Cold Hit

Chapter 32

I found a desk and started plowing through the reams of case notes. Otto and Blackman were thorough and meticulous. Detective Blackman had neat handwriting with a slight, backward slant and she drew cute, feminine circles over her I's, something I'm sure heckling, fellow officers had broken her of by now. Otto printed in bold, angry, slashing strokes. You could tell a lot about detectives from their paperwork. It was apparent from the thorough nature of their notes that they had desperately wanted to clear this case and had worked it vigorously.

In 2001, Paoluccia and Nye took over. By then it was officially a cold case-a grounder that had rolled foul. Nobody wanted it because there wasn't much chance it would ever be solved. Sal and Al had done what is known commonly in police parlance, as a drive-by investigation. Their notes and case write-ups looked slap dash. What it amounted to was they had blown it a kiss and moved on. Kobb's wife had left L. A. after his death and gone back to Iowa. She died a year later of ovarian cancer.

Even though I knew Detective Paoluccia, I decided I'd skip getting in touch with Sal and Al and would contact the more thorough team of Otto and Blackman.

As I paged through Detective Blackman's background notes some interesting things caught my attention. First and foremost, Martin Kobb was a second-generation Russian-American. His original family name, before it was shortened, had been Kobronovitch.

First I find Andrazack, a dead Russian dumped in the river. Then ex-KGB agent Stanislov Bambarak comes limping into his funeral on swollen ankles to make sure Andrazack's actually dead. Now I find out Kobb was Kobronovitch, and was killed outside a Russian market ten years ago with the same gun that got Andrazack. Way too claustrophobic and way too many Russians. I made a note to follow up on that.

Next I read Blackman and Otto's initial piecing together of the incident. It was pretty much the same as the case summary, but with a few more details. Kobb had been shot off-duty in the parking lot of a specialty market in Russian Town at around 7:50 P. M. on June 12, 1995. A Monday night.

According to his family he liked to cook old-country style. He had gone grocery shopping and stumbled into a burglary in progress. Yuri Yakovitch, owner of the Russian market, who everybody called Jack, had apparently left the cash register where he normally worked, and gone to the loading dock to supervise a vegetable truck delivery. Yakovitch said he was in the market alone because his regular stock boy was ill. He thought he had a pretty good view of the front of the store and his cash register from the loading dock, but he somehow missed the burglar and Kobb when they entered the market.

The burglar had a gun, but apparently ran, leaving the money behind, when Kobb pulled his off-duty weapon. They ended up in the parking lot where Kobb was shot in the northeast corner. He died next to a fence that backed up to an adjoining Texaco station.

Yuri, a. K. A. Jack Yakovitch, stated he hadn't seen the burglar, but had heard a single shot and ran through the market into the parking lot, where he found Kobb dying. He never saw a getaway car.

The lack of any witnesses stymied the investigation. Because a cop died, the case remained active until '98 when it was officially marked cold.

Given the dearth of material, there was actually damn little here to work with. Since the case was unsolved, I really hadn't expected much. But I knew for the most part, we would be coming at this through the Andrazack killing anyway.

I made copies of the top sheets and the crime scene diagrams and handed all the rest of the material back to the clerk. I also put in a written request for the murder book, which had been sent back to Internal Affairs Division where the case originated.

Next I decided to take a run out to the corner of Melrose and Fairfax and get a look at the crime scene. Maybe Yuri Yakovitch still ran his market there.

Over the last two days, the temperature in L. A. had switched from cold and damp, to hot and dry. Sometimes in January, just to remind us that we shouldn't have built this town in a desert, God cranks up his Santa Ana winds. They come whistling out of the east and drive the mercury up into triple digits. Today was one of those days; bright, hot, and clear, but with air so full of pollen that antihistamine sales would quadruple.

I dialed the main LAPD switchboard from my car and asked the operator to find me department extensions for Steve Otto and Cindy Blackman. Otto wasn't listed, so he might have retired or left the job, but there was an extension on file for Cindy Blackman. I called and found out she was now stationed in the Central Bureau, Area 13, which by the way, was good old Shootin' Newton. She was new in Robbery Homicide, but wasn't at her desk, so I left a message for her to call me.

As I drove, I let my mind crawl back over the festering mound of guilt that I will loosely label My Zack Problem. I didn't want to leave him parked in the psych ward at Queen of Angels, yet he seemed far worse to me the last time I saw him. I was really worried and searching for some middle ground. I remembered that the LAPD had a psychiatric support unit located somewhere in the Valley. It existed to help suicidal cops or those with drinking problems. I made a mental note to call and see if I could get Zack some help there.

By the time I arrived at the corner of Melrose and Fairfax the air conditioner in my new gray Acura had cranked the interior temperature down to a brisk sixty-eight degrees. I sat in the car with the engine running and pulled out Otto and Blackman's crime scene sketches of the area. They detailed a layout of the market in 1995, including the spot where Martin Kobb's body was found near the Texaco station. Now as I looked at the actual terrain, nothing was the same. The corner had been completely redeveloped. A giant Pay-Less Drugstore took up the entire area. The Texaco station was also gone, folded into the huge drugstore complex.

I stepped out of the car into a blast furnace of hot, late morning wind and hurried into the air-conditioned drugstore. Nobody working there was older than twenty-five. Memories were short.

"Only been here since April, dude," one guy told me. "We get a lot of turnover."

"The boss here is a jerk," a young girl added. "Nobody puts up with that Barney for long,"

None of them remembered the old Russian market. Nobody remembered Yuri "Jack" Yakovitch, or a policeman named Kobb who had given it up in the parking lot ten years ago.

As I trudged back to the car and tossed my coat into the backseat, the name Vaughn Rolaine flashed in my memory again, along with a vague notion of where I'd heard it. My house? The backyard? I made a frantic grab for the recollection and missed, coming up with a handful of nothing. The memory slipped quickly back into the tar pit that sometimes serves as my mind.