Chapter 39
Morris brought Parker with him to his hastily arranged meeting at Little Kiev. The sign on the door claimed that the Russian restaurant was closed and didn’t open until five on Sundays, but that didn’t stop two of Lebed’s thick-necked men from letting Morris in after he knocked. Morris recognized one of the men from the photos Polk had taken at the Hollywood Hills Casino. That was the one who grunted at Morris, demanding to pat him down. When the thug took a step toward him, Parker began growling.
“I don’t think he likes you,” Morris said.
The Ukrainian stopped in his tracks as he gave Parker a cautious look. He asked Morris in a series of barely decipherable grunts if he was carrying.
“Nope.”
The thug nodded toward the briefcase Morris was carrying, and Morris opened it to show there were no guns inside.
The Ukrainian looked at his partner, who shrugged in a way to say that looking inside the briefcase was enough, and it wasn’t worth getting bitten in the ass in order to check Morris more carefully. The Ukrainian gave Morris a menacing scowl and lifted his cheap suit jacket enough to reveal a holstered Sig Sauer 9mm, and in more barely decipherable grunts warned him not to try anything stupid.
“I’ll be on my best behavior,” Morris promised.
With the warning delivered, they escorted Morris through the restaurant and brought him to a private dining room where Pavlo Lebed sat with several meat dishes and half a bottle of vodka sitting in front of him. Morris wondered if that was all these Ukrainian gangsters did during their downtime. Eat.
Lebed looked even more like a bull in real life than he did in Polk’s photos. He gave Parker a half-lidded stare before turning those nearly dead eyes toward Morris.
“You brought along muscle,” Lebed said, his voice surprisingly a light tenor with very little accent. Given his thick, square body, Morris had been expecting a deeper bass than what he’d heard from his men.
“Nah, just taking him along for the exercise.”
“Good, because he don’t look so tough.”
Morris was going to remark that the Ukrainian mob boss didn’t sound so tough, but he bit his tongue, and took a seat on Lebed’s right while holding a short leash on Parker so the dog couldn’t bull his way over to Lebed.
“You haven’t seen him in action,” Morris said.
Lebed smiled thinly, although his eyes remained unchanged. He cut a piece of lamb from one of his plates and held it out to the bull terrier. The dog’s tail wagged slowly, and Morris relented and let out more of the leash so that the bull terrier could grab the food. While Parker chewed on the piece of lamb, Lebed thumped the dog loudly several times on the side.
“Not so tough,” Lebed said.
Morris shook his head at Parker. “Traitor,” he said. The bull terrier sheepishly came back over to him and sat down.
The thin smile Lebed had showed faded, and his eyes took on a deadlier look.
“I don’t like being threatened,” he said.
In order to arrange this meeting, Morris had a message delivered to Lebed: Meet me this afternoon, or MBI will be using all of our resources to put you in prison.
“It wasn’t an idle threat,” Morris said. “Only what I expected to do. I want you to take me to Chuck Macon.”
“Why?”
Morris took several crime-scene photos from his briefcase and tossed them in front of Lebed. The Ukrainian picked them up, and as he made sense of what he was looking at, a muscle twitched briefly along his jaw.
“You believe Macon could’ve done this?” he asked, his tenor voice a shade duller than earlier.
“Don’t you recognize the dead girl on the left?”
Lebed shook his head.
“Mia Dickerson.”
It took Lebed a moment to recognize the name. There was no faking his reaction, and it all but told Morris that if Macon committed these murders, he did it on his own and without the Ukrainian knowing about it.
Lebed handed the photos back to Morris. “When did this happen?” he asked.
“Last night.”
Lebed nodded in an almost imperceptible way, as if confirming a thought he had. “Chuck Macon didn’t do this,” he said.
“Why is that?”
“By last night he was gone.”
“What do you mean, gone? From LA?”
Lebed made a backhanded dismissive gesture like he was swatting lazily at a fly. “You got wax in your ears? Gone as in gone.”
“Ashes to ashes, huh?”
“Your words, not mine.” A shrewd look sparkled in Lebed’s eyes. He winked at Morris. “This is what I heard from a reliable source, whose name right now eludes me.”
“That’s it? No proof you can give me?”
“That’s it. He didn’t do this. If he did, I’d have my men find him and bring him to you in pieces.” A thought occurred to Lebed, and he waved a thick, sausage-like index finger at Morris. “And don’t you think I had anything to do with this shit. I’m a businessman. I don’t do nothing unless I can make a profit from it. What profit can I make from something like this?”
“None that I can think of,” Morris admitted.
“That’s right. So we’re settled? You trust what I’ve told you and you won’t make any more threats?”
Morris certainly didn’t trust Lebed. What he did trust was his ability to read people and know when he was being lied to, even by a vicious, sociopathic Ukrainian mob boss. While an unmistakable undercurrent of violence had been present in Lebed’s eyes, his expression had otherwise been inscrutable. Two cracks had shown through. The first had been a glimmer of surprise when he learned about Mia Dickerson being one of the four dead girls in the crime-scene photos. The other had been a brief glimpse of certainty regarding Macon already being dead when those girls were killed.
“You’ve convinced me,” Morris admitted. “For now.”
“Good.” Lebed smiled then. He might’ve been a ruthless gangster, but from the looks of his smile he took exceptional care of his teeth, better than Morris did his own. He cut another piece of lamb and held it out to Parker, who wagged his tail more enthusiastically this time. Morris let go of enough of the leash to let Parker take the meat.
“Not so good for muscle,” Lebed noted. “Too easily corrupted.”
“You found his weak spot,” Morris noted with a sigh.
“Very true,” Lebed said, grinning. “My specialty.” The mob boss barked out something in Russian or Ukrainian, Morris wasn’t sure which. His two thugs who must’ve been waiting right outside, because they quickly they came into the room. Lebed gave them another order in whatever language they spoke, and his hired men escorted Morris and Parker out of the restaurant. Once he was outside and in the bright LA sunshine, he called Doug Gilman and told him that Chuck Macon wasn’t their killer.
“That was fast,” Gilman said. “Any chance you’re wrong about that?”
“None.”
“That’s too bad,” Gilman said, his disappointment evident. “You had me hoping we’d be able to clear this up quickly. So what now?”
“I’m not sure. Let’s meet at MBI in two hours and figure it out.”
* * *
Morris called Felger and Bogle, interrupting their Sunday afternoons, and they both agreed to meet up at the MBI office without any complaints. When he called Lemmon, his investigator thanked him.
“Corrine is about to pick my next task from her dreaded ‘honey-do’ list,” Lemmon said. “I’ve got a sneaking suspicion it’s going to be power-washing the deck. Yeah, I think I’d rather come in.”
Polk, though, was another matter.
“I’m at the Dodgers game,” he grumbled. “I was planning to have some cold ones and ribs afterwards with buddies.”
Morris heard the ball game in the background. A large groan had just risen up from the crowd. Something bad had happened to the home team.
“You’ve got buddies?”
“Well, yeah, a few, but that’s only because they don’t know me well enough yet. What’s so urgent?”
“We’ve got four dead girls who died badly last night in Malibu. LA is taking jurisdiction, and the mayor’s office wants us to take the lead.”
“Is there a way not to die badly?”
“Just about any other way would be better than what happened to these girls.”
“I thought we weren’t taking on any more murder investigations?”
“This one’s different.”
“Why?”
“Mia Dickerson was one of the victims. The other three were friends of hers.”
“Jesus.” The connection went mostly quiet for a long moment, with only some sporadic jeers from the crowd coming through. Morris figured things were not going well for the Dodgers. When Polk spoke next, his voice sounded as if his throat had tightened with emotion. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”
“Yeah, I figured as much.”
“That sonofabitch Macon killed them.”
“That was my first thought, but he’s not our guy. It’s not Lebed, either. It looks like we’ve got a serial killer. A really nasty one. Maybe the same guy who killed the newlywed couple in San Luis Obispo last week.”
“There hasn’t been much in the news about that couple,” Polk said.
“There hasn’t,” Morris agreed. “I’m going to call SLOPD when I get back to the office. The FBI profiler on these girls’ murders is also going to be contacting them.”
Polk chewed on that for a moment. “Awfully big coincidence that a serial killer would target Mia Dickerson a day after Macon is sent packing.”
“It’s a funny world sometimes.”
“Yeah, but I’m not much in the mood for laughing right now. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“I can’t ask for more than that,” Morris said.