Jeffrey Siger - Mykonos After Midnight

“No, I never saw any of them. She’d have them over in a guest room after I left and before Mister Christos came home for his nap in the late afternoon.”

“Did he know about the other men?”

She shrugged. “If he did, he never said anything to her. At least not when I was around.”

“What else can you tell me about her?”

“She had a boyfriend.”

“Who is he?”

“I don’t know, but he’s not from Mykonos.”

“How do you know?”

“From the way she talked to him on the telephone.”

“She talked to her boyfriend in front of you?”

“Once, in Polish.”

“You understand Polish?”

“Enough to know she was talking to a boyfriend.”

“Do you have a name for the boyfriend?”

“Sergey. He’s in Bialystok. She was talking about visiting him.”

“Going to visit him, or having already visited him?”

“Both.”

“When did she visit him?”

“She left the island five or six weeks ago, so it was probably then.”

“Did she travel a lot?”

“Not without Mister Christos. That was the first time I could remember her traveling without him. They argued about him paying for her trip. Mister Christos said he wouldn’t pay for her to go somewhere without him. Even if it was to see her family.”

“Is that where she went?”

She shrugged. “That’s what she said.”

“Any mention of Christos in her conversation with the boyfriend?”

“She said ‘the old man suspects nothing.’ I guess that was about Mister Christos.”

“‘Suspects nothing’ about what?”

“No idea.”

“You never told Christos any of what you’d overheard?”

She looked at Tassos’ eyes. “Do you think Mister Christos didn’t know what she was? If I told him what I’d heard, it would be nothing different from what he’d already imagined and had accepted as the price of being with her. If I told him, he wouldn’t get rid of her, he’d get rid of me, the one who told him what he did not want to hear.”

Tassos smiled. “I see you knew your employer well. Any idea where the girlfriend is now?”

“Mister Christos told me she’d left a week ago Sunday for Poland.” The maid spit at the ground. “On another visit to her family.”

“You think she went to see the boyfriend?”

“That’s what she was talking about on the phone.”

“Did Christos say when she’d be back on Mykonos?”

“This weekend.”

“Any idea of who might have done this to him?”

She gave a quick upward jerk of her head in the Greek gesture for “no.”

“No enemies, no arguments, no strangers coming around the house?” said Tassos.

“The putana would know about those sorts of things. She’s the one who brought strangers into Mister Christos’ home.”

Tassos said nothing for a moment, smacked his hands on his thighs, stood up, and waved for the sergeant to come over. “Thank you, keria.”

“Yes, sir?” said the sergeant.

“Please have one of your men give the lady a ride to wherever she has to be.”

The maid stood and started to follow the sergeant but Tassos touched her arm to stop her. He handed her his card and whispered, “If you think of anything else that might be helpful, anything at all, please call me. And I’d appreciate it if you’d keep that second safe just between us.”

Tassos dropped his hand from her arm and walked back into the house.

We have no signs of forced entry.

We have no signs of the girlfriend.

We have a suspect.

***

Anna had been away from Bialystok for less than a week but it felt like a lifetime. When they reached the building, she told the two men to wait outside. She wanted to be alone in Sergey’s one room apartment.

The fresh flowers she’d left in a vase on the small table next to his bed were gray and shriveled, surrounded by withered petals that had fluttered onto the tabletop.

All it would have taken was a little water.

She looked at the bed. It hadn’t been made. Dirty clothes lay scattered on the one upholstered chair in the room. There were dishes piled up haphazardly in the sink and God only knew what sort of a mess was in the bathroom.

Sergey was the same slob he’d been when they’d lived together, always waiting for someone to pick up after him. But now that someone was used to maids.

How can I ever go back to this?

Anna sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the icon on the wall between the room’s two dirty windows. She didn’t pray, only stared, waiting to hear him at the door.

There were a lot of things she had to tell him.

Tassos turned back into the house and went straight upstairs to Christos’ bedroom. It was messy, but slept-in messy, not ransacked. The safe was where the maid had said, its door wide open and insides empty. He looked around. There wasn’t a thing in the closet or bedroom that looked as if it might have been in the safe. The killers must have taken everything in it, he thought.

He went back downstairs and found the coroner working in the living room. “There’s a safe upstairs, Costas. It’s wide open so let’s get the tech boys on it doing their thing. But I doubt they’ll find anything more than the victim’s prints.”

“Why so pessimistic? Even cops get lucky sometimes.”

Tassos shook his head. “Not on that safe we won’t. My guess is Christos opened it for them. As messy as this killing was, if they’d murdered him first there’d be blood tracked somewhere upstairs or on the steps. Besides, the smart move was to get him to cooperate.”

“Unless they already knew the combination.”

Tassos nodded. “Yes, but even if they did, I doubt they’d have killed him first. Still, have them check for blood traces up there just in case I’m wrong for the first time in my life.”

“What do you think happened?”

“I think Christos opened the upstairs safe but they were looking for more than what was in it. And not just money or jewelry.”

“And how do you come to that conclusion?”

“They took everything in the safe. I mean everything. Most people keep at least some personal papers in a safe. Deeds, a will, an old photograph or two, something they think important enough to protect. Sure, there may be some blackmail value in some of those things, but I can’t believe every scrap of paper in there would interest a thief. Unless, what they wanted wasn’t in the safe and they thought the papers might hold a clue to what they were really after.”

“But why kill Christos if he gave them what they came for?”

“The point is, I don’t think he did. The maid said there was a second safe. Maybe the killers knew about it, maybe they didn’t. But I think he died because he didn’t give them what they were looking for. Something they knew he had hidden somewhere. Either in a second safe or someplace else.”

“What the hell was worth dying for? Certainly not money.”

Tassos shrugged. “Who knows what people are willing to die for? You and I know better, because we’ve seen this before.” Tassos waved his hand at the bodies of Christos and his dog. “But most folks, don’t think this could ever happen to them. Especially on Mykonos, where violent crime is practically unheard of. When something like this starts to go down, they think it’s just a bad dream that’ll end when they wake up.”

“But if he opened the upstairs safe without a fight, and the killers realized he hadn’t given them what they wanted, why didn’t they beat him up in the bedroom instead of bringing him down here to do it?”

Tassos shrugged again. “That, my friend, is a question to ask them when we catch them.”