Hollywood Station

TWENTY

AT 3 A.M. Ilya Roskova was sitting in the detective squad room, which was more crowded with people than it ever was during daylight hours. There were Force Investigation Division people, there was the area captain, there was the Detective Division commander-everyone had left their beds for this one. And the Gulag had more LAPD cars and personnel swarming around than they ever had customers during happy hour.

What was known so far was that the diamonds found on the desk at the Gulag under the body of the Georgian bartender matched descriptions given by Sammy Tanampai of his jewelry store inventory. The serial number on the Beretta 9-millimeter pistol used by Cosmo Betrossian to kill Dmitri and the Georgian proved to belong to the weapon taken from the surviving security guard during the ATM robbery.

Viktor Chernenko, the man who had been instinctively correct from the beginning, was told that, along with the captain, he should be prepared to speak to the media in the late morning after he got some much-needed sleep. Viktor predicted that ballistics would show that the bullet that killed Farley Ramsdale came from the same Beretta, and that Farley Ramsdale must have been an accomplice to the robbery and had a falling-out with Cosmo Betrossian.

There was a person in the squad room, being guarded by Budgie Polk, who knew if Viktor was correct in both theories, but she wasn’t talking. Ilya’s wrist was handcuffed to a chair and she’d said nyet to every question asked, including whether she understood her constitutional rights. Everyone was waiting for Viktor to find time to try an interview in her language.

Andi McCrea along with the others who had participated in the officer-involved shooting were being separately interviewed by FID and were scattered among several of the station’s offices. Andi was the third one finished, and when she came back into the busy squad room, she played the videotape that had been seized along with the other evidence from the desk of Dmitri.

When she watched the video with Brant Hinkle looking over her shoulder, they nodded, satisfied. The stabbing of the student was caught vividly. The identity of the assailant was unmistakable.

“He’ll cop a plea when his lawyer sees this,” Andi said.

After packaging the videotape for booking, she looked at Ilya Roskova, sitting in the chair glaring at her stoic guard, Budgie Polk, who had been interviewed for one hour by FID.

Andi pulled Viktor aside and said, “Have you gotten any information out of her?”

“Nothing, Andrea,” Viktor said. “She will not speak at all except to ask for cigarettes. And she keeps wanting to go to the bathroom. I was just going to ask Officer Polk to take her.”

Andi kept eyeing Ilya, looking particularly at her lower body squeezed into that low-rise red skirt, as tight as Lycra. She said, “Let me take her. Where’s her purse?”

He pointed and said, “Over there on the desk.”

“Does she have cigarettes in there?”

“Yes.”

Andi went to the desk and picked up the purse, then walked over to Ilya Roskova and said, “Would you like us to take you to the bathroom?”

“Yes,” Ilya said.

“And after that maybe a cigarette?” Andi said.

“Yes.”

“Take the cuff off her, Budgie,” Andi said.

Budgie unlocked the handcuff and the prisoner stood, massaging her wrist for a second, prepared to accompany the cops.

As they started to walk, Andi opened the purse and said to Ilya, “Yes, I see you have cigarettes in -” Then the purse dropped from Andi’s hand onto the floor.

Ilya looked at Andi, who just smiled and said “I’m sorry” but made no effort to pick up the purse.

Ilya angrily bent over to pick it up, and Andi stepped forward, put her hand on Ilya’s shoulder, and forced her down into a full squat with one hand, reaching down toward the purse with her other, saying, “Here, let me help you, Ms. Roskova.”

And when Ilya was held in the squatting position for a few seconds, making a fish mouth, a diamond hit the floor. Then another. Then a ring with a four-carat stone plinked against the floor and rolled across the squad room, stopping when it hit Viktor’s shoe. Diamonds were shooting from that “safe place” where she’d promised Cosmo to hide them.

Andi reached under Ilya’s arm and raised her up, saying, “We’ll let you pee in a urinal and we’ll be watching. And Viktor, I think you better put on gloves before you pick up the evidence.”

“Bitch!” Ilya said, as the two women, one on each arm, led her to the door.

“And you can use our bidet,” Budgie said. “Like the one I have at home. It’s called a sink. You jump up on it, but we’ll keep the stopper in.”

Brant Hinkle said to Viktor, “I think she might talk to you now.”

“How did Andi know?” Viktor marveled.

“She noticed right away and told me. No panty line, no thong line, nothing. She guessed that Roskova might want to get rid of them in a hurry first chance she’d get at privacy.”

“But the trick? To put her down in that position? How did she know that trick?”

“Viktor, there’re some things you and I didn’t learn at detective school that women just know,” Brant Hinkle said.

When Andi and Budgie returned with the cache of diamonds, Budgie said, “I’m sure glad I didn’t have to remove the evidence. I can’t even clean out my rain gutters for fear of spiders and other crawly things.”

Late the next day, after getting five hours’ sleep in the cot room along with a wardrobe change driven to the station by his wife, Maria, Viktor Chernenko completed his investigation by supervising a thorough search of the car and apartment of Cosmo Betrossian, as well as the house of Farley Ramsdale.

They found Cosmo’s Lorcin.380 pistol and the Raven that Ilya had carried during the ATM robbery. At Farley’s house they found some stolen mail, a glass pipe for smoking meth, and the usual litter and detritus that are found in the homes of tweakers. There were a few articles of women’s clothing, but it appeared that Farley Ramsdale’s companion had disappeared.

Viktor and two other detectives inquired at every house on both sides of the street but learned nothing of value. The next-door neighbor, an elderly Chinese man, said in barely understandable English that he had never spoken to Farley and never noticed a woman. The neighbor on the other side was an eighty-two-year-old Romanian who said that she only saw the man and woman coming in late at night and that her night vision was so bad she’d never recognize them in the daylight.

Interviews of other, mostly elderly, residents on the block were equally fruitless. Even when Olive’s old mug shot was shown to them, nobody could say that she looked very familiar. She was the kind of person, it seemed, who would live and die on the streets of Hollywood utterly invisible.

Upon reading the news accounts about Farley Ramsdale and the massacre at the Gulag, a very frightened Gregori Apramian called Hollywood Station early in the afternoon to offer information. And after that call, his junkyard was deemed a crime scene and was sealed and scoured by criminalists and detectives from downtown.

Gregori stood in front of his office next to a leashed Doberman who, despite the cast on his rear leg, was snarling and still ready to fight. And scaring the crap out of every cop who got within ten yards.

What Gregori said for the record and what was transcribed onto a police report was: “I just promise Cosmo to tow the Mazda that night. I don’t know about no robberies. Maybe Cosmo bring this guy Farley to my yard to destroy the Mazda? That is what I think. They are going to burn up the Mazda to do the covering up of robberies. But something happen. They get in fight and hurt my Odar. And Cosmo shoot the man Farley. I do not know Farley. I do not know the Russian woman you arrest. I only know Cosmo because we go to same Armenian church sometimes. I am trying to be a friend to a fellow immigrant and be a, how you say, credit to America.”

At the end of his long day, Viktor Chernenko played a tape of Ilya Roskova’s interview for the detective lieutenant and both area and station captains. Ilya had stopped saying nyet after the diamonds were excreted onto the squad room floor. She had then voluntarily removed the rest in the Hollywood Station bathroom where they were packaged and booked.

Ilya had been advised of her rights in both English and Russian, and she declared her understanding. The interview about her role in both robberies was long and tedious and self-serving. She kept claiming to have been totally in thrall to Cosmo Betrossian, calling herself a mental captive who lived in fear of him.

When one of the captains looked at his watch, Viktor advanced the tape to the portion dealing with the last pieces of the puzzle that remained missing: Olive and the ATM money.

Ilya’s voice said, “Olive was there when Farley did blackmail on Cosmo. When he gave big threat to tell police about the stolen letter. But Olive is, how you say, imbecile. Her brain is in a destroyed condition from drugs. I am very astounded that she have enough of the brain left to find the money Cosmo steal from ATM. Very astounded that she can take the money and vanish into thin smoke.”

Then Viktor’s voice said, “Do you think it is possible that Cosmo was holding back from you? Is it possible that Cosmo hid the money somewhere because he did not wish to share with you?”

After a long pause on the tape, Ilya’s voice said angrily, “Is not possible!” Then she obviously realized that she was blurring her portrait of enslavement and said, “But of course I was so much in fear that I may be incorrect about what Cosmo can do. He was very much clever. And had two faces.”

Viktor turned off the machine then and said to his superiors, “So far as I am concerned, we have hit a stone fence. I believe that Cosmo Betrossian took the ATM money from under the house of Farley Ramsdale on the night that the car was towed to the junkyard. I believe that Cosmo Betrossian has disposed of the ATM money with a friend, probably another woman. The Russian pride of Ilya Roskova does not wish to admit such a possibility-that he could have another secret woman and would be leaving her. I believe that Cosmo then tried to tell to Dmitri Zotkin a false story of Olive stealing the money, but Dmitri was too smart to buy it. And that’s when the shooting started.”

“You’ve been right on so far,” the area captain said. “So what do you think happened to this woman Olive?”

“I think she finally got scared enough of Cosmo Betrossian to run away from Farley Ramsdale. She is probably living now with some other tweaker. Or maybe just living out on the street. We shall find her dead sometime from an overdose. Truly, she is of no further use to this investigation.”

“Do you think we’ll ever find the ATM money?” the station captain asked.

Viktor said, “We have learned that Cosmo Betrossian loved Russian women. There is probably one of them shopping on Rodeo Drive with the ATM money. Right now as we talk.”

“Okay, it’s a wrap,” the area captain said. “When you do press interviews on this, just try to avoid mention of the missing money. The other pieces fit perfectly.”

“Yes, sir,” Viktor Chernenko said. “That is the only fly in the jelly.”