Strip (36 page)

“I’ll tell you what I need from you. I need the name of the man who pulled the trigger. I don’t know why you haven’t told us yet. Maybe he paid you to set those three up, maybe you just happened to be there when it happened, and you owe him because he let you leave. I don’t know. But if you tell me, I’ll try to keep you from being charged as accomplices. If you don’t, then the DA may decide to charge you with the shootings. One of the things that will strike him is that you both had brand-new guns in your purses. You must have thrown away the old ones on the same night. I’m going to give you a chance to think.” He stood up, beckoned to Detective Serra. “We’ll be back.”

As soon as the door closed, the two girls moved closer, leaned together. “He means it,” said Irena.

“I know. Shh!”

“He really does. You want to go to trial for murder? We don’t have any money for good lawyers. They’ll lock us up forever.”

Ariana had tears in her eyes. “But we can’t.”

“Why not? We met the man once. We don’t care about him.”

“But we owe him” Ariana said.

“We do not. There wouldn’t be any problem if it weren’t for him.”

“He didn’t do anything. They were about to kill him. He didn’t even bring a gun with him. All he did was fight back. He had to, and then he let us live. We were the only witnesses, and he knew we worked for Rogoso. If he had killed us there wouldn’t be anybody left to tell on him. But he didn’t. He even gave us the keys to the car so we could get away.”

“They weren’t his to give. And maybe he was smarter than we were and knew the car would turn out to be a curse. Maybe he set us up on purpose so we’d be blamed.”

“You know that’s not true. He even waited and gave us time to get far away before he set the fire.”

“He’s an old man, not a little boy. He knew what he was risking. Nobody made him do it.”

Outside the room, in the smaller one that was marked “Cleaning supplies,” Lieutenant Slosser and Detective Serra watched the television monitor and listened to the voices, amplified by the microphones all over the room. “Say it,” he whispered. “Say the name.”

Ariana said, “It was my fault more than yours. He took the gun out of my purse. I’ll take the blame.”

“I don’t want either of us to take the blame. Why should we throw ourselves away, especially for a man we don’t even know? And he’s a pig. He got rich by making women strip and then turn tricks in those private rooms.”

“What are you talking about? A year ago that’s what you wanted to do.”

“I changed my mind.”

“You got a better offer, more money just for carrying things.”

“And I let you in on it too, didn’t I?”

In the next room, Detective Serra said, “They’re off the subject. Do you want me to go back in and remind them they have to come up with the name?”

“No, thanks, Louise,” Slosser said. “This could take a while. I want them to get so used to the interrogation room and the predicament they’re in that they forget we’re out here listening. You can go back to your other work.”

“Thanks.” She went out the door and closed it.

Ariana said, “Why don’t we make a story up? Why can’t we say ‘We met a man named Stanley in Wash, he drove us to Malibu, and argued with Mr. Rogoso.’”

“Then what?”

“Just what really happened. Make it all the same except the man’s name. Mr. Rogoso told Chuy and Alvin to kill him, but he snatched the gun out of my purse. It was self-defense.”

Slosser’s face was close to the screen, his jaw working. “The name, honey. Time to say the name.”

Ariana said, “I wish I could talk to him. I could explain why we have to do it.”

“What would you say? Hello, Mr. Kapak. This is your good friend Ariana. I’ve got something to tell you that’ll just kill you.”

Slosser stood up. He left the tape running and walked back toward the big open office where the detectives had their desks. Nobody had told him anything to his face yet, but the big turn had occurred. He knew.

A
T JUST AFTER NOON,
Manco Kapak lay in his bed in a troubled sleep. He dreamed he was in a field with golden stems and fat seeds of grain. He knew he was young again, and back in Hungary. He was with Marija. She was studying music in Budapest, but he was only posing as a student. He was the right age—twenty-two—and he had acquired the bohemian look that students had, the workman’s clothes, a pair of round sunglasses that he wore all the time, a modest beard.

He had told her and her friends that he was studying political science, because it seemed to be a subject that had no particular agreed-upon content, no specific books that everyone had to read. It was also one of the dangerous subjects that implied membership in one of the opposition groups. But since he was on no lists of students and never attended a lecture, he felt secure. He and Marija were both Romanians—he from Bucharest and she from a village not too far away where he had relatives—and he suspected that much of what he had to offer was a cure for homesickness, a chance to use her own language.

She sometimes asked him why he never spoke about his studies, and he answered that he learned more by listening than by talking. He said that at his age, all he would be doing was repeating the words of his professors anyway. He would speak and write his own opinions when he had learned enough to have a right to them. When the others in their set heard this, he gained a reputation for wisdom and humility.

But in his dream he didn’t feel the contentment of those summers. He knew a great many things that none of the others knew, because he wasn’t only Claudiu the student. He was also Manco Kapak at age sixty-four. Camping in the wheat fields was sure to disappear with the summer, and anyone would know that, but he knew that it would disappear forever. All of it—the smell of the plants that somehow clung to Marija’s hair, the finger-touch of the gentle breeze, the steady sound of the chatter of their student friends, uncaring as the chatter of birds—was going to be obliterated. He knew that it was going to turn into a nightmare place. He tried to tell all of them that it was time to go, but his voice turned thick and slow, and he couldn’t draw in enough breath to speak loud and strong. The others didn’t seem to hear him. He had to save Marija, so he picked her up in his arms.

He knew the time was running out as he went along, holding her. He could not see the dips and rises in the earth, because the stalks of the plants hid them. He tripped and staggered and lost his balance many times. He made one long step and began to fall. He knew the hole was deeper than he had feared, and he began to turn as he fell, and gasped.

He awoke, lying there on top of the covers, trying to catch his breath. He looked past his feet at the tall, narrow windows copied in style from a French palace, turned and felt the smooth texture of the matching pillows and duvet on the bed. For an instant he saw it all with the twenty-two-year-old eyes of Claudiu the student. The old man he had become was richer and more secure than the most corrupt Communist bureaucrats he had met in those days. The thought brought him back fully to the present. He wasn’t really old yet, because he could still move quickly. His muscles had strength, even if it was not the strength of the young. When he got bent over and could no longer walk without help, he would be old. The time was coming, and it no longer seemed so distant as to be only theoretical. He could already feel a taste of the pains that he would feel then, so he knew where they would be—his knees, his right hip, and his hands.

He lay there and his memory brought his trouble back to him. He was in jeopardy. He had killed Rogoso and his two bodyguards. He sat up, swung his legs off the bed, yawned, and put on his shoes. He glanced at his watch. It was just after 12:00. He had slept late, and he felt anxious about being unconscious that long. There were forces waiting to take him down and destroy him. They were always there, and always had been, waiting like microbes for him to become too weak to fight them off.

He stood and held his place for a moment to be sure he had waited through the wave of dizziness from standing up too fast. He passed by the mirrored dresser and ran a brush through his hair to push it back down, and opened the door that led from the master suite to the hall.

He crossed the living room and looked, as he always did, to the left and right. To the left was the path through the tropical garden to the guesthouse, and beyond it, the bamboo forest at the back of the property. To the right was the formal front entrance with the two big carved teak doors that nobody ever used. It was protected from the street by a tight planting of trees. When the sunlight passed through all the greenery, it became soft and secret and the undersides of the leaves glowed.

Kapak walked down the far hallway past the pantry, the maid’s quarters, into the kitchen. The women of the cleaning crew were all gone, and Spence was sitting at the kitchen table reading the
Los Angeles Times.
He always read it in a prescribed order—front section, California, Calendar, and finally Business and Sports—then refolded it and put each section back as though he’d never touched it.

Even after more than thirty years in the city, Kapak could hardly ever bring himself to read the paper. He supposed it was because most of the stories were about things that had no bearing on his life. He checked it only to be sure his ads had run, skimmed the headlines to be sure there were no stories about him or about live adult entertainment. He said to Spence, “Good morning. Only it’s afternoon, right? You look relaxed.”

“I am.”

“How is that thing going? You know—the thing with Joe Carver. You got any leads yet?”

“I got him.”

“You
got
him?”

“Last night. I’ll show you something.” He got up, left the newspaper spread on the kitchen table, went to the maid’s room, and came back with a plastic zip-lock bag. He set it on the newspaper. “I thought this might make you feel good.” He began to pull the bag open.

“Is that blood?”

“Yes.”

Kapak looked down at it. “You don’t need to open that. It’s his shirt. I recognize the pattern. That’s the one he was wearing the day he came here. We don’t need to get any of his blood on anything.”

“I just figured you’d like to see proof that it’s over.”

“Did you get the girl too—the crazy one who helped him with the robberies?”

“Sure. But I didn’t bring back any souvenirs from her. Carver is the one we want to prove is dead.”

“Thanks. And great work. I was beginning to think this was going to go on forever. You’ll be getting some kind of bonus, when I think of something that would be big enough.”

He retreated from the kitchen and walked back toward the living room. He stopped in front of a big leather couch and let his legs give way to deposit him in the middle of it. For comfort he stared out the window at the enormous translucent ferns above the stubby sago palms. Even though the tropical plants were out of proportion and came from a distant, alien place, they were natural and green, so they made him feel calmer.

Spence had surprised him. It shouldn’t have been a surprise. He had been ranting for weeks that somebody should be able to find this Carver guy and get rid of him. But now Spence had done it. Kapak was beginning to feel a bit scared of Spence. He was like a genie. If you stated a desire in front of him, he would make it happen. But in the stories, the genie wasn’t benevolent. He was cunning and dangerous, and asking him to use his power was a risk. If you didn’t think carefully before you made the wish, there were terrible consequences.

Kapak tried to decide whether he had done the right thing. He was the one who had killed Carver and the girl, really. Spence’s disinterested violence was a kind of innocence. Kapak was the one who made the decision and the one who received the benefit. He had committed murder. It was the first time in a long life of struggling and fighting that he had done that. He had killed a couple of men before last night’s work at Malibu, but it had always had a fairness to it. Two men fight with grappling hooks on a moving boat, and one falls in. Maybe the propeller got him, maybe he drowned, and maybe he swam underwater to the far side of the boat, then ducked again to swim to the next boat.
Never seen again
wasn’t the same as
dead.
Running another car off the road didn’t mean he had killed the driver, or that the driver was even dead. If he was, he had certainly had a part in killing himself.

Joe Carver was the worst thing Kapak had ever done. He had ordered a man and his girlfriend killed merely for strategic reasons. It was what a king would have done. He had felt he had no other choice. He couldn’t afford to let people all over town believe that he had allowed a solitary stranger to keep robbing him over and over in different ways. It would have made him a victim to anyone in the city who owned a gun. As it was, he had waited one day too long and tempted Rogoso to kill him for being weak.

Telling Spence to kill Carver had been a bad thing. There was no doubt about that. But that wasn’t all there was to say about it. Life was more complicated than that. By having Spence kill Carver, he had put out a clear notice that anyone who attacked Manco Kapak was placing himself in terrible jeopardy. Kapak’s men would search until they found him, even if it took a very long time.

Spreading that story was a good thing to do. It would not only protect Kapak, but also his enterprises and all of his people. He wasn’t just thinking of the men like the Gaffneys, Spence, Guzman, Corona, and Voinovich, but also the bartenders, waiters, busboys, cooks, bouncers who worked in the clubs. If a bunch of men got up the nerve to pull a full-scale assault on one of the clubs, there would be shooting. In a crowded club, bullets could hit anybody, and they were far more likely to hit the people who had the least experience of gunfire. By making the decision to sacrifice Joe Carver, he may have saved ten or fifteen other people who depended on him for their livelihoods and their safety. He did not succeed in convincing himself.

He stood. The work was done. It wasn’t as though he had a chance to undo it. Now what he needed was to keep the killing from being wasted. He went back to Spence in the kitchen. “Have you told anybody that Carver is dead?”