It was dusk. The avenue was lit up bright, video stores, restaurants, insurance brokers, car parts. There were a couple twenty-four-hour joints where cabbies ate. Last few years when I was working around Brighton Beach, I sometimes went by for a meal.
Outside the video store, Bobo lit up a cigarette, and listened to music from the video store.
“Man, sounds like somebody stepped on the cat,” he said. “I can’t believe Masha lived upstairs. How could she live in a dump like this?”
A couple of women, their heads covered with scarves, strolled by, chatting and laughing. Bobo stared at them.
“What’s with you?” I said.
“Okay, I don’t like them. Okay? Say I have prejudice, I mean after 9/11, Artie, come on.”
“Stop fucking staring, Bobo.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t like it, okay? I just don’t, so I’m not PC, you should think about it, Artie, you’re also Jewish.”
“What difference does that make?” I had never been in a synagogue in my life except for a bar mitzvah once when a friend’s kid turned thirteen.
Moe reappeared.
“Can I help you?” he said, and I realized he had a British accent. On his t-shirt was an
“Masha Panchuk’s apartment?” I said.
“Yes, of course, I’m sorry. I was distracted. Come up, please.”
“You from England?” asked Bobo.
“Yes, as a matter of fact,” said Moe. “I was born and grew up in a place called Bradford. Man, I would never go back. Too wet and cold, rains all the time. I’m so sorry about Masha.”
“You knew about her? That she was murdered?”
“You told me,” he said. “You called the store and asked if she had lived here.”
“Right,” said Bobo. “You didn’t think to call when you knew she was missing?”
“I didn’t know until I heard from you,” Moe said. “She came and went. Often I didn’t see her for several days. In fact, I saw her Saturday, she was going out to shop.”
“Who else had extra keys, besides you?”
“I don’t know, maybe she made extras. I can’t say,” said Moe. “I keep spares because I own the building,” he added.
We followed him into the doorway next to his store and up three flights of stairs. “I’ll be downstairs if you need me,” he said, not looking at Bobo.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I said to Bobo. “You think you get anything by talking to people who help you like that?”
“I don’t like them, okay?” We stood on the landing. The apartment was sealed. Bobo carefully removed the tape and opened the door.
“Who got it sealed?”
“I did,” he said. “Soon as I found out where it was. I didn’t want anyone except guys working the case going in.”
“It’s not okay,” I said. “How come it took you so long to tell me where she lived?”
“You didn’t seem interested.”
Inside the tiny studio apartment was a bed, a dresser, a table, a tiny kitchen behind a curtain, a bathroom. It was a furnished room, and all Masha had added were a couple of posters of boy groups she must have liked.
In the closet were her clothes, jumbled together, some on the floor, some stuffed into shelves or on cheap wire hangers. Hard to tell if she’d been messy like a kid or somebody had come here to look through her things.
“Look for her clothes,” Sonny Lippert had said.
“You still didn’t find her clothes, right? The stuff she had on when they killed her?”
“I have four guys working on it,” said Bobo Leven. “I told them to leave the stuff here until we looked at everything.”
I pulled out some shoes, a bag, a jacket. There were expensive things in the girl’s closet. The kind of things I expected Val to wear, or her friends. There was no pink dress, no pink party dress with sparkles on it.
“What was she wearing when she was murdered?”
“Nothing,” said Bobo. “At least nothing when the tape was removed.”
“You think they killed her in the playground, taped her up there?”
“Probably not. Too risky.”
“So what happened to her clothes?”
“We’re looking, like I said. You have some thoughts?” he said.
“Yeah, look for a pink party dress. Let me know.”
Between us we worked over every inch of the place, her clothes, the make-up in the bathroom, a few paperback books, her iPod, a tiny pink address book. I scanned it, there were names of a few friends, city agencies, bars. Bobo said he had seen it, had it copied, put it back. Send me a copy, I said. Nothing in it, he said.
I wanted to get to the envelope Tito Dravic had left me, wanted the resume he had promised me, and the tape, Masha Panchuk dancing.
“What about this?” Bobo held up a small roll of duct tape he’d found in the bathroom.
“Probably somebody used it for sealing the window when it was cold. Anyhow, it’s black.”
“Yeah, right, this is a fucking waste of time,” he said.
“Get somebody from your station house to go over the place again, okay? In detail.”
“Yes, Artie, of course.”
On the street, Bobo on his phone, I went in to thank Moe and give him my number in case anything came up.
The weather had turned sultry. Humidity clung to my skin. It had been a long day, and now I felt I was fighting the air that was like syrup on my skin, heavy, thick, cloying. Music played out of car windows as guys rolled along Coney Island Avenue. Rap. Rappers call it music. I call it shit.
“I have to go,” I said.
“You don’t get it, do you? You don’t know anything.” He snapped his phone shut.
“What about?”
“These people, Artie.” Bobo was looking to pick a fight with me. I let him talk. “My cousin Viktor was fighting in Chechnya against these assholes. You have any idea what that was like for a Jewish boy from Moscow? If all young soldiers get beat up, all new Jewish soldiers get double beating, one for being Jewish, one for being from Moscow.”
“What’s it got to do with the Chechens?”
“You don’t know shit some of the time, pardon me, Artemy. Over there in the former USSR, they would like to kill all the Jews, except maybe one for each province. You remember that old saying about how every Russian governor always had one Jew for show. A Show Jew, Artie. But you don’t remember,” said Bobo. “You think the guys at my station house feel different?”
“Well, then, fuck them, too. Get over it. I’m not having you alienate half of Brooklyn because you hate Muslims, okay? You zip it up, Bobo.”
“I’m Russian. I’m also Jew. You have a lot of towel-head friends, Artie?” His tone was mild but the words were aggressive.
At the center of this string bean of a kid with his shambling walk, his punk haircut, was a determined, ambitious cop. And angry. He was learning fast. Before long he’d stop taking shit from anybody, including me.
“So, Artie. Here,” he said handing me a card. “I also found this in the apartment. In the medicine cabinet.”
Natasha Club, it said. The best in Russian Women.
“What is it?”
“Mail-order brides, you say, I think. Or whores.”
“There’s something else?” I said to Bobo.
“Yeah, something else. I want to tell you what it was like at home, okay? Caucasians from down there from the Caucasus, they come to Moscow, they take over most of the market stalls, they’re dirty people, and they blow up
