by Thomas Perry
She sometimes asked him why he never spoke about his studies, and he answered that he learned more by listening than by talking. He said that at his age, all he would be doing was repeating the words of his professors anyway. He would speak and write his own opinions when he had learned enough to have a right to them. When the others in their set heard this, he gained a reputation for wisdom and humility.
But in his dream he didn’t feel the contentment of those summers. He knew a great many things that none of the others knew, because he wasn’t only Claudiu the student. He was also Manco Kapak at age sixty-four. Camping in the wheat fields was sure to disappear with the summer, and anyone would know that, but he knew that it would disappear forever. All of it—the smell of the plants that somehow clung to Marija’s hair, the finger-touch of the gentle breeze, the steady sound of the chatter of their student friends, uncaring as the chatter of birds—was going to be obliterated. He knew that it was going to turn into a nightmare place. He tried to tell all of them that it was time to go, but his voice turned thick and slow, and he couldn’t draw in enough breath to speak loud and strong. The others didn’t seem to hear him. He had to save Marija, so he picked her up in his arms.
He knew the time was running out as he went along, holding her. He could not see the dips and rises in the earth, because the stalks of the plants hid them. He tripped and staggered and lost his balance many times. He made one long step and began to fall. He knew the hole was deeper than he had feared, and he began to turn as he fell, and gasped.
He awoke, lying there on top of the covers, trying to catch his breath. He looked past his feet at the tall, narrow windows copied in style from a French palace, turned and felt the smooth texture of the matching pillows and duvet on the bed. For an instant he saw it all with the twenty-two-year-old eyes of Claudiu the student. The old man he had become was richer and more secure than the most corrupt Communist bureaucrats he had met in those days. The thought brought him back fully to the present. He wasn’t really old yet, because he could still move quickly. His muscles had strength, even if it was not the strength of the young. When he got bent over and could no longer walk without help, he would be old. The time was coming, and it no longer seemed so distant as to be only theoretical. He could already feel a taste of the pains that he would feel then, so he knew where they would be—his knees, his right hip, and his hands.
He lay there and his memory brought his trouble back to him. He was in jeopardy. He had killed Rogoso and his two bodyguards. He sat up, swung his legs off the bed, yawned, and put on his shoes. He glanced at his watch. It was just after 12:00. He had slept late, and he felt anxious about being unconscious that long. There were forces waiting to take him down and destroy him. They were always there, and always had been, waiting like microbes for him to become too weak to fight them off.
He stood and held his place for a moment to be sure he had waited through the wave of dizziness from standing up too fast. He passed by the mirrored dresser and ran a brush through his hair to push it back down, and opened the door that led from the master suite to the hall.
He crossed the living room and looked, as he always did, to the left and right. To the left was the path through the tropical garden to the guesthouse, and beyond it, the bamboo forest at the back of the property. To the right was the formal front entrance with the two big carved teak doors that nobody ever used. It was protected from the street by a tight planting of trees. When the sunlight passed through all the greenery, it became soft and secret and the undersides of the leaves glowed.
Kapak walked down the far hallway past the pantry, the maid’s quarters, into the kitchen. The women of the cleaning crew were all gone, and Spence was sitting at the kitchen table reading the Los Angeles Times. He always read it in a prescribed order—front section, California, Calendar, and finally Business and Sports—then refolded it and put each section back as though he’d never touched it.
Even after more than thirty years in the city, Kapak could hardly ever bring himself to read the paper. He supposed it was because most of the stories were about things that had no bearing on his life. He checked it only to be sure his ads had run, skimmed the headlines to be sure there were no stories about him or about live adult entertainment. He said to Spence, “Good morning. Only it’s afternoon, right? You look relaxed.”
“I am.”
“How is that thing going? You know—the thing with Joe Carver. You got any leads yet?”
“I got him.”
“You got him?”
“Last night. I’ll show you something.” He got up, left the newspaper spread on the kitchen table, went to the maid’s room, and came back with a plastic zip-lock bag. He set it on the newspaper. “I thought this might make you feel good.” He began to pull the bag open.
“Is that blood?”
“Yes.”
Kapak looked down at it. “You don’t need to open that. It’s his shirt. I recognize the pattern. That’s the one he was wearing the day he came here. We don’t need to get any of his blood on anything.”
“I just figured you’d like to see proof that it’s over.”
“Did you get the girl too—the crazy one who helped him with the robberies?”
“Sure. But I didn’t bring back any souvenirs from her. Carver is the one we want to prove is dead.”
“Thanks. And great work. I was beginning to think this was going to go on forever. You’ll be getting some kind of bonus, when I think of something that would be big enough.”
He retreated from the kitchen and walked back toward the living room. He stopped in front of a big leather couch and let his legs give way to deposit him in the middle of it. For comfort he stared out the window at the enormous translucent ferns above the stubby sago palms. Even though the tropical plants were out of proportion and came from a distant, alien place, they were natural and green, so they made him feel calmer.
Spence had surprised him. It shouldn’t have been a surprise. He had been ranting for weeks that somebody should be able to find this Carver guy and get rid of him. But now Spence had done it. Kapak was beginning to feel a bit scared of Spence. He was like a genie. If you stated a desire in front of him, he would make it happen. But in the stories, the genie wasn’t benevolent. He was cunning and dangerous, and asking him to use his power was a risk. If you didn’t think carefully before you made the wish, there were terrible consequences.
Kapak tried to decide whether he had done the right thing. He was the one who had killed Carver and the girl, really. Spence’s disinterested violence was a kind of innocence. Kapak was the one who made the decision and the one who received the benefit. He had committed murder. It was the first time in a long life of struggling and fighting that he had done that. He had killed a couple of men before last night’s work at Malibu, but it had always had a fairness to it. Two men fight with grappling hooks on a moving boat, and one falls in. Maybe the propeller got him, maybe he drowned, and maybe he swam underwater to the far side of the boat, then ducked again to swim to the next boat. Never seen again wasn’t the same as dead. Running another car off the road didn’t mean he had killed the driver, or that the driver was even dead. If he was, he had certainly had a part in killing himself.
Joe Carver was the worst thing Kapak had ever done. He had ordered a man and his girlfriend killed merely for strategic reasons. It was what a king would have done. He had felt he had no other choice. He couldn’t afford to let people all over town believe that he had allowed a solitary stranger to keep robbing him over and over in different ways. It would have made him a victim to anyone in the city who owned a gun. As it was, he had waited one day too long and tempted Rogoso to kill him for being weak.
Telling Spence to kill Carver had been a bad thing. There was no doubt about that. But that wasn’t all there was to say about it. Life was more complicated than that. By having Spence kill Carver, he had put out a clear notice that anyone who attacked Manco Kapak was placing himself in terrible jeopardy. Kap
ak’s men would search until they found him, even if it took a very long time.
Spreading that story was a good thing to do. It would not only protect Kapak, but also his enterprises and all of his people. He wasn’t just thinking of the men like the Gaffneys, Spence, Guzman, Corona, and Voinovich, but also the bartenders, waiters, busboys, cooks, bouncers who worked in the clubs. If a bunch of men got up the nerve to pull a full-scale assault on one of the clubs, there would be shooting. In a crowded club, bullets could hit anybody, and they were far more likely to hit the people who had the least experience of gunfire. By making the decision to sacrifice Joe Carver, he may have saved ten or fifteen other people who depended on him for their livelihoods and their safety. He did not succeed in convincing himself.
He stood. The work was done. It wasn’t as though he had a chance to undo it. Now what he needed was to keep the killing from being wasted. He went back to Spence in the kitchen. “Have you told anybody that Carver is dead?”
“Nobody but you.”
“What did you do with the body?”
“I had rented a boat in Marina del Rey when I started looking for him. After I got him and the girl last night, I took the bodies about ten miles into the channel, almost midway to Catalina. I weighted them with chains and scrap iron I had collected and kept around for this kind of thing, and let them go. There’s a chance they’ll surface some time, but it won’t be soon.”
“All right. That’s good, I guess. We don’t want to get caught. But is there any way to let the word out that Carver has been found and killed?”
“There’s his shirt and his wallet, with credit cards and license. We can leave all of it where it will get found, if you like.”
“That ought to work,” Kapak said. “We’ll have to put some thought into where we want it found and who finds it.”
There was a sudden, loud pounding on the front door. It startled Kapak so much that he gave a little jump, then felt embarrassed because Spence hadn’t. He felt different about Spence today, and he’d only had a few minutes to sort it out.
Spence got up and looked at the monitor in the maid’s room. “It’s cops.”
“What cops?”
“Take a look.” He pressed the remote control and five of the small squares that shared the screen disappeared, so the view of the front steps took up the whole screen.
Kapak could see two men in sport coats and a woman in a pantsuit. “It’s that Lieutenant Slosser who’s been on my ass since the construction site thing. I just went for a ride with him this morning. You hide the shirt and stuff, and I’ll go talk to him.”
“Right.” Spence snatched up the plastic bag, opened a cupboard, stuffed it into a covered pot, then closed the door.
Kapak hurried down the hall toward the living room. He took a deep breath, then opened the door. He smiled. “Hello again, Lieutenant. Did you find the people who robbed my club last night?”
“Not yet. I’m sorry to bother you again, but I’m afraid we have to go talk downtown.”
“What about?”
“The deaths of Manuel Rogoso, Alvin Tatum, and Chuy Sanchez. We still have to clear some things up.”
Kapak couldn’t believe it. Here he was in his own house with the bloody shirt and the wallet of a murdered man, and here were three homicide detectives. But all they wanted from him was exactly what he wanted—to ride downtown a few miles from here to talk about something else. His luck must be returning already.
He smiled, almost laughed. “Of course. Just let me get my sport coat.”
31
KAPAK SAT in the back seat of the car beside Lieutenant Slosser. The two detectives, Timmons and Serra, sat in the front. The male, Timmons, drove the car, and the female was beside him in the passenger seat. It seemed the same to him as riding in a car with his parents when he was very young. His father had bought an old East German Trabant when Claudiu was young. His father would spend every Friday night and Saturday trying in vain to tune it properly or making the repairs to keep it moving, Sunday morning washing the fiberglass exterior, and the afternoon driving it with the family all dressed up, sitting stiffly and listening to the engine, waiting for it to cough, stop spewing black smoke, and glide silently to the side of the road.
He could feel tension in the car now, emanating from the front seat. Maybe it was because these two were partners and they were driving their boss in their unmarked car. He sensed that they were uncomfortable sitting this way, with the man driving and the woman beside him, because they knew it suggested to the eye that they were a couple. That had to be forbidden. They never spoke, only listened for some comment from the back seat that would distract everyone from the way they looked.
He felt sorry for them for a few minutes, then reminded himself that he was the one being transported for interrogation. He turned to look at Slosser and found Slosser already staring at him. “Do I look different?”
“It’s only been a couple of hours. But to me you look like a guy who’s got himself in trouble.”
“Getting older is trouble. Once you’re over sixty, every day is a gift, but carrying your gift around wears you down. I don’t know if young men would be such heroes if they knew that every bruise can turn into a pain that comes back later, and every twinge just might be the start of a heart attack.”
“I’ve got old age figured out. When I can, I’m going to lie on a beach every day and have drinks with little umbrellas in them every night.” He paused. “That’s what you should have done.”
“You may be right.”
“I know I am,” Slosser said. “But nobody quits while he’s still okay and hasn’t made a big mistake yet.”
“People make mistakes because they’re greedy,” Kapak said. “They never have enough. That’s not me. I just want to get through the rest of my life like I am.”
Slosser said, “Will one of you please read Mr. Kapak his rights?” He turned to Kapak. “Since we’re talking, I don’t want to take advantage of you.”
“Fine.”
Detective Serra, the one Slosser clearly had meant, recited the Miranda warning, speaking slowly and clearly.
When she reached “Do you understand these rights?” Kapak said, “I understand,” then turned to Slosser. “So now what did you want to ask me?”
“I think we can wait the last few minutes until we’re in the station.” He had sensed that Kapak was feeling too confident and comfortable, but now he had reminded him that their conversation would be recorded to be used at some future trial.
The car pulled into the driveway to the underground lot and stopped at the building entrance. Lieutenant Slosser and Detective Serra got out and escorted Kapak into the building.
The smell of floor wax and disinfectant filled Kapak’s nostrils. It was the smell of governments, the smell of the physical power that dragged people in who were dirty or bleeding or vomiting and made them invisible in some cell or interrogation room, and then cleaned up the mess. It was a reminder that the government was big, its surfaces hard and enduring and polished, and that human beings were small, soft, dirty, and weak. Thousands of them could be herded through here and there would be no sign of it, not even a human smell.
They took an elevator upstairs to the corridor that Kapak remembered from his questioning after the fight at the construction site. They conducted Kapak up the hall toward the interrogation room. There were cops coming up and down the hallway, doors that were closed, others that were open. Kapak’s mind tried to make sense of the place, his eyes scanning, passing over each sight. He could tell from Slosser’s manner that he thought he knew something Kapak didn’t. He knew that was not out of the question. The last time he was here, Slosser had known much more than Kapak about the fight at the construction site. He was determined not to underestimate Slosser.
His eyes turned to his right to glance into the next open doorway—the girls. Then he was past the doorway, with no way to turn and walk back to look again and be sure. He kept walking at the sa
me pace as the others. In a moment he was inside the interrogation room, and he was sure. Both of them had been looking in his direction, and his eyes had met theirs for a second, he had seen them recognize him, and then he was looking at the plain dirty wall going by.
He sat at the table in one of the plain, hard chairs and considered the implications. There could be no weapon. He had taken it apart and spread the pieces where they would never be found. There could be no fingerprints, blood, fiber after a fire. He had seen the house and there was nothing left. His footprints and tire tracks were obliterated when the fire trucks arrived. There was nothing that could connect him with the actual killing except the two girls. What were their names?
Ariana. That was the tall one, with the sweet disposition. The other one’s name was like it. Irena. There was something that he had seen and needed to think about. They had been surprised. If they had told what they had seen him do, why would they be surprised to see Kapak here?
Slosser watched Kapak sitting at the table, glaring at the wall. He caught Serra’s eye and nodded slightly. She was behind Kapak, so she could risk a quick half-smile to acknowledge that, yes, Kapak had seen the two girls through the open office door, and the sight of them had eroded his confidence.
Slosser said, “Mr. Kapak. The reason I asked you down here was that I wanted to double-check some things from our earlier conversations and pursue a few others in case there’s something you didn’t mention the first time. All right?”
“Sure.”
“A few minutes ago, Detective Serra read you your rights, including the right to refuse to answer questions and the right to have an attorney present. Would you like us to repeat anything or explain anything?”
“No. Are you arresting me?”
“No, we’re not. We’re just after information at the moment.”