Strip

by Thomas Perry

  Jeff set the skillet on the stove, clutched the handle of his suitcase, but felt too tired to lift it. He extended the handle, wheeled it to the doorway, and bumped it down the steps. He hurried to the car, wondering if he should have tied Roger up, or done something to prevent him from following.

  Carrie was waiting, having put her suitcase in the back seat instead of waiting for him to open the trunk. He lifted his in too, got into the driver’s seat, and turned to her. “Are you leaving your car here?”

  “Technically, it’s only my car because it’s the one he let me use. Don’t worry. I didn’t leave him any keys.” She gave him an appraising glance. “You want me to drive?”

  “No, thanks.” He started the car and backed down the driveway, feeling relieved when he got past the door without having Roger burst out into his path. He hit the button to lock the doors, pulled into the street, shifted, and headed to the turn that would take him down the hill.

  “Jeez,” she said. “I thought you were going to get us killed in there. Haven’t you been in a fight before?”

  “What do you mean? Roger is a very big, strong guy, and he didn’t manage to hit me even once.”

  “He was getting ready to, and it would have been awful. You can’t dance around like that and tap him. I could tell it was just pissing him off. That’s why I decided to make him freak out like that—so you would have to come to your senses to save me.”

  “Come to my senses?”

  “Yes. Before he killed you. We’re both very lucky that the place he was coming from was the airport. Anyplace else and he’d have had a gun.”

  “Don’t you ever date anybody who’s not a criminal?”

  She shrugged and smiled sweetly. “I guess all this time I’ve been searching for you.”

  29

  IT WAS HOT. Lieutenant Slosser’s office door was closed, and the three detectives were gathered in the room with their coats off, their shirtsleeves rolled up, and their ties loosened. Even Detective Louise Serra, who favored black suits with matador jackets, had hers off, so the gun in the small belt holster she wore was visible.

  Slosser leaned back in his desk chair, masking the eagerness that he felt. “So who are they and where did you find them?”

  “There are two of them,” said Timmons. “Both of them young, and would you say ‘attractive,’ Louise?”

  “Probably not, but you can. You say young and attractive goes with it. They’re teenagers.”

  “Right. Their names are Ariana Rodriguez, and Irena Estrada. The surnames may be fake, because the IDs are. The first names are probably real, because a lot of people know them under those names. They were picked up in Sunland in a BMW that was registered to Alvin Tatum.”

  “The Alvin Tatum that got killed in the Malibu massacre?”

  “The same. The car was parked on the street in Sunland near a corner where some coke dealers sell. At one, two A.M., this Beemer is not going to be noticed. At eight A.M., it kind of stands out. A patrol car comes by, the officer spots it, runs the tags, and it comes up stolen from a murder victim. They left it there and put it under surveillance for a couple of hours. Along come these two girls, Ariana and Irena, on foot. They unlock it with the remote on the key chain and get in. The chase cars roll in and block it, and they’re in custody.”

  “What did they have on them?”

  “The false IDs I mentioned. They each had a gun and a box of ammunition. If you unloaded the guns, the ammunition refilled the boxes. Both guns were new, probably never fired after the factory test firing. They both had the instruction booklets that came with them.”

  “What did they have to say?” Slosser asked.

  “Not much. Ariana said they had borrowed the car from a friend because they didn’t want to walk home in this heat.”

  “Was Alvin Tatum the friend?”

  “No. They didn’t know the friend’s real name. He calls himself Gordo—Fats.”

  “So they claim to know nothing about anything.”

  “Right.”

  “How hard did you try?”

  “Hard.”

  “Then it’s my turn. How much time do I have?”

  “They were brought in at ten. Nobody has asked for a lawyer or anything yet.”

  “Good. I’ll see them in Room Three” He stood. “Tell me you’ve read them their rights.”

  “We read them their rights,” Timmons said. “Here’s the file on what we’ve got so far.”

  He took it. “Good. Serra, can you please bring them down? I’d like you there.” Slosser walked out the door and down the hall to the interrogation room. He sat in a chair he selected for himself at the end of the bare table. When the door opened, Detective Serra held it open for the two girls. They stood at the other end of the table looking around at the uncomfortable room. He said, “Have you been given the chance to use the bathroom?”

  They looked at each other, then looked at him. The taller one, Ariana, said, “I’d like to go now.”

  “Detective Serra, will you please take them there?”

  “We know where it is,” said the shorter one, who was Irena.

  “I know.”

  While they were gone, he sat alone, thinking about his interrogation and studying the file. He knew where he wanted to go. It was only a question of getting them to take him there. His detectives would have kept them separated all this time, trying to keep them from concocting the same lies and to deprive each of the other’s support.

  As they came in the door, he looked at them. They were both thin, both Hispanic, with long, dark brown hair that had been straightened with a flat iron so it hung straight down as though it were heavy. They both wore tank tops, short skirts, and flip-flops. He watched them sit down near the end on opposite sides of the table, then turn to him, their dark eyes wary.

  He said, “I’m Lieutenant Nicholas Slosser. I’m the boss of the detectives you spoke with earlier. This is going to be your best chance to make the rest of this experience smooth and easy by answering my questions and telling me the truth.”

  Their expressions didn’t mask the fact that they’d heard it all so many times that the actual words fell to the ground before they reached them. It was always about the choice between cooperation and suffering. He decided to start with the taller one, Ariana. She had a naive, earnest look, not hard-eyed yet like the other. “Ariana. Your fake ID says you’re twenty-two. How old are you?”

  “Seventeen.”

  He examined the driver’s license from the file. “It’s a pretty good fake.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Why do you use it?”

  “I like to go to clubs.”

  He turned to the other girl. “It’s Irena, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Same question to you. I assume you like clubs too. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “That’s what it says on my license.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Slosser. “As long as you’re over sixteen, it’s all the same. You’ll be charged as an adult.”

  “At Disneyland they charge you as an adult when you’re ten.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. It’s a lot too. Like a hundred bucks.”

  “Let’s talk a little about why you’re here. Last night, there was a murder in Malibu, at the house of Manuel Rogoso. He and two men who worked for him, Alvin Tatum and Chuy Sanchez, were shot to death. The house was set on fire. At noon today, Alvin Tatum’s black BMW turned up in Sunland. Police officers watched the car, and then somebody came along, got in, and fired up the engine. You.” He looked at Ariana. “Help me out.”

  Irena said, “Is there a question in there?”

  “Tell me why I’m not supposed to think you two killed those three men, set the fire, and stole the car.”

  Ariana said, “Because we didn’t do that. We never killed anybody or started any fires. We don’t know anything about any fire or any murd
er.”

  “Then you’re very unlucky. You’re the only ones who can be positively placed at that beach house that night. The BMW was seen parked there before the killings, but wasn’t there when the firefighters arrived and found the bodies.”

  “We have an alibi” Irena said. “We were at a party all evening.”

  “Where?”

  “At my friend’s house, in Echo Park.”

  “What’s the friend’s name?”

  “Maria.”

  “Last name?”

  “I don’t know her last name. But she stays around there, near Echo Park.”

  “What time did it start?”

  “Like eight o’clock.”

  “And it went until two,” Irena said.

  “Maybe later,” Ariana said.

  Lieutenant Slosser took a blank piece of paper from the folder and a pen from his pocket and set them down on the table. “Write down the names of some of the people at the party.”

  “Who, me?”

  “Either of you. Both of you.” He watched as the two whispered and added names. When they seemed to have run out of names, he pointed and said, “Who is this one to you?”

  “A friend.”

  “This one?”

  “My sister.”

  “This one?”

  “A cousin.”

  Irena said, “Are you going to tell us that they don’t count because they’re friends and relatives?”

  “No. That wouldn’t be fair. But if you can please write down all the addresses and phone numbers you can remember, we’ll be able to use them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll have to have police officers go and pick them all up and bring them down here to prove your story before I can let you go.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Sure. We just keep you in this room, and we’ll put them in another and ask them where they were between eight and two last night.”

  Irena took the pen and began to write for a few seconds, then crumpled up the paper and held the ball in her hand. “All right. It wasn’t a party. We just hung out together at Wash in Hollywood, but it got too crowded, so we left.”

  “Why did you lie to me?”

  “Because we were afraid, and we wanted to be sure we didn’t get arrested. We didn’t kill anybody,” Ariana said. “All we did was borrow a car, drive it to our neighborhood, park it, and go home.”

  “So you didn’t steal the car from Alvin. You just borrowed it from him.”

  “Yes.”

  “You were at this house in Malibu and he just handed you the keys and said you could take it home?”

  “No,” said Irena. “We were at Wash. We were hot and tired and it was crowded, so we asked, and he gave us the keys.”

  “So you dropped him off at Rogoso’s house in Malibu, and then drove straight home?”

  “No. We didn’t go to Malibu.”

  “Then how did he end up there?”

  “I don’t know. We were gone. Maybe he went there with a friend, or maybe he took a cab. Maybe anything. But he wasn’t with us, and we didn’t go near Malibu.”

  “Okay, so how did you know Alvin Tatum so well he would lend you his fifty-thousand-dollar car?”

  “We met him at a club. It might have been Adder or the Room. I don’t remember. Once in a while we’d see him again, and he would come over and talk to us. If it was late, he might ask if we needed a ride home.”

  “Do you know what he did for a living?”

  “No.”

  “I do. I read his rap sheet. He started out selling cocaine on the street, but pretty early he learned that what he was really good at was taking care of the people who didn’t pay or the ones who were trying to work the same neighborhoods, or people who weren’t afraid enough of him or his boss, Rogoso. By the time he died, he had been a full-time bodyguard and killer for at least five years.”

  “We didn’t know about any of that,” said Irena.

  “This is odd. I assumed that my detectives would have told you what we know about you already. We know that you’ve been working for Rogoso for a year or more, because your names have been mentioned by people we’ve talked to for that long. You carry drugs to the sellers and money back to Rogoso. You were in Malibu last night. Either you killed Rogoso and Alvin and Chuy, or you were there and know who did. Which is it?”

  “Neither,” said Irena. “We know nothing.”

  “I’d like you to think about things for a while. You could be convicting yourselves of three murders. Or you could be putting yourselves in front of a lot of guns. Whenever a guy like Rogoso dies, there are a lot of people who believe there must be a lot of money hidden someplace. You don’t want them to think you’ve got it. There are also relatives of Rogoso who just lost a lifetime of living off him.”

  “Are you going to make sure they know about us?”

  “My job is to try to keep people from dying, not get them killed. If you get charged with murder, though, there’s no way it won’t be in the papers.”

  Ariana was hugging herself and rocking back and forth, staring straight ahead. The sight of her seemed to weaken Irena. “How do we avoid that?”

  “I’ll tell you what I need from you. I need the name of the man who pulled the trigger. I don’t know why you haven’t told us yet. Maybe he paid you to set those three up, maybe you just happened to be there when it happened, and you owe him because he let you leave. I don’t know. But if you tell me, I’ll try to keep you from being charged as accomplices. If you don’t, then the DA may decide to charge you with the shootings. One of the things that will strike him is that you both had brand-new guns in your purses. You must have thrown away the old ones on the same night. I’m going to give you a chance to think.” He stood up, beckoned to Detective Serra. “We’ll be back.”

  As soon as the door closed, the two girls moved closer, leaned together. “He means it,” said Irena.

  “I know. Shh!”

  “He really does. You want to go to trial for murder? We don’t have any money for good lawyers. They’ll lock us up forever.”

  Ariana had tears in her eyes. “But we can’t.”

  “Why not? We met the man once. We don’t care about him.”

  “But we owe him” Ariana said.

  “We do not. There wouldn’t be any problem if it weren’t for him.”

  “He didn’t do anything. They were about to kill him. He didn’t even bring a gun with him. All he did was fight back. He had to, and then he let us live. We were the only witnesses, and he knew we worked for Rogoso. If he had killed us there wouldn’t be anybody left to tell on him. But he didn’t. He even gave us the keys to the car so we could get away.”

  “They weren’t his to give. And maybe he was smarter than we were and knew the car would turn out to be a curse. Maybe he set us up on purpose so we’d be blamed.”

  “You know that’s not true. He even waited and gave us time to get far away before he set the fire.”

  “He’s an old man, not a little boy. He knew what he was risking. Nobody made him do it.”

  Outside the room, in the smaller one that was marked “Cleaning supplies,” Lieutenant Slosser and Detective Serra watched the television monitor and listened to the voices, amplified by the microphones all over the room. “Say it,” he whispered. “Say the name.”

  Ariana said, “It was my fault more than yours. He took the gun out of my purse. I’ll take the blame.”

  “I don’t want either of us to take the blame. Why should we throw ourselves away, especially for a man we don’t even know? And he’s a pig. He got rich by making women strip and then turn tricks in those private rooms.”

  “What are you talking about? A year ago that’s what you wanted to do.”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “You got a better offer, more money just for carrying things.”

  “And I let you in on it too, didn’t I?”

  In the next room, Detective Serra said, “They�
��re off the subject. Do you want me to go back in and remind them they have to come up with the name?”

  “No, thanks, Louise,” Slosser said. “This could take a while. I want them to get so used to the interrogation room and the predicament they’re in that they forget we’re out here listening. You can go back to your other work.”

  “Thanks.” She went out the door and closed it.

  Ariana said, “Why don’t we make a story up? Why can’t we say ‘We met a man named Stanley in Wash, he drove us to Malibu, and argued with Mr. Rogoso.’”

  “Then what?”

  “Just what really happened. Make it all the same except the man’s name. Mr. Rogoso told Chuy and Alvin to kill him, but he snatched the gun out of my purse. It was self-defense.”

  Slosser’s face was close to the screen, his jaw working. “The name, honey. Time to say the name.”

  Ariana said, “I wish I could talk to him. I could explain why we have to do it.”

  “What would you say? Hello, Mr. Kapak. This is your good friend Ariana. I’ve got something to tell you that’ll just kill you.”

  Slosser stood up. He left the tape running and walked back toward the big open office where the detectives had their desks. Nobody had told him anything to his face yet, but the big turn had occurred. He knew.

  30

  AT JUST AFTER NOON, Manco Kapak lay in his bed in a troubled sleep. He dreamed he was in a field with golden stems and fat seeds of grain. He knew he was young again, and back in Hungary. He was with Marija. She was studying music in Budapest, but he was only posing as a student. He was the right age—twenty-two—and he had acquired the bohemian look that students had, the workman’s clothes, a pair of round sunglasses that he wore all the time, a modest beard.

  He had told her and her friends that he was studying political science, because it seemed to be a subject that had no particular agreed-upon content, no specific books that everyone had to read. It was also one of the dangerous subjects that implied membership in one of the opposition groups. But since he was on no lists of students and never attended a lecture, he felt secure. He and Marija were both Romanians—he from Bucharest and she from a village not too far away where he had relatives—and he suspected that much of what he had to offer was a cure for homesickness, a chance to use her own language.