz was not entirely sure. The sky was gray. A thin mist drizzled off the windshield as he drove. The weather, he morosely reflected, reflected his mood. “I don’t understand what’s going on,” Kurtz finally said. “It worries me.”

  Lenore’s family was Jewish. Her mother came from Germany and had lived through the Holocaust. Esther Brinkman’s family history was immediate and real to her, less so to Lenore.

  Lenore’s grandfather on her father’s side, also Jewish, had emigrated to America in the late 1800’s, from Latvia. Supposedly, according to family legend, the Latvian Jews had originally emigrated to Latvia from the Caucasus, in Russia, but that was long ago and the story may not have been true. With each generation, the history of that side of Lenore’s family receded further into time.

  They were Americans. They were from Brooklyn and Manhattan and New York. None of them knew about or cared one iota for whatever country their distant ancestors might have come from.

  Donna Ryan’s family was different. The generation that had escaped the Soviet Union was still alive, the events that had propelled them from the old country still clear in their memories, their psychic wounds still bleeding. Most of them lived in neighborhoods filled with recent immigrants, just like themselves. They spoke Russian at home and read newspapers that were printed in Brooklyn but written in Cyrillic.