Part 7 The Third Wife
THE THIRD WIFE
It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.
– Sherlock Holmes
Rikers Island Jail
26 December, 1100 hours
An hour later, I arrived at Rikers Island in an Uber.
Since there wasn’t going to be any change to Audrey’s condition for at least two days, I figured it might be good for me to stay occupied, so I decided to take the meeting.
I went directly to the women’s facility, Rosie’s, where I was met out front by Yasmina Ivanova’s attorney, a skinny guy with a receding hairline, glasses and badly tied tie. He couldn’t have been more than 25.
‘Dr Speedman, hello, hello. My name is Georgy, Georgy Ivanov,’ he said.
His accent was Russian and his mannerisms quick and nervy. To call him skinny was an understatement. He was fragile. He was so thin, he made me look chunky.
I also think this might have been his first time at a jail.
‘Thank you so much for coming,’ he said. ‘Yasmina is very keen to speak with you.’
We entered the prison together.
When I’d first seen Yasmina Ivanova on the 95th floor of Aristo King’s penthouse on December 21st, she’d cast an imperious figure.
Tall, taut and dressed in yoga pants and her designer track top, she’d looked like a woman who was used to getting whatever she wanted whenever she wanted. The doors of the world opened for her everywhere.
She didn’t look that way today.
Now, as I entered one of the jail’s conference rooms—cinderblock walls, linoleum floor, Formica table—she was dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit, with her hair tied back in a messy ponytail.
She wore no make-up and her eyes were red from crying.
I took a seat opposite her. Georgy sat beside her.
‘You,’ she said. ‘You were very brave that day. You saved my little Alexei in elevator shaft and you saved me in the helicopter. Yet in all of news coverage, I have not seen you at all on the television. No interviews, no nothing. You could be hero, too. Why is this?’
‘My girlfriend was one of the FBI agents there,’ I said. ‘She was shot at the cemetery and hasn’t recovered yet. I’ve been with her at the hospital.’
Yasmina Ivanova nodded thoughtfully.
‘I didn’t do this,’ she said. ‘I have been—how you say?—setted up.’
I said, ‘They found correspondence between you and the Grandmaster, Sergei Kazan. And also with his Russian gangster buddies out by Coney Island, the Brighton Bratva crew. Was that legit?’
She scowled.
‘Okay, yes, yes, I see how this looks. First, I do not know this Grandmaster. I have never met him. But the others, Oberov’s people from Coney Island’—she grimaced in frustration—‘yes, I do know those men. But it is not what you think.’
‘What is it, then?’
She turned away.
Then she spun back and said quickly, ‘Those Russian criminals have photos of me, and videos. Nude photos and sex videos, from long before I met Aristo, from when I was a young model with no money.’
‘Sex tapes?’ I said.
I thought of the news reports about Yasmina’s connections with the Russian mobsters at Brighton Beach.
And four payments.
3, 6, 12 and 3 million dollars, as I recalled.
‘Yes,’ Yasmina said. ‘I was young, in my twenties. I came from nothing, from a small village in Russia, but here I was suddenly at huge parties in mansions in the Hamptons or penthouses in New York City.
‘There were drugs—cocaine, ecstasy—and rich men who wanted to fuck me. I was high most of the time and I let them and mostly it was fun, doing the fucking on cocaine, sometimes with billionaires, sometime politicians, sometimes Russian gangsters, sometimes with two men at same time. But I didn’t know some occasions had been filmed.
‘When I became famous a few years later—doing runway shows for Victoria’s Secret and swimwear shoots for Sports Illustrated—the Russians contacted me and said if I didn’t pay them three million dollars, they’d release the sex tapes.’
‘They blackmailed you.’
‘Yes. I paid them $3 million to make it go away,’ Yasmina said. ‘My career was taking off.’
I nodded.
‘But it didn’t go away, did it?’ I said. ‘They came back.’
That was the second payment: $6 million, I thought. They’d doubled their rate because her fame had grown.
Yasmina said, ‘That is correct. Two years later, they returned. Only this time they asked for six million. Because I was more well known. And I paid again.’
I could see where this was going, but I let her say it.
‘And then I met Aristo at a gala. I was twenty-four and now a famous model. And he wooed me. On our first date, he fly me to Paris for dinner. We stayed at the Ritz.’
I could only imagine what being courted by the world’s richest man was like.
Yasmina continued: ‘When our relationship became public a few months later, I was worried the Russians would call me again and ask for more money, but they didn’t.’
‘They didn’t?’ I said.
‘No, they waited till our engagement was announced and then they called me.’
‘Only now the price was twelve million dollars,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And I paid again.’
‘So what about the last payment, the three-million-dollar one? Why lower the price?’ I asked.
‘That’s the thing, I know nothing about that final payment. It went out of my account without my knowledge. It was done to frame me,’ she said.
I leaned back in my chair, thinking.
When you’re a private detective, you learn to gauge people.
Gauge when they’re lying and when they’re telling the truth.
Looking at Yasmina Ivanova in that drab prison conference room—deprived of her expensive clothes, publicly abandoned by her super-rich husband—I tried to make that assessment of her.
It’s never easy to admit to someone that you made a sex tape, let alone multiple sex tapes with multiple dudes.
I also recalled meeting her on December 21st, after I’d saved her little boy in the elevator shaft.
Two things that she’d done had struck me.
First, I remembered how she’d slapped the insurance guy, Quinn McCade, after he hadn’t paid the ransom that had been demanded for her son in time.
And second, she’d thanked me.
Not only that, she’d said she owed me a debt, one that she would not forget.
‘Mr Speedman—’ she said.
Georgy cut her off in Russian. ‘Yasmina, proshu proshcheniya on Doctor Speedman.’
‘I’m sorry, Doctor Speedman,’ Yasmina corrected herself.
‘My life is in ruins. My husband is divorcing me. He’s locked me out of our bank accounts.
I have almost no money. No attorney in New York will represent me, which is why I have my cousin, Georgy, helping me, and he only got his law degree from community college in July.
The media mocks me. The world thinks I am conniving suka. ’
I cocked my head at the unfamiliar word.
‘Bitch,’ Georgy said helpfully.
Yasmina said, ‘My friends will not return my calls and I cannot see my children, my little Alexei and my sweet Katya.
‘Aristo is an incredibly successful man, but as a father, he is—how you say—neglectful, inattentive. He has many children and he knows nothing of Alexei’s or Katya’s loves and joys. Sometimes he forgets their birthdays.
‘I am no angel. I have done things in my youth that I am not proud of. But I did not do this! Please, take my case.’
I looked hard at her.
December 21st had been a truly strange day.
Everything had happened so fast and, if I stopped to think about it all, many things about that day had not yet been resolved.
Audrey was still in a coma.
The QuantumSpeed-7 code-breaking chip had not been found.
And, for my own part, I still wondered about the mysterious man in the superintendent’s white coveralls I’d glimpsed on the 98th floor, which had led to the discovery of Katya in the garbage chute (for which Trey Hooper had claimed the credit).
Not to mention my—let’s be honest—creepy conversation with one of the villains himself when he shoved me into the sauna.
Working on this case would also have one other benefit: it would keep me in New York City and close to Audrey.
Yasmina mistook my hesitation for something else.
‘I can’t pay you anything now, but when it is over—’
I held up my hand.
‘It’s all right, Ms Ivanova. Don’t worry about payment. I’ll take your case.’
‘Oh, thank you, Dr Speedman! Thank you!’ she exclaimed.
‘Please, call me Sam,’ I said. ‘Just give me a moment. I need to gather my thoughts.’
I bowed my head and stared at the Formica table.
(Note 1: First of all, I needed to reframe how I’d seen the events of December 21st. Instead of viewing them as the exploits of a cunning Russian kidnapper employed by Yasmina Ivanova, I now had to see them as the work of someone who was working against her.)
(Note 2: When you take on a case where the client says they’ve been set up—this is very common in divorce cases—you need to make a mental list of the people who would want to ruin that client’s life.)
Yasmina and Georgy waited in silence as I sat there motionless, my mind whirring.
I tried to remember all the people I’d met or heard about on December 21st: all the people in Yasmina Ivanova’s life.
Names and faces flashed across my brain.
Aristo King’s two other wives.
His children to those other wives.
The young nanny who’d been sleeping with King while he’d been married to Yasmina.
And of course, Aristo King himself (seriously, he wouldn’t have been the first guy to arrange his own fake kidnapping).
Then I looked up.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I need to ask you a few questions. Some will be, well, uncomfortable.’
‘Go ahead,’ Yasmina said firmly.
‘King’s first wife, Winnie Tan, have you ever dealt with her?’
‘No.’
‘Ever meet her before December 21st?’
‘No.’
‘His second wife, Shelby Cox. Have you met her?’
A hesitant pause.
‘Yes . . . a few times.’
‘In what circumstances?’
‘The first time was soon after Aristo divorced her and married me. She came by the house to drop off some of his things. She said, “Enjoy him while it lasts, Slut. He’ll do to you what you did to me.”’
‘And the other times?’
‘Just random meetings, passing each other at restaurants in Vail or West Palm Beach.’
‘Did you converse?’
‘No. If she passed by me, all she’d say was, “Hey, Slut.”’
I nodded.
It was time for an uncomfortable question.