The Alibi Man

Chapter 16

“What are you doing in my house?” I asked, wondering what I could get my hands on to use as a weapon. Maybe I could hit him in the head with the stone soap dispenser, except I couldn’t reach back far enough to get it without him seeing.

“You know Irina,” he said.

“What if I did?”

He looked dazed, maybe psychotic, or ill. For all I knew, he had killed her.

“She liked you.”

I said nothing. His eyes wandered away from me for a second. I eased a couple of inches to the right.

“Did you know Irina?” I asked.

He looked at me again. “I loved her.”

Still a 50/50 chance he had strangled her. Maybe better. Nothing could drive people over the edge of violence more than love. He loved her but she didn’t love him. He loved her but she cheated on him. He loved her obsessively and wouldn’t let her go. There were a dozen scenarios.

“Did you know her in Russia?” I asked, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, inching a quarter step ahead.

“She was best friends with my little sister, Sasha.”

That name rang a bell. Sasha Kulak. The friend of Irina’s who had committed suicide because of Tomas Van Zandt, the horse dealer Irina had attacked in the barn.

Kulak. Alexi Kulak. Russians…

“She spoke fondly of Sasha,” I said, slipping the fingers of my right hand into the drawer behind me. He didn’t seem to notice.

“Did she speak of me?” he asked. Inside his open jacket I could see the handle of a gun.

“Irina was a very private person. She didn’t talk about her personal life very much.”

Tears filled his eyes. He appeared to be in a great deal of pain. “I was a ghost to her in this life she led. She shut me out.”

This wasn’t sounding good with regard to motive. My fingers fumbled over something in the drawer. I grabbed hold. A small pair of scissors.

He turned in the doorway and leaned against the frame, eyes closed, his face red as he fought tears.

“What do you want from me?” I asked.

He wiped a square hand across his eyes. There were tattoos on the back of his hand. Prison tats?

When I was a narc, the Russians had taken over a substantial chunk of the heroin trade in South Florida. Rumor had it they had gotten in bed with the Colombians to edge into the cocaine market. They hadn’t ventured into crystal meth then. Meth had still been-and still was-the bastion of white trash.

Alexi Kulak. Russian mob? Had that been Irina’s second job? The job that subsidized her lifestyle among the rich and famous?

“She is dead,” he said. “Murdered.”

He had taken hold of his emotions and locked them away somewhere. I could see him change, grow calmer, focus.

“Yes,” I said.

“She told me about how you helped that little girl.”

A year before, Molly Seabright, twelve going on Methuselah, had come to me, mistakenly believing I was a private investigator, to ask my help in finding her missing sister.

“You know these people she ran around with,” he said. “These rich American playboy sons of bitches.”

“No,” I lied. “I don’t know them.”

Kulak pinned me with a look that made me feel like an insect on a display board. The energy coming from him now was focused and intense. “You know them.”

I said nothing.

“I want to know which one killed Irina.”

“I’m not a private investigator, Mr. Kulak.”

He stepped into the bathroom, suddenly aggressive, intent on intimidating me. “I don’t care what the fuck you call yourself. I need to know who killed Irina.”

“That’s a police matter,” I said. I couldn’t back away. I was already against the vanity.

Kulak reached his hand up and grabbed me across the lower half of my face. I came underhanded with the small scissors and jammed it into his belly. I felt the blade hit a rib.

He howled and staggered back, looking down in astonishment as his shirt turned red with his own blood.

I clasped my hands together and swung at him from the side, hitting him hard in the cheekbone and temple.

Kulak staggered backward, stumbled, and fell.

I started to jump over him, but he caught me by one ankle, and I went down, my teeth biting deep into my lower lip. The taste of blood filled my mouth. I kicked at him to free myself. Arms and legs scrambling, I tried to pull myself forward, got to my knees, got my feet under me.

As I tried to lunge forward, Kulak caught me by the back of my neck, shoved me into a wall, and held me there with his own body weight.

“You bitch! You stabbed me!”

“Yeah. I hope you die of it!”

Kulak started to chuckle, then laugh, then laughed harder. “You are like Irina, I think.”

I hoped not. I didn’t want to think about water creatures nibbling at my face as I lay dead in a drainage ditch.

“You,” he said, dead serious once again. “You will be my eyes, my ears, my brain. They will accept you. You are one of them.”

“I don’t work for you,” I said. “I want to know who killed Irina, but I don’t work for you.”

He turned me around and held me up against the wall by my throat. My toes were barely touching the floor. He looked like it wouldn’t matter to him one way or the other if he crushed my larynx.

“Yes, Miss Estes,” he said softly. “I’m afraid that you do.”

I didn’t argue. His voice and demeanor made me go cold beneath the sweat of fear and adrenaline. His eyes were flat and black, like a shark’s. I swallowed hard beneath the weight of his hand around my windpipe.

He brought his face very close to mine and whispered, “Yes, you do.”