Ill tell you everything I know, but not until I get back, Promised Pronyakin and ducked into the corridor leading to the restroom, at the very end of which there was an emergency exit to the street.
Left alone, the former spouses gave vent to their feelings and began to quarrel, continuing the verbal altercation interrupted several years ago.
Are you still as secondary as your ridiculous cowboy hat? Still playing John
Wayne, even though youre not a figure!
Do you want me to dress like Sherlock Holmes? Smoke a pipe and wear caps and tweed jackets? Youre still the same fury in heels. All you can do is bite
people.
Well, lets just say I wont bite you Youre not even human.
True. Then who am I?
You are an imbecile. Your intelligence is equal to that of a monkey.
Whoever said anything about macaques, not you. The monkey and the glasses. And by the way, in case you hadnt noticed, you were tricked. Pronyakins gone and hes not coming back.
Your office? And where will you take him then, since theres nowhere lower to fall? Only the subway is lower!
Madam, a customer at the next table interjected, you dont drink on the subway. Its forbidden. Only the pit on Khokhlovka is lower. Theres no roof over your head there at all.
Anna looked at the uninvited interlocutor with such scalding contempt that he, with the words: Im leaving, I was wrong, hurried to move to the far corner of the liquor store, away from Anna.
Its amazing, Andrew adjusted his hat, as if to see if it was in place, Its been a long time, and you still hate me. I wouldnt be surprised if it turns out that you took this case just to annoy me.
Youre right, as always. At the same time, Ill make some money, help the widow get rid of the parasite.
Jesus Christ, Anna, fear God. Do you really think that Pronyakin is lying? If there was a will, thats easy to establish. And if Pronyakin isnt lying about the will, hes not lying about anything else. At the very least, Miliutin was threatened. Otherwise, why would he hide from his family?
Because he was manipulated. Hes schizophrenic. Didnt you know that? Somebody told him they were going to kill him, and he believed it. I wouldnt be surprised if it was Pronyakin. And rest assured, I will unravel this intrigue, get to the truth, and expose the scoundrel.
Chapter 4
Its a little immodest, but so sweet that I want to tell, says Andrei, looking at her with laughing eyes, I will tell you the name, and you will confirm or deny it to me.
God, how interesting. Im all a ball of nerves, readily agrees the notarys assistant, with whom Andrei is openly flirting.
Two buddies fell in love with a fallen girl. Who they met in a brothel. And they made a wager between them. If the girl chooses one of them, the other will
bequeath all his possessions to her chosen one, and he will go to a monastery. Can you imagine? As they say, dont stand in the way of high feelings.
Its crazy how romantic, the assistant was intrigued.
And so it happened. The lovers were married, and the grooms friend disappeared for several years until they received the news that he had been killed in Kamchatka. He did not go to the monastery, but took a job as a ranger in a bear reserve at the very edge of the earth, where he was mauled by a bear cub while rescuing a group of tourists from Moscow. It was these tourists who told our couple when they returned home that all of his property now belongs to them after his death. But, unfortunately, the original will perished along with its owner in Kamchatka: it was drenched in the heros blood. He kept it on his chest as a memory of his oath all this time. And now, I, a private detective, am forced to go around all the notary offices of our city and ask pretty notarys assistants like you, whether you have not met the surname Milyutin when executing documents?
Milutin, Milutin? The notarys assistant, pale as an angelic shadow, with brightly painted lips and thickly tinted eyes, wrinkled her convex forehead and suddenly exclaimed joyfully, I remember! We had Milutin two weeks ago. He
was so funny and disheveled. I thought he wasnt himself. His eyes were running and his hands were shaking. He was making a will.
And what is the record that the will was notarized and the state duty was paid?
Of course, in the civil registry. He wasnt alone, by the way-this crazy guy. He had a lawyer with him, a flamboyant one, trying to calm him down.
And why did you, dear Oksana, think he was a lawyer?
And he called himself that. As if it were a privilege.
Isnt that him, by any chance? Andrew took out his smartphone and showed the girl the photo of Orlovsky.
He, he, she exhaled happily, and looked at the detective in surprise, Only our crazy man is hardly the hero you are looking for. Yours died in Kamchatka, and made his will several years ago. You should make a written request to all the notarys offices and wait for an answer.
***
All night long, Anna was catching mice. Thats easy to say, catching mice. Its not an easy thing to do, and like any job, it requires a lot of intelligence. Try to get the information you need from the darkest corners of the Internet, the web of information flows, where it is easy to get lost, constantly moving the mouse on the table and looking at the numbers and lines on the monitor. But Anna is no stranger to looking for a needle in a haystack. She hacked into one website, hacked into another, went through the firewall, and got her way she found out everything the big government people knew about him: where he was born, who he married, who he sued, what he was good for in this life.
His whole life appeared to her in the form of dry facts of his very unremarkable biography on the monitor screen. It turned out that Pronyakins real
surname was Gorodov, he was born on April 1 in Kostroma, and he spent his childhood in Moscow. His father served in the police, and his mother taught art at the Stroganov School. After finishing the 8th grade he entered a technical college, qualified as a car mechanic, and then got a job at a car dealership as a salesman and consultant. Married, left his wife and child. Since 1984 he was wanted by the
police for fraud. He borrowed five and a half thousand roubles from a friend of his, promising he would buy him a car without waiting in line, using his connections in the car dealership. But the friend never saw the money or the car.
In 1986, he was sentenced to three years of suspended imprisonment with confiscation of property and compulsory labor for fraud, serving his sentence at construction sites in the Yaroslavl region. He was released early for good behavior. He settled down in Yaroslavl, opened a cooperative for recycling recyclables and a construction firm that manufactured wooden log structures.
In 1991 he moved to Moscow and married the widow of the owner of the first cooperative bank in the USSR, taking her last name. A year later he was widowed. And after that unfortunate event, his biography consisted entirely of a series of marriages and funerals. And each time he changed his last name, marrying under the last name of his wife.
He became a relatively recent Pronyakin, just three years ago, having inherited two apartments, a country house in Rublyovka and a chain of massage parlors after the death of his last wife, which he immediately sold to a well-known thief in law, with whom his wife had a conflict of interest.
The wifes parents did not believe that their daughter had died accidentally and suddenly, and appealed to the prosecutors office to investigate the causes of her death, accusing the new widower of organizing the murder of his wife in order to take over her property. Anna was not even too lazy to find out the name of the investigator who tried to handle the case: he still worked in the prosecutors office.
We should talk to him, Anna decided, its amazing that no one has yet seen the obvious connection between all these deaths. They are not accidental. And every time Pronyakin got away with it. How is that possible?
If it is clear to Anna that Pronyakin is a marriage swindler and swindler who skillfully manipulates people, then it is completely unclear why he changed his last name with amazing tenacity, as if he wanted to start life anew. Zero in on my
past? Start all over again? But why, if the goal was still the same to cheat himself of someone elses good? But he was a child, just like me: he went to school and studied the code of the builder of communism, she wondered, what made him become such an outrageous scoundrel? Was it money? He gave up his son so as
not to burden himself with unnecessary worries on the road to enrichment.
Anna is convinced that the change of surnames is not accidental, that there is some secret behind it. What are you hiding, Heifetz-Tverdokhlebov-Izyumov- Larin-Osmurkin-Pronyakin, honored widower and experienced catcher of womens hearts? What do you live for? What is your purpose, what do you seek?
Anna took her eyes off the monitor and looked out the window to see that the night had passed and it was morning. Its 8:00 a.m., and its time to make a call. Anna finds the right number in her phones contacts folder and makes the call.