The Pretender's Gambit

“Do you know who bought it?” Bart asked.

“No.” Yegor shook his head. “Uncle Maurice took care of all that. Me and Demyan just pulled stuff out of the storage units, sorted it out, boxed it when it sold, then lugged it to the post office after Uncle Maurice wrote the address on it.”

“Should be information on who bought it on the website, bro,” Demyan said.

“Maybe you could show me that,” Bart suggested.

* * *

DESPITE BEING PARTIALLY dazed and suddenly realizing he might be homeless or moving at the end of the month, Demyan got around on the computer just fine. Annja figured it was because he played his video games night and day, a stack of them barely hid behind a giant pink plastic pig bank that had suffered a permanent appendectomy and stood open and mostly empty.

“Here, bro.” Demyan waved at the laptop computer that he set up on the scarred coffee table covered in burn marks.

A website entitled Maurice’s Super-Good Things showed on the screen. The site had cheap theatrics, fireworks and a slideshow showing some of the stuff that Benyovszky had featured for sale.

“Me and Yegor named the site,” Demyan announced proudly.

“Yeah.” Yegor nodded.

“Great,” Bart said. “Now show me the elephant.”

Demyan’s fingers flicked across the keyboard and brought up the picture of the elephant. “Here you go.”

“When did the sale close?”

Squinting at the monitor, Demyan tapped a few more keys. “A guy calls himself the Idaho Picker.”

Bart frowned. “That’s not his real name.”

“No. That’s his handle on the site.”

“Can you get me his real name?”

“Sure.” Demyan tapped some more, bringing up other screens of information. “Says his name is Charles Prosch.”

“Do you have an address and phone number for Mr. Prosch?”

“Yeah.” Demyan tapped keys again.

Chapter 4 (#ulink_0db2dd82-8a8a-5123-9e8b-766b96c3c24b)

Annja cycled through the items Benyovszky had up for sale on his site. He had a lot of merchandise, most of it was furniture, exercise equipment, clothing and assorted electronics, computers, video-game consoles and DVDs. She also took notes on the storage companies Benyovszky regularly bought defaulted units from, and managed to track the elephant back to a company called Illya’s Storage, which appeared to cater to the Russian neighborhood. Benyovszky had kept good notes, and his nephews had entered all of the information. At least, they had evidently entered a great deal of the details in the database.

Bart was on his cell phone doing background work on Charles Prosch.

“You’re pretty good on that computer, bro.” Sitting on the couch, Demyan smiled at Annja as she worked the keyboard.

Bro? Annja let that pass because Demyan still referred to Officer Falcone as “police chick,” too, and she didn’t intend to become “computer chick.” “I am.”

“You could probably make somebody a good secretary.”

Annja resisted the impulse to show Demyan how much fun a punch in the nose could be. Instead, she tried to ignore him.

Demyan sucked at his teeth and smoothed his mustache with his fingers. “If you want, maybe I can make some calls for you. Check around. See if there are any openings for secretaries. I know a few people. I could hook you up with a sweet job.”

“Thanks. But I already have a job.”

“What?” Demyan grimaced. “You got too much class. You ain’t no police chick.”

“No, I’m not.” Annja looked at the guy, pinning him with her gaze. “Which means I don’t have to play by police rules or be nice when someone says something insulting.”

Demyan broke eye contact and looked away, but only for a moment. Then he found something new to talk about. “You know who might have killed Uncle Maurice, bro?”

“Who?” Annja pulled up the bid page and looked at the other names listed there. Few of them were real names, but Bart and his digital police investigators would be able to track them down and put actual identities to online handles.

“His old cronies. Some of the other guys that were part of the Potato Bag Gang (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_Bag_Gang).”

That caught Annja’s attention and she stopped what she was doing. “The Potato Bag Gang? What’s that?”

“Mafia wiseguys.” Demyan touched the side of his nose and winked. “Uncle Maurice was part of the original Russian organized crime guys that came over when communism started going bust.”

Bart put his phone away and crossed the room back over to Annja. “Back in the 1970s, Russian criminals, some of them, first started turning up in Brighton Beach. Those guys tended to be con artists, not hardcases. One of their main schticks was selling antique gold rubles to buyers who thought they were getting a great deal. They told the buyers that they couldn’t get caught with the rubles, couldn’t exchange them to a legitimate market, so they had to sell them at a loss. Only when the victims opened the bags those con artists gave them, they only found potatoes, not rubles. So those guys became known as the Potato Bag Gang.” He grinned. “Don’t tell me I knew something you didn’t.”

“You did, and it’s not that hard to do. History and culture are huge. There’s no way I can know it all.” Some days that bummed Annja, knowing that she couldn’t know everything. She usually distracted herself from that by learning something out of the ordinary. “But I also think the Potato Bag Gang is interesting. I’ll have to look into it at another time. Did you get hold of Prosch?”

Bart shook his head. “Not yet. I left a message, but it’s still early out in Idaho.”

“Idaho? The state of Idaho?” Annja couldn’t remember Idaho even being mentioned on the pages she’d sorted through. “You’re not just saying that because of the Potato Bag Gang.”

Bart grinned. “Yeah. Surprised me, too. Prosch lives in a town in the middle of nowhere named Bonner’s Ferry. The town’s supposed to have like ten thousand people in it. Compared to New York, it’s a ghost town.” He checked the time on his watch. “I’ll call again in the morning.” He looked at Annja. “I can have an officer take you home. Save you some cab fare.”

“What are you going to do?”

“It’s three o’clock. I’ve got a report to file and information to collect, then I need to wait for a decent hour to call Prosch. I’m going to go down to the diner at the corner and camp out. See what turns up.”

“Want company?” Annja wasn’t prepared to let go of the mystery that had been brought into her orbit, and Bart was a friend. It had been a long time since they’d had the excuse to hang out together.

“This isn’t your thing, Annja. I feel bad about asking you to come see what you had to see earlier. I just needed answers if you had them.”

“I’m thinking I could go through Benyovszky’s files and get a better idea of the kind of business he was doing. If that would help.”

Bart hesitated, then smiled. “It would. I don’t want this to be more of an inconvenience than it already is.”

Annja stood. “It won’t be. An inconvenience would be me going home and not being able to sleep because I’m wondering what this is all about. Somebody killed that poor old man for a reason. I’d like to know why.”

“That’s the problem.” Bart’s eyes held a glint of bitter sadness. “Sometimes even when you know the answers, you don’t understand them. People kill each other for the stupidest, most selfish reasons you can imagine.”

Demyan leaned forward to insert himself into the conversation. “I’m telling you, bro, you need to listen to me. It was probably one of them old-time gangsters Uncle Maurice sometimes hung around with.” He leaned back on the couch. “Them guys, they would sit and talk about the old days, and not one of them with two nickels to rub together. They were jealous of the business Uncle Maurice, Yegor and me had going. We were making money, bro, and they wanted some of it. Uncle Maurice said that elephant was the biggest score he’d ever pulled down.”