If Mishkin noticed me, he didn’t show it, but it would have been hard for him to let his attention drift from his companion, who had her hand on his knee and was leaning in to either make a point or show him her cleavage. A widower for just a few months, Mishkin looked like he’d already found a replacement for his beloved Fran. Something told me she wasn’t the marketing genius that Fran had been, but I had a feeling she was pretty good at something else. The woman flicked a key ring with a blue rubber pompom on it, and periodically pointed with it for effect.
There was one waitress on the floor and a plump brunette with thick, shiny hair and Buddy Holly glasses was manning the bar; I didn’t see Oksana. Since bartenders generally knew the locals, and two brothers might have stuck in someone’s memory, I decided to summon up enough energy to ask the bartender a few questions before crashing in my room.
I took the long way to the lounge, avoiding Mishkin and circling the corpse flower, which hadn’t changed much since my last visit. From the corner of my eye I saw Mishkin’s female companion storm out of the lounge area, nearly knocking over three frat boys who’d just come in. Mishkin mopped his brow and straightened his tie, emitting a fake laugh to suggest that nothing major had happened, but the look on his face said otherwise. Mishkin scoped out the room for witnesses to the embarrassing scene, but the few people who’d seen anything were involved in their own dramas and it barely registered. I hid behind the corpse flower, thinking, Ain’t love grand?
After he left, I settled in at the bar, ordering a drink and a bowl of Goldfish and engaging the bartender in a round of girl talk. Despite what Detective Stacy Winters thought, I hadn’t interviewed anyone in a long time. What I remembered about it was that a successful interviewer made the subject feel comfortable, as if you were having a conversation, not grilling him or her under a spotlight. So that’s what I did. I nursed a white ginger cosmo and gently complained about my (nonexistent) boss, my (nonexistent) boyfriend, and the paucity of good-looking men at the bar at Titans. By the time she’d topped off her last few customers, it was as if she and I were old friends.
She told me it was Oksana’s night off, and Hector Ruiz, the only other person I knew to ask about, had left about an hour earlier.
“Hector and his wife and baby girl live in a mobile park,” she volunteered without much prodding. “Near the reservation. A lot of Titans workers do. There’s not much affordable housing around here since the casino went up.”
“Is that where you live?” I asked, trying to read her name through her long hair. She brushed it back over one shoulder. “Helayne?”
She shook her head, and the hair fell back against her round face. “I moved back in with my family, but I’m going for my aesthetician’s license, so I may be out again soon.” She made it sound like she’d be crashing out of prison.
“What about Oksana?” I asked.
“She shares with a girl named Nadia. In the same park as Hector. Nadia has a double-wide.” Helayne was impressed.
Nadia worked at the big casino. She’d kicked her boyfriend out of their trailer a few months ago and Oksana had moved in to help out with the monthly payments. It was supposed to be temporary.
“O. thought she’d move in with Nick, but he was a big talker. A terrible flirt. He came on to me once, but I told him I was engaged. ‘You see that ring?’ I said. ‘That means something.’ You heard what happened to him, right?” she said, under her breath.
I nodded, and spared a moment for the late Nick Vigoriti, who might have been a little less successful with the ladies than I’d originally thought. This was mildly interesting but it wasn’t getting me any closer to the two brothers.
“A friend of mine was here last weekend. She said she met some really cute guys. They’re a little young for me,” I said, tilting my head toward the table of college kids who got rowdier with each round of Guinness and were taking turns trying to get the widget out of the can. “A couple of brothers, I think she said.”
Helayne gave it some thought. I couldn’t see her in a ménage, but you never knew about people. For all I knew, there was a trapeze over her bed.
“Some brothers, but not single. And no one I’d call cute.” She made eye contact with the security guard and motioned toward the kids so that he would keep an eye on them.
“Well, my friend has eclectic taste. You or I might not think they were good-looking.” That’s right, we’re women of the world.
“The Laheys are cute, but I think the younger one is gay.”
“I don’t think that’s her thing.” I played with the dregs of my drink as long as I could before she brought me a second, stronger than the first.
“The Crawfords are good-looking,” she said, setting the drink down. “Billy and Claude. There was a third one but he died. But they’re not allowed in here anymore. Something happened, before I was hired. Oksana told me about it. Security has instructions to keep them out. Maybe they drank too much. You should ask her. Oksana knows more male customers than I do.”
I bet she did. Oksana’s vulnerability and pouty good looks probably got her as much attention as she wanted. Maybe more.
Two Asian guys entered the lounge, ignoring the No Smoking sign and feigning ignorance when the security guard told them to put the cigarettes out. The waitress came back with their orders and Helayne got busy mixing their drinks. “They stare as if they’ve never seen boobs before, but they’re good tippers,” the waitress said.
I toyed with the idea of waiting for Helayne to finish, but the drinks and the hour were conspiring to get me in the sack. Tomorrow I’d face Oksana and ask her about the Crawford brothers.
The phone rang at around 3:30 A.M. I must have just fallen asleep because I woke up with a start, the way you do when you’re afraid you’ve nodded off in an inappropriate place like the theater or a meeting. I looked around trying to remember where I was and where the hell that obnoxious noise was coming from. I knocked over the lamp and a water bottle reaching for the phone and caught it on its sixth ring.
“Hello,” I mumbled into the dead air. “Lucy, is that you?” I turned on the light and saw the last drops of a two-liter bottle of water trickling into my Nikes.
“Do you know a woman named Lucy?” someone asked, surprised.
“Who is this?” I raised myself up on my elbows, waiting for an answer.
“It’s me. Oksana. The bartender?”
“Oksana, it’s . . .” The numbers on the digital clock were magnified and distorted by the overturned bottle; I shoved it aside. “It’s three-thirty. What is it?”
“I need you to help me find out what happened to Nick,” she said.
“I have no idea what happened to Nick.” I sat on the edge of the bed and shook the water out of my shoes. “Do you know a woman named Lucy?” I asked.
She paused, as if she was deciding how much to tell me. “We can’t talk on the hotel phone. Will you meet me at the casino?”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“The night Nick was killed, he left the bar to meet a woman named Lucy.”
Seventeen
My sneakers were soaked, so I slipped into the only other shoes I’d packed—the heels I brought to wear with my leather pants. As I dressed, I started to feel like a hooker making a house call, but it was either my nice outfit or cargo pants with heels and that would have been too weird, even for me.
Unlike his counterpart at Titans, the parking attendant at the casino was cheerful and energetic; at that hour of the morning it was downright creepy to be so perky.
“Welcome to happy Hunting Ridge, ma’am.” He said it as if “happy” was part of the casino’s full name. “Have you been with us before?”
I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t with Hunting Ridge and would probably never be and that the last time I was out at 4 A.M. it was with a flashlight and I was looking for slugs, but this time I was meeting a probably delusional woman who thought she knew something about a
murder and a kidnapping. But I decided to spare both of us. I forced a toothless smile and fished out a five, hoping for a better reaction than I’d gotten from the attendant at Titans.
“Don’t bury it. I won’t be long,” I said, handing him the folded bill. “Know where the Coyote Café is?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He beamed, eager to be of service. I couldn’t remember the last time five dollars had provoked such a rapturous response. “Straight in, past the Chilulhy sculpture, then make a left. Have a lucky stay!”
Jeez, what did they put in the water here?
If I was expecting to see glamorous model types and men in tuxedos playing baccarat and passing the shoe, I would have been sorely disappointed. I’d been to Vegas plenty of times when I was in the television business, and although it had changed dramatically in the years since, there was still a frisson of rat-pack glamour if you looked hard enough for it.
Not at Hunting Ridge. The exuberant use of wood, slate, and river stones gave the place the look of an upscale lodge with incongruously placed slot machines and designer boutiques—Chanel and Cavalli sharing space with Squanto and Sacajawea. There were any number of ways to leave your money there.
The Coyote Café’s sandwich-board menu was bordered with a blanket pattern and offered, among other things, Chippewa chips and Navajo pancakes. I didn’t know where the Chippewas came from, but we were a good two thousand miles from any Navajos. Oksana was behind the sign, pacing and chewing her nails. Then she spotted me.
“It’s too crowded in there,” she said, walking over to me. “Come this way.”
“Oksana. I’m running on fumes. What’s all this about? What do you know about my friend Lucy?”
She pulled me over to a bench near a diorama of a Native American village. Every few minutes one of the resin natives offered resin corn to a resin settler who looked suspiciously like Brad Pitt.
“Was she your friend?”
A chill crept through me. “What do you mean, was she?”
Eighteen
Oksana played with a pack of cigarettes but didn’t open it. She fiddled with her flat, dirty blond hair, the scarf that was wrapped around her neck three or four times, and the hem of her skirt.
“Hector told me your name and I Googled you. The newspaper article said you helped solve a crime once. Is that why you’re here?”
“The police solve crimes. I’m a gardener. I have to be honest with you. I’m not here because of Nick, I’m only here because you mentioned someone named Lucy. She’s the person I was waiting for the night I met Nick in the bar.”
Oksana shook her head back and forth like a petulant child.
“What do you mean, no? I know what I was doing there.”
“The other woman met Nick . . . and now he’s dead.”
Nick had gotten two phone calls after I left and Oksana had heard him speak to someone he called Lucy. He said he’d meet her.
“He made a joke about older women and then he left. That was the last time I ever saw him.” Older women? Lucy was thirty-five. I guess if you were Oksana’s age, that was old.
She looked around again, as if she expected someone to be listening over her shoulder. I dropped my voice just in case.
“Why are you doing that? Who else would care what we’re talking about?”
“There are people.”
Now she was weirding me out. “Do you by any chance know a couple of guys, the Crawford brothers?” I asked.
Oksana nodded. “They’re natives. They were friends with Nick.”
Maybe Lucy met all three of them. But why wouldn’t she have text messaged that, instead of . . . two brothers?
“Did you see them last night at the hotel?” I asked.
“No, they can’t come in. They picketed some cheesy Indian display the Mishkins put up outside the hotel. Worse than this one,” she said, pointing to the marginally distasteful one right near us. “Rachel got the cops to kick them out and a judge to say that they couldn’t come back. I don’t think Nick liked it either. He told me that’s what he and the Mishkins argued about.”
“Are you sure?”
“Nick said they were greedy.”
“Do you know what he meant?”
She shook her head and looked around again.
“Who are you expecting to see?” I asked, exasperated.
Wide-eyed, she leaned in and whispered the name.
“Sergei.”
Nineteen
Sergei Russianoff was an entrepreneurial Ukrainian who had helped Oksana out of the orphanage in Kiev, where she grew up. After she watched her stepfather and mother drink themselves to death, Oksana and her younger brother went to live with their grandmother, but the old woman could only afford to look after one child and for practical reasons she chose the little boy. That sent Oksana to the orphanage until she reached the age of seventeen, when all residents were booted out, sometimes into the arms of mobsters or predators.
Russianoff was neither. He recruited girls in Kiev to come to the U.S. to work in his various small businesses in Connecticut.
“I’d visited with a host family in Connecticut when I lived in the orphanage. American families would take us for three weeks. We would get off the plane with a plastic bag that held one change of underwear. For those three weeks we had everything . . . as much food as we wanted, television, toys. Some people bought us clothes or books. One time I stayed with a couple that had a dog. It was like a dream. Then we got shipped home and we woke up. Most of the time any gifts we were allowed to take home were stollen by the older kids. When Sergei said I could live in Connecticut, it was as if he told me I was going to Hollywood to be a movie star.”
She didn’t become a movie star. Sergei trained her to be a dog groomer. For the first time since I’d met her, she smiled, and it made her look like the young girl she still was.
Russianoff had a house in Bridgeport where they’d all lived. At times there were as many as twelve of them. Oksana said it was like the orphanage only they had better clothing and didn’t have to go outside to smoke.
“Another older girl, Sveta, and I would drive around and give dog baths in the back of a van.” Now I knew where Sveta had gotten her training. I must have felt like a big old Great Dane to her.
I’d seen other dog-grooming vehicles tooling around Springfield and thought the idea was ingenious. But Sergei’s company had had a few mishaps. The owner of a golden retriever that had gotten a particularly bad haircut sued. She didn’t win, but things went south after that.
“The dog’s coat grew back, she didn’t have to ruin him,” Oksana said.
We walked through the casino’s arcade, absentmindedly looking into shop windows, although most of the shops were closed.
“Did you get paid?” I asked.
“We got an allowance.”
What a guy. In addition to the mobile dog-grooming company, Sergei had a small bar, a housecleaning service, and an employment agency. But apparently his big dream was to open a skating rink. Not just a place where suburban kids would go to flirt and drink hot chocolate on a Friday night, but a full-scale facility where coaches and former champions would go to train.
Oksana lowered her voice. “He borrowed a lot of money. He thought he could get a famous skater like Viktor Petrenko to endorse it, but it didn’t work out. I think Petrenko opened his own place.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
“Now he has to pay the mortgage on a big empty building that he can’t sell, with a secondhand Zamboni that doesn’t work.”
That could be a problem—not much call for Zambonis on eBay. So Sergei got into other businesses. Oksana didn’t elaborate, but the other businesses sounded suspiciously like an escort service and small-scale loan-sharking. She said she didn’t want to work for him anymore and I wasn’t surprised. When some housecleaning clients started to miss items from their homes Sergei caught the attention of the local authorities. Nothing was ever proven, but now he was on their radar.
She wrestled with how much more to tell me. Her tiny face screwed up until she looked like a toddler about to break into a tantrum, but she held back.
The roommate had dropped her off at the casino and had just started her shift, so Oksana asked for a lift home. It was nearing five and I had passed the point of being up late and was now up early, so I said sure. I was disappointed Oksana hadn’t seen Lucy at the hotel, but at least I could follow up on the Crawford brothers.
Surprisingly, there was still a decent-size crowd at the casino—stragglers, Ambien zombies, groups of guys that might have been bachelor parties, sleep-deprived vacationers, and more than a few manic souls still looking for that lucky slot machine with their name on it—more people than Titans probably had on a holiday weekend in the summer.
We made our way back to the lobby. Then Oksana spotted two men at the end of the long hallway and visibly stiffened. She pulled me into one of the Native American boutiques in the casino that was still open—turquoise jewelry 24/7.
One of the guys was skinny with long, greasy blond hair. I couldn’t see the other one that well because the resin Native Americans had gone into their timed routine again, handing out fake corn and receiving fake trinkets from the fake settlers. All I could make out was that he was a large man wearing a leather jacket.
Oksana was slim enough to hide behind a rack of oversize fringed bags while I pretended to be shopping for silver cuffs. She stood stock-still until the men passed.
The Big Dirt Nap Page 10