Strip

by Thomas Perry

  He drove along past Colfax, then Tujunga, before he felt a sensation that was familiar, yet unexpected. He looked down to confirm that it was her hand on him, and then his eyes moved rapidly up her arm to her shoulder to her face.

  “I don’t want to just drive around” she explained.

  “You’re killing me.”

  “There are two nice hotels right up the hill at Universal Studios.”

  “Hotels aren’t a great idea if you’re pulling something.”

  Her beautiful smile returned. “No?”

  “A crime. You give them your name and your credit card number and they get a video record of you and your car. If anything goes wrong, there you are.”

  “We can spend some time at my house, then,” she said. “It’s just up in the hills.”

  “Where?”

  “Make a right at Vineland and go straight up”

  He made the turn at Vineland, then let the upward slope slow his car down. “Do you have roommates or family? A real sister or somebody?”

  She looked at him but didn’t move her hand away from his lap. “I have a boyfriend.”

  “A boyfriend?” He veered to the right and stopped by the curb.

  “But he’s away. For, like, the last two weeks and the next three weeks. It’s a work thing.”

  Jeff drove on up the hill, stopping to look both ways at each intersecting street. Everything seemed unnaturally quiet. He saw only a couple of cars in motion on the cross streets. The curbs were lined on both sides with cars parked so close they almost touched.

  She guided him up into the neighborhood. “Turn left here, then a quick right. Now left up here. See the house with the brick front and the big garage?”

  He turned into the driveway, and she stopped him. “Stay here but keep your motor running. I’m going in to open the garage.”

  7

  IT WAS NIGHT NOW. Since his visit to Kapak’s house, Joe Carver had been taking a more aggressive attitude toward Manco Kapak. He had come back early in the morning, driven past Kapak’s house, and looked at the signs on his front lawn. They all said PROTECTED BY DEDICATED SECURITY, and under that, ARMED RESPONSE. He drove to the Sherman Oaks public library and signed up for half an hour of computer use.

  He wrote Dedicated Security an angry letter from Kapak. He demanded a full refund of the cost of the monitoring service for the past six-month billing period, because the alarm system had not detected a break-in or summoned the armed response. He said he also intended to sue the company for the cost of the alarm equipment in his home. He demanded that his security service be terminated immediately and warned the company not to bother him with other offers, but to simply send the refund check or suffer consequences he did not name. Then he printed out the letter and drove it to the post office to send it by certified mail.

  Since his recent infusion of money from Kapak’s credit card, Carver was able to pay in cash to sleep in hotels around the city under false names, but he only did it once. He found that day that the new clothes he had bought with Kapak’s credit card helped to make him more acceptable to hotel staff and guests. Women seemed to be the ones most aware of the quality of his costume. His uncle Joe had told him when he was young that if he wanted to get people to take him at his word, he should spend the most he could on his shoes, watch, and haircut.

  Early in the morning, Carver had gone to the Department of Building and Safety in the governmental complex at 6262 Van Nuys Boulevard and found the records counter on the second floor. The woman at the counter eyed his suit as she asked him, “What can I do for you, sir?”

  “I wondered if I could see the blueprints for my house.”

  “You’ll need written authorization from the licensed architect of record, and the owner, and a copy of the grant deed.”

  “Gee, I’m the owner, but it’s an old house. I don’t even know the name of the original architect.”

  She leaned forward and said in a conspiratorial tone, “You know, this office also has copies of all permits, with the approved building plans. Those are public and they might tell you what you want to know. If not, at least you’ll have the name of the architect.”

  “That would be great.”

  “Address?”

  He handed her a piece of paper with the address written on it and signed the name “M. Kapak.”

  “And you’re the owner?”

  “Yes.”

  “This could take a few minutes.”

  “Thank you.”

  She disappeared through an open door and returned fifteen minutes later with a file. “This is all permits, certificates of occupancy, plot plans, electrical, plumbing, mechanical. If you need the geology reports, I know where they are.”

  He smiled. “No, thank you. I just wanted the plans.”

  Joe Carver paid to have the papers copied and walked off with the records of Kapak’s house. When he was in his car in the municipal parking structure, he examined what she had given him. The drawings submitted for approval by the inspectors were extensive and detailed. The only reasons they weren’t blueprints were that they weren’t blue and they were on letter-size paper.

  The house was built in 1956 by an architect named Paul Bruning for a client named Ralph Thompkins, was sold to Myrna Sorley, whom Carver recognized as the actress who played Mrs. Cole in the old television show Raising Danny Cole. It was bought again in 1985 by Claudiu V. Kapak and his wife, Marija. Whoever Marija had been, she certainly wasn’t around now. In fact, it was difficult for Carver to even imagine Kapak married, and even more difficult to imagine a woman who would have married him, even if he assumed that Kapak at that time might have weighed forty pounds less and not yet have bushy eyebrows. Carver was fairly sure he had stumbled on a first and only wife, a woman Kapak had brought with him from whatever backward country he had come from.

  Carver found another permit issued shortly after Kapak bought the property. With it were plans to build a large guesthouse behind the main building. That could have been the place where Kapak had been coming from on the day Carver had visited him.

  Carver put on his wig and mustache to drive to Kapak’s neighborhood. He drove up and down the surrounding blocks studying every car, every house. In his left hand he held the new digital camera he had bought, steadying it on the door of the car and taking pictures without appearing to as he drove up and down the streets. He did the same for the two clubs, Siren and Temptress. Then he drove to a Long’s Drugstore and used the photo machine to print the pictures, walked up Ventura Boulevard to the FedEx-Kinko’s, found Kapak’s block on Google Earth, and printed the best satellite picture he could get.

  Minute by minute, Carver worked on Manco Kapak. He held the man in his mind and turned him around like a mysterious object. Carver had avoided him, but it had not worked. He had humiliated Kapak’s men at the construction site, but it had no effect. He had visited Kapak and shown him that he meant no harm, but that had not worked either. Since then Carver had pulled a few tricks on him. The intended effect had been to make Kapak ask himself whether he really wanted to waste so much time and money to hunt down a man who had done him no real harm. Now it was time to take a closer look.

  It was already evening, and he had made his rounds twice. Tonight all the cars parked near Kapak’s house were ones he had photographed the first day. There seemed to be nobody patrolling the property, and no activity in the house. The big black Town Car with the chauffeur was not in its space in the garage.

  Carver selected a parking space along the curb one street away from the back of Kapak’s house. It was near enough to the apartment building on the main cross street to belong to a tenant, so nobody would be curious about it. He was more cautious now than he had been before he’d met Kapak. When he walked away from the car, he had a knife strapped to his ankle and carried his shotgun in a laundry bag. He made his way to the back of Kapak’s yard, went over the wall and into the bamboo grove.

  Carver found a path through the bamboo that led down
ward and away from the main house. It was a smaller path, not one that had been expensively laid out by the landscapers. It was more like a shortcut that animals or children used to get from the wall into the yard. He followed it down the incline all the way to the guesthouse. The guesthouse was at the center of the property, far back from the main house, which had been built as a wide obstacle that ran nearly from one side of the lot to the other, only about fifty feet from the street.

  Carver made his way to the guesthouse, walked to the back of the low building so he wouldn’t be seen from the main house, and began to try the doors and windows. The first few were tight and unmoving, as though they had been nailed shut. But when he reached the north side, he found a louvered window beside a sun window that jutted out from the kitchen. He touched a couple of the glass strips and found that he could rattle them. He slid his knife between one of the louvers and the aluminum frame that held it, bent it slightly, pulled out the rectangle of glass, and set it on the ground. He repeated the process with all of the louvers below it, then crawled in through the window onto the kitchen counter. He slid off the counter and went deeper into the guesthouse to be sure it was empty, then opened the kitchen door and brought his shotgun inside with him. A shotgun was reassuring. If he made a mistake, he could erase it.

  In Woodland Hills, Lieutenant Nick Slosser turned the corner at his street and then turned again into his driveway. He stopped in front of the three-car garage. Mary’s Volvo and the Audi that Nick Junior and Sally shared were already parked there, so he pulled into the third space. He got out of the car, walked around to the trunk, and picked up his two cases. One was the locked aluminum briefcase that held his extra pistol and magazines and some police department paperwork he had brought home. The second was his suitcase, after three days mostly filled with dirty clothes.

  He stepped to his front door, used his key to open it, and went inside. He smiled, happy to catch a glimpse of his wife just cleaning up in the kitchen. Tonight and for the next three nights, the wife he would come home to would be Mary.

  Slosser set his two cases down just inside the dining room, walked into the kitchen, and looked at her. She looked up and came to kiss him. “Nick. Right on time. The kids had to eat early because they’re both going out. If you’re ready, I’ll heat ours up in the microwave.”

  “Sounds fine to me.” He stood by while she put the first of the plates into the machine, closed the door and punched the buttons, then loaded the second plate with roast beef and spinach and potato. They took their plates into the dining room and sat next to each other on the long side of the table.

  “Well?” she said. “You look pretty good. You having an okay week?”

  “Not bad,” he answered. “I’m managing to keep busy and healthy. I got a thing this morning that looks kind of interesting. I missed you, of course.”

  “There. That’s what I was waiting to hear” she said. “I’m doing pretty well too. I think I managed to sell the place on Long-ridge. Our counteroffer is in, and the buyer’s realtor didn’t flinch. It could go through tomorrow.”

  “Wonderful. Congratulations, baby.”

  “No congratulations yet. You’ll jinx it. Just so far, so good.”

  “Right. How about the kids?”

  “They’re on a roll too. Sally got a ninety-eight on a Chem test today, and the teacher read Nick’s essay on Thoreau out loud.”

  “We should have them bronzed just as they are,” he said.

  The Slossers were talkative, and it would have struck only the most observant of eavesdroppers that Nick Slosser never said anything specific about his work. Slosser believed in self-discipline the way some people believed in God or the scientific method. It was a way of seeing. The problem with all of the petty criminals he ran into was that they had no sense of how to govern themselves. They were thirty-five- or forty-year-old men who lived the lives of teenagers, following every impulse without any acknowledgment of responsibility to the greater society, to their families, or even to themselves.

  Slosser’s own life had begun to thrive only after he’d learned the benefits of self-discipline. He had come home from the army and married Mary, the girlfriend he had met in college. They had bought this house in Woodland Hills that she had spotted as a bargain as soon as it had come on the market. They’d had Nick Junior and Sally within two and a half years, and Mary had kept working in real estate even after they’d come along. Nick had been so happy with his wife and family that he had married again right away.

  He met Christa when he was at a police training conference in Phoenix. He was a young detective at the time, and he had found that the convention atmosphere that prevailed after hours didn’t make him happy. He didn’t drink. He was used to getting up early and lifting weights, and then going out for a run before the weather got too hot.

  Christa happened to be staying at the same Phoenix hotel. She sold pharmaceuticals for a big drug company and had a route that took her from city to city over much of Arizona, New Mexico, a sliver of California, and Nevada, excluding Las Vegas. She was a lot like Mary, he thought. They didn’t look alike. Mary was short, with curly chestnut hair, big breasts, and wide hips. Christa was tall and thin with straight blond hair that she felt was her worst feature. She would say, “Give me a minute to brush my string,” or call it “this limp spaghetti.” But otherwise, Christa was a lot like Mary. He loved her almost immediately. In the first hours of joyful recognition, he had an impulse to call Mary at home and tell her, “I just met this great girl.” He didn’t do it, because he’d lost his heart, not his brain.

  His infatuation caused anxiety. His train of thought on the first day went “What a terrific woman. If I tell her I’m married, she’ll lose all interest in me and go away.” So he didn’t tell her. That first night they met for a drink, and both ordered iced tea. Later they shared a large bottle of mineral water in his room. The second day of the conference, he skipped the meetings to go for a run among the desert rocks with her. During the walking breaks she told him all about herself—her family in Nantucket, her intense love of children. She said she wasn’t a frivolous person. If he wasn’t at least open to the idea of marriage and children, then they would have to end it after one night.

  He was overjoyed. He loved marriage, and he knew he could be a good husband and father, because he already was a great husband and father. They never parted during the weeklong conference. She had to make a week of sales calls by phone while lying in his bed, and he pretended to be too sick to go to any seminars.

  Then the week was up. Dating required planning and care. It had to occur without disrupting Christa’s regular round of sales visits. A young detective like Slosser had little control over his schedule. They managed to see one another, sometimes only for a daylight tryst in hotels along her route in Victorville, California, or Elko, Nevada. The following spring he took two weeks off, told Mary he had to give expert testimony in a trial in Massachusetts, and got married at Christa’s family’s church in Nantucket.

  Christa’s family were exactly as he’d imagined them: tall, fair New Englanders with the same long, sinewy limbs Christa had, with high cheekbones, blue eyes, and faces reddened by the sun. They were great people.

  Now, as he ate his dinner, he turned to glance at Mary Slosser. He had been married to her for twenty-two years. This house was the same one she’d picked out as a young realtor. Nick junior was now eighteen, and Sally sixteen. He and Christa Slosser had been married for nineteen years. Their children, Martha, Ross, and Catherine, were eighteen, sixteen, and fourteen. He lived with them in a house in Burbank. He slept three nights a week in each house and took a night shift on the seventh night.

  His life required that he be a paragon of self-discipline and consistency. His families could count on him. He had not always been present for every piano recital or championship game, but few parents were, and he always made an effort to spend time with the child whose event he’d missed, and listen to the story or see the videotape
or hear the piece replayed for him alone.

  He even took both families on vacations. He had a police career punctuated by long, unexplained undercover missions, and while he was undercover he couldn’t be reached by phone. Now and then he would be sent on training assignments run by the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security. There were even a couple of Western Hemisphere Anti-Narcotics conferences at Cancun and Puerto Vallarta.

  Slosser had been disciplined. He was always aware that he could be unmasked and destroyed if he got careless. Even a single word in the wrong place could do it. He allowed himself no vices or even luxuries, so he could support both households. He grossly understated his salary to both wives to make it easier, and he encouraged them to invest most of their own income, just in case he was caught and they had to live on their own after that. The system had worked because he had willed it to work. The well-being of the women he loved and his five perfect children depended on it.

  The disaster that had been creeping toward him since the beginning was drawing very close now. He had begun trying to avoid it more than ten years ago, but he had been unable to do it. His two eldest children, Nick of the Woodland Hills family and Martha of the Burbank family, were high school seniors, and both had been accepted to expensive, competitive colleges for next fall. Nick had decided to go to the University of Pennsylvania, and Martha to Stanford. Slosser had managed to avoid their going to the same college, but only narrowly, by telling Nick that a Western student needed to broaden his background by going East, and Martha that Silicon Valley was where the future would be designed and built. Tuition, room, and board at each of these institutions was over fifty thousand dollars a year. That meant he would need to come up with a hundred thousand dollars a year, while he still had three more children to educate.

  There was financial aid available, but between the federal forms and the ones supplied by the College Board, there was no way he could apply without committing perjury and unmasking himself. The forms required an incredible amount of personal and financial information, starting with the parents’ Social Security numbers. False Social Security numbers, in his experience, never happened without a crime being committed, and so if the feds caught it, they would not shrug it off as a typographical error. They would begin to dig. His fraud trial would lead smoothly into his bigamy trial, which would invalidate his marriage to Christa, and then to the proceeding when Mary divorced him. Then there would be prison.