The Art of Deception

Old Friends, New Enemies

“You want peepers? We got peepers. But I gotta tell you, Johno: Your guys have been through these already, because of Hebringer and Randolf.” Marisha Stenolovski slid a file cabinet drawer open. The files went back twelve or fifteen inches.

Stenolovski stuck out a few inches in all the right places herself. He’d been there, done that.

“Last thirty days. I’ll know it when I see it.”

It had been a year earlier. A cop bar. Both of them flirting a little too openly. She stood a good three inches taller than he.

Lanky. Dark Slavic skin, brooding eyes. A screamer-he remembered that as well. It had lasted a week or two. He’d dumped her for someone, no doubt. Couldn’t remember for whom just now. The problem with relationships at work, they came back to bite you.

She lowered her voice. “You’re an asshole, John. Until you need my help, you don’t give me the time of day. What am I, damaged goods? Leftovers? I don’t care that you leave me for some singer. Good riddance. But the way you avoid me now.

It’s disrespectful.”

The singer. He remembered now. “I don’t avoid you.”

“Have we said two words in the last six months?”

“A woman got peeped over at the Inn. I’m looking for similar complaints.”

She slapped the steel file drawer. “There. All the peepers a guy could ask for. Look hard, Johnny. Maybe you’re in there too.”

She walked off. He remembered that walk. Strong. Alluring.

Legs to the moon. One foot placed exactly in front of the other, like a runway model, so her butt shifted back and forth like a pair of puppies in a paper sack. She’d donned a pair of his boxer shorts one morning. Topless, just the boxer shorts, nothing else.

They ate bagels together at the kitchen table, her, dressed that way. He remembered more about her than he might have thought.

It shouldn’t have surprised him that the one case file that interested him turned out to have Stenolovski’s name listed as the investigator. Life was like that. He should have known, because there were only a couple full-eights in Special Assaults-SA. The rest worked it part-time.

He caught up to her as she sat atop a metal stool in an office cubicle covered with magazine tear sheets of barefoot water skiers. A photo of a nephew. Another of Prague or Moscow, someplace gray, bleak with billboard ads he didn’t recognize.

Definitely Eastern European. In the photo she had her arm around a very old lady with hair the color of winter clouds.

He cleared his throat. “With me, you get what you get. Sometimes that’s a good thing. Sometimes not. If you’re pissed, you’re pissed. But if I apologized, it would be wrong because it would be insincere. I’m not sorry for any of it, anything we had, except that since then maybe I’ve treated you wrong.”

She smiled, “So pull up a chair, asshole.”

He smiled back. “Yeah. Thanks.”

“Ms. Tina Oblitz?” The phone cradled between his shoulder and ear, LaMoia was guessing that the Oblitz file had been passed over during the Hebringer/Randolf race for lack of what his department called “connective tissue” because Oblitz herself had tried to withdraw the complaint. That sticky note in the file would have tainted it-why further investigate something that “didn’t happen”?-but it was just this Post-it that intrigued John LaMoia.

“This is she.”

LaMoia introduced himself by rank and awaited the mandatory pause of shock value. Telephones weren’t the greatest.

His beeper chirped and he yanked it off his belt, wondering if Rehab was bugging the neighbors. The dog had attached himself to LaMoia and reportedly would wail hours on end when LaMoia was off on night duty. No such problem during the day shifts. The dog needed a shrink. Maybe Matthews would give it a spin.

He recognized the phone number on the pager as the ME’s-Dixon must have completed the autopsy on Mary-Ann Walker.

“Yes, Sergeant?” Tentative. Cautious.

“You recently filed a voyeurism complaint with us. Then you called back to attempt to retract the complaint.”

“It was nothing. I was mistaken.”

“And we,” he continued, as if uninterrupted, “Detective Stenolovski, actually, informed you that once filed, a complaint cannot be retracted.”

“It’s fine. It’s nothing.”

“It’s not fine with me, Ms. Oblitz. I’ve got a case I’m working, a stalking, voyeurism. I’ve just been reviewing a similar case file. From your initial complaint, I’m thinking our current case might be the same guy who was watching you.”

“No one was watching me, Sergeant. I was mistaken.”

“If there’s blackmail involved, extortion, then I can help with that, Ms. Oblitz.”

“It’s nothing like that.”

“Then what is it like?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Stenolovski says the initial complaint was quite convincing.

You saw this guy out your hotel window. That’s important to me, Ms. Oblitz. Then you call to distance yourself. Suddenly you don’t want anything to do with it. I’ve got to ask myself: Is it because you’re afraid? Have you been threatened? Extorted?

I need to know about that.”

“It’s not that … it’s just that I was mistaken.”

“Okay, so I’m wrong. I still got to talk to you, Ms. Oblitz, about that original complaint. A woman’s gone through something awful-two others have gone missing-and I think you may be able to help me with this. I think you know what she’s going through.”

A long pause. He could hear her breathing. “Not now. Not over the phone.”

LaMoia experienced a great sense of victory. He closed his eyes, drew in a deep breath, and combed his free hand through his hair. “Okay. Thank you. So when? Where?” He added, “You’re in … the Bay Area. It’s going to have to be by phone, I’m afraid.”

“I’m traveling up there on business, Monday. I’m in the W.”

“Name a time,” he said.

She asked him to wait a minute. “I have an opening at four.

Four to five. Will that suit you?”

“Four o’clock. Fine.”

“Whatever you do, don’t announce yourself at the desk, would you not, Sergeant? Just call up to the room, please.”

“Done.” He hung up the phone with a smile. He owned Ms.

Tina Oblitz. She just didn’t know it yet.