Genie for Hire (11 page)

The squirrel remained on the ground next to him. “What?”
Biff asked. “I can’t go back in there until the cops are done.”

The squirrel chittered something. Despite his command of
various languages, Biff did not speak squirrel, so whatever it was didn’t
matter.

Biff sighed. “I know, Sveta was my client. I should do what
I can to help Jimmy figure out who killed her. Of course, I already know that,
don’t I? Kiril Ovetschkin.”

He looked up and down the service drive. The UPS truck was
parked behind the medical equipment store, though the skinny, tattooed delivery
man was nowhere in sight. Biff walked toward the store’s back door, and as he
approached, the delivery man stepped out, pushing a hand truck loaded with
boxes.

“Hey, Mario,” Biff said. “You see anybody going into Sveta’s
studio this morning?”

“Not going in,” Mario said, beginning to load the boxes into
the back of the truck. “Coming out.”

Biff noticed that the squirrel had followed him, remaining
under the pine trees that ran alongside the drive. “Really? Who?”

“Don’t know him. Bodybuilder asshole type. Had his fucking
Beemer blocking my way in and I had to wait for him to pull out.”

“He was alone?”

“Yeah.”

That would be Igor Laskin, Biff thought. But he thought he
had sensed two visitors to the studio. Had they been there at different times?

Jimmy appeared at the door of the studio. “Andromeda! I need
you over here.”

“Hold up, Jimmy. You need to talk to Mario here.”

Mario looked at his watch. “I’m running late, Biff.”

“Just take a minute.” When Jimmy approached, looking
irritated, Biff said, “Mario saw somebody leave Sveta’s studio.”

Mario repeated his story to Jimmy, though without the
expletive, and Jimmy took down his name and contact information. As Mario drove
away, Biff and Jimmy walked back toward the studio. The squirrel stayed where
he was for a moment, then followed them. “You forget to mention something?”
Jimmy asked, when Biff reached him.

“What?”

“Have a look. This time pay attention.”

Biff bristled at Jimmy’s comment, but he did his best to protect
himself against the smell and the lingering aftereffects of death, and then
stepped into the workroom. There in front of him was Sveta’s body, just as he
had seen before. But then he noticed something he had missed—the toe of a man’s
highly polished cordovan loafer.

He stepped around the light table that blocked his view and
looked down. The loafer was attached to a foot, which connected to a leg, and
then to the rest of a man. A dead man. A portly, bearish Russian man in his
mid-fifties.

Kiril Ovetschkin.

Biff looked at the entrance behind him. The squirrel sat on
the threshold, looking inside. “What are you doing here?” he said crossly. “Go
on, shoo.”

He stepped toward the squirrel, who turned and scampered
away. Then he walked back outside, where Jimmy Stein was on the phone. “Loi is
on his way,” he said, when he ended the call. “So tell me again, exactly what
happened.”

Officer White reappeared from around the corner. “Mr.
Andromeda was correct, sir. The front door is locked.”

Jimmy nodded. “Good. You watch this door and wait for CSI.
We’ll be in the coffee shop inside.”

Biff was still numb. Though he had been around for a long
time, and seen his share of dead bodies, they still upset him. It was one thing
to go through the home of a murder victim, as he’d done with the parking valet
Usnavy. It was a hundred times, a thousand times, worse, to be in the presence
of a corpse—or two. Especially when he had known the victim, spoken to her,
even been kissed by her just a short while before. The psychic reverberations
were almost too strong to bear.

Jimmy steered him down the service drive toward the corner
of the shopping center, and the squirrel followed them. “You got a new friend?”
Jimmy asked.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with him.” He turned around and
waved his hands at the squirrel. “Go on, get out of here. Go eat a nut or
something.”

They walked around the corner and down the sidewalk to the café.
It had just opened for lunch, and the only customers were a pair of elderly
white women in pants suits that had been fashionable in the seventies. “
Dos
cafecitos, por favor
,” Jimmy said to the short, dark-haired woman behind
the counter.

Biff thought it was an excellent order. He could use a gulp
of the strong Cuban coffee brewed with demerara sugar after seeing the two dead
bodies. “Make mine a
cortadito
,” he said, adding milk to the drink.

Jimmy led Biff to a table by the glass storefront, out of
hearing of the other customers. When they sat down, Biff said, “I got the files
for Sveta and returned them to her yesterday morning.”

Jimmy was taking notes in a small spiral-bound notebook. “How’d
you do that?”

“I found the place where Igor Laskin had them stored.”

“And?”

“And nothing. I retrieved my client’s property and returned
it to her. End of story. She gave them to Ovetschkin, but he didn’t believe he
had all the originals and he threatened her again. I wanted to find something I
could use against Ovetschkin, to protect her from him. That’s why I was asking
about The Professor—I thought maybe he might be Ovetschkin’s boss, or that he
might have some kind of hold over Ovetschkin I could use. That’s why I went
down to the marina this morning.”

The waitress brought the two tiny espresso cups, and the
aroma of the strong, sweet coffee swirled up and filled Biff’s nostrils. He picked
his up and sipped it, feeling the mix of caffeine and sugar pulse through his
system. When he looked up again the squirrel was sitting on the sidewalk
outside the storefront, looking at him. Biff noticed that his tail was long and
straight, not curled around at the end like some squirrels, and he was staring
at Biff like he wanted some of that coffee.

“What the hell?” Biff banged on the glass.

Jimmy looked up. “Must be your animal magnetism.”

The squirrel rolled over onto its back, waved its little
legs in the air, then went still. “Jesus, you killed it,” Jimmy said.

“Me? I didn’t do a thing.” And that time at least it was
true.

Then the squirrel hopped back up and danced around on the pavement.
Jimmy laughed, and Biff couldn’t help joining him. “Fine, stay out there if you
want,” Biff said.

“Let’s get back to what happened when you returned to your
office from the marina,” Jimmy said.

“I’d just opened a browser to do some Internet searching
when I heard the shots.”

“How many?”

“Two.”

“Then what?”

“I knew the shots had come from Sveta’s. I ran down the hall
but the front door was locked.” Biff couldn’t tell Jimmy he’d slipped in the
studio in a puff of smoke. “I knocked and called out for her, but I didn’t get
a response. So I went around to her back door.”

“You see anybody in the service drive?”

Biff shook his head. “Nope. The door was ajar, so I pushed
it open with my shoulder. I saw her on the floor and I backed right out. That’s
when I called you.”

A young mother entered the café, pushing a double stroller.
The two boys seemed to alternate screaming, like an infant tag team, as the
oblivious mother debated her pastry choices from the low counter. “Isn’t there
something you can arrest her for?” Biff groused. “Disturbing the peace, at
least.”

“Now, now,” Jimmy said. “A long time ago you were a brat
like that.”

Biff thought Jimmy had no idea how long that was. But he
just said, “Me? Never.”

Jimmy’s cell rang. “Fine. Get started on the workroom. I’ll
be there in a few.”

He picked up his cafecito. “CSI’s there. I’m sure there’s
more to your story than that, but we’ll save that for another day.”

He drank a bit, then sighed appreciatively. “Any idea who
might have killed her?”

“My first thought was Kiril Ovetschkin, because he’d threatened
her. But that was before I saw his body there.”

“And?”

“And I wonder if Igor Laskin might have turned on
Ovetschkin. That’s the only other guess I’ve got right now.”

“What about this Professor guy? You said you were looking
into him.”

“Couldn’t find anything useful, though. As far as I can tell
from Hector, the Professor is the boss, but I don’t know if Ovetschkin worked
directly for him or just, you know, paid him a tribute or something.”

Jimmy’s phone rang again and he turned away from Biff to
answer it. Biff sat back against the hard metal chair and remembered walking
into the studio, then the workroom. How had he missed Ovetschkin’s body? Was
there anything else he had overlooked?

He admitted that he had been freaked out by seeing Sveta’s
body, and by the assault on his senses from the blood and the psychic
reverberations. Now he understood those had been magnified because there were
two victims.

Something nagged at him. There was something else he had
missed, wasn’t there? His brain was like a video camera; it recorded everything
he experienced, and stored the details away, allowing him to return to any
point in his history and reexamine it. Only his recent history; even his brain
didn’t have enough bandwidth to store away everything he’d ever experienced in
his centuries of existence.

By opening his third eye and focusing it inward, he was able
to replay everything, from the moment the gunshots shocked him from his
complacency. He knocked over his ergonomic chair as he jumped up, then felt
again the rough pavement under his slippers as he ran and the energy boost as
he jumped over the woman in the wheelchair.

He heard the guitar, drums and synthesizer of Haitian
compas
music as he passed the café, the sound of traffic passing on Ives Dairy Road, a
door slamming somewhere. The maintenance man had hosed down the glass
storefronts earlier that morning and he smelled the tang of the cleaning fluid.

He experienced again the brief buzz he always got from the
brief transition to a puff of smoke that let him slip into the studio. It was
quiet and dark in there; Sveta hadn’t turned the fluorescents on and opened for
business yet. That didn’t matter to Biff; he could see in the dark as well as
any cat.

The door to the workroom was half-open, and the lights were
on in there. He moved carefully through the door. His eyes adjusted to the
light immediately, and he spotted Sveta’s body sprawled on the floor. He forced
himself to observe what he’d been too quick to run from. He smelled the coppery
tang of the spilled blood, felt the anger, fear and violence in the displaced
air molecules, heard the sound of a car with a German-made 6-cylinder engine accelerating
past the open back door of the workroom.

Then he realized. It wasn’t something he had missed; it was
something missing. He had sensed Farishta’s energy signature in the studio
after the files had been stolen. And he had sensed it on Ovetschkin’s boat. But
there had been no trace of her around the two bodies in Sveta’s studio.

Had she been there, and he’d missed the traces of her energy
signature because he’d been preoccupied with Sveta’s death? What was her
connection to all this?

“I need to check something out,” he said, standing up.

Jimmy was still on the phone. “Don’t go far. I still want to
talk to you.”

“I won’t.”

Biff stepped outside into the heat and humidity, realizing
as he did that Jimmy was going to have to pay for those two coffees. That was
new and different.

The squirrel was across from him, sitting in the dirt around
a scrawny bougainvillea. Biff walked down the sidewalk, all his senses on
alert. It was almost overwhelming to open himself up that way in a public
space; he took in reverberations of everything around him, from the
frizzy-haired woman who was worried about an argument with her husband that
morning, to the slim young black woman whose dog was sick, to the older man who
had been unemployed for over a year and despaired of ever working again.

Shaking them all off, he focused on any energy remaining
from what had happened in Sveta’s studio. He stopped in front of the glass
storefront, closed his eyes, and opened his third eye. Had Farishta been here?

He extended his senses to the glass, the overhanging roof, the
sidewalk and then the parking lot. There was no sign of her at all.

“Are you waiting for the photographer?”

He turned around and opened his eyes. The Russian-accented
voice belonged to a young woman with a baby boy in a stroller. “We have an
appointment at twelve.”

“The studio’s closed,” Biff said. “You’re going to have to
find someone else.”

“That is not possible. I spoke to her just this morning.”

Jimmy appeared behind the woman. “Miss Pshkov’s studio is
closed,” he said, showing her his badge.

The little boy spotted the squirrel and started giggling and
pointing.

“This is unacceptable business practice,” the woman said. “I
will make sure all my friends know.”

“You do that.” Jimmy turned to Biff. “I’ve got to talk to
Loi. I’ll catch up with you later.”

The woman made a disgusted sound and turned her stroller
around. Biff followed her slowly down the concourse until he came to his own
office. When he looked around the squirrel was behind him.

“You might as well come in,” he said, touching the eye, then
opening the door and motioning the squirrel forward. “You like halvah?”

Biff had loved the sesame-seed based treat since his days in
Constantinople, but he had to admit he preferred the kind now made in Brooklyn,
packaged in chocolate-covered rectangular logs.

He led the squirrel through to the back office, where he
opened a package of halvah and broke off a piece. “Sorry, don’t have any nuts
on hand.”

The squirrel took the chunk of halvah and sat on his
haunches with it clasped between his paws. His dark, beady eyes were bright
with curiosity. He sniffed it carefully, then clawed the chocolate covering off
and nibbled at the sesame.