Sleight of Hand: A Novel of Suspense (Dana Cutler) (19 page)
Read Sleight of Hand: A Novel of Suspense (Dana Cutler) Online
Authors: Phillip Margolin
Dana got home a little after two-thirty. Jake woke up when she entered the bedroom. Dana sat on the side of the bed.
“We have to talk,” she said.
The only light in the room came from the moon, so Dana’s face was in shadows. Jake couldn’t see her expression, but he could hear the tension in her voice. He sat up.
“What’s wrong?”
“I was attacked tonight.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, and the man who attacked me isn’t. I took care of him. But he was working for someone who wants to scare me off a case, and I’m worried that they might try to get at me through you.”
Jake was wide awake now. “How serious is this?”
“Very serious.”
“Shit.”
“I’m sorry, Jake. I’d never have gotten involved if I had any idea I might put you in danger.”
“I know that.”
“I’m working with a homicide detective who told me to go out of town for a day or so. He’s working on something that he thinks will make the threat go away. Why don’t you come with me?”
“Where are you headed?”
“Kansas City. We’ll leave in the morning.”
Dana was packing when Frank Santoro called.
“There have been two developments,” the detective said. “Neither one is good, but one is interesting.”
“Tell me.”
“Tiffany Starr is dead.” Dana felt the air go out of her. “A jogger found her body in Rock Creek Park. Stabbed in the heart. It looks like a robbery—her purse is missing and she wasn’t wearing any jewelry.”
“But you don’t think robbery was the motive?” Dana asked as she shut down her emotions.
“It’s too much of a coincidence,” Santoro answered.
“You said there were two developments.”
“Last night, a man named Gregor Karpinski was admitted to Georgetown Medical Center. He’d been stabbed in the balls and had his head kicked in. The beating was pretty brutal.”
As soon as Santoro detailed Karpinski’s injuries Dana’s pulse shot up.
“There’s a connection between Karpinski and Barry Lester,” Santoro continued. “Lester was in general population in the jail. Then he was placed in isolation because he had a run-in with Karpinski. Karpinski is a beast, six five and solid muscle, and he works as an enforcer for Nikolai Orlansky. Barry Lester is a little shit with almost no muscle and no record of violence. The jail incident report states that Lester bumped into Karpinski, then called him an asshole.”
“You think the fight was staged to get Lester into isolation?”
“That’s precisely what I think. Karpinski doesn’t breathe unless he gets permission from Orlansky, so either Nikolai wanted Lester in isolation or he was doing a favor for someone.”
“Have you asked Karpinski if he was ordered to beat up
Lester
?”
“He isn’t in any condition to answer questions.”
“Will he pull through?”
“The doctors can’t say yet. There’s something else. Four years ago, Karpinski beat an assault charge. Do you want to guess who his lawyer was?”
Kansas City, Missouri, was founded in 1838 at the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas Rivers and had grown into a picturesque city of boulevards, parks, and fountains. Dana and Jake had checked into a hotel a few blocks from the Plaza, an upscale, outdoor shopping and entertainment district that was famous for being the first suburban shopping center in the United States specifically designed to accommodate shoppers arriving by automobile. The blighted urban area into which Dana was driving seemed as far from the condos, museums, upscale restaurants, and nightclubs of the Plaza as Earth was from the moon, but it was only a short distance by car from the heart of downtown.
Dana had dressed in a severe business suit but she wondered if she was overdressed. The neighborhood she was in was a strange mixture of lots filled with abandoned tires and rotting furniture that were patrolled by feral cats, well-tended single-family dwellings, and trashed, ruined, and looted homes with shattered windowpanes. Sullen young men stared at her as she drove by, and she spotted gang colors she’d learned to identify during her stint with the D.C. police. What she did not see were happy couples strolling behind baby carriages or neighbors talking over white picket fences. Why make yourself a target?
Just as she’d given up on the neighborhood, Dana suddenly found herself in an oasis of modern middle-class homes with newly mown lawns. Dana parked in front of a fifties ranch-style home with a peaked roof and stone-and-wood siding. The house was set back from the street, and a slate path led across a manicured lawn. A minute after she rang the bell the door was opened by a slender African-American man with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a Kansas City Chiefs sweatshirt and neatly pressed jeans.
Dana had seen Roger Felton’s name in the newspaper article detailing the execution murder of the two drug dealers. She had gone to police headquarters in Kansas City and learned that Felton was living with his elderly father in the neighborhood where Felton had grown up.
“Detective Felton?” Dana asked.
“I was,” Felton answered as he eyed Dana suspiciously. “I’m retired. How can I help you?”
“My name is Dana Cutler.” She held out her identification. “I was a police officer in Washington, D.C., but I’m private now. I’d like to ask you about a case you worked on about twenty-five years ago.”
Felton scrutinized her ID before stepping aside and ushering Dana into a large living room that was illuminated by the sunlight that streamed through high picture windows. An elderly man who was breathing from an oxygen tank sat in a wheelchair across from a stone fireplace.
“That’s my dad,” Felton explained. “I live in Florida, but he had a stroke and I’m back here to help him out.
“This is Dana Cutler from Washington, D.C.,” Felton told his father. “She wants to ask me some questions about an old case.”
Felton turned back to Dana. “He has trouble speaking, but Dad is still sharp.”
Felton sat in an armchair and motioned Dana onto an identical chair that was standing on the other side of a walnut end
table
. A photo of a much younger man who strongly resembled Felton’s father and a smiling, heavyset black woman stood in the center of the end table next to a lamp.
“So, what do you want to know?” Felton asked.
“Do you remember Anthony Watts and Donald Marion?”
“Sure,” Felton said without a second of hesitation.
“I’m surprised you recall a case that old so easily,” she said.
“There are some cases you never forget. I’m certain I know who killed those two but I could never prove it, and it’s always bothered me. Why do you want to know about Watts and Marion after all these years?”
“Richard Molinari has become a person of interest in a case I’m investigating.”
A cloud passed over Felton’s features. “Richard, huh. That’s a name I never hoped to hear again. What’s he involved in now?”
“Some very interesting stuff, and he doesn’t go by Molinari anymore. He changed his name to Charles Benedict, and he’s a criminal defense attorney.”
“You’re kidding me?”
“Molinari moved from here to Pennsylvania and changed his name. Then he earned a GED, went to college, and graduated from law school at the University of Virginia, with honors.”
“I’ll be damned. I never saw that coming.”
“What can you tell me about Molinari?”
“He’s a stone killer, that’s one thing I can tell you. You’ve probably noticed the racial makeup of this neighborhood. It’s mostly black and Hispanic, and it has a very high crime rate. I tried to get my father to move to Florida because it’s not safe, but he’s stubborn. Even this area, which is mostly middle class, has more than its fair share of crime.
“There are a lot of gangs operating here, and it was worse twenty years ago. The most powerful gangs were African American, so figure out how tough a white boy would have to be to earn the position of enforcer in the Kung Fu Dragons, the dominant gang in the neighborhood. That was Richard. He was devoid of a conscience, owned a very high IQ, and was totally ruthless. No one wanted to fight him because you had to kill him or he’d never stop coming after you.
“Let me give you an example. Molinari’s family moved from somewhere back East when he was sixteen. The first day in high school three kids beat him up. After that, Molinari gave them his lunch money and generally acted like a coward toward them, but before the month was out, two of the boys were beaten with a baseball bat. The brain damage was so bad that they were useless as witnesses. The third boy was burned to death in a house fire that killed his entire family. The day after the assault and the
arson
, Richard showed up at school with a baseball bat. He never said anything, but word got around the school that he was not someone to fuck with, if you’ll pardon my French.”
“Was he arrested?”
“The principal told us the boys had beaten up Molinari, and about the bat, so Richard was our main suspect, but the kid was too smart for us.”
“Did you take a look at the bat he brought to school?”
“Sure, but it wasn’t the bat he used. That bat was found on the front steps of the burned-out house, covered with the victims’ blood but wiped clean of any prints. Someone, probably Molinari, spread the word around school that the kids had been beaten silly with a baseball bat.”
“How did he get into the gang if he was white?”
“The rumor was that he made a deal with the leader of the Dragons to take out the leader of a rival gang that was trying to take over the crack cocaine trade in the area.”
“He killed him?”
“We don’t know. No one could prove he was murdered because he just vanished. After that, everyone started calling Molinari ‘the Magician.’ ”
“Because he made his victims disappear?”
“That was part of it, but he actually was an amateur magician.”
“If he was in so tight with the Dragons, why did he take off?”
“The Dragons were dealing for a Mexican drug cartel. Marion and Watts were emissaries from a gang in Cleveland that was going to do a drug deal with the Dragons. We had a snitch who told us that the deal was bigger than usual and there was a substantial amount of cash involved. Watts and Marion were supposed to make a swap in one location but they never showed up. We think Molinari lured them to an abandoned barn, killed them, then hid the money. We arrested Molinari but we couldn’t hold him. The day he left the jail was the last day anyone saw him in Missouri.”
“Fascinating.”
“Isn’t it. And what you’ve told me makes sense. Even as a teenager, Molinari was the smartest criminal I’d ever dealt with. He was definitely smart enough to know he had no future with the Dragons after he ripped them off, and smart enough to know he had to disappear, like a card in one of his tricks.”
Frank Santoro had a friend in Organized Crime in the Department of Justice who owed him a favor. According to Santoro’s friend, Nikolai Orlansky was always accompanied by several bodyguards and his armor-plated car had bulletproof glass. Orlansky varied his routes from his home to his businesses and never visited the businesses in any predictable order. The crime lord did have one weakness, however—women.
Nikolai changed mistresses frequently. This was not a problem, since one of his businesses was prostitution and new young bodies regularly flowed from Eastern Europe to the brothels he controlled. Orlansky rarely kept company with one woman for very long, but he used the same penthouse apartment in a high-rise condominium in D.C. for his assignations. Santoro’s friend said that Orlansky was known to have a very healthy sex drive and rarely remained celibate for more than a few days. According to the latest surveillance information, Orlansky’s wife had just left for a shopping spree in Manhattan and the Mafia chief had not visited his current mistress in several days.
Nikolai Orlansky’s driver parked in a reserved spot next to an elevator that went straight to the penthouse. A second car filled with bodyguards made certain that their boss was safe before motioning him out of the car.
Santoro watched the ritual from the front seat of his car. As soon as Orlansky got out, Frank walked toward the gangster with his badge held high.
“Lee County police,” he proclaimed in a loud voice.
The bodyguards swiveled toward him and several guns pointed at various parts of his body.
“Mr. Orlansky,” Santoro said, “I’m unarmed and I’m not wearing a wire. I just want to talk. If you’ll give me a few minutes of your time I’ll be out of your hair.”
Orlansky assessed the situation before telling his men to stand down.
“Frisk him,” Orlansky told a slender man with a narrow mustache and watery eyes. Santoro had read several files on Orlansky, and he recognized Peter Perkovic from a mug shot. Perkovic was a ruthless killer and Orlansky’s right-hand man.
“He’s clean,” Perkovic said after a thorough pat-down.
“Come in the car,” Orlansky said. He slid across the backseat, and Santoro sat next to him. Perkovic shut the door but watched the detective through the window.
“So, Detective . . . ?”
“Frank. And this conversation is just between us. It is completely off the record. I’m going to talk and I don’t expect you to say anything. I just want you to listen.”
Orlansky looked amused. “You have intrigued me. So, tell me, what is so important that you have approached me in secret in a garage?”
“Gregor Karpinski.”
Orlansky’s brow furrowed and Frank got the impression that Orlansky was genuinely puzzled.
“He’s a bouncer at one of my clubs,” the gangster said.
“He’s also in the hospital after coming out on the wrong end of a discussion with a friend of mine.”
Santoro assumed that someone like Orlansky, who was used to dealing with the police, would be able to mask his emotions if he wanted to, but Orlansky showed surprise, and it looked genuine. Either he was a terrific actor or Santoro’s revelations were new to him.
“Horace Blair has been charged with murder. Barry Lester is the state’s key witness against Mr. Blair. Two days ago my friend interviewed Tiffany Starr, Lester’s girlfriend. Two things happened that evening: Karpinski threatened to rape my friend if she didn’t back off, and Tiffany Starr was stabbed to death in Rock Creek Park. It’s too late to help Tiffany Starr but I’m here to tell you to stay away from my friend. If a hair on her head is touched, I promise to make your life hell on earth. Are we clear?”
Orlansky did not look frightened or angry. If anything, he looked confused.
“You say Karpinski is in the hospital. How did that happen?”
“Ask him, if he survives.”
Orlansky seemed troubled. “Detective Santoro, thank you for speaking to me in private. I appreciate the courtesy. I had nothing to do with what happened to your friend or Miss Starr. You can tell your friend that she has nothing to fear from me.”
“Then our business is done. Have a nice evening.”
When Santoro walked to his car he didn’t look back. His heart was beating like a trip-hammer and he couldn’t relax until he was out of shooting range. While he drove, Frank thought about his meeting with Orlansky. He was pretty certain that the Russian was genuinely surprised by everything he’d been told. If Orlansky didn’t send Karpinski to threaten Dana, there was a good chance that Charles Benedict was behind the threat, and that presented a problem. It was one thing to use his position to threaten a gangster like Orlansky. It was quite another thing to try to strong-arm a member of the bar who also happened to be the attorney for a very powerful and well-connected person who was facing a murder charge. This was especially true when you had no evidence whatsoever that the lawyer had committed a crime. Santoro could imagine the fallout if he confronted Benedict the same way he’d confronted Orlansky.
Santoro pulled into a shopping mall and dialed Dana’s cell.
“How is Kansas City?” he asked when Dana answered.
“Interesting. Why are you calling?”
“I had a talk with Nikolai Orlansky. He assured me that he didn’t send Karpinski after you. I got the impression that he didn’t know anything about what happened.”
“Then I think I know who did send that ape. Especially after what I learned today.”
Dana filled in Frank on Charles Benedict’s background.
“This puts everything that’s happened in a completely different light,” Santoro said when Dana was through.
“I think it’s possible that Benedict killed Carrie Blair and set up her husband. Our problem is that we have no proof. If he did kill Carrie Blair, Benedict is one crafty psychopath. We can’t talk to his client without his permission, and unless Karpinski confesses, we have nothing.”