Strip

2

MANCO KAPAK AWOKE to the sound of the master bedroom door swinging inward. He tugged the sleeping mask up onto his forehead with his left hand, reached under his pillow with the right, grasped the .45 pistol, and held it under the covers, squinting against the morning sunlight as he prepared to fire through the blankets. He had been jumpy since the night a month ago when a man in a ski mask had stuck a gun in his face and robbed him.

“It’s me, Mr. Kapak. It’s only me.” The male voice was soft and calm.

It was Spence, Kapak’s driver and bodyguard. Kapak brought the pistol up and put it into the top drawer of the nightstand. “What do you want?”

“It’s the police on the phone. They say they need to talk to you right now.”

“Shit” Kapak sat up and yawned, then rose to his feet. He caught sight of himself in the mirror and once again felt the shock of seeing his naked body. His shoulders and upper arms were still hard and muscled, his forearms and thighs still had sinews like cables under the leathery skin, but over the years his torso had grown thick and soft, the belly rounded now like a pear, and the pectoral muscles loose like little breasts. His skin was gray-white like a dead man’s, except in the places where it was blotched and reddish from sleep.

Spence held the phone out and Kapak took it, then looked over his shoulder at the small shape under the covers on the other side of the bed. He saw long blond hair on the pillow, but her name didn’t come to mind. He stepped into the living room and closed the door to let her sleep.

“This is Mr. Kapak.”

“Good morning, sir. This is Lieutenant Nicholas Slosser, Los Angeles Police Department. We would like you to come in this morning to talk to us”

“Where is ‘in,’ and what do we have to talk about?”

“‘In’ is Parker Center, Room Five Thirty-two. We’re investigating an incident that took place last night on a construction site in Hollywood. Two vehicles registered to the Kapak Corporation were found wrecked there.”

“Wrecked? Are you sure?”

“We’ll talk about it. It’s seven now. Can you be here by nine? Or I can send a unit to pick you up.”

“I can get there myself.”

“See you then.”

Kapak pressed the button to end the call, then punched in the cell phone number of Gerald Ospinsky. After a couple of seconds he said, “Gerald.”

“Yes?”

“It’s me. I just got a call from a Lieutenant Slosser at Parker Center. They want me to go in there at nine.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s about a police lieutenant rousting me out of bed to go down and talk to him. It would seem to me that my lawyer would want to be there.”

“Of course I do. I just meant … it doesn’t matter what I meant. I’ll be there.”

“Thank you.”

Kapak switched off the call and tossed the phone across the living room to Spence. “Did any of the guys call me before that cop?”

“No”

“Idiots” he said. “It’s stupid not to call me.” There was a mixture of resentment and amazement in his expression.

Spence was aware that no answer was expected of him. He stood with the telephone in his hand and waited while Manco Kapak stepped to the large sliding-glass window that overlooked the sandstone path between Australian black gum trees and sago palms and through a jungle of tropical plants.

Kapak absently scratched his bulbous belly in front of the window. “I’ll get a shower in the guesthouse. Take the girl home, wherever that may be. Then come back and drive me downtown to Parker Center.”

“Got it”

Kapak opened the door, then walked naked down the path toward the guesthouse.

As Spence went back into the bedroom, he glanced at his watch. It was already a minute or two after 7:00, and he would have to get the woman moving if he wanted to get Kapak to the police headquarters on time. He closed the bedroom door behind him and assessed the physical evidence to decide how to proceed. The girl’s clothes were draped with a reasonable attempt at keeping them unwrinkled on the couch at the foot of the bed, so he was fairly certain she had not been drunk. She had worn a nice summer dress and a pair of relatively tasteful strapped heels—nothing that would make her look like a weakened nocturnal creature trapped in the daylight. The bra and panties were of good quality, a matching set of Easter egg purple with a bit of lace.

Spence cleared his throat and watched the woman stir, pulling the blanket up near her ears to preserve her unconsciousness. Spence walked to the bathroom, brought back a clean white Turkish bathrobe, and placed it at the foot of the bed where she would feel the weight of it on her feet. Then he walked along the wall beyond the foot of the bed, opening the curtains of the tall windows, pair by pair.

He heard her groan.

“Good morning, miss,” he said in a cheerful voice. “Good morning.”

She began to sit up, revealing for a moment a pair of breasts that seemed to be unaugmented but above criticism to Spence’s eye, then realized she was not alone and pulled the covers to her neck.

Spence said, “I’m afraid Mr. Kapak has been called away unexpectedly on important business. He asked me to give you his regrets and to take you home myself. There’s a robe at the foot of the bed, and the master bath is just behind you and to your right. When you’re ready, I’ll be in the kitchen at the far end of the house. Would you like coffee or tea this morning?”

The girl took a moment to look around her in the glare of reflected sunlight as though she had no idea where she was, so Spence began to fear this might be some kind of ugly surprise, but she said, “Coffee, please” in clear, unaccented English. Spence was relieved. If she hadn’t spoken English, the rest of this would have been very difficult.

Spence pivoted in place, went out, and closed the door. He walked the length of the house to the kitchen, and then entered the small office off the pantry and watched the row of high-definition color security monitors.

When the young woman got out of the bed and put on the bathrobe, he could see she had a very fine body—cream with a blush here and there. She cinched the robe around her waist and explored the master suite a bit, opening dresser drawers and cabinets, not methodically like a burglar, but randomly, like a snooping child. Spence didn’t blame her. She was a pretty woman in her twenties who had just spent the night with a sixty-four-year-old gangster who was a fearsome sight naked—an old boar. She was probably searching for something—a bit of compensation, maybe even a souvenir to prove the story was true if she chose to tell it. Let her.

He moved his attention to the cameras around the guesthouse. He could see a light on behind the smoked glass window of the bathroom, so Kapak must be in the shower out there.

In a few minutes the girl appeared in the kitchen. Spence treated her like a starlet dropping in for an appearance at a charity event. “What would you like in your coffee, miss?”

When he had given her the coffee and settled her on a seat at the granite counter to drink it, he said, “It’s already getting hot this morning. I’ll go bring the car around under the awning and get the air conditioning circulating.”

He went out. The biggest step was already over—getting her up, showered, and from the bedroom to the kitchen with all her clothes properly on her and secured without incident. Getting her from the kitchen to the car would also be a big step, though. This one was sober, well-behaved, and apparently sane, so he sincerely felt kindly impulses toward her. She wasn’t trying to keep from leaving. She knew it was time, and that there was no sense in her teasing and wheedling anybody but the man who had brought her here.

Spence returned with the car and made her take a second cup of coffee with her in a thermos mug. He sat her in the back seat and put the mug in the cup holder on the console so she could reach it. As he backed out of the long driveway, he said, “Now, miss. What’s your address?”

“I’m Kira,” she said. “I live on Coldwater.”

“North or south of the 101 freeway?”

“Practically on it, but a little bit north. It’s a big apartment building.”

“Okay,” said Spence. He pulled out of the driveway and headed for the freeway. It wouldn’t be too hard, he decided. He might be able to do it in twenty minutes if the traffic let him. Nothing about this one was hard. A certain percentage of Kapak’s women visitors were terrible. A lot of them had been nasty and crazy. Some had been drunk in that odd, unfortunate way that some women got drunk—they shouldn’t have been able to walk and talk, but they did.

Others that Kapak had brought home with him had been hoping for some kind of bonanza and seemed to feel that leaving his house in the morning would be relinquishing their claim to the reward. When Spence had become insistent, a couple of them had even started hinting at the possibility of making claims that they had been raped. Spence had no illusions about Manco Kapak’s ethics, but he knew that Kapak was prone to erectile dysfunction, and that Kapak’s appetites didn’t include anything as strenuous as overpowering anybody. Each time the blackmail strategy came up, Spence had said, “Think about him. Do you really want to be the person he sees as capable of sending him to prison for the rest of his life?”

He glanced at the girl in the rearview mirror. “Are you comfortable back there, miss?”

“Kira. My name is Kira. I’m fine. Have you worked for him long?”

“Nearly six years”

“Is being a gangster exciting?”

“Not for me.”

“You’re too tough for that?”

Spence chuckled. “I’m not tough at all. I’m not a gangster. I drive his car. I answer the phone. I make sure there are enough fresh vegetables and the garbage is taken out to the curb on Tuesday night.”

“You don’t get to go to the clubs or anything?”

“He doesn’t spend a lot of time in the clubs. They’re an investment. When he goes in, I usually stay with the car.”

“Aren’t you interested in women?”

“Sure. But there aren’t many women in a strip club, and the ones who are there are working.”

“If there’s nothing fun about it, why do you work for him?”

“Because he pays me a salary and health insurance and contributions to my 403b.”

“I heard he got robbed.”

“I heard that too. I wasn’t there.”

“Doesn’t it scare you?”

“You’re in a car with a man you never saw before, and it’s going over a mile a minute. Doesn’t that scare you?”

“Not really”

“Then you understand. Anybody can get in an accident any time. Anybody can get robbed. Changing jobs doesn’t do anything.”

“He’s different. He’s a rich old criminal. He’s a big target.”

“Then why did you sleep with him?”

“I was at Wash. It was kind of a slow night and I was just dancing with my friends. In comes Manco Kapak, and everybody in the place starts staring at him and telling each other who that is. He’s the guy who owns Wash and about three other clubs, and he’s this big, powerful guy with all these connections. After a few minutes he practically bumped into me in the crowd and asked me to sit with him and have a drink. It made my friends get all agitated and warn me not to go, and so I couldn’t resist.”

“But later on, you were disappointed?”

“Well, you know. He’s got money and power and all that, but those things don’t come to bed with him. What’s there is a sixty-five-year-old fat guy with a hairy back and trouble getting hard. So I guess that’s what I get out of the experience. I learned that.”

“I suppose that’s worth something,” Spence said.

“Yeah. I suppose.”

Manco Kapak stood in the shower in the guesthouse, feeling the jets of warm water scouring his body, then running down in soothing streams to his toes. He had mixed feelings about this shower. It was perfect in every way. It was much better than the ones in the various bathrooms in the main house, because he had decreed it. He had not merely bought this one when he bought the property. He had talked with the architect and the contractor during the building of the guesthouse and made sure they understood what he wanted. He had also made sure they understood that Kapak wanted what he wanted, not something they thought was similar to what he wanted. The more he enjoyed the beauty, tastefulness, strength, and even warmth of the shower, the more resentful he became that it was so much better than the ones he usually used. Was he supposed to walk all the way out here to the end of the path every time he took a shower, or stay in the main house and use inferior facilities? The whole idea made him furious. He was going to have to remodel the main house.

His train of thought brought him to how much money it would cost, and how much money he had been losing lately. His mind struggled with the thought. He was beginning to feel the unfamiliar sensation that he wanted to go see the police as quickly as possible. They seemed to know what had happened last night, and he certainly didn’t. This morning he could hardly call any of the five men he had sent after Joe Carver. That police lieutenant might very well have forgotten to mention that his five men had found Carver and killed him or something.

But Kapak knew his luck wasn’t that good. This guy Carver was an unknown. The man had simply appeared beside Kapak one night wearing a ski mask, stuck a gun against his head, and said he would pull the trigger if Kapak didn’t drop the bank deposit pouch and stand with his hands on the wall of the bank for five minutes while he disappeared. At first Kapak had almost laughed. He had considered saying it out loud: “You really don’t want the one you rob to be me.”

But small-time characters were the most likely to panic and shoot somebody. There was no point in incurring that risk. For five minutes Kapak could be silent and stand there. After that it would be different. It would be his turn. It still seemed perfectly fair to Kapak. He had been robbed of cash receipts, so he had asked around about new people with a lot of cash and come up with the name Joe Carver. Kapak had never seen or heard of the robber before, and he had never seen or heard of Joe Carver, so it seemed like a match. It had to be somebody new if he didn’t know who Kapak was.

He had to admit to himself in the solitude of his guesthouse shower that he had probably been overconfident in being satisfied with Joe Carver as the robber. The truth was that he had not really considered it absolutely essential that he catch and punish the right man. It was essential that he find and punish some man and get his money back, if only so that everybody knew he had done it. If he had the wrong man, it wasn’t the end of the world. These things had happened to people before. Carver could either put up with the loss or go find the real thief and get the money back from him.

Kapak dried off and walked naked back up the path toward the big house. He was sure the girl would be gone by now, and he could get dressed for the police interview in peace. The tedium of these interviews was their most striking quality, and this made it difficult to maintain the level of concentration he would need to avoid their purpose, which was entrapment. The cops obviously knew something was up, and the two cars registered to his company proved he was somehow connected with whatever had happened, and they needed to wear him down so they could fool him into incriminating himself. Actually, the process was more like being nagged than fooled.

Kapak came into the house through the sliding door into the living room and padded along barefoot on the polished hardwood floor for five paces before his eye caught the unfamiliar shape and identified it as a man.

The man was about forty, with a short beard that looked as though he hadn’t had a chance to shave. He wore a pair of black jeans and a T-shirt with a long-sleeved cotton shirt open over it like a jacket. He was standing absolutely still near the fireplace.

Kapak was naked and unarmed, and there was no way to retreat unnoticed, so he resorted to bluster. “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m Joe Carver.”

“You’re …”

“Yes. I came this morning because I wanted you to get a chance to look at me. Now you know that I’m somebody you never saw before. I never held you up.”

Manco Kapak’s mind was stalled, caught up in the contemplation of details. It was absolutely undeniable that this Joe Carver did not seem to be the man who had stuck a gun against his head a month ago. He hadn’t seen the man’s face, but the voice seemed different, and the shape of the body. But had Carver forgotten he’d been wearing a ski mask? Kapak tried to follow these thoughts to some kind of conclusion but was distracted by the feeling that he was exceptionally vulnerable.

At the same time, he couldn’t help thinking that this situation was likely to change radically within ten or twenty minutes. Spence would return, perceive instantly that there was an intruder in the house, and probably shoot him. Or a couple of survivors of last night’s debacle would show up to tell Kapak all about it, recognize Joe Carver, and take revenge for whatever he’d done last night. And, if nothing else happened, the police lieutenant would probably send a patrol car out at 9:01 to drag Kapak to headquarters. They’d bang on the door, get no answer, and then kick it in. Not only would Kapak’s immediate problem be solved, but so would the larger question of what to do about Joe Carver. The courts would put him away for a home invasion and for the sheer weirdness of keeping a naked man prisoner. Kapak had to stall until one of these things came to pass.

“Look,” he said. “I can see you’re a sensible, reasonable man. You didn’t come in here talking nasty and waving metal around. I’d love to talk to you about this and come up with some sort of mutually satisfactory arrangement.”

“That’s exactly what I want.”

“Good, good,” Kapak said, nodding his head. “Since we’re both civilized and neither of us is crazy, I’d like to get dressed before we do that. I feel at a loss here, standing around like this. It’s hard to concentrate.”

“That’s okay,” Carver said. “This doesn’t need to take a lot of your time. Now that you know I’m not the one you’ve been looking for, I’ll just go. You and I don’t have a problem.” He turned and moved toward the back door.

That wasn’t satisfactory. It would allow Carver to slip out into the yard and probably through the tall grove of bamboo on that side of the yard and over the fence. It wouldn’t bring him into a collision with Spence or the Gaffney brothers or the police.

“Wait” said Kapak.

Carver stopped and turned to face Kapak. For a moment Kapak endured Carver’s stare and tried to hold his eyes on Carver’s. The expression on Carver’s face changed to disappointment—not, Kapak reflected, anger or fright. “Sorry. Got to go.”

Kapak persisted. “It’s all well and good that you didn’t take my money. But what if you did something to my guys, or my cars? Is everything supposed to be even because you didn’t do one thing, but did five worse things?”

“If I could do five worse, I could do ten worse. It’s best to be forgiving.”

“But is that fair to me?”

Carver slid the window open on the other side of the room and sat on the sill. He swung one leg out. “Be satisfied with peace. I could have hurt you today”

“I’m just saying…”

But Carver’s other leg swung over the sill and he slid off. Kapak heard him drop to the grass below, then heard him begin to run. Kapak had already begun moving, sidestepping closer to the master bedroom suite. Now he ran toward it. His bare feet gave him good traction on the slippery floors, and he made it to his bedroom quickly.

Spence or the girl had opened the curtains, so he could see Carver trotting toward the tall, graceful bamboo stalks that swayed in the breeze another hundred feet ahead of him.

Kapak dived onto the bed and rolled to his side to tug open the drawer of his nightstand. He grasped his pistol, nudged the safety off with his right thumb, then did two rolls in the other direction so he would arrive at the window-side of the bed. He swung his legs to get his feet on the floor. Carver was still visible through the nearest of the twelve-foot double-pane windows, and still in possible range. Kapak sprang to his feet and reached for the window latch, but was overcome by a wave of dizziness from all the rolling. He leaned against the wall to steady himself. He knew there wasn’t enough time left to get the big window open, so he took aim at Carver’s back through the glass and fired as Carver disappeared among the twenty-foot bamboo stalks.

Kapak watched as the hole he had blown through his bedroom window seemed to move. His vision wavered a little as cracks shot upward to the top of the window frame and big shards of glass dropped toward the floor.

Kapak stepped back just before the first shards hit the sill and the floor and shattered into a large number of sharp splinters and fragments. Tiny bits of glass flew, spinning in the morning sunlight to flash rainbows and explosions of reflected brightness as their sharp edges stung his face, neck, chest, belly, penis, testicles, thighs. A few little daggers of glass arced upward off the sill, turning to slash at his shins on the way to the tops of his feet.

“Holy shit,” he muttered.

He heard a noise and painfully half-turned to see Spence shoulder the door inward and drop to his knees beyond the bed, sighting down the barrel of a gun at the tortured flesh of Kapak’s glittering chest.

Kapak dropped his gun on the bed and stood still.

“What the fuck?” Spence seemed to intend it as a question.

Kapak looked in the full-length mirror near the head of the bed. His fat, bulbous body was pocked with single droplets of bright red blood. In the sunlight, he could see his skin was powdered with tiny bits of glass from scalp to toenails. “Look what that son of a bitch did.”

Spence stood up, put his gun in his belt, and approached cautiously. “We’d better get you cleaned up. You’ve got to be at that cop’s office in, like, thirty-five minutes.” He plucked a few shards out of Kapak’s bushy eyebrows. “Maybe you can go into the shower again and try to spray the little bits of glass off you with the heavy jets.”

“Good idea. While I’m in there lay out some clothes for me. But keep your eye on that bamboo grove. I don’t want the bastard coming back just because he heard a gun go off” He waddled carefully toward the master bath. “That’s the way he thinks—like everything’s got to be even.” He went inside, closed the door, and locked it.

Spence looked out at the bamboo grove and saw nothing, then hurried to the closet and collected some clothes for Kapak. On the way back he noticed that there was a trail of small blood spots on the carpet. Kapak must have stepped on a sharp piece of glass and not noticed it yet. He set the clothes on the other side of the bed and went to find the first-aid kit.