Detective Fiction

by William Wells

  I turned to see Stefan, Vasily’s chauffeur, standing in the doorway. He was wearing only a very large handgun that was pointed at my chest. It was a Desert Eagle Mark XIX, available in .357 Magnum, .44 Magnum or .50 Action Express.

  That revolver is a big mother, appropriate for hunting elephants or tanks. In the semidarkness, I couldn’t tell the caliber of that particular model, but at a range of ten feet it hardly mattered. The .357 and .44 would throw my body against the wall; the .50-caliber would blast me into tiny pieces. Either way, you’re dead meat, Pete.

  It amused me to wonder where Stefan concealed the Desert Eagle when he walked around, buck-naked like that. I’d carry something in a smaller caliber. I noticed that Lena the receptionist was standing behind him, also naked. If you are about to die, you might as well be looking at something pleasant like the lovely Lena, so I focused upon her and not the Desert Eagle. I noticed she had a mole on her left breast, which only added to her allure. Small flaws can enhance beauty.

  Come on, Jack. Concentrate on the situation at hand. So I swung my attention back to Stefan, the man with the gun.

  His other weapon was also oversized. Lucky Lena. He had the lean, muscular physique of a fighter, not a talker. There was a small white star-shaped scar on his right chest, a gunshot wound, and a tattoo on his left bicep, hard to tell exactly what it was; the designation of some commando unit was my guess.

  Stefan smiled and said something in Russian, perhaps, “I just got fucked but you are even more fucked, Amerikanski pig.” He glanced down at my right ankle, where I was wearing my S&W .38. He must have seen the bulge under my pant leg. In a contest between the two firearms, always bet on the Desert Eagle. So I left the .38 where it was, nodded at Lena, winked, and said to Stefan, “I won’t tell if you won’t.” Worth a try.

  Stefan stepped inside the office, and Lena followed him. If I were naked, too, they would have known how happy I was to see Lena like that.

  Stefan took my flashlight from where I’d left it on Vasily’s desk, turned it on, and gestured with it for me to walk out into the hallway as he and Lena followed. He pushed me into one of the other offices, where I saw a tan leather sofa, and two piles of clothes on the floor.

  Lena dressed and then held the gun on me as Stefan did the same. He gestured for me to turn around, with my back to him. I did, and that’s when Stefan, not the Naples city engineer, turned off my lights.

  WHEN I regained consciousness, I was lying on my back on the couch with my hands tied behind my back and my ankles bound together with the kind of plastic restraints police use. I guessed that guys like Stefan always had a supply of them at hand, even if Jack Stoney didn’t.

  I had the mother of all headaches. Obviously Stefan had used the butt of the Eagle on the back of my head and the Eagle won.

  The lights were on. A clock on the wall said five a.m. By then, I’d planned to be at Ash’s house, asleep. As my vision cleared, I saw that Vasily was sitting behind a desk, sipping a drink. Lena was gone.

  Vasily said something in Russian to Stefan, who took out a combat knife from a leather case on his belt. Had he told Stefan to gut me like a sturgeon? Stefan used the knife to cut the plastic ties from my wrists and ankles. I sat up on the sofa. My pistol was not in its holster.

  Vasily looked at me and spread his hands. “We have some important things to discuss,” he said. “First of all, I am not your enemy. The evidence of that is you are alive.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Not here. Not like this. Over dinner tomorrow night is best, if you are still free.”

  Now that Stefan had cut the restraints, I was free as a man can be with a Russian commando packing a Desert Eagle in the room.

  “It’s a date,” I told Vasily.

  26.

  HELLO, JACK. HELLO, BORIS.

  Provence restaurant occupies a one-story, white clapboard building with black shutters and a green awning over the entrance and is located near the city dock on Naples Bay. Flower boxes and vines climbing on trellises add to the look of a country inn transplanted from the south of France to the tropics.

  Advil way beyond the recommended dosage had eased the throbbing pain in my head. On the way home from the Atocha Securities offices, I’d stopped at the Naples Community Hospital’s ER and gotten twelve stitches on the back of my head, the shaved area now covered with a bandage.

  The doc, an earnest young man not old enough to shave, or so he seemed to me, asked how I got the wound. I told him that a naked Russian commando had hit me with his gun after I’d broken into the offices of his boss, a Russian Mafia don. The doc laughed, probably thinking that I was either confused from the blow or too embarrassed to tell him I’d slipped in the shower.

  I gave my Corvette to the valet, wondering if valet parking would boost business at The Drunken Parrot, went inside the restaurant, and told the young woman at the hostess stand that I was joining Mr. Petrovich.

  “Yes, sir, Count Petrovich has already arrived,” she said in a mellifluous French accent. She picked up a menu from the hostess stand and said, “I will show you to his table.”

  I wondered if her accent was real, or if she was from Iowa or Wyoming and had acquired it via a Rosetta Stone language course in order to get the job. She was tall and tanned and young and lovely, like the girl from Ipanema, and had long dark hair. She was wearing a white cotton peasant blouse embroidered with flowers and had a white orchid tucked behind her left ear.

  I seem to focus in on the specifics of firearms and women’s attire. The former is a vocation and the latter an avocation. I had the sexist thought that I’d never seen an ugly restaurant hostess. Young and pretty must be in the job description. I was old enough to remember when the same was true of airline stewardesses, back when it was fun to fly.

  I followed the young lady through the crowded restaurant to a rear courtyard, trying to not trip over the tables as I watched her cute little derriere move beneath her tight black skirt, like a sack full of cats on the way to the river.

  Vasily was seated alone at a table in a corner of the courtyard, under a white wooden pergola and beside a white brick wall covered in climbing trumpet vines with purple flowers. The other tables, candlelit, were full of diners eating and chatting under the starry sky. It was all very pleasant, and reminded me how especially nice it is to be alive on a night like this, or on any night, for that matter.

  As the hostess and I reached his table, Vasily stood and said, smiling, “Hello, Jack.” My real name. I was thrown only momentarily as the hostess held out my chair, handed me the menu, and departed. I sat, and then responded, “Hello, Boris.”

  So the cards were on the table before the breadbasket.

  Boris smiled. “So, Jack, we have both done our homework.”

  The waiter appeared; he was an older man with a bald head and bushy white mustache, wearing a white shirt and dark pants with a starched white apron folded and tied around his waist. Another staffer right out of Central Casting.

  “What may I get you and your guest to drink, Count Petrovich?” the waiter asked. His accent was Eastern European. Maybe by way of Gary, Indiana. Was anyone who they seemed in this town?

  Obviously the waiter had not done his homework about Boris’s true identity. Or maybe he had, but believed that a count would be a better tipper than a mobster from Brighton Beach.

  “I believe I still have some pinot noir in my private stock, Henri,” Boris said.

  “I checked when I learned you were dining with us tonight,” he answered. “You only have four bottles of the Louis Jadot Gevery-Chambertin, so I ordered three more cases.” Sam Longtree does the same for me with my root beer supply.

  Henri looked at me with raised eyebrows. “And for you, sir?”

  There were many wise guy remarks I could have made, such as inquiring about my private stock of root beer, but this was not the time for it, so I asked for a Virgin Mary, extra hot.

  When Henri departed, Boris gave me a serious look and s
aid, “I’m glad you came, given our recent encounter. How is your head?”

  “It always feels better when someone doesn’t hit it with a gun.”

  “That was most unfortunate,” he said with a shrug. “If Stefan had called me first—”

  Henri arrived with our drinks and left. Boris sipped his wine and said, “I invited you to dinner because I want to ask your help with an important matter.”

  “You want me to commit suicide to save you the trouble of making another run at me?”

  I said that a bit too loudly, and a young woman at the next table gave me a quick glance. She was with an older couple, probably her mom and dad. Maybe she was hoping for some excitement, right then and there, to relieve the boredom of dining with her parents.

  “Another run at you?” Vasily asked. “What do you mean?”

  “Someone broke into Ash’s house and took a shot at me.”

  “Believe me, I know nothing about that.”

  “Why should I believe you, Boris?”

  “Because the men I would have sent would not have missed.”

  Serge and Stefan. He had a point. “Who, then?”

  “Over the last six months, there have been a number of burglaries in town by people from Miami, I suspect, where there are gangs that prey upon wealthy communities. They take only jewelry and cash. Maybe you surprised such a burglar.”

  “Why haven’t I heard anything about that?”

  “Because this is Naples. Chief Hansen has persuaded the homeowners to deal only with the police and their insurance companies, but not make it public. Property values, you understand.”

  “And how do you know about that?”

  He smiled and said nothing, which I took to mean that he knows things about the city others don’t.

  “What do you know about me?” I asked him.

  He smiled again, like the Cheshire Cat. “I know that you are a retired homicide detective from Chicago. I assume that you have been hired by Mayor Beaumont and Chief Hansen to investigate some suspicious deaths. Deaths that they, and I, believe to be murders.”

  “Bingo,” I said. “You’ve qualified for the bonus round.”

  He continued: “I also assume that I am the primary suspect, given that you know my true identity, and that the victims were all my clients.”

  “Also correct. You win the Sub-Zero refrigerator,” I said, imitating Alex Trebek, host of the TV game show Jeopardy!

  “In your place, I’d think the same thing. But I assure you I am not the killer. I propose that we join forces to find out who is murdering my clients.”

  “Continue.”

  “To state the obvious, as I told you, if it was me, you would be swimming with the fishes rather than dining on them tonight. The fish is very good here, by the way. Further, I assume that because you have been focusing your investigation on me, you have no other suspects.”

  “That is also correct,” I admitted. “I’m curious about something. What blew my cover? Was it my table manners at the dinner at Ash’s house?”

  “Not at all. Although I did notice that you used the same fork and spoon all evening. I do a background check on all of my prospective clients. You know my family connections. We have considerable resources. Your false identity was not difficult to penetrate. And I am not surprised that you did a background check on me as soon as you made me a suspect.”

  He took a sip of wine and added, “By the way, I really did invite you to invest in my fund because I am seeking some younger clients.”

  I considered that information to be in the good news-bad news category. My table manners had mostly passed muster. But the Russian Mafia knew who I was and where I lived.

  Henri arrived and told us that the specials that night included vichyssoise, a warm goat cheese and fig salad, beef bourguignon, and branzino, which, he explained to me, and not to Vasily, was a Mediterranean sea bass.

  I’ll admit that I don’t know a branzino from a doorknob. My favorite fish is the fried perch you can get at the Baby Doll during the annual spring perch run in Lake Michigan.

  “I think the vichy, a Caesar salad with anchovies, the duck a l’orange, and I’ll preorder a Grand Marnier soufflé,” Vasily told Henri.

  Here was another opportunity to reveal the real me by asking for a double bacon cheeseburger with fries but that wasn’t on the menu. I ordered the french onion soup, goat cheese salad, and the branzino, just to show Henri that I, Frank Chance, was a player in the world of haute cuisine. I added a preorder of a chocolate soufflé, to seal the deal.

  That business finished, Boris said, “I ask that you relay my offer of assistance in the investigation to Mayor Beaumont and Chief Hansen. Tell them that we share a common interest. We all have a stake in finding the real murderer and in keeping the whole affair confidential.”

  At that point, I was beginning to believe him. I was, after all, alive. “And that common interest is?” I asked him.

  “The City of Naples needs to protect its image. I wish to do the same for my business. If it became public knowledge that investing with me could be fatal—” He shrugged. “You see what I mean.”

  “So that your fraud can continue? That’s not likely, now that we know who you are and that you’re running a Ponzi scheme.”

  “The Atocha Fund is not a Ponzi scheme,” Vasily asserted, sounding sincere. “True, that was the original idea. But I found out that I was, in fact, highly skilled at the hedge fund business. I was making such good returns that I did not need to defraud my investors. As you know, a Ponzi scheme eventually collapses upon itself. But a hedge fund, if successful, can go on for a very long time. My family was very enthusiastic about being involved in a legitimate business that is making money.”

  “Your family being the Russian Mafia out of Brighton Beach.”

  “Russkaya Mafiya has become an outdated term,” Boris said as our soup arrived. The bowls came with big spoons, so no problem there. “True, there still are various organizations which can be said to come under that umbrella. But they are far outclassed by the oligarchs who hold most of the wealth and power in Russia today. For those in organized crime, such as my family, there has been a great incentive to convert from crime to capitalism, where the risk is less and the returns can, if successful, be far superior. Given that we can’t own a piece of Russia, we want to own a piece of America.”

  I’d expected a confrontation with an assassin, and instead I was getting a lesson in the politics and economy of modern Russia. All of this was getting curiouser and curiouser, as Alice said in Wonderland. Naples certainly is its own Wonderland to me.

  “So how can you help me with the investigation?” I asked as the salads arrived.

  “I have a theory about what is going on,” Vasily said. “But I will need assurances that, if we are successful in finding the real killer, I, in return, will be left alone to run my legitimate business.”

  During my law enforcement career, I’d been part of joint task forces with the FBI, the Illinois State Police, and the Cook County Sheriff’s Office. Here was the chance to add the Russkaya Mafiya to that list. I wondered if I could request that Lena or Elena be my liaison.

  “I’ll pass on your offer to my employers,” I told him.

  “That’s all I ask, Detective Starkey,” Boris said.

  He gave me an impish grin. “By the way, I’m a fan of the novels. I hope you don’t mind me saying that, if Detective Jack Stoney was on the case, he’d have solved it by now.”

  Ouch.

  We enjoyed the rest of our dinners, with me randomly switching forks and spoons, while discussing such topics as the problem of inflation in the Chinese economy, which he knew all about, and the National League Central Division pennant race, about which I possessed the expertise. Just two worldly gentlemen, breaking bread at the best French restaurant in Naples, Florida, a town that was the playground of the American Oligarchy.

  When we were finished, Boris said, “One more thing. Because we are both undercover,
I suggest you continue to call me Vasily Petrovich and I will call you Frank Chance. After all, there is a murderer out there who may be watching us.”

  “Right,” I agreed. If Boris/Vasily wasn’t the doer, we’d need to keep our heads down.

  He insisted on paying the check. As we were about to leave, he said, “Of course, I will return your $10 million investment to whoever owns it. But I can provide audited reports showing that my fund is beating the market averages by a considerable margin, and that it ranks near the top of all hedge funds in America. Perhaps the person will wish to leave the funds with me.”

  In summary: A fake count who is the scion of a Russian Mafia family in Brighton Beach is alleging that he is an investment genius and legitimate businessman who can help me catch a serial killer.

  I felt that I had now joined Alice, all the way down the rabbit hole.

  27.

  QUID PRO QUO

  The next morning, I went to Naples city hall to present Vasily’s unusual and perhaps off-the-wall offer to Mayor Beaumont and Chief Hansen.

  Kathi smiled pleasantly when I walked in. Manning the reception desk back at my old Chicago PD station house on South Wentworth Avenue was a sergeant named Jablonsky, who everyone called Tiny because, in a culture where irony was highly valued, he was anything but. Kathi is a definite upgrade, as receptionists go.

  Beaumont was seated behind his desk. Hansen was in one of the club chairs beside the couch. I sat in the other chair. Without preamble, Hansen began: “Bishop, that’s the crime scene tech, dug the bullet intended for you out of the wall at Ashley Howe’s house. It’s a nine-millimeter. Because none of our vics were shot, that tells us zip. Tell me you’ve got something.”

  “I might,” I said, and gave them a report on my early morning visit to the Atocha Securities offices, and my dinner with Boris, aka Vasily, at Provence restaurant.