Hella Nation - Evan Wright [76]
When I leave they walk me to the door. Harold shakes my hand. Jane hugs me. Both make me promise I will write the truth about their son.
10. BLACKMAIL
I MEET WITH SIMBERG’S former girlfriend, Ksenya, twenty-two, outside a coffee shop at the Camelback Mall. She is not much over five and a half feet tall, with platinum bangs hanging over her face in a way that exaggerates brilliant green eyes and wide, Slavic cheekbones. She wears a slick black coat and jeans. Though she is perilously thin, her jeans are so tight they appear on the verge of splitting every time she shifts her legs to light a cigarette. She seems to snarl every time she puffs on her cigarette. But when the subject of Simberg is raised, she rolls her eyes and laughs, her entire body shaking. “Kostya,” she says, using the diminutive of his first name. “He was so stupid.” Ksenya recalls an especially funny memory. “He drove his stupid car, with the cover in front gone”—she’s referring to the missing hood on Simberg’s Camaro—“and I would laugh.”
Ksenya says that when Simberg was released from jail in November, he did not tell her that he had provided key evidence against Southland. If he had, Ksenya would have scolded him. She and her sister had come to believe that Southland was a CIA agent possessed of extraordinary powers.
Simberg became obsessed with retrieving the $35,000 Southland had taken from Ksenya (telling her he was investing it in Sea Castle). “He did not want me to work at the club,” Ksenya says of Simberg. “He would say, ‘This is a disgusting job. You should not be doing it.’ But he had no money.”
Ksenya is certain Simberg originally agreed to work for Southland to obtain money to impress her. After his release from jail in November, she says, the two of them planned to move to New York. Simberg planned to use her Sea Castle investment as their stake for getting out of town.
He confessed to Ksenya that he was cooperating with Britt against Southland. Soon, Ksenya suspected Simberg threatened Southland and Langdon that he would testify against them unless they paid Ksenya her $35,000. He began confronting Southland and Langdon at Christie’s Cabaret and calling their homes, telling them if they simply handed over Ksenya’s money, he would skip town.
Ksenya believes she is responsible for Simberg’s death. “He met Sean through me. He worked for him because of me. He tried to get my money back and he was killed.” She tells me this sitting in a rental car late one night outside her apartment. She dreads going inside. Since Simberg’s death, she says, she gets through nights by turning on every light in her apartment and drinking vodka until she passes out.
She gestures toward Phoenix—empty streets, blinking traffic lights, mini-malls. “There is nothing here,” she says. “People my age, all they do here is smoke pot and listen to techno.”
Ksenya pauses a moment before portraying to me the fantasy she had for her future in New York. “I told Kostya I would be a businesswoman when we went to New York. I would be in my Mercedes convertible, with my hair up, wearing a suit, doing something like real estate.”
Ksenya recalls the last time she saw Simberg alive, December 14. That morning Simberg woke up uncharacteristically early and prepared to leave. Ksenya asked what he was doing. He said, “Don’t worry, it’s a good thing.”
Later that afternoon, Simberg met up with the three young men now accused of killing him—Chris Andrews, Dennis Tsoukanov and Mikhail Drachev. Of the three, he was closest with Tsoukanov. Simberg often hung out at Tsoukanov’s house and went to clubs with him.
Simberg met his alleged killers that day in order to borrow $400. Simberg needed the money to pay off some parking tickets, which would enable him to take out a $2,000 title loan on his Camaro. All four of them went to the bank together to get the $400 and then headed to the apartment Andrews and Drachev shared. By then it was about six P.M. Soon after arriving at the apartment, Simberg called Britt. Since Britt arrested Simberg, they had