Kobronovitch, and was killed outside a Russian market ten years ago with the same gun that got Andrazack. Way too claustrophobic and way too many Russians. I made a note to follow up on that.
Next I read Blackman and Otto's initial piecing together of the incident. It was pretty much the same as the case summary, but with a few more details. Kobb had been shot off-duty in the parking lot of a specialty market in Russian Town at around 7:50 P. M. on June 12, 1995. A Monday night.
According to his family he liked to cook old-country style. He had gone grocery shopping and stumbled into a burglary in progress. Yuri Yakovitch, owner of the Russian market, who everybody called Jack, had apparently left the cash register where he normally worked, and gone to the loading dock to supervise a vegetable truck delivery. Yakovitch said he was in the market alone because his regular stock boy was ill. He thought he had a pretty good view of the front of the store and his cash register from the loading dock, but he somehow missed the burglar and Kobb when they entered the market.
The burglar had a gun, but apparently ran, leaving the money behind, when Kobb pulled his off-duty weapon. They ended up in the parking lot where Kobb was shot in the northeast corner. He died next to a fence that backed up to an adjoining Texaco station.
Yuri, a. K. A. Jack Yakovitch, stated he hadn't seen the burglar, but had heard a single shot and ran through the market into the parking lot, where he found Kobb dying. He never saw a getaway car.
The lack of any witnesses stymied the investigation. Because a cop died, the case remained active until '98 when it was officially marked cold.
Given the dearth of material, there was actually damn little here to work with. Since the case was unsolved, I really hadn't expected much. But I knew for the most part, we would be coming at this through the Andrazack killing anyway.
I made copies of the top sheets and the crime scene diagrams and handed all the rest of the material back to the clerk. I also put in a written request for the murder book, which had been sent back to Internal Affairs Division where the case originated.
Next I decided to take a run out to the corner of Melrose and Fairfax and get a look at the crime scene. Maybe Yuri Yakovitch still ran his market there.
Over the last two days, the temperature in L. A. had switched from cold and damp, to hot and dry. Sometimes in January, just to remind us that we shouldn't have built this town in a desert, God cranks up his Santa Ana winds. They come whistling out of the east and drive the mercury up into triple digits. Today was one of those days; bright, hot, and clear, but with air so full of pollen that antihistamine sales would quadruple.
I dialed the main LAPD switchboard from my car and asked the operator to find me department extensions for Steve Otto and Cindy Blackman. Otto wasn't listed, so he might have retired or left the job, but there was an extension on file for Cindy Blackman. I called and found out she was now stationed in the Central Bureau, Area 13, which by the way, was good old Shootin' Newton. She was new in Robbery Homicide, but wasn't at her desk, so I left a message for her to call me.
As I drove, I let my mind crawl back over the festering mound of guilt that I will loosely label My Zack Problem. I didn't want to leave him parked in the psych ward at Queen of Angels, yet he seemed far worse to me the last time I saw him. I was really worried and searching for some middle ground. I remembered that the LAPD had a psychiatric support unit located somewhere in the Valley. It existed to help suicidal cops or those with drinking problems. I made a mental note to call and see if I could get Zack some help there.
By the time I arrived at the corner of Melrose and Fairfax the air conditioner in my new gray Acura had cranked the interior temperature down to a brisk sixty-eight degrees. I sat in the car with the engine running and pulled out Otto and Blackman's crime scene sketches of the area. They detailed a layout of the market in 1995, including the spot where Martin Kobb's body was found near the Texaco station. Now as I looked at the actual terrain, nothing was the same. The corner had been completely redeveloped. A giant Pay-Less Drugstore took up the entire area. The Texaco station was also gone, folded into the huge drugstore complex.
I stepped out of the car into a blast furnace of hot, late morning wind and hurried into the air-conditioned drugstore. Nobody working there was older than twenty-five. Memories were short.
'Only been here since April, dude,' one guy told me. 'We get a lot of turnover.'
'The boss here is a jerk,' a young girl added. 'Nobody puts up with that Barney for long,'
None of them remembered the old Russian market. Nobody remembered Yuri 'Jack' Yakovitch, or a policeman named Kobb who had given it up in the parking lot ten years ago.
As I trudged back to the car and tossed my coat into the backseat, the name Vaughn Rolaine flashed in my memory again, along with a vague notion of where I'd heard it. My house? The backyard? I made a frantic grab for the recollection and missed, coming up with a handful of nothing. The memory slipped quickly back into the tar pit that sometimes serves as my mind.
Chapter 33
Cindy Blackman called me right after lunch and we agreed to meet for coffee in an hour at a Denny's halfway between the Newton precinct house and Parker Center. She turned out to be a tall, slender redhead in a tan pantsuit. After introducing herself, she slipped into the window booth and dropped her purse on the seat next to her.
'I swear traffic is getting to be a bigger bitch every year,' she said. 'I don't know which is worse now, the four-oh-five or the seven-ten.'
In L. A. this is good opening dialogue. We bond over our hatred of freeway traffic. Cindy was a Detective II and since she was in IAD back in '95, that meant she had at least fifteen years on the job. But she looked about eighteen. Her red hair was done in twin braids and freckles sprinkled the bridge of her nose. An impish smile hovered at the corners of her mouth like a child on the verge of a prank.
The waitress took our orders. Because it was so hot, we both asked for Cokes. After a few minutes of Who Do You Know, where we discovered we'd once had the same, humorless, iron-fisted captain in the Valley, I got into it.
'Looks like you and Detective Otto were all over this case,' I said, setting her notebook on the table between us.
'Didn't help much.' A frown darkened her bright demeanor; not accepting the compliment, or giving herself much credit.
'As I said, I'm on it now. Third time could be the charm.' I smiled, trying not to sound like I was sweeping up after a bad job.
'I hope you do better than Steve and me, or Sal and Al.'
The Cokes came and we tore the paper off our straws. 'I dropped by that crime scene address. The Russian market's not there anymore.'
'Yeah, I know. They put up a monster drugstore.' She frowned again. 'I hope you can solve it. The Kobronovitch family were nice people. Came over here from Minsk. American dream and all that.'
Cold cases usually don't get solved because somewhere along the way the investigators have accepted a particular construct of facts that turns out to be false. The trick is to look for tiny holes in logic, and once you clear them away, hope they're hiding bigger problems.
'If you think back through the case,' I said, 'what fact or idea did you come across that jarred your sensibilities before you finally accepted it?'
She sipped her Coke. 'That's an interesting question. What jarred me? Anything? Doesn't have to be crime related?'
'Yeah, anything.'
She thought for a minute, then smiled. 'Well, this is stupid, but Kobb's wife said he liked to cook Russian dishes and that's why he went shopping. But it was a Monday and Yuri's market was all fresh food. Fish, vegetables, everything right from the boat or the garden. Marty Kobb was working patrol, and with a baby coming, he'd been putting in a lot of overtime. His wife said he was coming home after ten o'clock almost every weeknight, only taking Saturday and Sunday off. So I'm thinking, who goes to a market to buy fresh fish and veggies on,a Monday night if they're working late all week and can't cook until Saturday? It just didn't hit me as quite right. I like
