Part 7 The Third Wife #2
‘Did you sleep with Aristo King while he was married to Shelby Cox?’
Another pause.
Yasmina’s eyes flitted downward.
‘Yes.’
‘Multiple times?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you were aware he was married to her?’
‘Yes.’
‘What about Shelby Cox’s children, Ajax and Cassandra, the ones who were attached to the outside of the tower. You ever interact with them?’
‘Not intentionally. I knew they lived in the tower, which was one of the reasons I rarely went there. I didn’t want to bump into them in the lobby.’
‘Has that happened?’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘They also call me Slut. Ajax was especially hostile. Cassandra, less so.’
I moved on.
‘The nanny who had an affair with your husband, Madison Barnes. I’m guessing your interactions with her weren’t exactly pleasant.’
‘Madison was eighteen when we hired her. It only took her four weeks before she was fucking my husband in his home office while I was out.’
‘She also now has an apartment at 59West,’ I said.
‘Another reason I don’t go there,’ Yasmina said. ‘She seduced him solely to get pregnant. Now she is set for life. Apartment, monthly stipend. She knew exactly what she was doing.’
I sighed inwardly.
A clear pattern was emerging.
Aristo King, the richest man on the planet, waltzed through life moving from one woman to the next, fathering children with all of them.
He’d cheated on Wife No. 1 with Wife No. 2.
Then he’d cheated on Wife No. 2 with Wife No. 3.
Then he’d cheated on Wife No. 3 with the teenage nanny.
For most men, such consistent infidelity would prove to be very expensive in divorces, but I suspected King also had an answer for that.
‘Do you have a pre-nup with Aristo King?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘What do you get in the event of divorce?’
‘I get $200,000 per year, plus a residence. He pays for the children’s living costs—schooling, clothing, et cetera—which is about half a million per year.’
I nodded.
For a guy worth hundreds of billions of dollars, this was a pittance.
He’d completely screwed Yasmina in the pre-nup, as wealthy guys with armies of attorneys often did with beautiful young models who were ‘in love’.
‘Do you know if his other wives got similar deals in their pre-nups?’
Yasmina shrugged. ‘I only know what Ari told me a few times. Winnie did much better, since they were young when they got married and since she helped build their first company. She’s a billionaire in her own right.
‘Shelby, the second one—she was once his executive assistant and she has a law degree from Brown—so she cut a better deal. This is why she has houses in Vail and all that.’
Yasmina looked down again.
‘I was not as smart. I have no degrees. Just my looks. I was young and naive when I met Aristo and he swept me off my feet with all the jets and dinners and trips to Paris. And romantic enough to believe that our love was forever, so I just signed the pre-nup when it was put in front of me.’
I nodded.
This was also common among younger second and third wives.
The husband—wealthy and worldly—had his attorneys draft the pre-nuptial agreement. The new young wife—starry-eyed and dazzled and, most of the time, entering into her first marriage—signed it thinking it would never be used.
It was almost always used.
For my purposes, however, it meant that Aristo King had no financial reason to set up Yasmina.
Divorcing her wouldn’t impact him at all.
And he’d walked out on two previous marriages without having to elaborately set up those wives.
Then there were the Russians.
‘Your Russian blackmailers,’ I said. ‘Who were they exactly?’
‘They worked for Roman Oberov, leader of Brighton Beach Bratva. Oberov is very powerful and ruthless man. Rules underworld of Coney Island like a, uh, shadow king. On one occasion, I had to deliver blackmail money to him at his apartment on top floor of Huntington Project Tower out by amusement park.’
The Brighton Bratva.
Xiao had mentioned them: they’d been connected to his case involving the Grandmaster, the one concerning the Chinese crypto influencer who’d been crushed under his own Ferrari.
‘And you never met anyone named Sergei Kazan, the Grandmaster?’
‘No. I’d not even heard of anyone by that name till after that terrible day in tower last week.’
‘Okay.’ I stood up. ‘I need to go and look into a few things.’
Then I stopped.
I nodded at Georgy. ‘Hey, have you got a car?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘It’d be really helpful if you could drive me around on my investigations. Would you be able to do that?’
Georgy looked from me to Yasmina. ‘But, of course. Anything to help my cousin.’
He gathered up his things, kissed Yasmina on the cheek and joined me at the door.
We knocked and two guards came: one to let us out, the other to take Yasmina back to her cell.
‘Please, Sam Speedman,’ Yasmina said. ‘Help me. All I want is to get back to my children. I did not do this.’
‘I’m on it, ma’am,’ I said and left with Georgy.
Georgy’s car turned out to be a clunky old red Toyota Yaris. It was parked in the jail’s visitor lot.
We got in.
‘Where to, Dr Sam?’ Georgy asked.
‘Just a moment.’
I pulled out my notepad and pen (from the very convenient pockets on my new Patagonia jacket).
I needed to formulate a plan because there were many questions to answer.
What had the events of December 21st actually been about?
To take millions of dollars from Aristo King?
To humiliate him?
And why employ the Grandmaster to do it with elaborate deathtraps and riddles? Why not just extort Aristo King the old-fashioned way?
And there was another question for me now: if it hadn’t been Yasmina Ivanova who’d paid for it all, then who would want to set her up for it?
Where to start?
In my notepad, I sketched a quick diagram of Yasmina’s connections:
I stared at the web of connections.
None of them struck me as criminal geniuses, except for maybe the guy who’d spoken to me in the sauna. He’d been a cool customer.
A word about criminal masterminds.
In the first ten seconds of the first lecture I attended on my first day studying criminology at Rice University, my lecturer Professor Lincoln Abbott said, ‘First and foremost, let me be crystal clear about this: there are no criminal masterminds in the real world. If any of you came here looking for that, then you’re gonna be sorely disappointed.
There are no evil geniuses: no Moriartys, no Jokers.
Most crimes are usually the result of one of three things: opportunity, passion or plain old stupidity. ’
My subsequent experiences as a private detective had proven Professor Abbott to be correct.
There were no criminal masterminds out there.
Idiots stole parked cars when they saw that the engine was running (opportunity); organised crime gangs like the Russians at Coney Island were usually thugs who saw an occasion to profit via intimidation (again: opportunity).
Men beat their wives or killed them (passion).
After drinking too much, men and women got into fights/crashed their cars/stole stuff (stupidity).
(Sometimes, white collar crimes could be more complex, but even schemes like insurance fraud weren’t usually executed with much sophistication.)
Set-up cases were no different.
When someone’s set up, most of the time they’re framed by a person who is (a) close to them and (b) has a grievance with them, not some criminal mastermind playing four-dimensional chess from the shadows.
For women, it’s often their man’s ex-wife or ex-girlfriend (the woman scorned).
For men, it’s also often a romantic rival, but business rivals have to be considered, too.
In Yasmina Ivanova’s case, there were several women in her life who might have had motives to set her up, chiefly because at some time they’d all slept with her husband.
Winnie Tan, King’s Wife No. 1, was unlikely. Prior to December 21st, Yasmina had never met her. Winnie Tan had exited King’s life long before Yasmina had come along.
Wife No. 2, Shelby Cox, was a different story.
Yasmina had started sleeping with King while he had been married to Shelby.
It didn’t surprise me at all that Shelby had hostile feelings toward Yasmina. She’d have to be questioned.
Likewise, Yasmina’s former nanny, the 23-year-old Madison Barnes, who’d had a child with King while he’d been married to Yasmina.
Understandably, Yasmina despised her, even if this was exactly what Yasmina had done to Shelby Cox. I’d also have to speak with Madison Barnes.
And then, of course, there was Aristo King himself, the man with an evidently uncontrollable penis.
This was a long shot. Seriously, he was the richest guy in the world; he could divorce Yasmina with a single call to his lawyers, especially since he had a watertight pre-nup with her. Why even bother to set his wife up? He’d also lost a son on December 21st.
But you never knew.
Aristo King had actually gained something from December 21st: genuine sympathy in the media. The events of that day had totally reset the narrative about him and that was a win for a guy who’d suffered major image problems since his women-shouldn’t-vote controversy.
Either way, I wanted to look into him, too, and I had an idea for that.
I stared at two other entries I’d added to the diagram: two people who’d been at 59West on December 21st whose actions were still bothering me: the disappearing superintendent named Lenny and the guy who’d shoved me into the sauna and chatted with me.
The building’s superintendent had been in King’s penthouse at the start of the day, but then he’d oddly vanished in the middle of it all, only for me to see him in his white coveralls up on the 98th blow-through floor and later on the bottom floor of the penthouse, just before I was shut in the sauna by the other mystery man.
I wanted to find and speak with Lenny at some point.
After all that, there was one other group of people connected to all this and apparently quite closely to Yasmina.
The Russian mob out near Coney Island, led by Mr Roman Oberov at the Huntington Projects.
One: they’d blackmailed Yasmina for years.
And two: they had links to the Grandmaster, Sergei Kazan.