A Winsome Murder (20 page)

How to Gain Your Parakeet's Trust

He'd picked it up at the Windy City Parakeet Boutique on the way home from Winsome Bay. Coose thought he was insane. The day that Mangan had found the bird in Fenyana Petrakova's apartment he hadn't known what to do with it, so he brought it home with him. He didn't know why. He didn't like animals. And now he had to take care of the thing.

He flipped the book open to a random page.

“
When you first take your new parakeet home, expect him to be terrified. This anxiety and stress may make him bite
.”

Mangan looked at the sullen parakeet in the cage. “You bite me, and you're out of here. You understand me?”

The bird cocked its head slightly.

“
Reassure your parakeet in a calm voice and with slow movements
.”

“Reassure your
self
,” he told the bird. “Life's tough, get used to it.”

“
Whistle to your parakeet
.”

“Not a chance.”

He read on, skimming through chapters.

“
Parakeets are extremely social birds and they must be kept in pairs to avoid harmful behavior problems
.”

“Well, that's not going to happen. We're bachelors here. Or you're a—whatever—a bachelorette, a bird bachelorette.”

The bird was most likely a female, if Mangan understood the book correctly. Something about the color around its beak. Anyway, he decided it was a girl whether it was right or not.

“Phoebe,” he said to the bird. “That's your name now.”

The book had said that parakeets make a lot of noise, but Mangan hadn't heard a chirp since he'd found her in the bathtub of the apartment. He leaned back into the armchair and watched the bird for a long moment. She watched him too. Gloomy little thing, he thought, probably traumatized somehow. A line of poetry came to him—
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
Mangan leaned forward and tapped the cage.

“Hey. You okay in there?”

Phoebe scooted sideways on her perch.

“Relax, I'm not going to hurt you.”

She backed farther away, pressing up against the side of the cage.

Mangan tried a calmer voice and then realized he was talking to a bird.

“Jesus.”

He put the cage on a table near the bay window, then went into the kitchen to make another drink. He cracked some ice into a glass, gave himself a two-finger pour of gin, hesitated a moment, and made it three. He splashed in a little soda and joined Phoebe in the front room. She skittered away as he flopped into the chair next to her. He took a long, deep breath and thought of nothing for exactly two seconds. He looked out the window.

“In the morning,” he told Phoebe, “you'll see sparrows.”

Mangan checked the time. Mickey Eagan would be bringing Savva Baratov in for questioning in about five or six hours. He drank deep and ran the scenario in his head. Baratov, Ellison, and Fenyana at dinner together. Coose said that Baratov definitely was not mob affiliated, but he might still be trafficking women. Most of the lowlifes involved in the sex trade in Chicago weren't associated with organized crime syndicates. They were most often part of the plague of entrepreneurs that had spread like pond scum around the world after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and runaways,

A scum of base lackey peasants,

Whom their o'er-cloyed country vomits forth.

Their disregard for human life was unfathomable.

Mangan could imagine Deborah Ellison getting mixed up in the sex trade when she'd moved to Chicago; that wasn't such a stretch. Now, whether she was being trafficked against her will was another question. It wasn't uncommon to see trafficked women beaten or killed if they resisted. Maybe Fenyana wasn't her lover. Maybe she'd been assigned to watch Ellison, to keep her in line. Some of the more senior prostitutes sometimes did that. Mangan considered if he should be looking at the Fenyana woman more closely. She was on the run.

Had Ellison been made an example of ? For some offense?

But why had Ellison's body been dumped in her hometown if somebody wanted to make an example of her in Chicago? If she was being trafficked, the killer, or killers, would want the other girls to see her, to scare them. Or maybe Winsome Bay was merely where they finally caught up to her, maybe she knew she was in trouble and was trying to get home.

Whither should I fly? I have done no harm.

But this still didn't shed any light on the motives for the brutal slayings of Mara Davies and Jillian McClay. Ellison's murder could certainly have been some form of retribution or punishment, but it didn't make sense with regard to the other victims. If it was a sex ring, why kill the other women?

Unless someone was afraid that the
American Forum
articles might bring attention to their operation. Unless the men running the ring wanted the police to
think
there was a serial killer murdering these women. All they'd have to do was to write a few weird notes and leave them for the police to find, try to make everyone think it was personal, some lone figure wronged by these women. That was a stretch, though, and Mangan knew it. The sleazebags who ran these operations weren't that smart. They preyed upon the innocent and the vulnerable, the immigrants, the drug addicted, the poor and abused, children.

Mangan checked his watch again. Shit. He knew he had to sleep. He turned to Phoebe. She was staring at him and had inched the littlest bit closer.

“What do you think?” he asked her.

She scooched away again, looking slightly panicked.

“You're no help,” he said, and stared up at the ceiling.

Why? Why were these women murdered?

If he could figure out the why, he could maybe figure out the
who
.

T
he man sat in his truck, in the parking lot, the engine running. The radio playing, quietly. Country music. The sun just up. The lake so crispy blue, so different from his lake, the one to which he would lead them later. This lake was much bigger, much wider.

A sea-lake.

He could make out a dock to his left. The boats there, bobbing. Fishermen waiting on the dock, in small huddles, coffee cups in their prayerful hands, steaming. Their mouths moving mutely.

He rolled down his window and dropped the note out. It clinked on the pavement. It was too windy, though, he thought. It might blow away. He got out and picked it up. He placed it under the wiper blade of another car.

The cottony clouds, puffy white and low, scuttled across the sky from north to south. He marked the wind. Its speed. He breathed in deeply and stilled himself, steadied his mind. Checked his watch. Focused.

He got back in his truck.

She would be here soon.

She would be here very soon.

S
avva Baratov looked half asleep when Mickey Eagan escorted him into the interview room.

“Why do you bring me here?” Baratov said. “I have nothing to do with this.”

Eagan left and shut the door. Coose leaned against the far wall, arms crossed. Mangan pulled out a chair, spun it around, and sat across from Baratov, a stocky, crevice-faced man with a look of privilege smoldering about him. He had wide hands, fingers like fat sausages, and was too well dressed for the owner of a diner.

“I have done nothing,” Baratov said again. He took off his black-rimmed glasses and cleaned them. “Why do you bring me here?”

“Actually,” Mangan said, “I'm the one who gets to ask the questions.”

“I am United States citizen. Eighteen years I am here now. I have rights.”

“Yes, you do.”

“My lawyer, he comes. Then you ask your questions.”

Mangan ignored him and asked, “Where are you from anyway?”

“The Bank Street Diner.”

“Very funny. I don't meet a lot of Russian comedians.”

“There is no jokes in Russia.”

“Not a fuck of a lot here either. I asked you where you were from.”

“… Constanta, Romania.”

“Not familiar with it,” Mangan lied, well aware that Romania was a global center for human trafficking, a leading exporter of human flesh. He opened a file and took out a photo of Deborah Ellison. He slid it across the table. “You know this girl?”

Baratov looked at it for a long moment. “I must wait for lawyer,” he said. “I am United States citizen.”

“Look, you can sing that song all the way to the state penitentiary. The place is filled with United States citizens.” Mangan pointed to the photo. “I asked you if you know this girl.”

Baratov folded his arms across his chest.

Mangan folded his.

A long silence passed. Mangan let it strain.

Finally, Baratov, smiling slightly, looked to the ceiling and said, “A policeman was just born.”

Something clicked in Mangan's brain. Something about those words. He'd heard them before. “What? What'd you just say?”

“Nothing. It is a, how do you say, a
proverb
where I come from.”

Mangan couldn't place where he'd heard the phrase before.

“And for each police baby that is born,” Baratov added, “there is little lawyer baby born too. That is
my
proverb. And now, I am so sorry, but I must talk no more until my baby has arrived.”

Mangan ignored Baratov and nodded to Coose, who walked over and loaded a DVD copy of the security tapes from O'Rourke's tavern into a laptop. He cued it up and turned the screen toward Baratov. “Where were you on the night of August tenth,” Mangan asked, “between five o'clock and midnight?”

“Lawyer,” was all Baratov said.

“Video,” was all that Mangan said.

Coose pressed the Play button on the laptop.

Baratov's wall of a face fell slightly. “I did not—I have nothing to do with this.”

“With what?” Mangan asked.

“With her, with what happened to Deborah. It is too horrible to think.”

“So, you know her?”

“Who, Deborah?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, of course I know her. I like her.”

“Doesn't look like you were getting along too well on this tape.”

“No, that was, that was business meeting.”

“What kind of business?”

“Come now, my friend, you know my business,” Baratov said, far too smugly for Mangan's patience. “My girls are clean. Yes? I keep them
off the street. But sometimes I need to remind them of the rules, yes? Ask Sergeant Burke, my friend Mr. Burke, in vice, he will tell you. I am fair and safe.”

The more Baratov talked the more Mangan wanted to punch him in the head. “First off,” Mangan said, “I'm not your friend. And what I
do
know, is that this girl disappeared very shortly after you had an argument with her.”

“What argument? We discuss business.”

“The tape has you leaving the restaurant around seven forty-five, right after her. Where did you go?”

“I do not remember.”

“This shows you with a girl a few hours before she was murdered. Where did you go?”

“Okay, okay, I go to the Bank Street!” Baratov said, his cockiness limply retreating. “I am open all night, and through weekend. The drunks they come late for food, yes? You can see, my receipts, my cameras. I have cameras too. I am on the tape if you look. I work all night. I give you tapes, yes? Come, we go now and get them, I don't care. No warrant. We go now.”

Mangan looked to Coose and said, “Send Eagan over there.”

Coose stepped out of the room.

“I do not lie, Detective,” Baratov said. “I take care of my girls. You ask them.”

“Why were you at a restaurant with two of your girls? I don't see a lot of hookers going out to dinner with their pimps.”

“That word—pimp—it is terrible. I am like father to my girls.”

“Yeah, I'm sure you're a regular bang-up dad.”

“What is this
bang-up
?”

“Just—would you—just shut up, okay?”

“Okay.”

“How do you know Deborah Ellison?”

“Fenyana bring her to me. For a job. I say yes. They work together sometimes. I take care of her.”

“To the tune of 70 percent, right?”

Baratov gave a half nod.

Mangan asked, “Do you know anyone that might want to hurt her?”

“No.”

“She have any trouble with your customers? Any violence or drugs?”

“No.”

“No drugs?”

“No. No drugs. Fenyana tells me Deborah has quit the drugs.”

“Deborah Ellison was on drugs?”

“Yes, you know, the meth.”

Mangan noted this. “She owe anybody money that you know of ?”

“I don't know.”

“She owe you money?”

“No.”

At that point the door opened and Coose walked in, followed by a thin, well-dressed man.

“Good morning,” the man said. “I'm Marcus Grigory, Mr. Baratov's lawyer. You're charging my client with what, may I ask?”

Coose closed the door and said, “Violating the Clean Indoor Air Ordinance. Permitting smoking in the Bank Street Diner. Health department sent us.”

“I'm sorry, Officer,” Grigory said, “are you trying to be funny?” No one said anything. “If you have formal charges to make against my client, please do so. If not, we're finished here.” He waited for an answer. “Very well.” He gestured to Savva. “Come, Mr. Baratov.” Baratov stood as Grigory opened the door for him. “By the way,” Grigory said, “you'll be hearing from us. This frivolous and unwarranted harassment of my client by the Chicago police is just one more example of the continued ethnic stereotyping of—”

“Would you please stop talking,” Mangan said.

“Excuse me?”

“Look, I don't care about your client's little titty business, but I promise you I will make his life absolutely miserable if he doesn't cooperate.” The only people Mangan hated worse than guys like Baratov were lawyers for guys like Baratov. “I will have the Department of Health, the fire inspector, the building inspector, the IRS, the INS, and every other S-ending acronym I can think of, camping out on the sidewalk of his restaurant twenty-four-seven.” Mangan wanted to hit something, he closed in on Baratov. “I will put you
under
, Mr. Savvy, Ali Baba—whatever the hell your name is! You are fucking with the wrong guy!”