“And the one in the living room?”
“A few months after I started working for Mister Christos he asked me to clean out the fireplace in the living room. I noticed some of the marble tiles had separated from the wall. I touched them, and they swung open like a door. The safe was inside.”
“Did you say anything to him?”
“No, I left the tiles just as I found them. I didn’t want him to know I knew about the second safe.”
“Why?”
“He’d never done anything to suggest he wanted me to know about it. I thought he might be testing me to see if I touched things that I shouldn’t.”
“Did you ever see the marble tiles open again?”
“No.”
Tassos nodded. “Did anyone else know about the safes?”
“I don’t know.”
Tassos looked at his watch. “Keria, you’re running out of time.”
“Many people knew about his safe in the bedroom.”
“What about the one in the living room?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Did his girlfriend know?” Tassos had spent his time on the boat trip over from Syros calling several of Christos’ well-known friends. They’d told him about the girlfriend.
The woman’s face came alive at the question. “She’s a whore.”
The “putana from Ukraine,” was the phrase most often used by Christos’ friends. “Why do you say that?”
“I made the beds.”
Tassos shrugged. “So?”
“I could tell when it wasn’t Mister Christos who’d been with her.” She lowered her eyes. “His hair was silver. Not black or brown or…”
Tassos nodded. “I get it. Do you know the names of any of her visitors?”
“No, I never saw any of them. She’d have them over in a guest room after I left and before Mister Christos came home for his nap in the late afternoon.”
“Did he know about the other men?”
She shrugged. “If he did, he never said anything to her. At least not when I was around.”
“What else can you tell me about her?”
“She had a boyfriend.”
“Who is he?”
“I don’t know, but he’s not from Mykonos.”
“How do you know?”
“From the way she talked to him on the telephone.”
“She talked to her boyfriend in front of you?”
“Once, in Polish.”
“You understand Polish?”
“Enough to know she was talking to a boyfriend.”
“Do you have a name for the boyfriend?”
“Sergey. He’s in Bialystok. She was talking about visiting him.”
“Going to visit him, or having already visited him?”
“Both.”
“When did she visit him?”
“She left the island five or six weeks ago, so it was probably then.”
“Did she travel a lot?”
“Not without Mister Christos. That was the first time I could remember her traveling without him. They argued about him paying for her trip. Mister Christos said he wouldn’t pay for her to go somewhere without him. Even if it was to see her family.”
“Is that where she went?”
She shrugged. “That’s what she said.”
“Any mention of Christos in her conversation with the boyfriend?”
“She said ‘the old man suspects nothing.’ I guess that was about Mister Christos.”
“‘Suspects nothing’ about what?”
“No idea.”
“You never told Christos any of what you’d overheard?”
She looked at Tassos’ eyes. “Do you think Mister Christos didn’t know what she was? If I told him what I’d heard, it would be nothing different from what he’d already imagined and had accepted as the price of being with her. If I told him, he wouldn’t get rid of her, he’d get rid of me, the one who told him what he did not want to hear.”
Tassos smiled. “I see you knew your employer well. Any idea where the girlfriend is now?”
“Mister Christos told me she’d left a week ago Sunday for Poland.” The maid spit at the ground. “On another visit to her family.”
“You think she went to see the boyfriend?”
“That’s what she was talking about on the phone.”
“Did Christos say when she’d be back on Mykonos?”
“This weekend.”
“Any idea of who might have done this to him?”
She gave a quick upward jerk of her head in the Greek gesture for “no.”
“No enemies, no arguments, no strangers coming around the house?” said Tassos.
“The putana would know about those sorts of things. She’s the one who brought strangers into Mister Christos’ home.”
Tassos said nothing for a moment, smacked his hands on his thighs, stood up, and waved for the sergeant to come over. “Thank you, keria.”
“Yes, sir?” said the sergeant.
“Please have one of your men give the lady a ride to wherever she has to be.”
The maid stood and started to follow the sergeant but Tassos touched her arm to stop her. He handed her his card and whispered, “If you think of anything else that might be helpful, anything at all, please call me. And I’d appreciate it if you’d keep that second safe just between us.”
Tassos dropped his hand from her arm and walked back into the house.
We have no signs of forced entry.
We have no signs of the girlfriend.
We have a suspect.
***
Anna had been away from Bialystok for less than a week but it felt like a lifetime. When they reached the building, she told the two men to wait outside. She wanted to be alone in Sergey’s one room apartment.
The fresh flowers she’d left in a vase on the small table next to his bed were gray and shriveled, surrounded by withered petals that had fluttered onto the tabletop.
All it would have taken was a little water.
She looked at the bed. It hadn’t been made. Dirty clothes lay scattered on the one upholstered chair in the room. There were dishes piled up haphazardly in the sink and God only knew what sort of a mess was in the bathroom.
Sergey was the same slob he’d been when they’d lived together, always waiting for someone to pick up after him. But now that someone was used to maids.
How can I ever go back to this?
Anna sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the icon on the wall between the room’s two dirty windows. She didn’t pray, only stared, waiting to hear him at the door.
There were a lot of things she had to tell him.
Chapter Three
Tassos turned back into the house and went straight upstairs to Christos’ bedroom. It was messy, but slept-in messy, not ransacked. The safe was where the maid had said, its door wide open and insides empty. He looked around. There wasn’t a thing in the closet or bedroom that looked as if it might have been in the safe. The killers must have taken everything in it, he thought.
He went back downstairs and found the coroner working in the living room. “There’s a safe upstairs, Costas. It’s wide open so let’s get the tech boys on it doing their thing. But I doubt they’ll find anything more than the victim’s prints.”
“Why so pessimistic? Even cops get lucky sometimes.”
Tassos shook his head. “Not on that safe we won’t. My guess is Christos opened it for them. As messy as this killing was, if they’d murdered him first there’d be blood tracked somewhere upstairs or on the steps. Besides, the smart move was to get him to cooperate.”
“Unless they already knew the combination.”
Tassos nodded. “Yes, but even if they did, I d
oubt they’d have killed him first. Still, have them check for blood traces up there just in case I’m wrong for the first time in my life.”
“What do you think happened?”
“I think Christos opened the upstairs safe but they were looking for more than what was in it. And not just money or jewelry.”
“And how do you come to that conclusion?”
“They took everything in the safe. I mean everything. Most people keep at least some personal papers in a safe. Deeds, a will, an old photograph or two, something they think important enough to protect. Sure, there may be some blackmail value in some of those things, but I can’t believe every scrap of paper in there would interest a thief. Unless, what they wanted wasn’t in the safe and they thought the papers might hold a clue to what they were really after.”
“But why kill Christos if he gave them what they came for?”
“The point is, I don’t think he did. The maid said there was a second safe. Maybe the killers knew about it, maybe they didn’t. But I think he died because he didn’t give them what they were looking for. Something they knew he had hidden somewhere. Either in a second safe or someplace else.”
“What the hell was worth dying for? Certainly not money.”
Tassos shrugged. “Who knows what people are willing to die for? You and I know better, because we’ve seen this before.” Tassos waved his hand at the bodies of Christos and his dog. “But most folks, don’t think this could ever happen to them. Especially on Mykonos, where violent crime is practically unheard of. When something like this starts to go down, they think it’s just a bad dream that’ll end when they wake up.”
“But if he opened the upstairs safe without a fight, and the killers realized he hadn’t given them what they wanted, why didn’t they beat him up in the bedroom instead of bringing him down here to do it?”
Tassos shrugged again. “That, my friend, is a question to ask them when we catch them.”
Tassos walked over to the fireplace and began tugging at the tiles. When a section of them shifted, he pulled harder, and the tiles swung open just as the maid said they would.
“Bingo.” Inside was a closed safe door twice as large as the one upstairs. “Care to bet whether the killers ever found this one?”
Costas gestured no with his head. “But I still don’t understand what could be in it worth dying for.”
“Me either, but our answer might be inside. Besides, if you’re right about the first blow taking him out, Christos may not have had a chance to change his mind and give them what they wanted.”
Costas shook his head. “Poor bastard.”
“Can any of your boys open a safe?”
“Professionally?”
“No jokes. I need someone who can do it and keep his mouth shut. Too many loose lips among the local police.”
“One of my guys has done that sort of thing before, though he might be reluctant without a court order.”
“Just get it done.”
Costas nodded.
Tassos turned and pointed to a bookcase in the far corner of the room by the door leading to the backyard. “Did you see that?”
“If you mean the camera? Yes. It’s pretty well hidden but I saw it. One of your men found where the recorder used to be.”
“Used to be?”
“Yes, everything’s gone. Whatever was recorded is no more.”
“Sounds like whoever did this really knew the house.”
“You think so, huh? No wonder you’re chief homicide investigator.”
Tassos shot him the middle finger as he shouted, “Adonis, where are you?”
Ten seconds later a lanky, dark-haired uniformed cop in his early twenties stuck his head through the doorway out to the backyard. “I’m out here, Chief, looking for footprints.”
“Forget about that for now. I want you to check out every house that has a sight line on this place. See if any of them have security cameras aimed in this direction. If you find any, get everything they have going back a week. And I mean everything.”
“Yes, sir, right away.” He disappeared.
Tassos said, “Good kid.”
“Why, because he listens to your every word? And don’t bother giving me the finger this time. I’m too busy concentrating on my work to notice.”
Tassos gave him the finger anyway.
***
Anna lay stretched out on her side across the foot of the bed. The apartment’s windows faced front, across a busy commercial street three stories below, and the little light still in the sky came from behind the building. She fell asleep to the din of the traffic.
She awoke in the dark and slid off the bed to make her way to the bathroom next to the front door. She turned on the light, did her business, and stepped back into the room making up the rest of the apartment. That’s when she saw the men asleep with their heads resting across their forearms on the kitchen table over by one of the windows.
From the number of empty beer bottles on the table, Anna guessed that she’d had the company of her two traveling companions for quite some time. They must have tired of waiting outside the apartment and come in to pass the time drinking and whispering to each other about what they’d like to do to her as she slept on the bed. But she knew all they’d dare do was fantasize. After all, she was Sergey’s girlfriend.
Where is he? She’d spent six miserable days with these degenerates getting to Mykonos and back on schedule, and Sergey couldn’t bother to be here waiting for her? Bastard. In addition to maids, Anna had become used to better treatment from her men.
The whole trip would have taken two days, three at most, had they flown. But that would involve closely checked identification at security checkpoints. Boats, buses, and trains were a pain in the ass to travel between Bialystok and Mykonos but that was the way Sergey wanted it done. It was his plan and they’d stuck to it faithfully––except for the part about what happened to Christos.
Bang!
Anna jumped up and spun around to face the door.
Bang, bang, bang.
Someone was hammering away at the door with a fist.
“Who is it?” she said.
“Your happiness and joy.”
“Sergey!” She hurried to the door, undid the bolt, and swung open the door.
A tall, broad-shouldered man with Romanesque features stepped inside, arms spread wide and smiling as if he were a kid on Christmas morning. Fair-skinned, with pale blue eyes and shoulder-length, bright white hair, he seemed almost albino, except that his eyebrows and lashes were jet black.
She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him hard on the lips.
Sergey brought his arms in toward her body and gave a sort of a hug with his elbows.
She pulled back, her hands still around his neck. “Is this how you show how happy you are to see me?”
He waved with one hand to the two men at the table. They waved back, smiling.
“Where have you been? I’ve been waiting for hours,” she said.
Sergey leaned in and kissed her quickly on the lips. “My darling, I’ve been buying vodka to celebrate.” He pulled back from her grip and brought his hands around to show a plastic grocery bag in each hand.
“Here, put them on the table so we can share with our friends.” He handed her the packages and started walking toward the men.
“What’s the matter, you couldn’t carry them over to the table yourself?”
He paused for an instant, but said nothing and kept going.
The two men stood up and embraced Sergey.
“You did it, my friends. Congratulations. Well done.” Sergey slapped both men on the back.
Anna hadn’t moved. “‘Well done’? These imbeciles beat him to death before we had the chance to find where he’d hidden what we were looking for. They ruined everything.
Destroyed our plan.”
Sergey turned and walked back to Anna. He took the packages from her hands. “Relax, it was an accident.”
“Accident? You weren’t there. They never gave him a chance to tell us where it was. I did just as you said. I told him the two had kidnapped me and wanted money to let me go. That’s when he took us upstairs and opened the safe.”
“But what we wanted wasn’t in there,” said the shorter of the two men.
“There were other ways to get him to tell us,” she said.
“We tried,” said the tall man.
“Throwing him down the stairs wasn’t what I meant.”
The tall man shrugged.
Anna nodded toward the short man. “That asshole never gave me a chance to get him to talk. He just started beating Christos with a statuette until his head split open, while you did the same thing to the dog.” She pointed at the tall man.
“The fucker bit me,” said the tall man waving a bandaged hand.
Sergey sighed. “There’s nothing we can do about it, my love. Let’s just move on.” He kissed her on the forehead, took the packages to the table, and gestured for the men to open them.
“How can we move on? I can never go back to Mykonos. I’m no longer a kidnap victim, I’m part of a murder.”
“We took all the videos,” said the tall man.
She shook her head. “It’s still too big a chance for me to take. I’ll always be a suspect.”
Sergey nodded. “Yes, I’m afraid you’re right about that. But look at the bigger picture. Christos is no longer. The king of Mykonos nightlife is gone. Hail the new king.” He pointed to his chest.
“Are you crazy? You’re not Greek, let alone Mykonian, and you’ve never even been to Mykonos.”
He smiled. “Details, my love, details.”
“You are crazy! What about all those things he bragged about to me? The things you said we must have for the plan to work?”
He shrugged. “I assume the police will find all of that and we’ll be able to buy what we need from them. If not, we shall find other ways.”
“And what are we going to use for money?”
He shook his head. “Oh ye of little faith. Remember, police aren’t as expensive as they used to be.”
Mykonos After Midnight Page 2