Saturday 9/20
PAUL WOKE UP ON SATURDAY IN A ROTTEN MOOD, NOT HELPED BY the nightcaps he had drunk the night before.
He had slept alone on the thick new foam pad Nina had bought to soften up his stiff bed. Tossing, unable to sleep, he decided he didn’t like the heat the pad created or the cozy embryonic illusion of comfort, so he ripped it off and threw it to the floor. Damn woman, coming in here, changing everything to suit herself and then moving out!
He did not like uncertainty. He lived by rules, such as the first rule he had established when he went into business: if someone was going to get hurt, that someone would not be him. He had just gotten used to her living with him, to her scent and a particular softness of hair. Then her kid arrived, and before he could blink she had gone.
What use was it, having her in Pacific Grove, ten miles away? How was that getting together?
Now, very early, cup of coffee in hand, he stood on the deck watching the sun filling in the morning shadows, the distant line of ocean in the west, and the blue jays flitting around in the eucalyptus trees. He listened to the radio news while he ate, then made the bed and threw the foam pad into the condo Dumpster. He checked his e-mail.
Damn, but the house was quiet and the morning was long.
Wish showed up at Paul’s office at eight.
Sandy’s son, Wish Whitefeather, towered over everyone, even Paul, and weighed one-forty on a feast day. Twenty years old, he walked into the room with the insouciant glowing health only youth possessed, even if he had spent the night on a pal’s floor. His hair was getting long again, just touching the collar of his wrinkled green polo shirt. He was all bone, with a long face with a high forehead, a jutting nose, and a prominent Adam’s apple that bobbed as he swallowed the last of his caffeine fix.
“Let’s do it, good buddy,” Wish said, adjusting his sunglasses. He was wearing his trademark Doc Martens and brown khaki shorts, drinking from a cardboard coffee vat. Evidently Sandy was leaning too hard, because he launched into his problems with his parents, and how he could never escape their watchful eyes. “I leave Tahoe to come here and be on my own, you know? And they follow me!”
“All for a good cause. You’re going back soon, anyway,” Paul said, picking up Dean Trumbo’s shitty investigative report on Alex Zhukovsky and locking his office door behind him. On the landing he glanced down below at the Hog’s Breath, always on the lookout for a pretty girl to start the day off right, but the courtyard below was deserted. “You’ve got nothing to squawk about. You don’t have to stay with your parents.”
“That’s the whole problem. My mom hates letting me out of her sight.” He sighed deeply. “I stay with friends and she really kicks.”
“Where are your folks staying?”
“With old friends in Big Sur. They got to know each other when my dad was doing truck driving. They’re starting an abalone farm off the commercial pier in Monterey.” Wish took the stairs down two at a time, and barely seemed to be working at it, saying, “You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to farm abalone.” Paul followed at the more sedate single-step pace. “Actually,” Wish went on, “since I’m taking a bio course this fall, they’ve been able to help. They know a lot.”
They got down to the street. “We’ll take my car,” Paul said, leading to the red Mustang parked by the curb.
“Can I drive?”
Paul tossed him the keys.
Wish lectured Paul about the wild ways of abalone, which Paul had heretofore only known as sizzling breaded objects on a plate, all the way up the cottage-lined streets of Carmel. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I’m still into criminal justice. Bio’s important these days because of DNA.”
“DNA’s our worst problem in this case. You know Stefan Wyatt’s blood was found at the scene.”
“Yeah. The case.” Wish blinked and came back to their mission of the day, the interview of Alex Zhukovsky, Christina’s brother.
“If you were on a jury and heard that, you’d think he did it, wouldn’t you?” Paul asked.
“Well, it wasn’t enough to nail O.J. So Stefan’s got that going for him. But between you and me, Paul, ya know, she threw a glass that broke, right? And his blood was on the glass, right?”
“The tests are even more reliable than in O.J.’s heyday,” Paul said.
“Nina thinks he’s innocent, so we go with that, right?” Paul did not answer, because he wanted Wish to maintain his zeal, but the truth was, Nina hadn’t expressed an opinion about Wyatt’s guilt or innocence. That could be because she wasn’t sure, or thought he was guilty, or he had confessed to her and that was confidential, or simply because she was a lawyer and not stupid.
“What’s the first thing to think about, when you want to know who killed her? A single woman, forty-three, not bad looking?” Paul asked instead.
“The love life,” Wish said promptly.
“Yes. I go there first myself.”
“You lose a woman you supposedly love, well, man, better go kill her! Don’t you just love male logic? Oops,” Wish said, running over a curb as he made the turn into the college.
“I can’t believe you just did that to my Mustang.”
“They made this turn too tight.”
“No, you took it tight.”
They passed under a large brown structure bearing a sign that read, WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY MONTEREY BAY. LUNCH IS BACK AT THE GENERAL STILWELL COMMUNITY CENTER.
“Speed limit’s thirty here, Wish.”
Wish slowed down. “I know. Don’t forget, I’m taking an Administration of Justice course here. Just started last week.”
Another sign said, WELCOME U.S. ARMY ORD MILITARY COMMUNITY.
“It’s a strange association,” Paul said, “a college and the military. I’ll never think of Fort Ord as anything but a base. Fifteen years ago Seaside and Marina were military towns. Monterey depended on the soldiers. Saturday night at the movies, every skull had a buzz cut.”
“Well, they had this huge military reservation, and all these buildings, and when the military mostly left, they had to do something. I think it’s great.”
They passed a thrift shop, and a few signs praising the Otters, apparently the university’s athletic alter ego. A drab beige corrugated metal building had another sign announcing that it was a “future complex.” All around, as they continued along the road into the school, noisy orange machines, expansive dirt lots, dirt piles, holes, and orange fencing hinted at an inscrutable future. A construction guy was lying in the back of his pickup truck on a folding lounger, eyes closed, taking in a little sun on his break. It was cool, though, with fog and ocean never far away along this stretch of coast.
They drove by a field of yellow flowers and trees, striped with pitted strips of asphalt that ended arbitrarily after a few hundred feet. What looked like native coastal scrub stretched east into the far flat distance except for the dirt roads snaking through it. A sign read NO TRESPASSING, and Paul wondered how much live ammo was still out there. He pictured young men and women in uniform, the rumble of tanks, sand flying.
A concrete wall studded with graffiti art celebrated multiculturalism along with FIELD ARTILLERY, and another sign warned visitors to watch out for wildlife. A few girls in shorts walked in a pack toward one of the new buildings, a science center.
“Thousands of military people have passed through here, getting physically and mentally ready to go to war,” Paul said. “Now there are these green kids, ready for just about anything else. It’s a little like fresh skin growing over a wound.”
Weeds popped the asphalt in vast, empty parking lots. They passed by an abandoned guardhouse, and Paul had to look twice at where a faux window had been painted, from which a painted sentinel, wearing a wide-brimmed, World War I-style khaki hat, smiled out.
Wish inclined his head toward the painted guard. “He’s the ghost of military guys past.”
These students were operating in the midst of an ongoing military attitude. Although the place had the quiet of desuetude, something new and vibrant was sending tendrils here and there, as bright bikes whizzed by and a student waved and shouted at a friend. “Is there any competition between the remains of the military here and the university?” Paul asked.
Wish shook his head. “I haven’t noticed any. I would bet most of the military people like what’s happening here. There’s no more shooting or scrambling through the brush. They’re all techies and administrators. Look, this is the building my class is in.”
“Looks like a circus tent.” The renovated buildings wore coats of raspberry, terra-cotta, yellow ochre, and teal on different sections, a fanatically modern architect’s ideal. Stucco covered in strange paint combos apparently meant campus; gray or white clapboard meant military.
Paul decided he liked the place. Tall dunes across Highway 1 hid the ocean, but the air held a sea zest, and the clash of colors, architecture, and cultures suited him.
In spite of Wish’s knowledge of the campus, they had a hard time finding the administrative hub. The purpose of some of the buildings remained unknowable. They asked two sets of people before locating a place with a map of the campus. Then, after picking up a parking permit, they set out to find Alex Zhukovsky.
They parked near a temporary building that housed classes in Russian along with several other languages. As they walked over, Paul noticed how quiet the place was. Bugs chittered in the fields around, and almost no cars were parked in the barren lots.
Zhukovsky’s office was located in front. He must have seen them coming, because he met them at the main door, which he unlocked.
Deano’s report hadn’t described him, except to say he taught languages. Zhukovsky was a little younger and shorter than Paul, late thirties, with red-rimmed eyes in a soft face marked by a fine, straight nose and an unhappy expression. He had the well-trimmed beard of a stereotypical academic and the belly of a sedentary type, but might be fitter than he looked. The brown hair was already receding into a V. He wore a white dress shirt rolled up at the sleeves, belted jeans, a big emerald ring on his left pinky.
They introduced themselves and exchanged business cards, and he nodded impatiently. Instead of inviting them inside, he pulled the door shut behind him, saying, “Follow me. Let’s not waste time sitting around inside.”
The three set off, turning up the hill nearby. Zhukovsky’s pace was relentless, no trouble but faster than suited decent conversation. They didn’t have far to go. He stopped at the student center, and motioned toward the outside tables. “It’s better here in the sunshine,” he said. “A teacher spends too much time indoors.”
Once they sat down, Zhukovsky’s foot started tapping. He kept raising and lowering his shoulders, a strange tic. He was hyper, probably. How did he get through his classes? In his own youth Paul had found it unbearable to be stuck at a desk with a soothing voice droning somewhere in the distance, the equivalent of a warm summer day in a flower field, insects buzzing, sun shining, bored out of his skull and sleepy into infinity.
Of course, the instructor could pace around in front, even if he was in the cage, too. And maybe Zhukovsky’s fidgeting was a function of nerves. Paul studied him through his sunglasses and decided to be friendly.
“Good of you to see us,” he said. Finally, he added silently. Zhukovsky had stalled Paul for the past two weeks, refusing to meet with him. “I realize you’ve been interviewed before by someone from the Pohlmann firm.”
“Deano, he called himself,” Zhukovsky said with a lifted Elvis lip.
“We’re not like him,” Wish put in hastily, starting up a tiny recorder.
Deano stands alone, Paul thought, king of fools. He was looking forward to running into Deano soon.
“I don’t have much time. I teach a Saturday afternoon class for the dedicated and the crazy. I wouldn’t have talked to you again. But I have a demand.”
“Ms. Reilly-remember her? She’s the attorney for Stefan Wyatt and has a few more questions.”
“Speaking of crazy, she is if she thinks she’ll get Stefan Wyatt off.” He said “Stefan” with the accent on the second syllable, and Paul remembered that Wyatt’s mother was Polish. Zhukovsky spoke good old American English himself. “First, I tell you what I want. Then, maybe I’ll answer some questions.”
“Okay,” Paul said. He crossed his legs and looked amenable.
“I want my father’s bones back. My father, Constantin Zhukovsky.”
Paul and Wish exchanged looks.
“Tell me more,” Paul said.
“I received my father’s remains a couple of weeks ago, and had buried him once. This time the remains were cremated. You can understand why.” Paul did understand. The bones had been busy, getting dug up, riding around in back seats, and pawed over by police forensics technicians. “But now I find out two bones were withheld. Do you understand how infuriating this is? How disrespectful?” He jabbed a thick finger into Paul’s chest, never a good idea, saying, “I’ve been informed by the D.A.’s office that your people have them.”
Paul held up his hands, to show there were no bones there, but he was aching to jab back, show Zhukovsky what a real jab felt like.
“I want to know why, and I want to know where the hell you are keeping them.”
When Paul said nothing, he said more reasonably, “I have a right to know, don’t I? He was my father.”
“They were considered evidence. The remaining bones are in Sacramento being tested by our expert, a forensic scientist, Ginger Hirabayashi, and they’ll be released once the trial is over.”
“Tested? What? Why? You have no right! The D.A. never tested my father’s bones. They have nothing to do with my sister’s murder. I want all testing discontinued immediately. Tell your boss I’ll sue her if I don’t get them back within a week.” He folded his arms, glaring.
“I’ll get back to you. I’m a mere functionary in such matters.”
“Do that,” Zhukovsky demanded. “I don’t think you people fully comprehend what I’ve been going through. My sister is dead, murdered. It’s the worst thing I can remember, worse than losing my father. At least he lived his full life. Now she’s a spectacle, remembered for all the wrong reasons, as the victim of a ghoulish crime.” He had Stalin’s black eyebrows, which ruined an otherwise rather pleasant face. “It’s a shock I will never get over, and then, on top of it, this never-ending thing with my father…”
“My turn, now? I’m wondering,” Paul said, “how close were you and your sister, Christina?”
“She was older, and, growing up, we weren’t close. We became closer as we reached adulthood.”
“Were you close enough to know her lovers?” Paul asked.
The foot-tapping stopped abruptly. The shoulders hesitated. This was not a question to ask a brother, Zhukovsky’s disapproving face said. “What?”
“Who she was sleeping with,” Wish said helpfully.
“Christina didn’t confide in me in that way,” Alex Zhukovsky said, gathering himself, his agitation showing itself in the rapid eye movements, the shifting of weight, the folding of a napkin. He didn’t like this.
“Oh, you probably knew.” Wish seemed to be studying the professor. “Even if she didn’t tell you.”
Zhukovsky said nothing.
Paul flipped through his notebook. “Witnesses say she was having a relationship with a man named Sergey Krilov.”
“What witnesses?” The thought of witnesses clearly jarred the professor.
“You know Krilov?”
“I know about him,” he admitted. “You’re right. They had a relationship for a while. She ended it.”
“Was that the day of the conference, or before it?”
“What do you know about that?”
“We know you were there and so was she, along with a bunch of Russian visitors. She was seen arguing with Krilov.”
“I believe they broke up before the conference. That day he wanted to reconcile. She didn’t. That’s all that happened.”
Paul felt like a seal breaking through the ice to the surface, finally able to take a breath. Krilov excited him. “I’ve been looking into Krilov’s background and have learned a few things.”
“Really?” All the pretend indifference in the world couldn’t disguise Zhukovsky’s intense interest in exactly what Paul had learned.
“Yeah, you know, information’s cheap these days. Anyone can access the Web for the price of coffee in a Styrofoam cup.” He waited for Zhukovsky to beg him. He needed the guy engaged at this point, and he wasn’t going to let him ice up again.
“What did you learn?” Zhukovsky asked, unable to escape the plan.
Paul smiled to himself. “He’s from a family of formerly wealthy Russians who hit the skids when the Soviet Union busted up. He’s heavily into politics there, and holds some unusual views, such as, much as he hated the Soviet Union, he hates the current regime more. He hangs with radicals who want to throw out the president and restore a kind of prerevolutionary hierarchy over there. How involved was your sister?”
“My sister-okay, let me tell you the truth about her. She never got over losing our mother and father. She put herself to sleep reading an old book of fairy tales Papa used to read her at night. She never married. She had friends, but her natural reserve kept her from getting really close to people. Her life was-empty, sad. Then this Russian pops up out of nowhere, whispering in her ear, telling her she’s beautiful, unique, consequential. Well, can you blame her for wanting to believe him? He gave her life the meaning she needed. She fell in love with him and with the dream of a meaningful existence he offered.”
“Did she buy his politics?”
“She wasn’t mixed up in any cockeyed, lunatic, jug-headed plans to overthrow the Russian government, if that’s what you’re implying!”
Whew. Hit a nerve there, Paul thought. So, she had been involved somehow. To give himself a further chance to ponder Alex’s overreaction, and Alex a chance to use a napkin to wipe sweat from his forehead, he scribbled in his notebook. “Is Krilov the violent type?”
“Don’t try to pin my sister’s death on Sergey Krilov. Believe me, I wish it had been him-but your client’s blood was in her apartment! Stefan Wyatt killed her.”
Paul wanted to know why Alex would prefer that the killer be Krilov and not Stefan, but the purple map springing up on Zhukovsky’s forehead suggested he move on. Zhukovsky would clam up again if Paul wasn’t careful. He was feeling guilty about something. A connection with Stefan he regretted?
“You and your sister grew up here in the Monterey area?” Paul asked.
Breathing hard, still upset, the professor said brusquely, “Yes. Our father owned a pastry shop on Alvarado Street. Our mother died when my sister and I were children.”
“Was Christina a handful growing up? Anything unusual about her?”
“Everything. While her girlfriends were trading lipsticks, baring their belly buttons, and sleeping around, she was at the library reading. After college, she worked at a preschool and as a recreation counselor for elderly people. Later, she got a job here at the university.”
“You worked together?”
“No. There is a big gulf between administration and faculty at most colleges.”
“What was her title?”
“Public Affairs Officer. She was in charge of organizing special occasions on the campus.”
Low on the totem, Paul thought, for such an accomplished woman. And given her fancy apartment, there must have been family money behind her. He made a mental note. “And you’re on the Russian faculty?”
“I am the Russian faculty. I also teach French and German. Unfortunately, nobody around here wants to study anything but Spanish.”
“Did your sister speak Russian, too?”
“Yes.”
“Impressive,” Paul said. “I never learned a foreign language.”
“Why should you? You live in this vast land that you consider the center of civilization, and you simply make foreigners learn English. Most of my students are just filling in time or need to have a smattering of language to read technical articles.”
“But Christina wasn’t like that, was she? She left her work to travel for several months early this year, and nobody could tell me where she went. That’s a long time to be living out of a suitcase, isn’t it?”
“She was seeing the world,” Zhukovsky said shortly. “She was unmarried and unencumbered. Why shouldn’t she?”
“Just going from hotel to hotel? I mean, her coworkers didn’t even get postcards.”
“She kept in touch with me. She had her own money and she wanted to travel.”
“Yes, that would be expensive,” Paul said. “I suppose your father left you and Christina something.”
“That’s not your business.”
“The probate is a public record,” Paul said. “Your father seems to have done very well with his pastry business.”
Zhukovsky scratched behind his ear, saying, “Deano didn’t bother me with personal questions.”
Wish, who had listened patiently, said, “We kind of got that from his report.”
“What was she doing during those months she disappeared?” Paul said. “I’m trying to figure her out. She’s an enigma.” He had an idea about where Christina Zhukovsky had spent those missing months, and he would bet Zhukovsky knew.
“Having fun. I got postcards from all over.” A faint red shadow appeared on his neck as he spoke.
Zhukovsky was a liar. But Paul had figured that before even meeting him.
“You know,” Paul said, “I have a sister. And she drives me nuts, by the way, but if she disappeared for a month, much less several months, even I would send a posse out to find her.” He exaggerated. He would wait as long as he could. She could be extremely irritating.
“I wasn’t worried. She could take care of herself.” He must have realized how foolish that sounded now because he added, “Of course I would have worried if she hadn’t prepared me for a long absence. Is your assistant taping me?”
“Yes.”
“Tell him to stop.” Paul nodded and Wish turned off the recorder and got out his notepad.
“I understand that before she died, your sister helped organize an important conference on Russian international relations here. Word is,” Paul said, “Cal State Monterey as a whole has benefited in terms of prestige and recognition from the conference she set up.”
“True,” Zhukovsky said. “Christina was very enthusiastic about it. She worked hard to get some big names here.”
“What was the subject of the conference?”
Zhukovsky said a long Russian phrase, then, apparently translating, “Post-Communist Russia and the Twenty-first Century.”
“Did either of you ever live in Russia?” Wish asked.
“No.”
“Did you visit there?”
“What do you think? I am a Russian professor! I studied for a year at a language institute in Moscow.”
“Right,” Wish said, and wrote that down.
“But your father came from Russia?” Paul asked, taking over again.
“Yes, long ago.”
“Whereabouts?”
“St. Petersburg.”
“When did he come to this country?”
“In the 1920s.” A soft pink crawled up Zhukovsky’s neck. “He came from Russia when he was very young.”
“How young?”
“Oh, twenty-four or -five.”
“How did he end up in Monterey?”
“After the turn of the century, there was quite a Russian immigration to San Francisco and south to the Monterey Peninsula. He came over with family friends.”
“Not with his parents?”
“They died in the revolution.” His body, until then managing a slow tap of agitation, practically turned inside out as he decided to find himself a better position on the wire chair, failed, and stood up.
“He was a good man, my father,” Zhukovsky said firmly. He began pacing the deck, hands in his pockets. “Sociable, well liked. Loved to talk. He could make friends with anyone.” A fleeting nostalgic smile died on his face. “My parents had a happy marriage,” he went on, tacking in another direction. “After Mother died in 1971, Papa would go to that cemetery. Visit her. He got to know the workers over there. They had their children late in life. Christina was born in 1960 and I was born in 1964.”
Paul could see Zhukovsky enjoyed talking about his family history, but he wasn’t the only one having problems figuring out how Papa Zhukovsky related to their present-day murder, other than the fact that his grave offered a convenient receptacle for the victim. He wondered, as he had before, if there had been some kind of symbolism in the daughter ending up buried with her father.
Nina’s client claimed Alex had something to do with it. He was a logical suspect, considering he knew both of the dead people and had the strongest emotional connection to them, but what kind of a symbol might he mean by the gesture? Paul had thought about it several times, and discussed it with Nina, but neither of them had the slightest idea.
He had lied about Christina, saying he had no idea where she had gone when she took a leave from the university early this year. Why? A normal instinct to keep private things private?
“Getting back to this conference,” Paul said, “how many of the participants did you know before they came?”
“These were people from all over the world. Christina knew many of the participants. I knew a few.”
“So she did have extensive contacts with the Russian community and with Russia?”
“She was involved locally,” the professor said. “We were raised in the American Russian Orthodox Church and have many close ties there. She found people through our church, which is a gathering place for many Russian nationals, and through our cultural association.”
“I never know what people mean when they say that. What do these organizations do exactly?”
“The main one that’s still active in this area is the Russian Alliance. They raise money for good causes. They allow others with similar heritage to meet and perhaps practice some old traditions.”
He was leaning against the railing, and had taken up thrumming with his right hand. Noticing, he put it in his pocket, took it out again, checked his watch, and sat back down in his chair.
Silence fell. Paul had asked about everything but the crucial thing, and he still wasn’t sure how to approach it. He took off his sunglasses and squinted out at the windswept sea plain.
Zhukovsky, no fool himself, was waiting anxiously for Paul to get down to it. He knew what Stefan had told Nina and Paul. Deano had leaked all that months before.
“Professor Zhukovsky, you know that Mr. Wyatt was arrested after digging up the remains of your father,” Paul finally said.
“He admits that? He’s going to admit that in court? I thought…”
“He’s not going to testify, I believe,” Paul said.
“Why did he kill Christina? Why? I’ve asked myself that over and over. It’s crazy. How did he know her? Has he told you that?”
“He pled innocent to the murder of your sister. But he admits digging up the grave of your father.”
“It’s all the same,” Zhukovsky said with disgust. “I’m sick of this. You’re not going to tell me anything, I understand. So what else do you want to know? Let’s get this over with.”
“On that Saturday night, April twelfth and into the morning of the thirteenth, the night the police discovered your sister’s body, how did they know you were related to the man buried in the cemetery?”
“I signed the logbook at the cemetery when my father was buried. I suppose they got my name from that.”
“And why did you hire Mr. Wyatt to dig up the bones of your father?”
Alex Zhukovsky drew himself up. All the restive tapping of his fingers on his knee, the twitching of his foot, stopped. His neck-ah, his neck had taken on the hue of a tequila sunrise, heavy on the grenadine.
“As I’ve told the police and said in a deposition, I didn’t. Is that why you came? To drag me into this? Because you don’t want to do that.”
“Stefan Wyatt collected your father’s bones,” Paul said. “That’s a fact.” He consulted his notes. “He says you hired him.”
“Yes! Yes! He says that! He’s a liar! Does he say I hired him to kill Christina? Because I’ll kill him if he has the audacity to suggest such a thing!”
“Calm down, Professor. He only claims that you hired him to get the bones.”
Zhukovsky’s eyebrows beetled into one. “I didn’t. And don’t try to claim I did or I’ll sue. Tell your boss that. I would never hurt my sister.”
“But why bury her in your father’s grave?” Paul asked. “That’s the thing that keeps me awake at night. There were other graves nearer the street. So why that one? Was he involved in something special, something important, your father, Constantin Zhukovsky?”
“My father was no one, an entirely ordinary man. A baker, for God’s sake! Let him rest in peace!” The flush test had stopped working. Zhukovsky was far too excited by now.
“He had been dead for twenty-five years,” Paul persisted. “Something or someone made Mr. Wyatt go dig him up. Obviously, there was a point to the exercise. Unless Wyatt’s just nuts. Do you think he’s nuts?”
“I don’t know the man.”
“You never met him?”
“Never. I saw him brought into court, that’s it.”
“No theory about why he would dig up your father, then.”
In keeping with his professorial disposition, Zhukovsky could not resist the opportunity to give his sister’s death a spin. Paul hoped something in what he said would give them insight into his own motives, which remained tantalizingly elusive. “Christina must have known Wyatt, and took him along when she visited our parents’ graves. She always brought cut roses. Sometimes, she cried.”
Thus he implied that Stefan might have been his sister’s secret lover, Paul supposed.
“And he,” Alex Zhukovsky, swept away with his own imagination, went on with alacrity, “that bastard, thought of the grave when he had killed her. And then possibly, while burying my sister’s body, when he came upon the casket of my father, he looked inside, saw the medal worn by my father upon his burial, grabbed it, and grabbed the-rest without thinking.”
These convolutions didn’t seem to convince even the professor, and yet he seemed sincerely puzzled about something, to be struggling to explain the inexplicable. Part lies, part truth, Paul thought, but he couldn’t sort it out. Who was lying, Zhukovsky or Stefan?
“Yes, the medal, I wanted to ask you about that,” Paul said.
“It was my father’s. What else is there to say?”
“What was it?”
He squirmed. “A military honor from the early part of the twentieth century.”
“You’re an expert in Russian history, correct?”
“I am.”
No expert in modest manners, however, Paul noted. “You know your military history, no doubt.”
“It’s all military history in Russia.”
“You weren’t curious enough to do some research on this medal?”
“During this last year I’ve learned it’s called the Order of Saint George, First Class. It’s solid gold with precious inlays, an original historic medal, with some special features. A Carmel antiques expert appraised it for several thousand dollars. Bad news for your client. I understand its theft constitutes a separate felony.
“My father wanted to be buried wearing it on a sash across his shoulder. He used to say he got it as a kind of joke when he was little for fighting with his teachers. I never knew it was valuable.”
“Was your father in the military? Involved in the revolution in 1917, maybe?”
“No.”
“Funny how things happened there,” Paul said. The naïveté of the comment was rewarded with another snarl. This professor was the fiery sort of intellectual. Paul had no use for intellectuals these days. They made lousy lovers who wouldn’t live with you. “Wouldn’t the poor old tsar be turning in his grave, seeing how things have turned out for the country that murdered him to make a revolution,” he went on, hoping to stoke the fire.
“The country did not murder the tsar! The tsar and his family were assassinated by Bolshevik elements.”
“I understand they finally dug up the grave of the Romanovs in 1991,” Paul went on, “but two of the bodies were missing. It’s a strange parallel.”
Zhukovsky made a sound, guttural, untranslatable, but plainly repelled by his comment. Paul had just been riffing, and had never intended to turn the professor off.
“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to disrespect your father. It’s just-you were talking about the second burial-and the two missing bones.”
Zhukovsky had had enough. “You have my card,” he said. “I want the remains of my father delivered to me care of that address within one week. I’m dead serious about this.”
“He lies, left, right, and center,” Paul said. As Wish dodged the curbs, driving them back to Carmel, Paul scribbled. “Let’s assume he hired Stefan to dig up the grave, but not to kill his sister. Question is, why? For the medal? It’s valuable, and not doing the old man any good under six feet. If Zhukovsky wanted that so badly, then why hire Stefan Wyatt to take his father’s remains as well?”
“For a satanic ritual,” Wish guessed. “Or, what about this? In Africa they grind up rhino horn for an aphrodisiac and sell it in the Far East…”
“The problem with your theory is, once he had the bones back from the cops, he cremated them. We’ll check that, but I believe him on that score. I’ll grant you, maybe the old man had a horn on his nose no one’s talking about that’s all ground up…”
“You’re makin’ fun of me.”
“Not at all. It makes as much sense as anything I can think up.” Paul thought some more, then said, “Maybe Zhukovsky has some genetic issue to explore that he doesn’t want anyone to suspect. One of those diseases that hits in middle age? Like we were all worried Arlo Guthrie might get.”
“Who?”
“Son of Woody?” Paul stared at Wish, who continued to relay incomprehension. How could he not know these cultural icons? Was Paul, twenty years older, so removed from the current set of urban legends? “Huntington’s chorea. Or Parkinson’s? I’m not sure which diseases they can find through genetic testing, but I’m making an educated first guess that’s what he wanted to find out.”
“Then why doesn’t the professor just test his own blood?” Wish asked, showing one of his rare flashes of intelligence.
“Good point,” Paul admitted.
“His father was dead in his grave for twenty-five years. So what’s the big rush?”
“Make a note for me to try to obtain Constantin Zhukovsky’s medical records. Alex’s will be completely off limits. I want you to Google the Web tomorrow. Look for the Order of Saint George. Write up a report of whatever you can find out and leave it in the mailbox at the Pohlmann office. Nina will be working there Sunday night.”
“Check.”
“I want verification on what the medal is worth, who gets it, and why.”
“No sweat.”
“Now, the boyfriend, if that’s what he was. The man she spent a lot of time with at this conference.”
“Sergey…”
“Krilov. Use the ID software on my computer at the office and find out more. Do the same on Constantin Zhukovsky, the father. See if you can find out when he came to this country. Maybe you can find some immigration records. You can get old ship passenger lists on the Web these days. Ellis Island, the whole thing. Check some of the genealogy sites like Ancestry.com. Hell, see what you can find on the whole mother-loving family. Alex. Christina. Give that info to Nina, too. Let’s get a copy of the death certificate. Call the county and see what office you have to go to.”
“Sure.”
“I can’t believe Dean Trumbo didn’t do any of this work. This is nuts. She’s in the middle of trial, trying to incorporate this basic investigative information, tearing her hair out.” Paul clenched a fist.
“Didn’t Trumbo rent your office last year?”
“Yeah. Deano.”
“That’s the same face the professor made when he said that name.”
“Deano’s giving the P.I. profession a bad name, and I think it’s time I did something about it.”
“Talk to him?”
“Something like that,” Paul said.
“Whoa.”
“What happened to Christina when she left the good old U.S.A.? A brother is going to know this stuff,” Paul said absently. They passed the Del Monte exit, along the eucalyptus-covered grounds of the Naval Postgraduate School. To their right a neighborhood of not-too-spiffy frame houses led to the little strip of sand called Del Monte Beach, where Paul had once had a bachelor apartment on Surf Way.
“I’m gonna say-Russia.”
“My conclusion exactly.”
“With her boyfriend, Krilov.”
“Maybe that’s where she met him.”
“Playing house or playing politics?”
“That is the question.”
Wish adjusted his sunglasses. He said, “I’m getting smarter. I watch you. I’ll see if Christina’s passport was taken into evidence. So where do we eat? The deli at the Thunderbird Bookstore?”
“Take the next exit,” Paul commanded.
“But we’re miles from Carmel. This is Monterey!”
“Do it!”
Wish swung off Highway 1 at the Aguajito exit.
“Get to the right.”
Wish signaled and moved, setting off a chain reaction of traffic goofs that would be laughable if they weren’t so damn sad. These people should put down their mobile phones, quit slopping food around their mouths, quit plucking their eyebrows, and give the open road its due respect, Paul thought.
“Now, as soon as we cross this intersection, there’s a tiny entrance on the right. Turn there.” Paul scrutinized the row of greenery screening a narrow driveway. “Hard right!”
Wish turned on his blinker and made the turn, squeaking through a narrow, gated entrance. “Cementerio El Encinal,” he read.
“Let’s take some photos for Nina. Then we’ll eat.”