Gave me nightmares. Sometimes I still get them.”
“What did your great-uncle do with the stuff he got from the storage units?” Bart asked.
“Pieced it out and sold it, bro. What else you gonna do with stuff like that? A lot of it was junk we just dumped. Never know what you’re gonna get outta one of them things.”
“Where did he sell it?”
“Online, wherever he could find somebody that wanted something. Me and Yegor dragged some of them things around to pawn shops and swap meets. Man is all about making a dollar. He pays me and Yegor chump change, though.”
“He pays for the apartment we’re living in,” Yegor said quietly.
“Oh, yeah. He does that, too.” Demyan looked at his brother. “Only if he’s dead, he ain’t gonna do that no more, is he?” He frowned. “Who’s gonna pay the rent if Uncle Maurice is gone?”
Yegor shrugged and looked unhappy.
“Hey, Demyan.” Bart snapped his fingers. “Focus.”
Demyan looked at Bart, had to narrow his eyes a moment, then looked again. “What?”
“If you guys put the stuff up on the computer for your uncle, who managed the sales?”
“Me and Yegor. We boxed stuff up, carted it to the post office. Uncle Maurice wasn’t gonna do it. Man had no skills when it came to tech and he sure wasn’t gonna walk to the post office every day. Knew good stuff from the bad in storage units, though. Man could turn a dollar.”
Bart pulled up a picture of the elephant on his phone. “Tell me about this.”
A wide smile split Demyan’s face. “Oh, yeah! The elephant! I remember the elephant!”
“Uncle Maurice said he was gonna make bank on it,” Yegor added. “Said he had a bunch of different people bidding on it the first day we put it up.”
“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.
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.”
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.