The next morning, Knolls and McCartin decide to celebrate with a late breakfast at Howard’s Café, which is a few miles west of downtown in the corner of a Pico Union strip mall lined with Salvadoran businesses. Howard’s, which has a sign in front advertising CHINESE & AMERICAN FOOD, is jammed with cops, bus drivers, and city workers who dine on eggs and fried rice and other unorthodox combinations. The detectives and Krumer order the Howard’s Special No. 8, a heaping plate of barbecued pork and fried rice for $5.95.
“I never met Jews like Serge and Mischa before,” McCartin tells Knolls and Krumer, between mouthfuls. “I never met Jews who were crooks and thugs like this. Growing up in New York, all the Jews I ever met were doctors and lawyers.”
Krumer attended law school but grew disillusioned and joined the police force instead of studying for the bar. The parents of his academy classmates were proud to have a son who worked as a cop, but in a Jewish family, he grumbles, a cop is a disappointment.
“Not in an Irish family,” McCartin says, laughing.
After breakfast, they pile into McCartin’s Malibu and he heads west on the Santa Monica Freeway, negotiating the side streets of Westwood and pulling up in front of a luxurious Wilshire Boulevard high-rise. According to the FBI, a madam named Svetlana lives here, but the detectives decide to start with the manager. Knolls warns McCartin not to intimidate her by broaching the subject of prostitution right away. He plans to introduce the subject later in the interview, delicately.
After the manager ferries them into her office, Knolls says, “We’d like to ask you a few questions about some Russian tenants.”
“Well,” the manager says, “we had a group of Russian hookers here a little while back.”
McCartin flashes Knolls a barely perceptible smile.
“We had to throw them out at the end of last year,” the manager says. “They had a big argument on the fifteenth floor and a neighbor complained. Some Russian guy threatened the neighbor with a gun.”
Knolls shows her a picture of Mher.
“That’s him,” she says immediately. “It’s totally him. I had several face-to-face conversations with him.”
Svetlana moved months ago, the manager says, and she does not have her forwarding address. Knolls shows her pictures of the Ukrainian girls, but she cannot identify them. The hookers used to spend their days by the pool, she says, so after the interview Knolls declares with mock gravity that he must be meticulous and visit the pool to check for Ukrainian “dollies” lounging in their bikinis. The detectives, however, are disappointed to find the pool deserted. In their dark suits, white shirts, and polished black shoes, they look anomalous and awkward standing beside the water in the bright sunshine.
This morning, outside Howard’s Café, the air was still and oppressive and the smog so thick the sky was an adobe-colored vault. But in Westwood the ocean breezes blow away the smog and temper the harsh summer sun. Thinned of pollutants, the light is radiant here, the sky neon blue, the shadows razor sharp. The flaming bougainvillea and pink oleander blossoms that frame the pool are strikingly vivid. After being holed up in the squad room the past few weeks, the detectives are in no hurry to return. So instead of driving back to RHD, they meander east along Wilshire Boulevard.
McCartin, who worked in West Los Angeles when he was a young patrolman, knows the area well and decides to show Knolls and Krumer the small mortuary where Marilyn Monroe’s body is interred. He drives through a narrow passageway off Wilshire, behind a soaring Westwood office tower, and parks beside a satiny strip of grass dotted with headstones. Walking to a marble wall across from the graveyard, he points: “There she is, boys.” On one of the crypts is a simple brass plaque: MARILYN MONROE 1926 1962.” A brass vase affixed to the vault is filled with fresh yellow and white daisies. Until the 1980s, her ex-husband Joe DiMaggio paid for fresh flowers to be delivered to the vase. Now only visitors uphold the tradition.
McCartin tells them that Marilyn Monroe’s first husband was a “copper” who worked on the LAPD shooting range. After the detectives spend a few minutes walking about the small cemetery, McCartin drives them east on Wilshire and then north through Beverly Hills, past some of the most expensive mansions in the country. He pulls up in front of an incongruously bucolic home, known as the Witches’ Cottage, which would be more appropriate in a Brothers Grimm fairy tale than in an exclusive Beverly Hills neighborhood. It features two steeply peaked gables, an undulating cedar-shake roof, leaded glass windows, rough-cut wooden shutters, and a lawn split by a moat. The cottage, built in 1921, was originally designed as a movie set and office for a production company and was later moved to this neighborhood.
As McCartin threads the Malibu through traffic he says, “Mher’s the key to this case. Either he was there, he did it, or he knows who did it. Let’s stop by his house.”
Last year, Mher and his wife claimed on their tax returns that they earned $148,000 operating a flower shop. But the address listed for the shop is in a residential neighborhood near Hollywood. Knolls and McCartin have no intention of contacting Mher yet; they simply want to verify that he lives here. McCartin drives down a shady street and parks near the house, which is bright yellow and looks as if it has recently been remodeled and landscaped. A new Mercedes without license plates is parked in the driveway.
When McCartin and Knolls walk to the front porch, trying to determine whether someone actually operates a flower business at the house, Mher suddenly opens the door. He wears a sleeveless undershirt and blue sweat pants and has a large gold cross around his neck. Knolls quickly introduces himself and McCartin and tells him they are investigating Luda’s murder.
“We’d like to have you come down to the station and look at some pictures,” he says casually.
“Sure,” Mher says. “When?”
“We’ll let you know,” Knolls says. “What’s the best number to reach you?”
Mher gives Knolls his cell phone number. He tells the detectives he rented Luda’s apartment and later sublet the unit to her. “When can I get my stuff?” he asks.
“You’re getting evicted,” McCartin says coldly.
Knolls suggests that Mher call the manager.
When they return to the car, Knolls tells McCartin, “You’re pretty damn blunt.” He imitates McCartin’s New York accent: “Ya gettin’ evicted, ya fuckin’ asshole.”
“Why pussyfoot around?” McCartin retorts, shrugging. “Anyway, my personality doesn’t matter. We’ll be booking his ass soon.”
The next Monday morning, Knolls and McCartin are in the middle of a debate: are Mher and Armenian Mike the same person?
“I think so,” Knolls says.
“I’m not convinced yet,” McCartin says.
“I think Serge knows it,” Knolls says. “He just won’t ID him because he doesn’t want to go to court.”
Krumer calls the Ukraine, interviews Luda’s mother again, and gleans another interesting detail about Serge: he owed Luda $15,000. McCartin suggests that the debt could have colored his interpretation of events. Later, the detectives drive to a bank near Luda’s apartment and meet with a representative from the county office that administers the estates of foreign nationals. Luda’s safety deposit box contains her passport and an envelope with twenty crisp $100 bills. Her savings account total is about $7,000, and $2,200 in cash was found in her apartment.
“In about four months, since she arrived in the U.S., she’s got $11,500 in cash,” Knolls tells McCartin. “That’s not counting the money Serge owes her and all the cash she sent back to the Ukraine. She was raking it in.”
The one constant in Luda’s uncertain life, the detectives know from Krumer’s interviews, was her love for her daughter, Anastasia. Knolls and McCartin want to make sure that the money is sent to Anastasia, not to Luda’s estranged husband. Anastasia lives with Luda’s mother and the husband sees her only occasionally.
The detectives ask the county worker how they can ensure that the cash will be sent to the daughter. She says the county is required to secure the money first and determine later how it is disbursed.
Knolls says, “I’m thinking of taking the cash into evidence.” This would circumvent the county worker.
“We’d get it eventually,” she says. “The husband may be entided to the money.”
“We’ll research him,” Knolls says. “Maybe they were never legally married.”
Back at the squad room, the detectives prepare for an interview with Anna, a friend of Luda’s from Kiev who now lives in Los Angeles. Luda’s mother provided Krumer with Anna’s number and he asked her to stop by.
McCartin is surprised that Anna is so straightforward. She immediately volunteers that Luda admitted to her that she was a prostitute, and once even turned a trick while Anna was visiting. “She asked me to wait on the balcony,” says Anna, who seems more titillated than embarrassed. “She said it would be very fast. And it was very fast. Ten minutes at most.”
McCartin asks her whether Luda ever confided that she was in danger.
“She told me she paid to bring some girls over here. She said she was receiving threats because of these girls. I went to Western Union with her once to send two thousand dollars to her family because she didn’t want to have cash around the house. She was frightened. I told her to move. But she thought these people were only after her money. Not her life.”
While she rattles off a few sentences in Russian to Krumer, Knolls enters the room. An FBI agent involved in a counterintelligence investigation has just called. He told Knolls he has a Russian asset—spy jargon for “informant” or “snitch”—who has heard something about the murder. Excited, Knolls interrupts the interview and motions for McCartin to follow him into a hallway. The FBI has just learned, Knolls says, that Boxer confessed to a friend: “I left Luda’s child without a mother.”
“That’s a hell of a tip,” McCartin says. He returns to the squad room, quickly concludes the interview, and then calls the agent, whom he knows, for more information. The asset told the FBI agent that Boxer is a Russian immigrant whose name is Alexander Gabay. He apparently confessed to a friend when he was drunk. Boxer’s girlfriend is Oxana, one of the girls Serge and Luda smuggled into the country. She did not want to work as a prostitute, so Luda might have pressured her to either turn tricks or pay the $6,000 for her passage. This dispute, the asset said, might have provided a motive to kill her.
McCartin and Knolls know that snitches are frequently unreliable, but the FBI’s asset sounds legitimate. And the detectives are familiar with Gabay: his photograph was among those that the FBI provided them of Russian underworld figures.
“If Gabay’s involved, why is Serge pointing to Armenian Mike?” Knolls says, more to himself than McCartin.
“Maybe he wants to protect him because they’re friends,” McCartin says. “Maybe he wants to eliminate his competition. Maybe he wants to do both.”
The detectives review the various suspects. Gabay, acting alone, could have killed Luda. Gabay might work for Mher, and the two of them might have killed her. If Armenian Mike is not Mher, Armenian Mike might have killed Luda because he believed she reneged on a business deal.
“The homicide game is not always about trying to identify a suspect,” Knolls tells Krumer. “Sometimes you first have to eliminate a suspect.”
Serge calls and tells the detectives that he has convinced three of the Ukrainian prostitutes to cooperate. The girls are afraid of police stations, Serge says, so he suggests the detectives wear plain clothes and conduct the interviews at a Starbucks near Luda’s apartment in Studio City. The detectives are elated when Serge informs them that one of the three is Olena, the girl he had said was raped by Armenian Mike. At the very least, they will determine today whether Mher is Armenian Mike.
On a blistering early September afternoon, the detectives climb into Knolls’s unmarked blue Caprice and drive to the Valley. The temperature hovers at 100, and the sun glares overhead in the burnt-out white sky. Knolls and his passengers are disgusted when they discover the air conditioner is broken. As the Hollywood Freeway snakes over the foothills, the temperature rises and the detectives curse the city for providing such an unreliable car. When they roll down the windows, a dusty, searing breeze blows through the car. As they drop into the Valley, the smog thickens and the temperature reaches a scorching 105 degrees. The car feels like the inside of a dryer.
They cool off in a deli, where they order pastrami sandwiches and strategize. They decide not to press Serge about Boxer’s alleged confession. They want to see whether he volunteers the information. Serge is attempting to curry favor by rustling up the girls, and they plan to fully exploit his services as an intermediary before they browbeat him about Boxer.
Outside Starbucks, Serge waits with three pretty young women, who slow traffic and turn heads with their skimpy, low-cut tops, skintight lycra pants, and high heels. Serge points to Knolls’s Hawaiian shirt, McCartin’s polo shirt, and their jeans. He grins and says, “So this is how cops dress when they don’t want to look like cops.”
Starbucks is too crowded and noisy for interviews, so Knolls walks across Ventura Boulevard to a sprawling, faux-rustic establishment called the Sportsmen’s Lodge. The name evokes the agricultural roots of the San Fernando Valley. During the 1930s, the actors Noah and Wallace Beery owned a trout farm on the site. After World War II, a new owner created a French-country-inn motif and filled the ponds with water lilies and swans. In its latest incarnation, the restaurant resembles a mountain lodge. The entrance features a huge archway hewn from thick trunks of timber, boulder pillars, and a splashing wooden water wheel, which appear somewhat farcical on this bustling city street.
The Lodge’s manager agrees to let Knolls and McCartin conduct the interviews in the dim, quiet bar, which will afford some privacy. The detectives intend to talk to each girl without Serge hovering over them, so McCartin positions Olena beside a stone fireplace, while Knolls chats with Serge and the others at a table in the corner of the bar.
Olena, who is eighteen, wears white jeans, high heels covered with silver sequins, and a black tube top that reveals so much cleavage the bartender frequently cranes his neck to catch a glimpse. Olena, who wears no makeup, has flawless porcelain skin, high cheekbones, and almond-shaped eyes of the palest blue. She speaks no English, so Krumer translates for McCartin. All the girls worked as secretaries in the Ukraine, she says, barely surviving on their pay of $50 a month. “There’s no hope in the Ukraine,” Olena says, sounding like a rehearsed but distracted narrator in a grim documentary. “Nobody has any money. Everyone’s afraid they won’t be able to pay their rent and will get thrown out of their apartment. Hunger is a problem. Two-thirds of the people I know have no jobs.”
A Ukrainian travel agency obtained the girls’ visas and passages to Mexico, where they met Serge. Then they boarded a trawler in Rosarita Beach with about twenty other Ukrainians—mostly couples—on the night of July 4. A good night for smuggling, Olena adds, because so many people were out on boats watching fireworks. In the United States, the women were forced to work as prostitutes to pay off their $6,000 passage. Luda sold Olena to a madam named Lana, who took away her passport and who lives in a high-rise on Wilshire Boulevard—the same apartment building the detectives visited earlier in the week, McCartin realizes.
After Olena had paid off half her debt, she slipped away and contacted Serge. He did not care that she had run off, because he had already been paid for the smuggling operation. He arranged for her to stay in a friend’s apartment, along with Helen, another of the missing Ukrainian girls.
Olena tells McCartin she was not angry with Luda for selling her to Lana. She even socialized with Luda occasionally. The arrangement, after all, was mutually beneficial, and it allowed her to stay in the United States. The Saturday before the murder, she attended Luda’s birthday party, she says, along with Mischa, Ivan, and Leyla.
“I genuinely want to help you,” Olena says, turning toward McCartin, looking earnest. “Luda had a young daughter. It’s not right that she was killed.”
At some point, Olena says, Lana found her cell phone number. She called to demand the rest of the money owed her and told Olena she was “playing with fire.” When Olena refused to pay, Lana’s associate—an Armenian man named Michael—called. He wanted to know if Olena and the other girl who disappeared were now working for Luda. Olena denied working for anyone else.
“He told me that if I didn’t come back and go to work he was going to have my whole family in Kiev killed.” She drops her chin and adds, so softly that Krumer cranes his neck to hear, “He threatened to rape me.”
“Did he rape you?” McCartin asks.
She puffs up her cheeks and slowly exhales. Krumer chats with her quietly for a few minutes in Russian. Although a decade older, he looks about the same age as Olena, and she seems to trust him. Finally, Olena admits that Michael did rape her. She closes her eyes for a moment and shudders. “I was afraid he would have me killed if I didn’t submit.”
McCartin shows her Mher’s picture. Now, at least, he will learn whether Armenian Mike is Mher. “Is this him?” McCartin asks.
She looks at Krumer and says, “Nyet.”
“Can you describe him?”
“Early to mid-thirties. Grew up in Russia. Been in the U.S. about ten years. Brown hair. Starting to grow bald.”
“Did he kill Luda?”
“I don’t know.” She pauses and then begins again, gesturing with both hands as Krumer translates. “If he did, maybe it was to show everyone that a new regime is taking over. He thought Luda might be hiding the other girls who disappeared. He thought they were working for her.”
“Were they?”
“I don’t know, but Michael and Lana thought so. Luda told me that Michael and Lana came to her apartment. They accused her of encouraging the girls to run away to work for her instead. They threatened her, told her not to get involved in the business. Serge told me that Luda called him one night, crying. They told her she had two days to leave Los Angeles. But at her birthday party she didn’t seem that afraid.”
McCartin shows Olena a driver’s license photograph of Alexander “Boxer” Gabay. He has a shaved head, eyes as cold as embedded marbles, and a thick, muscular neck. Olena explains that Boxer met Oxana—one of the Ukrainian women—at a party and they now live together.
“Oxana and Luda didn’t have a good relationship,” she says. “Oxana owed Luda money, but refused to pay.”
McCartin asks whether Boxer has a gun. She knows he has a gun, she says, but does not know what caliber.
After the interview, he escorts Olena back to Serge’s table. Then McCartin confers with Knolls, who questioned the other girls, and discovers that they confirm much of Olena’s story. They decided to talk to the detectives in the hopes that the police will help them gain legal residency. None can identify Mher, but they all know Boxer. They met him in San Diego, shortly after their boat docked. He is a good friend of Serge’s, they say.
After Serge and the girls drive off, the detectives gather in the bar’s courtyard, which is laced with ponds, winding paths, wooden bridges, and waterfalls. The night is sultry, with a full, luminous moon. Pine and cedar trees border the ponds, casting silver shadows on the water. The patio feels a world away from urban Los Angeles.
The detectives decide their two leading suspects are Armenian Mike and Gabay, with Mher a distant third.
“I’m going with Armenian Mike,” McCartin says. “We gotta track down Lana and squeeze her ass so she tells us where we can find him. For Gabay, I need a stronger motive.”
“Maybe he was pissed at Luda for turning his girlfriend into a prostitute,” Knolls says. “Maybe, like Olena says, he’s pissed because Luda keeps hitting on her for the rest of the money she owes her.”
“I don’t like it when a case goes in two directions,” McCartin says. “I had a South-Central case once that split into five different directions. We never cleared it.”
The following Tuesday morning, Knolls and Krumer arrive in the squad room and find McCartin at his desk, smiling. “I have some good news,” he tells them.
FBI agents, who have access to more sophisticated technical equipment than LAPD detectives, have spent the past few days examining the videotape recorded outside the door of Luda’s apartment building. McCartin has just finished talking on the phone to an agent.
“At nine oh-three, on the morning of the murder,” McCartin says, “the tape shows Gabay and his girlfriend Oxana entering the building. It shows them leaving at nine twenty-three.”
Detectives are by nature pessimists. Witnesses recant. Suspects devise last-minute alibis. Juries free guilty men. But after tracking this convoluted, bewildering case for a month, Knolls allows himself a moment of elation. He raises a clenched fist and claps McCartin on the back. “That’s great! We’ll get their prints, and if we’re real lucky they’ll match up with prints at Luda’s place. We’ll get them in here and if they deny being at her apartment that day, they’re bought and paid for.”
“I’m psyched,” McCartin says. “This corroborates what the asset is saying.”
“A little bit more, and we’ll have him,” Knolls says. “I’m concerned, though, about coordinating the interviews with Gabay and Oxana. We’ll have to get them in at the same time.”
“There’s no rush,” McCartin says. “Let’s finish up the peripheral stuff first. Since Gabay’s in the naval reserve, let’s talk to navy criminal investigators and see what they’ve got on him. Maybe Gabay’s got a forty-five that was issued by the navy.”
He turns to Krumer and says, “This has brought us a lot closer, but you can’t get tunnel vision.”
The detectives have taken an interest in Krumer. Knowing that he plans to apply for a detective spot in a year or two, they attempt to teach him the basics of homicide investigation. “The asset could be full of shit,” McCartin tells him. “There could be a reason besides murder why Gabay and Oxana visited Luda. Maybe the asset has his own reason for spinning all this. Serge may be trying to save his ass and his friend’s ass and leading us off the trail. He owed Luda fifteen thousand bucks, so maybe he condoned the murder and even set it up. Maybe Serge is being so helpful so he can find out where we’re at.” McCartin strokes his chin and says, “What’s the saying? ‘Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.’”
Although the investigative spodight has shifted to Boxer, Mher still might be involved, McCartin explains. He reminds Krumer that another Russian asset had heard that Mher was in the apartment when Luda was killed. And since Mher was Luda’s pimp, he might have had a motive to kill her.
Even if Mher and Armenian Mike are innocent, Knolls now tells Krumer, they still must not definitively rule them out. If they do, a defense attorney could “bite them in the ass.” He could accuse the detective of railroading his client while ignoring important leads that pointed to other suspects. Failing to pursue all plausible suspects—even ones you believe are innocent—could provide a jury with enough reasonable doubt to free a killer.
On Thursday afternoon, a jittery Mher arrives for the interview McCartin had arranged. Looking like a caricature of a Russian mobster, he wears a gray leather jacket, a gold Gucci belt, and a garish pink, black, and white silk shirt.
“We know all the shit you’re involved in, but we don’t care,” McCartin says, confronting Mher immediately. “We don’t work vice. We just want to give you a quick polygraph exam to see if you’re being truthful about this murder.”
Mher reluctantly agrees. They march him up to the fourth floor, and the examiner hooks Mher up to the polygraph equipment. He sits stiff as a board, his hands tightly clasped.
“Are you employed?” the examiner asks.
“No,” Mher says. “Not right now.”
Knolls, monitoring in another room with McCartin, snorts derisively and mimics Mher: “I’m temporarily unemployed because my prostitute’s dead.”
Asked how he met Luda, Mher says he rented the apartment in Studio City because he had planned to lease his house for $2,700. When that deal fell through, he was stuck with the apartment. After he met Luda in a restaurant, he sublet the unit to her.
Knolls and McCartin study the monitor as the examiner asks Mher a series of questions including: “Were you inside Luda’s apartment at the exact time she was attacked?” “Did you shoot Luda?” “Do you know for sure who caused Luda’s death?”
A few minutes later, the examiner hurries into the monitoring room, announcing excitedly, “I think he’s your guy!”
Krumer jumps to his feet. McCartin claps. Knolls whistles.
“You really think so?” Knolls asks.
“He’s deceptive,” the examiner says. “I think he was in the room or he pulled the trigger.”