Strip (27 page)

“I’m sorry, Sandy. I apologize.”

“Now apologize to me for obstructing justice and making me compromise an ongoing investigation.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry who?”

“I’m sorry, officer. Sir.”

His voice sounded so obsequious, so fearful and weak, that Gaffney looked up and saw that Sandy’s face held a look of distaste.

“Now I want you to get up. I will walk you to the door. Then I’ll take the handcuffs off. If you go silently and voluntarily, get in your car, and go away, we’ll forget about filing charges. If I, or some other officer, have to put the cuffs on you again, the charges come back, and we’ll do things the hard way.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll go.”

Gaffney took his arm, helped him up, and guided him to the door. He half-turned. “Sandy, I’ll call you later. Okay? Just to talk.”

She frowned. “Uh, I don’t think so, Paul. I don’t want to talk. If I ever do, I’ll call you.”

“But—”

Gaffney tightened his grip on Herrenberg’s arm to stop the circulation. “She’s being pretty clear. Don’t you think so?”

“Yes.” He half-turned again. “You won’t even talk to me?” There were tears forming in his eyes.

“No. I want you to go away.”

The tension went out of Herrenberg’s muscles. Gaffney unlocked the handcuffs and removed them, then put his hand on his gun, but Herrenberg didn’t even look back to see the gesture. He stepped out the door, down the steps to the outer door, and kept going.

Gaffney closed and locked the door, and turned.

Sandy was standing in the doorway to the bedroom, looking at him with her arms folded. “Are you sleepy?”

“Not now.”

“Me either.” As she stepped backward into the bedroom, she pulled the nightgown up and off, then threw it aside.

S
PENCE SAT
on the roof of the Bank of America building on Ventura Boulevard and watched the sun lighten the sky beyond the gradual curve where Du-Par’s and Trader Joe’s were just visible. He could hear one of the local flocks of escaped parrots screeching in first flight, and the cars that went by on the street weren’t late-night partygoers and insomniacs now. These were regular people on their way to work.

He knelt and reached down for the .308 Remington rifle he had lying on the blanket. He ejected the box magazine, opened the bolt to be sure there was no round in the chamber, and took the weapon apart, removing the barrel and trigger assembly from the stock. He wrapped the parts in the blanket and put it into his backpack. It was clear by now that Joe Carver wasn’t planning to show up to ambush whoever came with the night’s take from the clubs. He wasn’t too surprised. It had seemed unlikely that Carver would strike two nights in a row, and that unlikeliness had been Spence’s main reason for coming.

He slipped the straps over his shoulders and crossed the roof to the back of the building, then climbed down the steel rungs set into the wall. He stayed behind the bank building, then walked along the side of the parking structure to get to the sloping lawn above the Los Angeles River, followed the high metal fence that marked the concrete bank above the concrete channel, and turned where the bridge crossed over the river at Whitsett.

While he was still on Ventura, he passed two other men walking toward bus stops and wearing backpacks. Since the cost of gasoline had gotten ridiculous, more and more people in the eastern part of the Valley had stopped taking cars to work and begun riding the bus wearing backpacks. He passed the bus stop at Whitsett and crossed the bridge.

The night had not been completely wasted. It had given Spence time to think.

Kapak was not wrong about Joe Carver. He really did seem to want to blow Kapak’s life apart. It seemed to Spence that Carver had taken up the work with enthusiasm, and he was actually making progress in ruining Kapak. But it didn’t make Spence relish the idea of killing Carver.

Spence approached his car watchfully, then put the backpack in the trunk, got on the freeway at Laurel Canyon, and drove to Kapak’s house. He left his car a hundred feet from the front gate and went through the pedestrian gate with his key. As he passed the garage, he looked in the window and noticed that Kapak’s car was gone. He looked at the house. The windows were all still dark. He went inside, then walked through the building quickly, looking for signs that Kapak had been here.

When he reached the hallway to Kapak’s master suite, he removed his shoes and walked slowly along the hardwood floor in his socks, opened the door, and saw that the bed had not been slept in. On the way back he stepped into his shoes and thumbed through the directory of his telephone. Voinovich’s phone said, “The customer you dialed is out of the calling area,” which probably meant the phone was off. He got the same recording for Jimmy Gaffney and for Jerry Gaffney. He almost called Guzman, but remembered he was in the hospital recovering. He called Corona.

“Yeah?” The voice was sleepy.

“It’s me. Spence. I just got to Kapak’s house, and nobody’s here. He hasn’t been in his bed. Is something up?”

“Not that I heard.”

“How’s Guzman?”

“Not bad for a guy that was shot. They’re giving him a lot of pills for pain.”

“Tell him I’m sorry I haven’t been to see him yet. There are probably a few people watching to see who shows up.”

“I know the cops are, for sure. They’re making a list. I’m on it, but you don’t need to be. Guzman’s sleeping half the time anyway.”

“Just so he knows the rest of us haven’t dumped him there.”

“No problem. And I’ll call you if I find out what’s up with Kapak.”

Spence went to the other end of the house to the room off the pantry where he liked to sleep when he was in Kapak’s house. He sat at the table in the small room and looked closely at each of the sections on the security monitor screen until he was satisfied that no human activity was taking place.

He lay down on the narrow bed in the small room and placed his cell phone near his head so if it rang he would wake and get it quickly. He took his pistol out of his belt and put it under the pillow, then slept.

Joe Carver stepped out of his room at the motel and studied the morning for portents and omens. Yesterday it had been clear and hot, and today would be an exact repetition of the day. The weatherwoman on television—a person who had been so surgically altered that her body was like a child’s drawing of a woman and her face had the wide unchanging stare and protruding mouth of a bass—had stood in front of a chart that displayed a row of seven calendar days that each held a perfect yellow ball of a sun and the number 102. Carver knew that the best time for moving around the city was now, before it was fully light out.

He found his car undisturbed in the motel’s parking lot, held his breath while he started it, and then chuckled at himself for being nervous. There was no reason to imagine any of Kapak’s men knew he had a car, and even if they had found it here, that any of them was capable of rigging it to explode. He drove toward the plaza in Encino where there was a restaurant that served customers breakfast in a shady, enclosed alcove down a flight of stairs below street level.

Now that his anger was fading, he was ready to decide exactly what he wanted to do next. He knew he wanted Kapak’s men to leave him alone so he could restart his new life in Los Angeles. He wasn’t sure how to accomplish that without destroying them, and he wasn’t a murderer. At least, he had managed to keep from being one so far. The fact that he was here in Los Angeles at all had been because of a problem in Chicago that made the Kapak situation seem irritatingly familiar. He remembered the night it started.

It was late. His name was still Pete Rollins and he still smoked. He stepped outside the bar he owned and stood in the shadows under the awning, smoking a cigarette and watching a gentle snowfall building a feathery white layer over the sidewalk.

He saw a man drive up in a black Cadillac Escalade and stop in front of the building. Two men wearing long overcoats got out and headed into his bar. He snuffed out his cigarette in the sand-filled urn beside the door and went inside to make drinks for the newcomers.

He stepped into the warm, quiet room with the dark antique wood paneling and thick woodwork, and the glowing lights behind the bar that made the liquor bottles look like amber and emerald and diamond. He was proud of his establishment. As he walked in, he actually relished the sensation of surprise and pleasure his new customers must be feeling.

He came through the inner doorway just as the guns came out from under the long coats. They looked to Rollins like AK-47s with the wooden stocks cut off. The shorter man started firing into one of the customers at the bar while the other turned his body in a semicircle, sweeping the barrel of his rifle like the gun in a tank turret, ready to open up, but searching for a target. Rollins was astonished. The man who had been standing at the bar remained upright for a moment, and then collapsed into what looked like a pile of blood-soaked clothes on the floor.

Rollins ducked behind his bar, swung the short-barreled shotgun up over the wooden surface, and dropped the shooter. The second man opened fire at Rollins and backed outside into the cold night.

Rollins ran after him, stepped over the body on the floor, and realized he knew the two shooters. He had met the two men a year earlier at a poker game that was run by his liquor distributor. The men were two brothers named Storrono. He made it to the door in time to see the Escalade arrive outside the bar and the surviving shooter step in. Rollins remembered the bloody footprint where he had stood. As the SUV drove off, Rollins ran inside, snatched up the telephone behind the bar, called the police, and told them what had just happened and who had made it happen. The anger carried him through the crime-scene examination and the long police interviews that night.

He hadn’t thought much about the danger he was in until he was ready to leave the police station the next morning. The police detective in charge of the case said that if he saw anything that worried him—any sign that somebody was unusually interested in him—he should request temporary protection.

Before the trial of the remaining Storrono brother, the case suddenly changed, or the police view of it did. The suspect talked. The murdered man was not an enemy of the Storronos. They had simply agreed to do a contract killing. The man they had killed was one of the targets of a federal investigation. The man who had wanted him killed was another, much bigger, and more important organized crime figure. From that moment, the main concern of the authorities was keeping Storrono alive. Pete Rollins was still in danger, but he was no longer essential.

Federal officials took over the case, and shortly after that they told Rollins he was going to be relocated to South Carolina. His name would be Joseph Carver. They supplied him with a driver’s license, birth certificate, Social Security card, high school diploma, and a job in a furniture factory outside Charleston.

It was hot work, operating machines with sharp steel blades spinning rapidly and sanders that filled the air with fine sawdust that stuck to his skin and found its way past his mask and goggles into his nose and eyes. After a few months, the government determined that he could never be Pete Rollins again and had intermediaries sell his bar and his house. They paid his mortgages and sent the remainder in two checks made out to Joe Carver. He decided to move to Los Angeles.

Carver arrived in Los Angeles with plenty of money and a notion that it was time to open a new business and start over. He spent some time at first just getting used to L.A. nightlife and meeting people. He spent a lot of money on drinks and dinners. He had overdone it, he knew now, and he regretted it. He had gotten to know a lot of women very quickly, but he had not made the right impression. Two of them thought he was probably an armed robber and had told Kapak’s men.

Last night he had overheard the names of the two women—Sandy Belknap and Sonia Rivers. To his surprise, he actually remembered both women clearly. He had met Sandy Belknap in the Adder Club. She was a young blond who seemed fresh and enthusiastic, with a cute face and blue eyes. He had not had any serious intention of forming any kind of relationship with her, because she was too much engaged in being pretty. But he had learned over the years that the best way to attract the attention of women was to be seen with the best-looking ones. The others seemed to find that intriguing. Maybe they thought it meant he had been cleared of their worst suspicions—he couldn’t be a dangerous creep. Since he wasn’t as good-looking as the woman he was with, maybe he was rich or clever or funny. The first night he started talking to her, other women began to drift in his direction, and then to put themselves behind her, in his line of sight.

He had actually met Sandy Belknap five times in three different clubs. After the first time, she had always been the one to approach him. She’d found it most comfortable to make her entrance by coming up to a friendly acquaintance who bought her first drink and gave her a few minutes to study the crowd without being overwhelmed. It was possible that she subscribed to the same theory he did, that people were most attracted to the person already taken. When he and Sandy had legitimized each other for a few minutes, they had parted with an affectionate hug and found other partners.

Sonia Rivers had seemed to Carver to be more promising. She didn’t have that protective wall of self-satisfaction that Sandy had. She was not at ease in bars trying to meet men. The first night he had met her, he had caught an expression now and then on her face that he interpreted as a kind of astonishment at finding herself in a club.

He had approached her in a quiet moment while a band was leaving and the DJ was getting set up, and asked if he could buy her a drink.

“Gee, I don’t think so, thanks.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want one.”

“It’s not really about wanting the actual drink. It can be a soft drink. No alcohol. It can be water, and you don’t have to swallow any of it. A drink is symbolic.”

“Of what?”