Strip (29 page)

“You know where we’re going?”

“How would I?”

“Sometimes people will make a lucky guess.” Slosser stared at Kapak, but he couldn’t quite tell whether Kapak was reacting or not. If so, he was good at hiding it. For days Slosser had been sure Kapak was in a war with somebody. Maybe what had happened last night in Malibu was Kapak’s counterattack. “Sure you don’t want to guess?”

“Pretty sure.”

“The sheriff’s people asked me to stop at another crime scene for a few minutes, and then we’ll go up to yours.”

“Another robbery?”

“No,” said Slosser. They reached the Santa Monica Freeway, and Slosser headed west. He drove until the final exit, where the freeway ended in the incline onto the Pacific Coast Highway. “Wow. The ocean. You can feel it when you go down that incline. And all of a sudden you’re in another, better world. The air is fresh and clean. The temperature goes down about ten degrees just on that ramp. Know anybody who lives along the ocean, like in Malibu?”

“I don’t think so,” Kapak said. “A house on the beach has got to cost quite a few million. I don’t know anybody with that kind of spending money.”

“I would have thought you could live there yourself. Maybe you could get a few of the girls at your clubs to chip in, and you could live down here with them, like a harem.”

“The dancers?”

“Sure.”

“Girls like that don’t need to buy a beach house. They get invited.”

“You said you don’t know anybody living there.”

“Not now. A few years ago there was a girl named Alisha Dolan. She danced under the name, what was it? Tiffany Rose. She got hired to be an extra in a movie, and she caught the eye of the director. She played him right and became his girlfriend. It lasted a long time. They lived in Malibu. I think he died, though.”

Kapak could see the house coming up on the left. It didn’t resemble a house now. The fire he had set had simply devoured the building. He kept himself from betraying any knowledge of the place by staring openly at it as Slosser drove past. “There must have been quite a fire there.”

Slosser was uncertain. If Kapak had pretended not to notice the black pile of charcoal where a big beach house had once stood, he would have known. But Kapak had not.

“Yeah. They say it went up quick. The firefighters came right away, but all they could even try to do by then was run in to search for survivors and wet down the two houses on either side.”

Kapak said nothing, even when Slosser turned across the two left lanes and came back toward the burned ruin.

Slosser glided to a stop behind another plain police car and a white vehicle that had
LOS ANGELES COUNTY CORONER
stenciled across the door. He got out and went to talk to the detective in the other car. He leaned on the car and spoke to him with his face turned away from Kapak for a few minutes, then turned around and came back to Kapak. “Come on. Let’s look around.”

Kapak got out of the car slowly. If he refused to look, Slosser would think he was feeling guilty about killing the three men and burning the building. He felt a small, hot spot of anger in his chest. When he was young he had felt bad if he had to harm someone, even if they had brought it on themselves. But he felt no guilt about Rogoso. He had been a betrayer, an enemy who had set up a trap and then spoken to him with contempt before sending him off to be killed. Kapak was proud of killing him. But he reminded himself that the pride was worse than the guilt, because the natural impulse was to hide guilt and flaunt pride.

Slosser walked close to the foundation of the building, which was now just a rectangular wall around a deep hole, mostly covered with fallen lengths of charred wood and dust, and below that, a glimpse of the blackened frames of Rogoso’s Bentley and his Maserati in the garage under the house. The only remnants of the upper floors were a frame of steel I-beams that supported those levels, a few pipes, and the brick chimney.

Kapak followed Slosser as he walked along the side of the foundation away from the road. He could feel the concrete give way to gravel, then to loose, grassy soil, then to pure, fine, salt-white beach under his shoes. Once he could see past the ruin, the blue ocean dominated his vision. The destruction was an improvement.

“You see Rogoso’s cars?”

“What?”

“The cars he had in the garage when it went up.”

“Rogoso? Is that the name of the owner?”

“Yeah. Very fancy cars.”

“Too bad. But I suppose they’re insured.”

Slosser went on, walking in the sand on the ocean side of the ruin, looking at everything as though it meant something to him. Kapak wasn’t giving anything away, but Slosser knew he was guilty. The perfect detachment of his reaction was almost an admission. He pretended to know nothing, and he asked nothing.

Slosser could see the coroner’s crew who had been working in the rubble now had something in a body bag, and together they lifted it onto their stretcher. The two men rose on a signal and stepped out of the wreckage carefully, their eyes on their feet. Slosser said, “I guess that must be the third one.”

“The third what?”

“Body. The firefighters got the first two out right away when the fire hadn’t reached them yet. But then the ceiling went, and this one wasn’t reachable. He was a distance from the other ones on the stairs.”

“Three killed, eh?” Kapak seemed to be showing only polite interest. “Too bad.”

Slosser knew Kapak wasn’t going to lower his guard. He had said nothing that would give Slosser an opening and made no slips. “That’s all I needed to see,” said Slosser. “Let’s drive up and see your robbery.”

They got into the car again and Slosser drove back toward Santa Monica along the Pacific Coast Highway. He tried again. “Did you ever hear of Manny Rogoso?”

“I don’t think so,” said Kapak. “Is he famous?”

“Why would you say that?”

“People who live in places like this have a lot of money.”

“He was a drug dealer. Nothing special about him. He wasn’t the biggest or the scariest. I would guess that if he hadn’t gotten shot to death, his next big problem would be the bank foreclosing on that house. He paid fifteen million for it.”

Kapak said nothing, but he thought about Rogoso. It was typical that he would exaggerate how much the new house had cost, when most people would have respected him more if he had paid less. “I suppose if he had been sensible, he wouldn’t be a drug dealer, and he wouldn’t be dead.”

“Just out of curiosity, where were you last night from, say, midnight on?”

“Is that why you brought me all the way down here? You think I killed some drug dealer?”

“No need to get upset. You weren’t at Siren last night. Where were you?”

“I was at Wash, my dance club on Hollywood Boulevard, until one or so, and then I went up to Temptress, my gentlemen’s club in the west Valley. I don’t get to every place I own every night.”

“But I hear you sent the cash from all your clubs to Siren last night for the first time to put it in the safe.”

“That’s right, and I didn’t think it would help to have me and everybody else show up there at closing time. It might draw attention to what was going on. I already had two security guys staying with the money.”

Slosser said, “Well, you just have to excuse me for asking. When a company does things differently for just one night and there’s a killing, I have to wonder if somebody’s making himself an alibi.”

“Is there some reason why I should let you drive me all over the county and ask me questions? Or are we going to stop and pick up my lawyer?”

“The lawyer I met? Gerald Ospinsky? Jesus, why would you bother?”

“To protect my rights.”

“You had a business hit by armed robbers last night. You called the police. We didn’t call you. How’s this? While your club was being robbed last night, were you at home?”

“I don’t know exactly when that happened yet. I know it was after two, because I had the managers of my clubs bring their cash to Siren after closing time. I was at Temptress watching the money count, said goodbye to Skelley, the manager, when he left to drive to Siren with the bank deposits. That makes it, like, two-thirty or so.”

“What about the rest of the night?”

“I went home with a lady friend who works at Temptress.”

“Dancer?”

“No. Waitress.”

“Name?”

“Sherri Wynn. I was there until Skelley called me around six-thirty to tell me about the robbery.”

Nick Slosser sat in silence as he drove, studying and memorizing the details of the story, comparing each part of it with what he knew about the club business, Kapak’s habits, and human nature. The time of the fire in Malibu was pretty well established at 1:10, because neighbors heard the noise of a gas tank blowing up, saw the fire, and called 911. But that didn’t mean that was the time of death for those three men. They might have been dead a bit earlier. He considered Kapak. He was a man in his mid-sixties, strong but not used to physical labor anymore. If he had killed those three, he almost certainly wouldn’t have done it alone. Probably he would have sent people. He glanced at him. “It takes a lot of guts to sleep with your own waitresses.”

“Only if they don’t want to,” said Kapak.

“You know—you’re rich, they’re not. They can file sexual harassment lawsuits, maybe a reprisal suit, and claim just about anything. It’s safer to go down the street and date somebody else’s employees.”

Kapak shrugged. “I’m old. I can’t live like I’m afraid all the time. She’s a nice, respectable, grown-up woman.”

“Been going together long?”

“No. But she’s worked for me for six or seven years, so I know her pretty well.”

They drove up the San Diego Freeway and then turned to the Ventura Freeway and got off in the northeastern industrial part of the Valley. It was full of warehouses of every description, auto wrecking yards, machine shops. They reached the parking lot of Siren, where there were more cops and technicians, white vans, and plain sedans. The building was set off by yellow crime-scene tape.

Slosser and Kapak got out and ducked under the tape, crossed the small stretch of parking lot that was taped off, and entered the building. “Shit,” said Kapak. The office wall was lying on the floor in what used to be the rear loading area for deliveries. The place was a mess. There were white and blue insulated wires dangling from the ceiling where they used to meet the wall that had been torn out.

He saw his day manager, Kearns. “Kearns, this is Lieutenant Slosser from the police. He’s been looking into all the robberies and things.” Kearns nodded, and the two shook hands.

Slosser said, “I’m sure the other officers have gotten your story, but let me try to catch up. Do you have any idea who did this?”

“The guys said it was a man and a woman, both carrying guns. They got our two security guys to open the door, then took off with the safe in an SUV that belonged to one of our guys.”

“Have you looked at the surveillance tapes yet?”

“No. They were smart. They disconnected the whole box and took it with them.”

“We’ll see just how smart,” said Slosser. “If the box turns up for sale, then they were dumb.” He walked outside to talk to the other cops for a few minutes, then came back in. “They’re just about finished out there. They’ve got all they can from the scene. No fingerprints, but a couple of brass casings. You can probably clean the place up and open by happy hour.”

Kearns said, more to Kapak than to Slosser, “I called a carpenter already. They should be here within an hour.” He looked at his watch.

“Want to stick around here, or you want a ride home?” Slosser stepped toward the door.

“My guys can handle this,” Kapak said. “I’ll go with you.”

“Okay.”

The two men walked across the parking lot. The tape had already been taken down, and Kapak could see deep marks on the pavement that he supposed were gouges made by the heavy safe.

Slosser said, “Are you ready to tell me who’s at war with you?”

“It’s a guy. I don’t know much about him, but his name is Joe Carver.”

“I’ll check that out,” said Slosser. He’d had detectives looking into it since the shootout at the bank. The problem was that there were lots of Joe Carvers, all over the country. Given a year or two of solid work, it was possible to check on each one—even call them all on the phone and talk with them. And the detectives were doing that. But so far there was no clear connection between any of them and Manco Kapak, and no evidence that any of them had a history of bank deposit robberies.

C
ARRIE SAID,
“What are you doing?”

“You’ll see.” Jeff knelt in front of the safe, held the flour in the palm of his hand, took in a slow, deep breath, and blew. The fine white cloud flew from his palm and covered the keypad of the locked safe. “See? Look closely.”

She knelt beside him and leaned close to the keypad. “Oh my God. Fingerprints.”

“Right,” said Jeff. “There are prints on the one, the seven, the eight, and the four. No prints on any of the other keys. If you have ten digits, then there are a billion possible combinations. But if you have a ten-digit keypad with fingerprints on only four numbers, then the combination has to be an arrangement of those four numbers. That’s, like, twenty-four possible combinations.”

He took up the paper and pencil, wrote 1478, then pushed those keys. Nothing happened. He tried 1487, 1748, 1784, 1874, 1847. “Okay. Now we start with 4.” He tried 4178, 4187, 4781, 4718, 4817, 4871. “Now eight.” He punched in 8147.

“I’ll go make some coffee.” Carrie got up and stepped toward the back door.

“Got it.”

“What?” She turned to see him swing the safe door open.

“It’s 8147.”

She moved closer to him as he looked inside. “Four bags this time. Does that mean what I think it means?”

He pulled the first bag out and handed it to her. She opened it and looked inside. “It’s money, all right.” She pulled out the deposit slip. “Twenty-six thousand from Temptress.” She set the bag down and picked up the next. “Twenty-two from Siren. Only sixteen from Wash. This one doesn’t say what it’s from, but it’s got over eighteen in it.”