‘And put in a good word for him? An unequivocal good word?’
It was wrong. But everybody had their price. The truth was Nikki would have sold her soul to know who Lenka Gordievski really was, and how she’d gotten her claws into Doug.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Now, please, show me what you have.’
Ten minutes later, a desolate Nikki looked up at Mick Johnson.
‘This doesn’t tell me anything.’
While she’d been reading the file on Lenka, he’d ordered himself a second stack of pancakes from the still-peeved waitress, and was two thirds of the way through them when Nikki spoke.
‘I’d say it tells you plenty,’ he said, dabbing syrup from the sides of his mouth with a napkin and swallowing his current mouthful. ‘Lenka was the go-between who helped Luis Rodriguez import his initial batches of Krokodil from Moscow. She’d changed her name to Gordievski five years earlier, after she turned state’s witness on one of the St Petersburg cartels. That’s why your friend Williams couldn’t find any history. Before that she went by Natalia Driskov.’
‘I don’t care about her name!’ Nikki said, exasperated. ‘I care about her relationship with my husband.’
‘It’s all connected, honey,’ said Johnson, not unkindly. ‘Lenka introduced Rodriguez to her network of suppliers and drug runners back in Russia. She was already living in LA and familiar with the networks on the ground here. I’m guessing she was well compensated, but that was always a dangerous game to play. The Russian gangs wouldn’t have appreciated anyone bringing one of the Mexican cartels onto their turf.’
‘So you think the Russians murdered her?’ asked Nikki. ‘By tampering with the computer on Doug’s car? He was collateral damage, is that what you’re saying?’
Johnson shrugged. ‘You’ve read the report, same as I have. Yes, I think your husband was definitely collateral damage. But I don’t believe the Russians were behind that crash. I’d say it was Rodriguez.’
Nikki frowned, confused.
‘But … if Lenka worked for Rodriguez …?’
‘She’d outlived her usefulness,’ said Johnson. ‘Like Willie Baden. And you saw with your own eyes what happened to him.’
Nikki shivered.
‘By the beginning of last year, Rodriguez’s crew already owned the Krok market on the West Coast,’ said Johnson. ‘With Goodman’s help, he’d effectively driven the Russians out and he was producing his own shit, down in Mexico City. He already had huge facilities down there for processing coke. Charlotte Clancy found out about those years ago, which was why she got whacked. All Luis had to do was re-fit that operation, turn it into giant Krok labs. After that he didn’t need Lenka any more. You wanna know what my theory is, about her and your husband?’
‘Sure,’ Nikki said wearily.
‘I think this woman knew she was on borrowed time with Rodriguez. So she tried to make herself useful to him in other ways. That was where your old man came in. She offered to get close to him, in hopes of pumping him for information about you and your patients. She had Haddon Defoe introduce the two of them, and the thing went from there. After all, by that point you were treating Carter Berkeley, one of his key money men in LA and witness to Charlotte Clancy’s murder. I reckon the affair with your husband was Lenka’s last-ditch attempt to keep herself relevant to Rodriguez. Relevant and alive. Not such a great plan, as it turned out.’
Nikki gazed blankly out of the window. So it was my fault? Lenka targeted Doug to get at me? After what felt like an age, she turned back to look at Johnson.
‘The thing is,’ she said sadly, ‘what this doesn’t tell me is why Doug did it. Let’s say you’re right about Lenka’s motivations, and Rodriguez’s. And maybe you are, because it all fits. It still doesn’t answer the biggest question of all, at least for me. Which is, why would my husband cheat on me with this person? This stranger. One minute we were happy – really happy – and the next, it was all gone. Why did that happen?’
Mick Johnson looked at her with genuine pity.
‘I don’t know, sweetheart. Maybe she fed him a sob story. Maybe she confessed she’d gotten mixed up with the cartels and Rodriguez and she was trying to break free? From what I heard, your husband was big on helping people in trouble. Second chances and all that?’
‘He got her pregnant!’ Nikki’s eyes welled with tears.
‘So maybe that was part of it too?’ offered Johnson. ‘He was trying to help her, they got close, he made a mistake and slept with her – and remember, all this time she’s fighting for her life, doing everything she can to seduce him and get close to him, because her own life depends on it. And maybe he regrets it, but then boom, she’s pregnant, and what’s he gonna do? Maybe that’s his one and only chance to have a child, because you guys couldn’t. That’s a tough thing to walk away from. Isn’t it?’
Nikki nodded mutely. Maybe. There were too many maybes. Johnson’s file had given her facts about Lenka, and he’d offered her theories. But facts and theories couldn’t explain emotions. Nor could they heal a broken heart.
Sighing, Nikki passed the folder of papers back to him across the table.
‘Oh, that’s OK,’ said Johnson. ‘Those are for you. You can keep ’em.’
‘No thanks,’ said Nikki. ‘It’s time to start letting go of the past. I might as well start here.’
An awkward silence fell. Pushing the cold remnants of his pancakes to one side, Johnson signaled to the waitress for the check.
‘So, er, what are your plans now?’ he asked, feeling someone ought to say something. ‘Will you go back to work?’
‘No.’ Nikki spoke with a firmness that surprised herself. ‘I shut down my office here and put my house on the market. I was toying with the idea of starting a new psychology practice in New York, but I’ve changed my mind. I’m sure I’ll do something out there, I just haven’t figured out what yet. Luckily I can afford to wait. Take some time out.’
‘You’re moving to New York?’ Johnson looked surprised. ‘When?’
‘Now, I guess,’ Nikki shrugged. ‘I mean, soon. There’s nothing keeping me here. I think today was the first time I understood that fully.’
‘OK. But our deal still stands, right?’ Johnson asked distrustfully. ‘You’ll speak up for Jerry at the parole hearing? Because that’s in a month.’
‘Sure,’ said Nikki, adding with a weak smile, ‘A deal’s a deal, Detective. I’ll fly back for it. What about you?’
‘What about me?’ Johnson raised an eyebrow.
‘What are your plans?’ Nikki clarified.
‘My plans?’ He seemed to find the question amusing. ‘I’m a cop. That’s the only plan I got. I’ll move on to the next case, and then the next one, till I croak. I’m not complaining,’ he added quickly. ‘I love the job.’
How could anyone love that job? Nikki thought, watching Johnson pay his check. Police work meant low pay, constant danger, and you didn’t even get public respect any more, not after all the corruption scandals. She still didn’t approve of the way Mick Johnson led his professional life, of the entitled way he behaved, a walking behemoth of white male privilege. And yet, after everything she’d been through, she found she could understand it. It must be exhausting to have to live in a permanent state of battle-readiness. She knew she couldn’t do it.
‘So, I don’t know if you heard,’ Johnson mumbled awkwardly, ‘but they’re giving me a service medal, kind of like a valor thing. For that night at the warehouse.’
‘They are?’ Nikki’s face broke into a genuine smile. ‘Congratulations! That’s amazing.’
‘I mean, you’re probably gonna be busy.’ Johnson was blushing like a schoolboy. ‘But I just thought, you know, if you wanted to come … what I mean is, you’d be welcome.’
‘I’d be honored,’ said Nikki. She was touched, knowing how much it must have cost him to extend the invitation. They’d been through a lot, the two of them, and she recognized this was Detective Johnson’s way of offer
ing an olive branch.
‘Let me know the date and I’ll be there.’ Standing up, she shook his hand. ‘Take care, Detective.’
‘You too, Doc.’
Mick Johnson shook Nikki’s hand and watched her leave the restaurant and disappear down the street.
She was a piece of work, all right. But she was also a survivor.
Mick Johnson respected that.
He hoped she found the happiness she was searching for in New York, but somehow, he doubted that she would. Sadness seemed to cling to her like mist to the ocean.
Oh well. He’d done what he could.
Like she’d said, it was time to let go of the past.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
It was another scorching day in downtown LA, up in the high nineties, but inside the Grand Ballroom at the Hollywood and Highland Entertainment Complex, all was cool. Sitting towards the back of the packed auditorium, directly below an air conditioning vent, Nikki wished she’d brought a cardigan. Today was Detective Johnson’s medal of valor ceremony, and she’d flown in specially, more to honor a promise than from any desire to be there. It was painful coming back to LA so soon, but at least she would manage to kill three birds with one stone on this trip: Johnson’s ceremony, the Kovak parole hearing, and the final trip to her attorney’s office to sign the sale papers on her Brentwood house. After this, she could fly away and never look back. In theory anyway.
‘We’re here today to celebrate an act of extraordinary courage,’ the Chief of Police, Brian Finnigan announced proudly from the podium. ‘Members of our police force are called upon to perform acts of courage every single day in the line of duty. And all of those acts are worthy of recognition. But occasionally, an officer steps outside the bounds of his, or her, normal service …’
He droned on in this vein for a number of minutes to a rapt audience, almost all of them either cops themselves or their families. Beside him on the podium, Mick Johnson sat looking awkward and heavier than ever in his tight-fitting formal uniform, with his stomach spilling over the belt and his broad chest looking as if it might burst, Superman style, through his starched shirt at any moment, sending the buttons flying around the room like bullets. Poor man, thought Nikki. He deserved the medal and was proud of his honor, but would clearly far rather have received the thing anonymously in the mail. Aware of the media presence – anything connected to the Zombie Killings and the Rodriguez Krok Ring, however tangential, brought them out of the woodwork like maggots – Nikki had signaled to Johnson earlier, making him aware of her presence, but after that slunk back into the shadows. Dressed to disappear in a shapeless, gray-black shift dress and dark glasses, with no make-up on and her longer, grayer hair tied back in a messy bun, she was unrecognizable as the glamorous Dr Nikki Roberts people remembered from the TV news reports.
While the commissioner rambled on, her mind wandered.
It was only three weeks since she’d moved out of Gretchen’s place, but already it felt like years. The day she left, all the LA channels ran the breaking news story that the prime suspect in the Zombie Killings, Brandon Grolsch, had finally been tracked down to an apartment in Fresno. Sordid details of his affair with Valentina Baden had already begun to emerge, and the live-action cameras were all trained with an expectant hush on the Fresno apartment as the police broke in.
In the days prior to that, Charlotte Clancy’s remains had been found at long last, in a shallow grave on the outskirts of Mexico City, their whereabouts divulged by Carter Berkeley as part of his plea deal for turning state’s witness. The news had been full of tearful, angry images of the Clancy family, furious that Carter had received only a four-year sentence for his role in laundering Rodriguez’s drug money and covering up their daughter’s death, while Dr Haddon Defoe, a far more minor figure in the Los Angeles ‘Krok’ ring, received a ten-year term. Even worse was the media’s fawning adoration for Anne Bateman, the beautiful young violinist who had been married to Rodriguez and claimed to have had no prior knowledge of any of his crimes. Anne’s trial would not begin for some months, the list of charges against her being longer and more complex than some of the other players involved.
But for Nikki, the day they found Brandon Grolsch was the hardest, and the most personal. Nikki and Gretchen watched together from Nikki’s bedroom, standing over her half-packed suitcase, as armed police broke down the door of Brandon’s apartment and entered. Nikki held her breath and waited. She was still watching when, an hour and a half later, the same men emerged bearing a body bag on a stretcher. Brandon was dead from an apparent overdose. Over the course of the afternoon it emerged that his corpse was already partially rotted when the cops found it. That he’d likely been dead and undisturbed for several days, if not weeks.
Nikki sank down on the edge of the bed, feeling suddenly faint.
‘You shouldn’t let it get to you,’ Gretchen told her. ‘He tried to kill you.’
‘I know.’
‘You can’t save everyone, Nik.’
‘I know that too.’
The problem was that, apparently, Nikki couldn’t save anyone. If she’d succeeded with Brandon, if she’d only been able to help him, Lisa Flannagan would still be alive. So would Trey – maybe.
That last day at Gretchen’s place got even worse at dinner, after Adam got home.
‘Guess what?’ Adam asked innocently, kissing both his wife and Nikki on the cheek as they all sat down at the table with the kids.
‘I heard today they’re gonna make a movie about the Zombie Killings.’
‘Cool!’ Nikki’s godson Lucas piped up excitedly. ‘Is Aunt Nik gonna be in it? Who’s playing her?’
‘You’re not serious,’ Nikki looked aghast at Adam.
‘Totally serious,’ he said, helping himself to a large bowlful of Gretchen’s Thai beef salad and a cold beer. ‘There’s already a three-parter script in the works at Warner. Part One’s the Charlotte Clancy case, set in Mexico City in the early 2000s. Part Two flashes forward to the Flannagan and Raymond murders, with some of the Krok wars thrown in. I’m guessing your character would have to be central in there.’
‘Awesome!’ the Adler children exclaimed in unison.
‘And Part Three covers Rodriguez’s LA drugs ring and how it got smashed, ending with Willie Baden’s murder and a big shoot-out scene at the warehouse. That’s more of a Michael Bey, Fast & Furious type vibe, I think, while the first two scripts are a little more slow burn. Like Traffic. Did you ever see that movie? With Michael Douglas?’
Nikki sat frozen with shock. Gretchen’s husband was a sweetheart. Adam would never knowingly try to upset her. Yet he seemed strangely oblivious to how awful it was to talk about these murders as if they were entertainment. As if Lisa and Trey and Brandon and even Nikki herself were fictional characters, to be polished and airbrushed and regurgitated onto the screen for general public amusement.
‘I know you don’t even want to think about this right now,’ Adam plowed on. ‘But this could actually be great news for you, Nikki. If these pictures get off the ground, or even if they don’t and they never get past the development stage, people are gonna be beating down your door to act as a consultant, maybe even to exec produce. Those gigs can be really lucrative.’
That dinner was the moment Nikki’s last ounce of hesitation or regret at leaving LA left her. This city was insane and rotten to the core. Even really good people like the Adlers became tainted by it after a while. As for Nikki, she wasn’t so much ‘tainted’ as immersed, covered in a stench of corruption and violence and death and lies and filth so strong that she didn’t know if she would ever fully get rid of it.
A ripple of applause broke her reverie. Suddenly she was back in the auditorium. Detective Johnson. The medal ceremony.
‘And now, without further ado,’ the commissioner was saying, ‘it is my duty, my honor and my pleasure to present the LAPD Medal of Valor to Detective Michael Johnson of the Homicide Division. Detective Johnson, please stand.’
/> Nikki watched as Johnson got awkwardly to his feet and lumbered over to the center of the podium to receive his award. To the left and right of her, the audience clapped and cheered and within a few seconds most got to their feet. Nikki stood and joined them, cheering the man who had saved her life and who she’d belatedly come to see as more than just a redneck – although that side to him was still alive and well. She was glad they’d buried the hatchet, but at the same time she wouldn’t be sorry to see the back of Detective Johnson and the rest of the LAPD, and all the other small, daily reminders of this terrible case.
Slipping out early, Nikki walked along Grand Avenue in the direction of Union Station. She would take an Uber back to her hotel, rather than a train, but it was a beautiful old building and it gave her somewhere to walk to on this hot, dazzling day.
Passing a flower stall, she bought an overpriced bunch of peonies to take back to her hotel room. Recently she’d been taking Gretchen’s advice and trying to appreciate the little things, like fresh flowers or a warm, blue-skied day. It might be corny, but Nikki knew from her own practice it was as good a way as any to fight depression. Tiny step by tiny step.
To the left and right of her, gleaming tower blocks in glass and concrete and steel rose like the behemoths of wealth and status that they were. Some were banks or insurance companies. Others were law firms. In and out of them, like tiny termites, scurried well-dressed workers, the women coiffed and uncomfortable-looking in their pencil skirts and high heels, the men simply overheated in their formal suits and ties.
Out on the sidewalks, directly in the shadow of these buildings, homeless people sat or stood or lay, some pushing shopping carts laden with blankets and clothes and their other meager possessions, others ragged and dirty and even barefoot. It felt to Nikki as if America was at war, a war between the haves and have-nots, and that these people were members of the losing army. If such a war really existed then Los Angeles was surely its front line. So much wealth and fame and glamour here, so much luxury, and yet at the same time so much despair.
Sidney Sheldon's the Silent Widow Page 38