Cold Hit

Chapter 33

Cindy Blackman called me right after lunch and we agreed to meet for coffee in an hour at a Denny's halfway between the Newton precinct house and Parker Center. She turned out to be a tall, slender redhead in a tan pantsuit. After introducing herself, she slipped into the window booth and dropped her purse on the seat next to her.

"I swear traffic is getting to be a bigger bitch every year," she said. "I don't know which is worse now, the four-oh-five or the seven-ten."

In L. A. this is good opening dialogue. We bond over our hatred of freeway traffic. Cindy was a Detective II and since she was in IAD back in '95, that meant she had at least fifteen years on the job. But she looked about eighteen. Her red hair was done in twin braids and freckles sprinkled the bridge of her nose. An impish smile hovered at the corners of her mouth like a child on the verge of a prank.

The waitress took our orders. Because it was so hot, we both asked for Cokes. After a few minutes of Who Do You Know, where we discovered we'd once had the same, humorless, iron-fisted captain in the Valley, I got into it.

"Looks like you and Detective Otto were all over this case," I said, setting her notebook on the table between us.

"Didn't help much." A frown darkened her bright demeanor; not accepting the compliment, or giving herself much credit.

"As I said, I'm on it now. Third time could be the charm." I smiled, trying not to sound like I was sweeping up after a bad job.

"I hope you do better than Steve and me, or Sal and Al."

The Cokes came and we tore the paper off our straws. "I dropped by that crime scene address. The Russian market's not there anymore."

"Yeah, I know. They put up a monster drugstore." She frowned again. "I hope you can solve it. The Kobronovitch family were nice people. Came over here from Minsk. American dream and all that."

Cold cases usually don't get solved because somewhere along the way the investigators have accepted a particular construct of facts that turns out to be false. The trick is to look for tiny holes in logic, and once you clear them away, hope they're hiding bigger problems.

"If you think back through the case," I said, "what fact or idea did you come across that jarred your sensibilities before you finally accepted it?"

She sipped her Coke. "That's an interesting question. What jarred me? Anything? Doesn't have to be crime related?"

"Yeah, anything."

She thought for a minute, then smiled. "Well, this is stupid, but Kobb's wife said he liked to cook Russian dishes and that's why he went shopping. But it was a Monday and Yuri's market was all fresh food. Fish, vegetables, everything right from the boat or the garden. Marty Kobb was working patrol, and with a baby coming, he'd been putting in a lot of overtime. His wife said he was coming home after ten o'clock almost every weeknight, only taking Saturday and Sunday off. So I'm thinking, who goes to a market to buy fresh fish and veggies on,a Monday night if they're working late all week and can't cook until Saturday? It just didn't hit me as quite right. I like to cook and I wouldn't shop five days ahead of time."

She paused, thinking about it. "But that doesn't necessarily mean he wouldn't do it. Maybe he was planning on freezing the food or surprising his wife by taking Monday night off from work to cook. I don't know. It just felt a little strange. Is that the kind of thing you mean?"

"Exactly." I wrote it down, but didn't have a clue how to use it.

She sat thinking some more, then remembered something else. "His aunt was so distraught when we interviewed her, she almost couldn't talk to us. She would start to say something and then she'd break down into tears. I know families can be close, but an aunt doesn't usually get that emotional. She was an immigrant who didn't speak very good English, but they lived a few blocks from the Bel Air Country Club on Bellagio Road. It was a very nice house-not a mansion exactly, but nice. I remember thinking these people were doing pretty well, coming over from Russia and all. My parents were born in L. A. and we didn't have anywhere near that nice a house."

"What was her last name?" I asked. I had skimmed some of the notes but didn't remember seeing anything about an aunt.

She hesitated. "Damn, what was her name?" She snapped her fingers. "I think it's in here."

She reached for her spiral notebook and started flipping pages. "Jesus, look at this. I was actually circling my I's back then. What a ditz." She finally found the page she wanted. "Yeah, here it is, under V. R. That's my shorthand for victim's relative." That's why I'd missed it. "Her name was Marianna Litvenko. Her husband was deceased." She looked up from the notebook. "Not very earth-shattering stuff, is it?"

I wondered if the Litvenkos had a big house because Mr. Litvenko had a Russian mob connection. I thought Minsk was somewhere up by the Black Sea. But I didn't know Russian geography very well and wondered if it was anywhere near Odessa. Back in '95, Little Japanese was just getting the Odessa Mob started in L. A., so Blackman and Otto wouldn't have thought to check Kobb's uncle to see if he was in Russian Organized Crime.

"What did the husband do?" I asked.

"Y'know, I don't even remember his first name. If it's not in our notes, maybe we didn't ask. He'd been dead almost a year by the time Kobb was murdered." She frowned. "Probably should have checked that out, huh?"

"Not necessarily. You weren't investigating the Litvenkos. It was the Kobb murder you were working."

I gathered up the rest of the case books. "Listen, Cindy, if I get these notes copied and send them over to you, would you mind going through them to freshen your memory, and then call me if anything else occurs to you?

"I won't be able to get on it until the weekend. I'm jammed. Our murder-robbery board in Newton is mostly red," she said, referring to the common practice of listing the month's open cases on the duty board in red magic marker and the closed ones in black.

"Tough beat," I told her, and it was.

We exchanged business cards. I left Denny's, then sat in my car in the parking lot as she drove off in a department slick-back, overworked and underpaid. I got the air going and once it cooled down, I tried to free up my mind. I wanted to come at all this from a different angle. Get a fresh take. I started by trying to put myself in Marty Kobb's head. I leaned back on the seat and gave it a go.

So now I'm Martin Kobb. I've got a baby coming and I'm taking on extra work to pay the bills. I'm in Patrol, but watch commanders won't book a patrol officer for double shifts, so how am I getting the OT? Maybe I'm loaning myself out on various department sting operations after hours. A lot of patrol guys will volunteer for undercover assignments if they're trying to make a move out of A-cars into detectives. I wondered if it was possible to get Kobb's timesheets from back then.

Would the LAPD even save old payroll stuff from '95? Probably not, but I took out my spiral pad and made a note to check the patrolman's time cards and log books.

I went back to being Kobb. After my shift, what am I working on? I didn't think the LAPD was actively working the Russian mob back then, but the divisions that could always use a fresh face were Drug Enforcement and Vice. Maybe I was working as an undercover for one of those outfits and pissed off some street villain. Maybe I wasn't killed by a burglar. Maybe I pushed too hard or got made, and some angry suspect pulled my drapes behind that market. I sort of liked that, so I made a mental note to revisit it, then moved on.

Yuri Yakovitch reported he was out back on the loading dock. He said he kept an eye on the cash register, but missed seeing the burglar. I started to wonder about that. What shop owner, working alone, leaves the cash register unattended to go supervise the unloading of a vegetable truck? I let my mind go, surfing the ozone. Maybe Jack Yakovitch was the suspect Kobb was working. Maybe he was running drugs or Russian whores out of his market. Maybe there was never a burglar. Jack Yakovitch makes Kobb as a cop, pulls a gun, and dumps Marty in the back of the parking lot.

None of this felt quite as promising, but I picked up my cell phone and dialed an extension in the Records section. Rose Clark came on the line. She's a researcher in the Computer Division who for some unknown reason thinks I'm sorta cute. She had done some back-ground searches for me in the past, and usually put me at the head of the line.

"Rosy? It's Shane."

"Parker Center's coolest boy toy," she teased. "What can I do for you, honey?"

I ran the Kobb case down for her, then told her what I wanted. "I'm looking for background from 'ninety-five on a guy, named Yuri 'Jack' Yakovitch, who ran a Russian market on Melrose. I don't know what happened to him. I need to find him. Run him through our Russian Organized Crime computer. Also, is it possible to get Martin Kobb's time cards and log books from that time?"

"I'm sure we don't save that kind of stuff from that far back," she said. "But I'll check."

"And can you also run a guy named Litvenko? Check him for an ROC connection. I don't have his first name, but he was Martin Kobb's uncle. He died in 'ninety-four or 'five. He lived in the Melrose area on Bellagio. The wife's name is Marianna."

"This is turning into a pretty big job."

I was losing boy toy points.

"This is important, Rose. A dead policeman. We can't let him fall between the cracks," I said, appealing to her sense of department loyalty. She agreed and I rang off.

As I put the car in gear, the name Vaughn Rolaine floated past my foggy view plate once again. This time I slapped it down, pinning it on the edge of my consciousness. Only something was wrong. It wasn't Vaughn. It was. . Army. . No, Arden Rolaine. That was it. Arden Rolaine. Who the hell was Arden Rolaine? Man or a woman? Where had I heard it?

Then slowly it all started to seep back, filling old ruts in my memory like seawater on a rising tide. My house. The backyard. Barbecuing. Last summer. I'd heard the name from Zack. He and Fran were over for dinner. This was right after we'd partnered up for the second time, or shortly after, only a few weeks into it. Alexa and Fran were inside setting the table and Zack and I were trying to decide what to do with our existing cases.

We wondered, now that we were partners, if we should throw all of our old unsolved homicides into the mix and work them together. I had three that were still active, he had four. That's when he mentioned Arden Rolaine. She was one of his unsolved cases.

Zack told me Arden was sixty or so and had been murdered in her house in Van Nuys. I couldn't remember what was unusual about her case or why it was being worked out of Homicide Special. We'd discussed it for only a minute or two before deciding to keep our prior cases separate, work them on the side. We wanted to start our partnership fresh with no unsolved cases to go against our clearance rate as a new homicide team. That's all I could remember.

I sat in the car with this strange fact still flopping around on the floor of my memory. I wasn't sure what the hell it meant, or how it fit in with the first Fingertip murder. Was Vaughn Rolaine a relative of Arden's? Vaughn and Arden were both unusual names. Some parents will do that. Give all their kids unique handles. You wouldn't expect somebody named Vaughn to have a sister named Sue.