Strip

by Thomas Perry

  “My name is Joe Carver. I’m trying to reach Sandy Belknap. Is she in this morning?”

  “No, I’m afraid she’s not coming in today.”

  “I wonder if you could possibly give me her number.” He knew the receptionist would never do it, but he also knew that salespeople didn’t want to miss calls.

  “Please hold and I’ll see if I can connect you to her personal number.”

  There was a series of clicks and dead seconds, and then he heard a ring signal. The phone was snatched up immediately. “Hello? Joe?” It was Sandy Belknap’s voice, but it sounded oddly distant and unclear.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “This is a surprise,” she said. “I haven’t seen you around lately. What have you been up to?”

  “Do you have me on the speaker?”

  “I’m sorry. Most people don’t notice, but it keeps my hands free. I was just getting dressed.”

  “Just give me a second to picture that.”

  She laughed. “It’s okay, but only if you have me wearing a nun’s habit or a space suit.”

  “That ruined the moment.”

  “It’s supposed to. So what’s up? We’ve missed you at the clubs.”

  “Who’s the rest of ‘we’?”

  “The girls. Nobody’s that fun lately. That’s the consensus.” There was a hum in the background, as though someone were whispering to her.

  “Is somebody there?”

  She didn’t answer directly, but he heard a distinct irritation in her voice. “Just a sec. Let me turn the TV off.” He heard a change in the sound as she turned off the speaker and picked up the phone. “Hi. Still with me?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Let me tell you the reason I called. Since the last time I ran into you, I’ve been having trouble. There’s a powerful man named Manco Kapak. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him.”

  “Manco Kapak? No. What an odd name.”

  “He owns Wash, on Hollywood Boulevard, and a couple of strip clubs in the Valley.”

  “That’s who owns Wash?”

  “Yep. What happened was that he was out late depositing money in his bank’s night drop, and a guy robbed him at gunpoint. He got mad. He sent a few of his goons out to find the robber. So they asked a lot of people—mostly girls in clubs—if they knew somebody who had just moved here and was spending a lot of cash. I think you might have seen two of them. They’re both tall, with red hair.”

  “Oh my God.” It was quiet, just above a whisper.

  “What?”

  “Oh, nothing. Just what you’re saying. It’s so scary. They think you did it?”

  “Yes. I’ve been trying to find out how they even heard I existed.”

  “I … can’t imagine.”

  “It doesn’t matter how, I guess. I just wanted to call you in case the rumor reached you. I’ve never robbed anyone in my life. It’s true I was new in town when I met you, and I guess I was spending more cash than I usually would, so it might seem odd to people who didn’t know me. I had just flown in and paid to have my furniture shipped, and put a lot of other charges on my credit cards. But I had cash from closing my bank accounts in the East.”

  “Look, Joe. We really should talk.”

  It was the kind of statement he had been waiting for to confirm his suspicion. Next she would say she wanted to meet him someplace at a particular time to discuss the past relationship they’d never had and the future that would never come. “That’s really all I wanted to say. I’m on a pay phone and I’m out of change. If you hear any of those rumors, please tell people I’m not a thief, I’m a mass murderer. That way they won’t want to get near me.”

  “Oh, I will. I promise.”

  It took Sonia Rivers three calls before she got the right number for Manco Kapak’s house. It rang a few times, and then a man’s voice came on. “Mr. Kapak’s residence.”

  “May I speak to Mr. Kapak, please?”

  “I’m sorry, miss, but Mr. Kapak isn’t at home right now. Can I take a message?”

  “My name is Sonia Rivers. I think there’s been a misunderstanding, and I’d like to correct it as soon as I can.”

  “My name is Richard Spence. I’m Mr. Kapak’s assistant. If you tell me, I’ll be sure your message gets to him as soon as possible.”

  Sonia hesitated for a second or two, until she felt the awkwardness increasing. She had to talk or hang up. “A month ago, two men who work for Mr. Kapak began talking to me while I was waiting to get into a concert. One of them asked if I happened to know a man who was new in town and who had been in clubs spending a lot of cash. I thought—I don’t know exactly what I thought—maybe this was somebody they knew and they were going to tell me something funny about him, or they had met a man like that but didn’t know his name, or something. So I said the name of a man I’d met in a club a couple of days before. I just heard that Mr. Kapak was told I thought this was the man who had robbed him. I never thought that, and never meant it that way. It never even occurred to me.”

  “I understand,” said Spence. “And just to make sure I get the story straight for Mr. Kapak, what is this innocent man’s name?”

  “Joe Carver.”

  “Joe … Carver,” he said, pretending to be a man at a desk writing things down. “Do you have an address or anything for him?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Then, your name and address, just in case the police would like to talk to you?”

  “Sonia Rivers.” She recited her address and phone number. She marveled at herself for doing it, but this man seemed so bright and businesslike.

  “Thank you, Miss Rivers. I have no idea whether this Mr. Carver was a serious suspect or not, but you can never be too careful with someone else’s reputation.”

  “That’s just how I feel,” said Sonia. She detected in herself an unexpected curiosity about this man, and realized that she had been stalling to give him time to say something to reveal more about himself. “Well, goodbye.”

  “Goodbye.”

  She should have been in her cubicle at work, staring out the part of the window she could see from her desk. Today there was a thin copper-colored smear of smog hanging near the tops of the tall buildings of Los Angeles, all in a little clump in the center of the million low buildings that covered the basin. She decided the man she had spoken to was probably nothing as interesting as a criminal. Kapak owned several businesses. Of course he would have a few dull, serious people like Spence to run things for him. She wondered if she should go in to work late, but the moment had passed. She took off her gray suit and hung it up for tomorrow.

  At Kapak’s house, Spence moved from the kitchen to the small maid’s quarters where he had been sleeping. He picked up the backpack that still held the disassembled .308 Remington, pulled his .45 pistol from under the pillow, and put it into the backpack too. He looked at the address he had written down, went out the back door and locked it behind him.

  A half hour later, Spence had found Sonia Rivers’s apartment. The only reason Sonia would have made the call to Kapak’s house today was if her relationship with Joe Carver had improved since she’d talked to the Gaffney brothers a few weeks ago.

  He studied the neighborhood and began to search. In another half-hour he had found a vacant apartment with a clear view of the windows along the side of Sonia Rivers’s apartment building. He went in and used a lock pick to defeat the cheap doorknob lock, then stood at the window. From his second-floor window he could see down into her apartment. In the front was the living room, then the smoked glass of the bathroom, then the two bedroom windows near the back. As he went through the vacant apartment, he found an easy chair with torn upholstery in the living room, undoubtedly left by the last tenant. He moved it to the window and tried it, then looked around for a few more minutes before he decided to go out and buy a cup of coffee for the wait. On his way out, he unlocked the door to save time on his return.

  25

  AT 10:15 A.M. Lieutenant Slosser stopped
his unmarked car in front of Kapak’s long, low house. Kapak pushed his door open and slowly swung his feet to the curb as he had seen frail old men do, then stood. “Thanks for the ride.”

  “If you hear anything else that might be useful to us, give us a call,” Slosser said.

  “Joe Carver. If you can find Joe Carver, this will be over.”

  “Maybe,” Slosser said. “But usually, in my experience, if somebody you never heard of makes a full-time job out of making your life miserable, usually he’s working for somebody else—somebody you know.”

  “He’s the one I’m sure of. I’ll take my chances on people who might be telling him what to do.”

  “We’ll see.” Slosser’s window closed and he drove off. Kapak turned and went up the walk to his house. He liked the lush plantings of palms and bananas, bamboo and eucalyptus, bougainvillea and ferns and orchids around the house. Now and then the gardeners would surprise him with a new planting of something colorful and exotic.

  He caught sight of one of the gardeners across the front yard and waved his arm. They always tried to do their work unobtrusively, like stagehands in a theater, but now and then, on a rare day when he was awake in the morning, he would glimpse one or two of them from a distance. He seldom saw the cleaning crew either, but he noted that their van was parked at the curb this morning.

  He went inside and listened. He could tell that the cleaning women were working in the kitchen end of the house, so he went the other way, to his bedroom suite. The room was finished, with everything in order, the floor polished, and the bed linens replaced. He turned on the television set and found the local news, and tuned his ears to listen for the words Rogoso and Malibu.

  It was nearly eleven, and he was getting hungry. This was before he usually had his breakfast, but he’d been up most of the night and then was up again at 6:30, so his body wanted something. He knew it was ridiculous that he was intimidated by the thought of going into the kitchen and having to talk to the cleaning women while he made himself a sandwich.

  He supposed they had a very specific idea of how he lived, and had opinions about it, but that only bothered him if he had to go in there and think of things to say to them.

  He lay on his bed, closed his eyes, and listened to the 11:00 news. There was an Asian Pacific festival, a report from the USGS that a huge new fault had been found under the northern part of the city capable of generating massive earthquakes. There was always some kind of festival to celebrate some other country, always a series of threatening reports from scientists about what people ate or where they lived. There was a police shooting in one of the southside cities, where the police had mistaken a thirteen-year-old for an armed fugitive. Then he heard “A fire in the Malibu home of a local man with a record of narcotics trafficking,” then the words “After this.”

  He sat up, propped a pillow behind him, and watched the commercials. They went on and on. There were cars, then a motorized wheelchair that the government could be called upon to pay for. There were more cars, a clothing store, and then a diet drink that melted off the pounds.

  At last he saw the burned ruin he’d seen this morning, and the coroner’s white van with the blue stripe and the words LAW AND SCIENCE SERVING THE COMMUNITY. The reporter was the middle-aged black woman they always sent when somebody died. She stood in front of the charred pile and the ocean beyond.

  “Sheriff’s deputies say that sometime after midnight last night, an intruder shot and killed three men in this Malibu beach house. He then set the house ablaze. By the time the fire trucks arrived, no more than ten minutes after the first call, the three-story house was fully involved. Firefighters managed to remove two of the victims from the building, but both were dead on arrival at County-USC Hospital. The third body was in a stairway that firefighters couldn’t approach. He is believed to be the owner of the house, Manuel Rogoso, age forty-five. The other victims were reported to be employees of his. The house, which had recently been purchased for fifteen million dollars, was a total loss.”

  As she stepped back from the camera, it panned to survey the pile of blackened wood on the charred, cracked foundation. “The police have no theory as to the cause of the triple murder-arson. They ask that anyone with any information call the nearest police station.”

  Kapak aimed the remote control at the television set and the screen went black. He lay back and stared up at the ceiling. He had killed them in self-defense, but he knew that was a technicality. The killing had been the end of a disagreement among criminals engaged in a scheme to launder drug money. There were no innocent parties, only some dead criminals and a living one. Even if he could have argued that he’d had no choice, that argument vanished once he had burned the house.

  Marija entered his mind. She would have glared at him and said, “See? That’s the kind of man you are.” No, but the idea of her would have, the Marija inhabiting his memory. The real woman would have denied to all bystanders that she’d ever known him, and then hurried away. She had wanted no part of the shame he brought her.

  He was sure she had told his children things that had kept them from trying to see him. If they were people of ordinary curiosity they would have come to see who he was, at least. If they were like him and most of his relatives, they would have come looking for him to see if he had serious amounts of money.

  He was sure that she had not even hinted at the truth. She had probably told them he had died when he was in jail. That way, when she had started going to bed with the periodontist who had lived next door, she wasn’t a faithless whore, she was a pretty young widow who had found a reliable, respectable man to protect her children. Her children. They were her children, not his. He had not gone to claim them. When he got out of jail, he had been so angry that he wanted to imply to her that he no longer believed he had been the one to conceive them.

  If he were to search for them now, he would have no clear path to them except through her, or if she was already dead, through the hated periodontist, Dr. Felder. He had no idea what city they’d been living in all this time, or if the children had kept his name or been given the name Felder. All he knew was that he had stayed in Los Angeles and kept the name Kapak. If they had ever wanted to see him, he would not have been hard to find.

  Thinking about Marija and the children was like thinking about people in another century. It seemed to have taken several lifetimes for him to change from Marija’s young, foolish husband to the man he was now. He thought about what he had done. He had obtained money. That was good, but not as good as he had thought it would be when he was young. And now the business itself was not the same. Last night, when he’d had to kill his most important and oldest ally, he had felt a change.

  He had chosen nightclubs because so much of the money that came in was cash, and he could use that legal cash to hide a stream of illegal cash. Laundering money for drug dealers had made him a potent and dangerous man, someone with connections. But now he had killed the source of the illegal cash and the power. If he wasn’t going to be laundering money anymore, what was he doing? Was he going to spend the final years of his life just running some honest bars? What for—to add a few more dollars to the bank accounts that would go unclaimed after his death?

  He reminded himself that he was winning. The ally who had turned on him was dead and he was alive. There was still Joe Carver out there somewhere, but soon Carver would be dead too. There was no need for anybody to think too hard about who won and who lost. The winners were alive and the losers dead.

  26

  JERRY GAFFNEY AWOKE just after 11:00, his usual hour, but he didn’t feel quite right. There was a distinct tightness in his right arm—more like a pain—and he wondered for a second whether he’d been stabbed. No, it wasn’t as bad as that. He tried to roll to his back and realized what was wrong. His wrists were handcuffed behind him, and that was a feeling he’d felt before.

  He drew in a breath in a gasp and sat up. He swung his legs, then realized that he was being restrained
. A rope was tied around his ankles and then to the bed frame.

  “Good morning.” It was Sandy Belknap’s voice.

  The relief he felt was like a cool breeze touching his sweating forehead. She was still here. If this was serious, she’d have left him like this, gone somewhere else, and called the cops. He could still talk her out of this. “Good morning,” he said. “This is an interesting development.”

  “Yeah. Interesting.” He still couldn’t see her, because she was somewhere behind him.

  He said, “I assume these are my own handcuffs.”

  “Yes, they are. Nice girls don’t have their own sets of handcuffs, I think. If they do, none of them ever told me about it.”

  “Well, this is a pretty cute trick.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You’re looking pretty cute over there, all bare-naked and trussed up. But I’m thinking that the joke has been on me all along.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Well, there was a part of my conversation with Joe Carver this morning that you didn’t hear. It wasn’t on the speaker.”

  “What did I miss?”

  “He knew that two men with red hair, one bright red—that would be you, the bright red—talked to me about a month ago at Wash, and that what we talked about was him.”

  “So why have I got handcuffs on?”

  “I’m getting to that,” she said. She walked around the bed and he could see she was dressed in blue jeans, running shoes, and a University of Missouri T-shirt. Her hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail. “The other thing he said was that these two men were brothers, a pair of thugs named Jerry and Jimmy Gaffney, who work for a gangster named Manco Kapak.”

  He looked at her in disappointment. “Well, of course, when we’re investigating a series of class-one felonies we don’t always go into crowds of unidentifiable people waving badges and using our real names.”

  “It’s pretty amusing to watch you sitting there making all this stuff up, and I’ll bet you could say more of it than I can listen to. But I’ve been up since that call, thinking.”