“Here you are,” said Omar, handing her a glass of green liquid swirled with yellow. He sat down cross-legged on his beautiful carpet, facing her with his hands resting, palms up, on his knees.
Elena took a sip of her kiwi and mango juice and gasped. “Is this alcoholic?” she asked.
Omar nodded enthusiastically. “I ferment it myself. Kiwi-mango hard cider. I’m applying for a patent.”
“Well—” Elena cleared her throat. “It certainly has a kick. Are you aware of what happened in the neighborhood this afternoon?”
“Can’t say that I am,” said Omar, “but I always enjoy a good gossip.” Then his face fell. “I hope you’re not going to tell me that both Fogels have colon cancer. I know they were scheduled for their yearly—”
“They’re fine,” Elena interrupted, not wanting to hear any more about flexible sigmoidoscopy. “It’s about Boris Potemkin.”
“That old fart! Someone ought to lock him up in his bomb shelter and throw away the key. Here, he’s married to a beautiful, intelligent, charming woman like Dimitra—”
Beautiful? wondered Elena.
“—with hair, as the young people say, to die for.”
Elena pictured the aluminum slinky curls on her neighbor’s head. They were unusual. But beautiful?
“Dimitra’s a charmer,” said Mr. Ashkenazi. “A chess player par excellence.” He lifted one small brown hand and circled the thumb and forefinger, smiling delightedly. “So what happened to Boris? Did she finally turn him in to the police? High time.”
“He was murdered,” said Elena, watching Omar closely.
“Murdered? What luck!” cried Mr. Ashkenazi and scrambled off the rug. “I must go right down to console Dimitra.”
“She’s gone to bed,” said Elena.
“Oh, of course. Dimitra keeps conventional hours. Have I told you my theory of natural sleep?”
“Yes, you have,” said Elena. “I’m afraid I have to ask you where you were this afternoon, Omar.”
“Well, I was right here. Snoozing. I just got up a few minutes ago.” He looked at his watch. “Nine hours sleep. I may not need any more for a few days.”
“Did anyone—ah—know you were asleep here?”
“Probably not. I was sleeping on this very rug. If you nap on a beautiful carpet, it’s not only good for your back, but it gives you splendid Oriental dreams. ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree’”—Omar was waving his hands excitedly—”’where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea.’ Coleridge had his opium; I have my rugs. Would you like to hear one of the dreams I dreamed this afternoon?”
“Ah—some other time,” said Elena. If, when she and Leo came thumping on his door earlier in the evening, they’d looked through the window, would they have seen him sleeping on his Oriental rug? “No telephone calls or anything?”
“While I was asleep? I wouldn’t know, my dear. My earplugs are exceedingly effective.”
“Any ideas about who might have killed Boris?”
“Goodness, I’d have done it myself if I weren’t a pacifist. That was one of the troubles between Boris and myself, you know. Aside from the fact that he treated the enchanting Dimitra so badly. We disagreed about war and violence. I do not believe in violence. Happily I am of an age to have missed the various wars this country fought. But I would have been a conscientious objector had I been called. Perhaps served in an ambulance unit. Unarmed. Saving the lives of young men maimed by nationalistic jingoism.”
“Omar—”
“Boris, however, believed in violence. He was hoping our Government would make a preemptive nuclear strike against Russia during the years when we were at each other’s throats, figuratively speaking. I have myself overcome a violent heritage.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, my ancestors were Mongol warriors. I could well be descended from Attila the Hun or Genghis Khan. Which says something for the evolution of the human soul. Unfortunately, Boris never evolved. He could have been Attila the Hun. I think he always regretted having been assigned to an engineering rather than a fighting unit. The man’s most cherished war memory was blowing up a bridge with a German army contingent on it, although he also expressed admiration for the Nazis. Good lord! The man was at war with harmless ground squirrels. I can’t understand why you didn’t arrest him for shooting them.”
“I never realized he was,” said Elena. “I never heard any gunshots in the neighborhood.”
“Well, he had a Machiavellian soul. He probably did his shooting while you were on duty. The rest of us certainly knew about it. And he frightened poor Dimitra into covering up for his cruelties against her.”
“You could have called the police yourself, you know,” said Elena.
“The fair Dimitra begged me not to. She said he’d kill both her and me if I reported him.”
Elena squinted at Omar. “Were you and Dimitra having an affair?” she asked.
“Only an affair of the soul, my dear. Of the mind. Not that I don’t desire the adorable Mrs. Potemkin. I burn for her. Have you read the poetry of Omar Khayyam, whose namesake I am? ‘A jug of wine, a loaf of bread—and thou beside me singing in the wilderness.’ Dimitra has a voice. You probably didn’t know this. We could have made beautiful music together. Perhaps we still can. If she weren’t addicted to regular sleeping hours, I’d rush over there right now and invite her to a movie. If it were forty or fifty years ago, we could have gone to a musical film. Has she ever told you about the Eugene Onegin movie made in—”
“Omar, I have to get home,” said Elena hastily. “It’s certainly been nice to talk to you. And thank you for your—ah—frankness.”
“And thank you, my dear, for bringing the good news. I shall watch Dimitra’s house from now until the time when, to paraphrase Byron, ‘she rises in beauty like the sun’—unless, of course, another sleep period comes upon me.”
Elena nodded. “You do that.” She bade him goodnight, handed back the empty glass, and walked home giggling as a result of the alcoholic kiwi-mango cider and Mr. Ashkenazi’s poetic and forthrightly stated crush on Dimitra Potemkin. Of course, that made him a suspect, and he didn’t have an alibi. Elena sighed. They’d need to work the neighborhood again to see if anyone had spotted him sneaking around the Potemkin house.
“Hi, Mom,” she said when she got home. “Found another suspect. Seems that Dimitra had a soul mate right here in the neighborhood.”
“Did she really?” said Harmony.
“Yep. He’s ready to snap her up now that Boris is out of the way.”
“How romantic! And how fortunate for Dimitra. Now she won’t be lonely.”
“You want her to marry someone who might have killed her husband?”
“Well, maybe she could settle for an affair until the case is solved,” said Harmony cheerfully. “And then there are social security considerations. Dimitra could lose hers if she . . .”
Trust Harmony to take delight in a weird idea. Dimitra Potemkin and Omar Ashkenazi having an affair. Over the chess set, no doubt.
6
Tuesday, September 28, 8:00 A.M.
“Elena was absolutely right when she said you’re as handsome as her father,” said Harmony, smiling at Lieutenant Beltran, the head of Crimes Against Persons.
Elena suppressed a look of astonishment. She might have said Lieutenant Beltran looked like her father, Sheriff Ruben Portillo. Both were stocky, graying, middle-aged men. But handsome? Well, Elena supposed her mother had thought the sheriff handsome when she was a twenty-year-old hippie dropout from Berkeley, living on a commune outside Chimayo, and Ruben Portillo a twenty-three-year-old deputy sheriff raiding that commune’s pot patch. The way her mother and father told the story, it was love at first sight between the unlikely pair, an Anglo flower child and a young Hispanic lawman whose f
amily had lived in the Sangre de Cristos since Spanish colonial times.
Lieutenant Beltran seemed to be completely bowled over by Harmony. And why not? thought Elena. Her mother was a beautiful woman: still slender, white-skinned, blue-eyed, with long black silvered hair that hung to her waist, still wearing beads and bright, flowing clothes that she wove and designed herself. Harmony bowled over every man she met, including some young enough to be her sons. Lieutenant Beltran, smitten, was telling Harmony what a fine policewoman her daughter was. As if, ever since the acid bath case, he hadn’t been treating Elena like an unwanted spider in a pfitzer juniper. It seemed as though every detective not out on the streets crowded around to meet Harmony, who had driven Elena to work after leaving the Penitentes’ pickup for servicing at a Chevrolet dealership on Montana. She was telling them about the problems of loading and off-loading her loom.
“Men are so chivalrous,” she said. “I’m afraid some macho old fellow at Socorro Heights will want to help me and end up with a hernia.”
“I can take care of that problem,” said the lieutenant, who evidently didn’t want to be outdone in machismo by some “old fellow.” “I’ll put wheels on the loom for you and a winch on your truck.”
“Aren’t you thoughtful,” said Harmony, beaming.
Elena decided that if her mother stayed in town a month, she’d probably talk Beltran into giving Elena sergeant’s stripes without a civil service exam.
7
Tuesday, September 28, 8:45 A.M.
Before Leo and Elena could revisit Dimitra Potemkin, their sergeant, Manny Escobedo, sent them off on a car-jacking with injuries. Rosa Munoz, a single mother and college student with a job at Burger King and a full class-load, had been driving to the University of Texas at Los Santos around seven-thirty when a guy jumped in her car at the Delta light, smashed her head into the driver’s side window, pushed her out onto the median strip, and drove away in her ‘85 VW. When they interviewed Rosa around nine at Thomason General, she said that the hijo de puta who’d knocked her out and stolen her car had a tattoo of the Virgin of Guadalupe on his right fist.
“Mano Alvarez,” said Elena. They picked him up playing street handball in the Lower Valley, had his picture taken and developed in the basement photo lab at headquarters so it wouldn’t have the usual mug shot name and number, and took the photo along with five others to Rosa Munoz, who said, “Number three. They ought to cut off his hand. It’s an insult to the Holy Mother.” They charged Mano with assault and grand theft auto. Case closed unless Auto Theft could find the car.
They didn’t get to Dimitra until eleven o’clock, although she had called headquarters earlier to report the theft of a “czar’s medal.” Elena and Leo interviewed Dimitra in her kitchen, where she was making cabbage rolls.
“For after the funeral?” Elena asked.
“For me,” said Dimitra. “I like cabbage rolls, and Boris would never let me freeze them. Now I’m going to make a whole year’s worth and freeze every one.” She rolled cabbage leaves around another lump of ground meat mixed with mysterious ingredients. “Would you like a few?” she asked Elena.
Accepting would probably be considered a breach of ethics by Lieutenant Beltran, but he wouldn’t complain if Harmony got the rolls. “Thanks,” Elena replied. “My mother adores ethnic food.”
“Peculiar woman,” said Dimitra. “My baba told me about women like that in the old country. Did you know your mother thinks she sees colors around people’s heads? A gold circle, I could believe, if you’re a saint or a member of the Holy Family, but colors? And she doesn’t understand why I’m not putting on black and crying over Boris. But then she probably likes your father.”
“Speaking of families, Dimitra. Have you heard from Lance?” Elena asked. Detective Beto Sanchez had tried to reach the son, Lance, by telephone to set up an appointment. No luck.
Dimitra shook her head. “He wasn’t answering his phone last night. And the English Department said this morning that he’d called in sick. I was real disappointed not to be able to tell him the good news.”
“You reported that something was missing besides the gun?” Leo reminded her.
Dimitra wiped her hands on a striped dish towel, thinking. “The czar’s medal.” Obviously pleased that she’d remembered, she folded the towel, now spotted with bits of meat and herbs, and laid it neatly over the back of a tan plastic kitchen chair. Then she scooped up a huge glob of meat stuffing from a blue Pyrex bowl.
“Boris’ family were czarists. He came to this country in ‘39, when he was seventeen. Chased out of Russia by the Communists—that’s what he said. But maybe he ran so he wouldn’t have to fight in Stalin’s army. Didn’t do him any good. He got drafted here in ‘41 and had to build roads
and bridges. You want a glass of tea? Bet you never had tea made in a samovar. Boris never let me offer refreshments. That zloy stareek!”
Elena and Leo declined with thanks. Dimitra looked disappointed. “Anyway, Boris spent most of the war in Europe; that’s until he got the back of his head blown off and they put the plate in. When he got out of the hospital, he became a guard in a prison camp near here. Boris loved that—pushing Nazi officers around. Then he came home to Coney Island after the war, so handsome in his uniform.” She sounded wistful. “That’s when he met me.”
Leo was showing signs of impatience, but Elena kept him from interrupting. With Dimitra so uncharacteristically talkative, they’d find out more about the family, hopefully something bearing on the murder.
“He always hated my people,” muttered Dimitra. “Called Papa a Communist. Of course, they weren’t—Mama and Papa. Even in the thirties they didn’t belong to the party. They were socialists, trade unionists,” she said proudly. “Papa was a presser in the garment district. Now Boris—his favorite American was Senator Joseph McCarthy, but then what can you expect of a man as mean as Boris?”
“You’re always saying how mean he was, Mrs. Potemkin. Could you give us an example?” Leo asked.
She squinted at him. “Well, there was Lance. You’d think when I finally had a baby—I was forty-two when Lance was born—you’d think Boris would have been happy. But he got meaner than ever. Lance must have been three, maybe four, and I wanted to start saving money for his college. I could tell even then he was going to be special, a Chekhov, or an Einstein, maybe a Robert Redford.”
Elena nodded politely. She remembered Lance as being cute but no Robert Redford, and his secretarial job in the H.H.U. English Department didn’t mark him as any Einstein. Now, Chekhov—maybe Lance wrote plays.
“You know what Boris did?” demanded Dimitra, highly incensed. “He took out a loan and built a bomb shelter in the back yard. To protect us from Communist H-bombs, he said. You’d think to hear Boris talk, my father was going to come down here in a Russian MIG and explode a bomb on top of us. What with paying off the house and the stupid bomb shelter, I never could put away any money for Lance.”
“How have relations been between your husband and your son in recent years, Dimitra?” asked Elena.
“What relations?” Dimitra wrapped her tray of cabbage rolls in foil, yanked open the top compartment of her refrigerator, and shoved the tray in. “Boris was the papa from hell, the Rasputin of fatherhood, the—”
“Yes, but specifically what—”
“He wanted Lance to be an engineer—not on trains, on buildings. Boris was a carpenter. Worked construction all his life, but he had to compete with the illegals from Mexico for jobs, so he never made good money. He wanted Lance to be one of the bosses. But Lance, he signed up to be an English major, so Boris stopped speaking to him. Two years later, he made my boy leave the house.”
“What was that quarrel over?” Elena asked.
“Oh, they just didn’t get along,” said Dimitra evasively, her thin, veined hands patting and rolling, flying between the work surface and the tray.
“Who could get along with Boris?” she muttered.
“Tell us about the czar’s medal,” said Elena.
“Sure. Boris bragged about that medal to everyone who’d listen. The czar, the one the Communists killed, gave it to Boris’ grandfather—for leading a bunch of Cossacks into the Pale and killing seventy-five Jews—grandfathers, women, children. Boris didn’t like Jews either, but then he didn’t like anyone.
“And the medal! You should have seen it. Seventy-five lives for a bit of green ribbon and a round coin-like thing. Wasn’t even gold. Of course, Boris, he said it would be worth a fortune some day—when the Communists were gone. So after Gorbachev and Yeltsin, I said, ‘Boris, why don’t you sell it?’ ‘What, sell my grandfather’s medal?’ he says. ‘At least, put it in a safe deposit box,’ I tell him. But not Boris. He says he’s got a gun. Anyone tries to take the medal from him, he’ll shoot them. But why would anyone want the ugly old thing? It’s probably bad luck. Blood on it.” She paused, a smile of surprise and delight dawning. “You know, it’s nice to say what I think for a change. You want to know about our family? I could talk for hours. Never got to before.”
Poor Dimitra, Elena thought, remembering how silent the woman had always been while Boris was alive. Now she couldn’t stop talking. “Did Boris ever say how much the medal was worth?” Elena asked.
“It wasn’t worth anything—except in his head.”
Could Boris have been shot for a worthless medal? Elena wondered. Someone heard him bragging about it, maybe thought it was gold, covered with jewels, got into the house, Boris pulled a gun, the thief took it away from him, shot him in the struggle or after forcing him to tell where the medal was. Or maybe when he saw that it was nothing special, the thief shot Boris for spite. Muggers did that. Beat up the victim because he didn’t have any money. “How did you happen to notice it was missing, Dimitra?”
“I was looking in the desk for his life insurance policy and noticed the box was gone. Boris kept it in a fruitcake tin Amy Fogel gave us one Christmas.”
Widows' Watch Page 4