“I been eating a lot of Indian,” Scott DeHaven continued. “There’s this great cheap place on Church Street where all the cabbies go.” He explained to his colleagues: “I was on assignment near Ground Zero for a couple of weeks.”
So much for banal conversation. For the next few minutes everybody started trading 9/11 where-were-you-when-you-first-heard-about-the-attack? Stories. Even two years later, New Yorkers still felt a compulsion to position themselves in exact relation to the event. Jack didn’t join in; on 9/11 he had been lying in a hospital bed next to a living, breathing Daniel Lelo.
Lieutenant Cardulli glanced at his watch. “We’ve given this creep enough time to consider his sins. Linda, you wanna talk to him again? Let’s see what happens if you offer him the Out.”
The Out was an opportunity to confess while claiming some sort of special justification for the crime. It was self-defense. I was just obeying orders. It wasn’t my idea. … Many perps welcomed it.
Vargas went back into the interview room. “All right, Alec. Let’s talk about that night over on Neptune Avenue. You know, when Daniel Lelo got shot.”
Shvidkoy listened wide-eyed to the translation.
“So tell me,” Vargas continued, “was Eugenia Lelo there? Did she tell you what to do?”
Their suspect shrank down into his chair.
“If this was her idea,” Vargas continued, “there’s no reason why you should have to take the blame. If you were just doing what she told you …”
Shvidkoy’s gaze darted to the interpreter, to the door, down at the floor. Anywhere but Vargas.
“Come on, Alec. You can spare yourself a lot of trouble here.”
Shvidkoy muttered something, but the interpreter looked reluctant to pass it on.
“What’d he say?” Vargas asked.
The interpreter shrugged. “Something not very nice about your mother.”
Vargas leaned in. “We want to help you, Alec. If you lie, you’ll end up in prison. And you know what? You might have heard that American prisons are soft, but it’s not true. There are a lot of really bad people in there. And they don’t like foreigners.”
Watching from the other side of the mirror, Jack frowned: his colleague might be pressing too hard.
Sure enough, Shvidkoy’s next words were “I want a lawyer.”
And that was it.
“Well, gang,” Cardulli said when they all got together next door, “that was a good effort, but it looks like we’re gonna have to take our chances with some lineups.”
“Don’t worry,” Scott DeHaven said to Linda Vargas. “We’re gonna nail this bastard. By the time he gets out of prison, techno’s gonna sound as old as doo-wop.”
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, Alec Shvidkoy had his lawyer. He had also been charged with attempted homicide. Now he stood in front of some very bright lights along with four other young men.
Behind another two-way mirror, Jack and his colleagues stood in the dark with Shawnique Emory, a young McDonald’s employee who had been busing tables outside on the afternoon of the shooting. She was a thin girl with lustrous ebony skin, a solemn face, and—luckily—perfect vision.
“I want you to take your time,” said the A.D.A. who’d been called in to run the lineup. “Don’t point to anyone unless you’re absolutely sure.”
Shawnique nodded gravely, the light from the window glinting on her gold hoop earrings.
Jack stood in the corner, chewing his lip. The criminal justice system often came down to this: the quite fallible perception of one inexpert human being.
The girl clutched her purse to her chest. “Can I see them step forward again?”
“Sure,” the A.D.A. said. He got on the intercom.
Jack frowned as each young white male in the lineup stepped toward the mirror.
“That’s him,” the girl said. She pointed a finger in the dim light. “Number three. The one with the red and black shirt.”
Jack exhaled.
Ten minutes later, Tyrese Vincent had his turn.
With equal certainty, he picked the same man.
AFTER CONSULTATION WITH THE D.A.’s office, they offered Shvidkoy special consideration if he would give up the details.
And Shvidkoy began to talk. He explained how the shooting at the McDonald’s had gone wrong. He had tailed Daniel for hours and finally seen him sitting still, out in the open. But how could he have predicted that, just as he was about to make the hit, this black guy three tables over—a total stranger—would rise up with a pistol of his own? This was a crazy country, full of guns.
Vargas tried another switchup, asking about Andrei Goguniv again, but Shvidkoy just looked blank.
“That’s okay,” Vargas said. “You’re doing great. Now tell me: did Eugenia ask you to shoot Lelo?”
A pained expression flickered across Shvidkoy’s face. “I don’t know this person.”
Vargas frowned. “Come on, Alec—we have two eyewitnesses who saw you with her at the hotel in Manhattan.” She leaned forward and stared directly into his eyes. “How about the second shooting, on Neptune Avenue? When Lelo got killed. Did you pull the trigger, or did Eugenia?”
His lawyer started to interject—his client had only been identified in the first shooting—but Alec looked up, the fluorescent lights reflecting in his anguished eyes, “I killed him,” he said. “Only me.”
In the next room, in the dark, Tanney and Cardulli and Scott DeHaven started congratulating each other. The charge had just gone from attempted homicide to murder.
Jack stared at the two-way mirror. The guy was lying to protect his lover. You had to give him some little credit for that.
He sighed. Maybe Zhenya had not actually pulled the trigger, but she was romantically involved with this perp. And that relationship gave her a clear motive for wanting her husband out of the way.
There were no two ways about it: it was time to bring her in.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
HE HUNG BACK IN the minty-green hallway and let Linda Vargas ring the doorbell. The last thing he needed was to have Zhenya pull him into the foyer and give him a great big (fake) kiss, and then have Vargas and the patrol cop behind her witness the whole damned scene.
He patted the pocket of his sports jacket and pulled out a roll of antacids. Chewed three. This was the last place on the planet he wanted to be right now. He supposed he might have taken some satisfaction at seeing Zhenya brought low for her lies, but he didn’t. He just felt awful. He sighed; there was nothing to be done. Nobody had forced to him to have an affair with this woman. It had been his own lousy judgment, and now he was going to have to pay the piper.
The door opened. Over Vargas’s shoulder, he saw Zhenya standing in the foyer. She wore one of her pairs of cute designer jeans and one of her silky blouses, and a sudden look of total comprehension. The jig was up.
“Would you like to come in?” she said. Still working the phrasebook.
Vargas entered, followed by Jack. Their patrol backup, a gangly young cop from the Six-oh house, stood guard out in the hall.
“We’d like you to come down to the precinct for a little talk,” Vargas said. “Do you understand?”
Zhenya nodded solemnly. She avoided Jack’s eyes. She swallowed. “May I ask, what is this about?”
Vargas nodded. She knew that, legally speaking, Zhenya didn’t have to come in unless they were arresting her. And so far they didn’t have any actual evidence to support a charge. So the team had come up with a strategy, and Vargas was about to play it out. “We’ve got your boyfriend,” she said. “It’s all over.”
Zhenya’s eyes widened. “My boyfriend?” For the first time, she looked directly at Jack.
“Let’s not play any games here,” Vargas said firmly. “Alec has already told us all we need to know.”
To the detectives’ surprise, Zhenya sputtered a short, sharp laugh. “Alec? You think he is my boyfriend?”
Jack’s jaw tightened. “I saw you,” he said. “I saw you k
iss him. Outside the hotel, in Manhattan.”
Zhenya stared at him. She blinked, registering his barely suppressed look of hurt and rage.
She sighed and her shoulders slumped. “Oh, Detective,” she said, and he thought he detected pity in her eyes. Pity for him. Why? Zhenya shook her head sadly. “I kiss my brother.”
This time, Jack couldn’t keep his surprise off his face.
Vargas tried to regain control of the situation. “What are you talking about?”
Zhenya sighed. “When I marry Daniel, I am taking his surname. But my—how do you call it?—my maiden name is Shvidkoy.”
Vargas looked at Jack, clearly taken aback by this new development. She squared her shoulders, though, and regained her composure. This didn’t change the game plan. “We talked to Alec,” she said. “He talked to us. And he told us how you killed your husband.” It was a bald lie, but Vargas told it smoothly. If you had two suspects, you played them against each other—it was the oldest trick in the interrogator’s book.
Zhenya pondered this information gravely. To the further surprise of Jack and his colleague, she didn’t argue or clam up or demand a lawyer. She just nodded.
“Yes. Is true. I kill Daniel. My brother is nothing to do with this. I take his motorcycle. I follow my husband to Neptune Avenue. And I shoot.”
Linda Vargas snuck another confused look at Jack. She turned back to Zhenya. “What about Andrei Goguniv?”
Zhenya looked confused. “He is manager of my husband’s company. Very nice man.”
Vargas frowned. Maybe they’d only wrap up one homicide here “Eugenia Lelo,” she said, “you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to have an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
Zhenya nodded.
Vargas shook her head. “Please answer yes or no.” She wasn’t taking any chances—she didn’t want Zhenya’s lawyer arguing later that his client had not understood the English.
“I understand,” Zhenya said.
“We’re placing you under arrest,” Vargas said. “You’re going to need to come with us.”
“Okay,” Zhenya said.
Jack’s heart sank. He had been hoping that she was just covering for her brother, but she seemed oddly resigned. He’d seen this before, any number of times. Sometimes an arrest could come as a big relief to the guilty party—no more dissembling was required, no more waiting, no more worrying. It was over. Zhenya half turned. “May I get my purse?”
“Sure,” Vargas said. As soon as Zhenya began to walk down the hall, the detective nodded toward Jack, and they followed their suspect, not taking any chances. Zhenya noticed but didn’t complain. They marched through the dining room and back to the living room, with its couch where Jack and Zhenya had first made love, its glass door onto the balcony where they had sat and drunk and enjoyed the sunsets over Brighton Beach. Zhenya went over to a desk in the corner and picked up her purse.
Jack swallowed. He turned to his colleague. “Linda, could you, uh, could you give me a moment here?” He lowered his voice. “I think I might be able to get some more information because I knew these people.”
Vargas stared at him. Again, questions tumbled behind her eyes. But she shrugged and left the room.
As soon as they were alone, Zhenya came back toward Jack. She raised her hand and he flinched, expecting a slap. But she just placed it tenderly on his cheek. Her eyes were luminous and large.
“Poor man,” she murmured. “I am so sorry.”
He could barely talk. “I thought … I thought you were seeing him. You know, seeing him.”
Zhenya just shook her head ruefully.
He raised his eyes to her face. “Just tell me one thing: why did you kill Daniel? For money?”
She bristled. “Is this what you think of me? That I will do such a thing for money?”
Jack frowned. “Why, then?”
Zhenya sank down onto the edge of the couch. She looked away for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice was tight and controlled. “Daniel is your friend. You think he is nice man, very—how you say?—friendly. He is this way with other mens. He is this way when he is not drinking. But with the alcohol, he is like Dr. Zhecko.”
Jack squinted. “Who?”
“Dr. Zhecko and Mr. Hyte. You know this book, yes?”
Jack nodded.
Zhenya frowned. “When he is drinking, he shouts. He is hitting me.”
“Why?” Jack asked, then realized that the question was stupid. If the man had hit her, there could be no good reason.
She scoffed. “Why? Because he does not like the dinner. Because he does not like my clothings. Because he is zhealous.” She touched the deep scar on her chin. “This was not bicycle. This was Daniel.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “Sometimes he will not have sex with me. He calls me a whore. Other times, when I will not have sex with him, he rapes me.” She looked up at him, bitterly. “You understand this? He rapes me. You are a man. Perheps you are thinking, a man cannot rape his wife. She is his property, no?”
Jack listened, thunderstruck. He thought of Daniel’s jovial, hearty manner—but also of how closed off and sullen the man had seemed back in the hospital. Evidently, that first impression had been more accurate.
He stared deep into Zhenya’s eyes. He had interviewed hundreds of suspects, and he could believe that the pain on her face was genuine. His heart twisted, but he fought the urge to sympathize. “You didn’t have to kill him. Why didn’t you just leave?”
Her eyes flashed with anger. “He telled me he will call INS. He will say I am marrying him only for citizenship. They will deport me. I am afraid.”
Jack ran a hand over his face. “Jesus.” He swallowed, then asked the question he’d been dreading. “What about me? Were you just using me to get information about the case?”
Zhenya hung her head for a moment. When she spoke, he could barely hear her answer. “At first, I want to know if police will find me. But then … you was kind to me. I hev feelings for you.” She looked up at him, and he was sure he saw some real love in her eyes.
He felt as if he had been punched again. He wanted to take her in his arms, to find someplace where they could go, away from all this mess, but there was nothing he could do other than to argue for lenient treatment of her, considering the domestic abuse.
He exhaled—he still had one more question. “What about this Balakutis crap? You were willing to send an innocent man to prison?”
She shrugged. “I never say he kills Daniel. I say they was in argument.” She grimaced. “Anyhow, I think he is not so ‘innocent.’”
Jack just shook his head, thinking about all the energy he had spent on trying to prove that Balakutis had killed Daniel. But then he thought of Andrei Goguniv’s battered body and of a shopkeeper’s bloody ear. Of strange transactions taking place in a doughnut shop and in a fish market. He would never have known about these things if not for her.
Zhenya stared forlornly at him. “The prisons here—they are bad?”
Jack knew she must be thinking about her childhood visits to her incarcerated father. “This is the United States,” he said. “They’re not so bad.” He did his best not to wince at his own lie: a maximum-security prison was always a nasty place, even if it was a women’s facility.
Zhenya read his face; she trembled.
He wanted to take her in his arms and kiss her one last time, but he was afraid Vargas would walk in. “Listen,” he said. “Do you have a lawyer?”
Zhenya nodded.
“Does he know what he’s doing?”
She nodded again.
“Good,” he said. “Find his number and bring it now.”
His ears perked up: some kind of commotion in the front of the apartment. A woman’s loud voice, speaking in Russian.
“Find that number,” Jack rep
eated. He went out into the hallway to see what was going on.
In the little foyer, arguing with Linda Vargas and the uniform, stood the grave neighbor Jack had seen in the apartment before—the woman who had reminded him of a little bishop. She spoke almost no English, but she seemed concerned about the police presence.
“Take her outside,” Vargas told the patrol cop.
The officer did his best to gently steer the woman back out. “Don’t worry,” he said, as if speaking to a child.
Vargas turned to Jack and lowered her voice. “You wanna tell me what was going on back there?”
Jack frowned. He knew he’d have to open up about his personal relationship. His colleagues would spend lots of time interviewing Zhenya, and the truth was bound to come out.
He sighed. “Can we talk about it as soon as we get her back to the station house?”
Vargas frowned but nodded.
The detectives heard a sound like fingernails scraping on a blackboard, coming from the back of the apartment. They looked at each other, then ran for the living room.
They were too late. Out on the balcony, Zhenya Lelo had pushed the little side table against the railing and used it to step up. Jack and Vargas reached the doorway just in time to see her stand and balance for a precarious second on the rail itself. Her fine blond hair glowed in the morning sun; the sky stretched out before her like an endless open field. She raised her arms and then, without looking back, she launched herself out into the light.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
THREE NIGHTS LATER JACK sat on his couch in the dark, an opened but unsipped beer clutched in his right hand. Outside the windows, below the streetlights, summer trees swelled and bowed in a night breeze, sending shifting shadows across the walls of his front room.
In the past few days, he had been rocked with too many emotions to count: jealousy, surprise, anger, disappointment, surprise, surprise again, and grief. Now he just felt drained, too tired to think of much of anything, though he couldn’t help picturing Zhenya’s sad eyes and wishing he might have done something to help her while her husband was still alive. As he puzzled over how things had played out, though, he couldn’t really see what he might have done differently. He was a good detective, and he had done his job; he couldn’t have let her just walk away from a homicide. He just wished he had never left her alone, that last fateful minute.
Neptune Avenue Page 21