Strip (38 page)

Jimmy Gaffney began to pick up his gear and stow it in his pockets.

Voinovich stood fully armed and equipped, his head nearly to the lower rafters of his little garage. He tried pressing the Talk button on his radio and listened to the static sound as the channel came to life, then nodded to himself and put it in his jacket pocket. He said, “I’d like to talk about the plan some more before things start happening.”

“All right,” Jerry said. “We’ve got to stay loose. First we find out where he is. We take him in our car and drive away. Probably we keep moving. We call, or let him call, the club managers to arrange a ransom. All three managers have signature power for major accounts set up to run the clubs. None of them has the kind of history that would make me worry. They came up to where they are by making sure there are enough cocktail napkins and olives behind the bar. They’re managers. So we give them something they know how to manage—getting us some cash. We pick it up, let Kapak go, and take off”’

“Okay,” Voinovich said. “We agree on the general outline. That’s how it’s done. It would be easier if he had a family, so we could deal with them and have them tell the managers what to do.”

“Then there would be more money around,” Jimmy said. “The kind you can put your hands on.”

Jerry said, “Look, you’ve got to kidnap the guy you have, not make up some imaginary guy who would leave more cash lying around.”

“It’s all right” Voinovich said. “We’ve got to think about the details. We’ll need plastic restraints for his hands and feet. We’ll need a cloth sack to put over his head so he can’t recognize any of us and doesn’t know where he’s been taken. That’s important.”

“We should try it on first,” Jimmy said. “We want to be sure he can’t see, but he can breathe.”

“Not too well,” Voinovich said. “If he can breathe easily, then he can yell too. We don’t want that.”

“No, we don’t want that” Jerry said. “If we’re quick and do this thing right, he won’t have to wear it for long.”

Jimmy looked at his brother. “What if everything doesn’t go right?”

“What do you mean?”

“What I said. You’re talking about everything going right. What if instead it all goes wrong? What if he doesn’t come with us just because we point a gun at him? What if they can’t come up with the money in one day? What if he does something stupid? Do we shoot him?”

“I guess we’d have to.”

“Then what do we do with the body?”

“What?”

“You heard me. You’re planning to go in with your guns drawn, and the whole thing depends on everybody saying yes and jumping to do what we say. If he doesn’t, I guess you’re saying we have to kill him. We can’t just sit someplace with his body and hope it walks away on its own. We need to have a plan for getting rid of it.”

“Well, if you’re going to kidnap people, you have to be ready for bodies,” Voinovich announced.

“Okay,” said Jerry. “We’ll just agree that if things go wrong we’ll shoot him, and then hide the body. We’ll put it in a Dumpster.”

“What about the other people—say, people who work for him too, like Spence, or the waiters, or the bouncer?”

“We shoot them too, obviously, if it comes to that. We have to protect ourselves.”

Voinovich thought for a moment. “Maybe the thing to do is just make him disappear. If we kill him we don’t have to worry about him yelling or running away or getting his hands on somebody’s gun. We just collect a ransom and give him back dead.”

Jimmy Gaffney said, “When we started, we were just hanging out with him for a while. He might not even know he wasn’t free to leave. Maybe we’d go to a bar or a restaurant. That’s what you said, Jerry.”

“I know. I did. And that’s the way we all want it to be. We just breeze into his place like nothing’s up. We tell him we want to take him somewhere and then go there, stop in the men’s room to call the clubs for the ransom money. The other stuff is just in case it sours. Vassily feels more comfortable if he knows what to do in the worst case.”

“Are you saying I’m a big coward?”

“No, Vassily,” Jerry said. “I would never say that about you. Never.” He turned to Jimmy. “He was just being prudent.”

Jimmy was animated by frustration. “Being prudent isn’t finding out that there’s only a half-assed plan, and then going ahead with it. Prudence is stopping before it goes bad.”

“There’s a plan,” Jerry snapped. “Don’t go saying there’s no plan. We just have to keep a few details undecided until we’re on the scene and can assess the conditions. And we’ve got quite a few decisions worked out in advance so if certain things go wrong, we’re not wasting time arguing about what to do. We all know and agreed ahead of time.”

“You’re both ready to shoot Kapak, who’s been pretty good to us, ready to shoot anybody who stumbles in, and then put all their bodies in Dumpsters. Are we all supposed to agree on where the Dumpsters are?”

“Don’t worry about any of that, Jimmy” said Jerry. “He’s not going to be able to cause trouble or anything. We’ll walk in, and nothing he does to stop us will work.”

“Why is that?”

“For the same reason we have to do this in the first place. He’s not the old Kapak. He’s lost his luck. He’s a magnet for trouble and ill fortune.”

“You’re really sure about that?” asked Jimmy.

“I’m so sure I can feel it and taste it and smell it.”

Jimmy looked at Voinovich. He was at the workbench loading extra magazines for his gun, pointedly pantomiming that he considered this a private dispute between the brothers. It wasn’t his business.

Jerry leaned close and spoke quietly. “You don’t want to be the one who sticks with the old man after his luck is gone and the money has been taken, and all the others have bailed out.”

Jimmy could see that their mother’s expression of clairvoyance had appeared on Jerry’s face—the wide-eyed expression of conviction and absolute confidence in his vision. It brought back the many times when their mother would lean close that way to impart her latest prophecy. Jimmy’s spine chilled and he felt a little shiver. Jerry and their mother had been born with the terrible gift, but Jimmy hadn’t. He had never felt a half-second of envy, but the sheer strangeness of it had created a distance with him on one side and his mother and only brother on the other. Maybe Jimmy’s only gift was to feel the chill to warn him that his brother was in a state. “Okay, then,” he said. “If you’re so sure, then we’d better be going.”

They walked out of the garage to the driveway and climbed into Voinovich’s SUV. The big vehicle backed out into the street, and Jimmy heard Jerry cycle a round into the chamber of his gun. He hoped that didn’t mean Jerry’d had another premonition.

K
APAK SPOKE
into his cell phone. “I just spent nearly an hour talking to Lieutenant Slosser. I need you to come and pick me up at the Parker Center.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can.” Spence pressed the red phone symbol to end the call and put his phone away as he stood up. “He’s at the police station downtown. That lieutenant is bugging him again.”

“It’s an opportunity. You know what you want him to feel,” said Joe Carver. “So you say the things that will make him feel that way. If you run out of ideas, call. I’ll be right here in the guesthouse.”

“Just stay out of sight. I’ll probably be bringing him back here.” Spence went out the door of the guesthouse and made his way up the path through the tropical plants to the back of the house. He went right to the garage, got into the black Town Car, and backed it out of the driveway.

Spence drove downtown quickly. He had planned to pull up near the Parker Center where he had waited for Kapak during his first police interview, but when he reached North Los Angeles Street, he could already see him. Kapak was standing on the sidewalk in front of the white stone with the weathered brass letters: DEDICATED TO WILLIAM H. PARKER, CHIEF OF POLICE. Spence stopped in front of the sign, leaned over, and pushed the door open, and Kapak climbed in looking irritated.

“See if the bastards follow us,” he said.

Spence drove a couple of blocks, turned, and went back the other way, then made a U-turn and then a series of right turns until he was near a freeway entrance with a split ramp that sent cars on the 110 freeway or the 101. He went onto the freeway, stayed to the 110 side until the last second, then changed lanes to go onto the 101. “Nobody was following. What did they want you for?”

“Lieutenant Slosser got the idea that I killed Rogoso last night and burned his house in Malibu.”

“Somebody did that?”

“Yeah. He had two men with him too—Alvin and Chuy. Slosser got the idea that it was me. I put up with the accusations as long as I could, until he got on my nerves. Then I said I wanted my lawyer, and he told me I could go.”

“I guess you must have been incredibly shocked to hear about Rogoso to begin with.”

“Not so much.”

“You did it?”

“I wouldn’t tell you, but since you did Joe Carver and didn’t make any big thing of telling me, I have to. Yeah, I did it. He was a rotten, crazy, greedy son of a bitch, and he was getting worse every day. He decided I was drawing attention to myself by letting Joe Carver rob me over and over. I’m listening to a man who had just bought a fifteen-million-dollar house on the beach at Malibu telling me I’m drawing attention. What he really thought was that I must be too weak to fight him off. That he could take over my clubs and kill me.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. He told his two monsters, Alvin and Chuy, to take me out for a ride and kill me. There wasn’t much choice.”

“If they’re dead and you’re here, you must have done the right thing.”

“That’s what I think.”

“And you killed everybody there and torched the house?”

“Well, there were a couple of girls—drug mules, no more than seventeen or eighteen, I think—who had come to take me to meet with Rogoso. I guess he used them because they didn’t look scary. And maybe because nobody wants some guy frisking him for weapons, but a girl can get away with checking everywhere.”

“Let me get this straight. What you did last night was kill Manuel Rogoso and Alvin and Chuy, and burn down the house. But there were also two witnesses, girls who worked for Rogoso.”

“Yeah.”

“Are they dead too?”

“No. I gave them the keys to Alvin’s car and told them to get out of there. I gave them time before I lit the fires in the house.”

“Holy shit. Where are they now?”

“I saw them a little while ago back at the police station.”

“Oh my God.”

“They’re drug mules. They could be in the station for anything—possession and sales is what they do—or maybe they’re out of work since Rogoso died, and they were caught turning tricks or boosting things from stores.”

“The day after the killing?”

“Young kids don’t know how to save money anymore.”

“They had to be in the police station ratting you out.”

“Could be,” Kapak admitted.

“It’s got to be,” Spence said. “Talking to the police is probably their only shot at staying alive.”

“Think so?”

“If Rogoso’s people know the girls were in the house when you killed Rogoso, how can they not think the girls helped you?”

“I guess you’re right. The police will protect them, maybe get them out of town.”

“How are we going to get you out of here?”

“What do you mean?

“You can’t stay in L.A.”

“Wait a minute. I haven’t decided anything like that. I mean, think about it. We’ve all had a rough week. It’s all just part of the Joe Carver problem. He robbed me a month ago, but we didn’t find him in all that time. That was what caused all this trouble for us. The worst thing it did was make that rat bastard Rogoso think he could kill me and take over. But you got Joe Carver, so he’s not going to be a nuisance anymore. I got Rogoso last night, and so he’s not a problem. There was a war going on for a few days, but it didn’t bring us down. We won. Our enemies are dead. It’s over.”

Spence said, “If you killed three men last night and the police have two eyewitnesses, then your trouble is only beginning.”

“Even if those two girls testified at a trial, the jury might not believe them.”

“I don’t see why they wouldn’t.”

“They’re criminals.”

“Do the girls know you did business with Rogoso?”

“They know something. They delivered Rogoso’s money to me a few times.”

“Think back. Can they say you were in business with Rogoso and how the business worked?”

“Sure, but who’s going to believe them?”

“Mr. Kapak, I don’t usually step out of line and give advice to my elders, or to the guy I’m working for. I shut up and learn. But you seem to be asking my opinion. Is that right?”

“I guess it is. Yeah,” Kapak said.

“Okay then. Will a jury believe two girls who worked for Rogoso when they say they saw you kill him and Alvin and Chuy? Yes. They will. Unanimously.”

“All I’ve got to do is pay one guy to hold out for innocent.”

“If there’s a hung jury, they don’t have to let you go. They can have another trial.”

“We can pay the next guy.”

“Even if we do, the whole story will have been in the papers and on television everywhere, every day, because it’s about a drug dealer with a house in Malibu and a strip club owner who’s been running dirty money through his pussy palaces for years to help gangsters. You’d be in worse trouble. Everybody in Rogoso’s organization, and all of his relatives, will know who got him. Getting off in court doesn’t get you off with them. There will be bunches of them out for revenge. There will also be people who can’t imagine anyone burning Rogoso’s house without first backing a truck up to the place and filling it with money and drugs. They’ll want to take you alive, but they’ll settle for dead, because then they can search your house and the clubs.”

Kapak let his frustration show. “I had no choice. What the hell am I supposed to do about any of that?”

“What I thought you must be doing already—getting out of town as fast as you can. Have the cops filed any charges yet?”

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“I asked Slosser before I left.”