by Thomas Perry
“Okay.”
“Let’s begin with Manuel Rogoso. Last time we spoke, you couldn’t remember ever having heard of him. I wondered if you had placed the name since then.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Any reason. Sometimes if a name makes the news and a witness sees a picture, he comes back to me and says, ‘Oh, yeah. I remember him now.’ Or ‘I didn’t know his full name. People just called him Manny,’ or something. Anything like that happen to you?”
“No.” He was becoming alarmed. The girls must have told Slosser he laundered money for their boss, Rogoso. That was a major crime, a federal crime. All he could do was hope there was no evidence left to prove what they’d said, and that maybe they hadn’t told Slosser that Kapak had done the shooting.
“I’ve talked to a lot of people who used to see Rogoso. They say you knew him well. They say you took his drug money and mixed it with your take from the clubs. Then you would send a check to a fake company Rogoso controlled for some imaginary service—linen or advertising or something.”
“They have the wrong man.”
“They all say they have the right man, and that you had a business relationship with Rogoso for years.”
“What people?” Of course it was the girls. There was nobody else who would know and tell. But maybe they’d had to give Slosser something but resisted giving him everything. Saying they’d been there and seen it would get them in trouble, maybe get them killed.
“Lots of people. Some worked for him, some didn’t.”
Kapak felt better. That’s all it was. The two teenaged girls were all they had. Kapak could go into court and look pretty honest and substantial beside two teenaged drug mules in short skirts and tattoos. “Well, they’re wrong. I never knew him.”
“I think I know what must have happened. He was a mean, violent guy. Everybody agrees on that. He got upset because you got robbed a couple of times, and it made him feel unsafe. He called you in to see him, you argued, and he told his men to kill you. Isn’t that right? And then you killed him in self-defense.”
Kapak smiled and shook his head. “I did all of this last night? I’m sixty-four years old. I don’t go quick-drawing guns and shooting everyone in sight so I’ll be a big hero. I don’t own a gun, and I’m sure you must have checked my record to see if I ever did.”
“I think you were at Rogoso’s house, and that you shot the three men and burned the house to cover it.”
“I didn’t do any of those things. I wasn’t there.”
“Where were you last night between midnight and three o’clock?”
“We already talked about that this morning. I was at Wash, then at Temptress until two. I talked to my guys at Siren a few times.”
“Anybody see you in any of those places?”
“A lot of people. Dozens of them,” Kapak said. “I talked to them, and they talked to me. I stood around a long time watching bartenders to see how they were keeping up with the demand. I spent time talking to my manager at Wash, Ruben Salinas, and his assistant. I talked to waiters, busboys, even a few dancers, the security guys.”
“Sounds like an awful lot of people. It seems almost as though you were trying to construct an alibi.”
“It might seem that way, if I didn’t do it every night. But I do—seven nights a week. You’ll find out when you start talking to the people who work for me.”
“I have no doubt your lawyers can bring in lots of people to swear you were in sight all evening, but it doesn’t mean you were. I’ll level with you. I’ve got really strong reasons to think you did this. I also know you did it in self-defense. If you’ll just tell me exactly what happened, it will save us both a lot of time and effort, and you a lot of money. The law will also go a lot easier if you’ll be honest about it. You and I both know what Rogoso was like. He was arrogant and vicious. He was trying to kill you right then. All you have to do now is agree with me.”
They sat and stared at each other across the table for a long time. Finally Kapak said, “I’d like to call my attorney now.”
32
JERRY GAFFNEY and Jimmy Gaffney and Vassily Voinovich were in the garage of Voinovich’s house. Since he had come to Hollywood, Jimmy Gaffney had seen these little old houses with high-peaked roofs that made them look like witches or goblins lived there and wondered what sort of person really did. It turned out that the sort of person was Voinovich. Whatever it reminded him of in his Russian life, it seemed to make him calmer.
The garage was far too small for his SUV, and so it served as a workshop and storage space. Jimmy Gaffney pulled his body armor over his head, then blew out a breath of air. “Man, this is hot. I feel like I’m in some kind of press.”
“It’s not there to be comfy” Jerry said. “If you take a round in the chest, you’ll be damned glad you’re wearing that thing.”
“Not always,” Voinovich said. “I saw two bulletproof vests pierced in one fight when I was back home. It was a war between the security forces of a bank and a department store.”
Jerry stared at him thoughtfully. “Well, probably nobody is going to be firing military ammo around here. If they do, at least now we’ll know why we’re dead.”
Jerry put on his shirt over the armor and buttoned it. He had the same squared-off barrel torso that Voinovich had with his vest on. He put on a shoulder holster to hold his Glock pistol, then knelt to put a small ankle holster under his right pant leg to hold his .380 pistol. He put on a thin windbreaker over his gear and shrugged a few times to shift everything into the right places. He went to the workbench to pick up his ski mask and one of the three radio receivers.
Jimmy Gaffney began to pick up his gear and stow it in his pockets.
Voinovich stood fully armed and equipped, his head nearly to the lower rafters of his little garage. He tried pressing the Talk button on his radio and listened to the static sound as the channel came to life, then nodded to himself and put it in his jacket pocket. He said, “I’d like to talk about the plan some more before things start happening.”
“All right,” Jerry said. “We’ve got to stay loose. First we find out where he is. We take him in our car and drive away. Probably we keep moving. We call, or let him call, the club managers to arrange a ransom. All three managers have signature power for major accounts set up to run the clubs. None of them has the kind of history that would make me worry. They came up to where they are by making sure there are enough cocktail napkins and olives behind the bar. They’re managers. So we give them something they know how to manage—getting us some cash. We pick it up, let Kapak go, and take off”’
“Okay,” Voinovich said. “We agree on the general outline. That’s how it’s done. It would be easier if he had a family, so we could deal with them and have them tell the managers what to do.”
“Then there would be more money around,” Jimmy said. “The kind you can put your hands on.”
Jerry said, “Look, you’ve got to kidnap the guy you have, not make up some imaginary guy who would leave more cash lying around.”
“It’s all right” Voinovich said. “We’ve got to think about the details. We’ll need plastic restraints for his hands and feet. We’ll need a cloth sack to put over his head so he can’t recognize any of us and doesn’t know where he’s been taken. That’s important.”
“We should try it on first,” Jimmy said. “We want to be sure he can’t see, but he can breathe.”
“Not too well,” Voinovich said. “If he can breathe easily, then he can yell too. We don’t want that.”
“No, we don’t want that” Jerry said. “If we’re quick and do this thing right, he won’t have to wear it for long.”
Jimmy looked at his brother. “What if everything doesn’t go right?”
“What do you mean?”
“What I said. You’re talking about everything going right. What if instead it all goes wrong? What if he doesn’t come with us just because we point a gun at him? What if they can’t come
up with the money in one day? What if he does something stupid? Do we shoot him?”
“I guess we’d have to.”
“Then what do we do with the body?”
“What?”
“You heard me. You’re planning to go in with your guns drawn, and the whole thing depends on everybody saying yes and jumping to do what we say. If he doesn’t, I guess you’re saying we have to kill him. We can’t just sit someplace with his body and hope it walks away on its own. We need to have a plan for getting rid of it.”
“Well, if you’re going to kidnap people, you have to be ready for bodies,” Voinovich announced.
“Okay,” said Jerry. “We’ll just agree that if things go wrong we’ll shoot him, and then hide the body. We’ll put it in a Dumpster.”
“What about the other people—say, people who work for him too, like Spence, or the waiters, or the bouncer?”
“We shoot them too, obviously, if it comes to that. We have to protect ourselves.”
Voinovich thought for a moment. “Maybe the thing to do is just make him disappear. If we kill him we don’t have to worry about him yelling or running away or getting his hands on somebody’s gun. We just collect a ransom and give him back dead.”
Jimmy Gaffney said, “When we started, we were just hanging out with him for a while. He might not even know he wasn’t free to leave. Maybe we’d go to a bar or a restaurant. That’s what you said, Jerry.”
“I know. I did. And that’s the way we all want it to be. We just breeze into his place like nothing’s up. We tell him we want to take him somewhere and then go there, stop in the men’s room to call the clubs for the ransom money. The other stuff is just in case it sours. Vassily feels more comfortable if he knows what to do in the worst case.”
“Are you saying I’m a big coward?”
“No, Vassily,” Jerry said. “I would never say that about you. Never.” He turned to Jimmy. “He was just being prudent.”
Jimmy was animated by frustration. “Being prudent isn’t finding out that there’s only a half-assed plan, and then going ahead with it. Prudence is stopping before it goes bad.”
“There’s a plan,” Jerry snapped. “Don’t go saying there’s no plan. We just have to keep a few details undecided until we’re on the scene and can assess the conditions. And we’ve got quite a few decisions worked out in advance so if certain things go wrong, we’re not wasting time arguing about what to do. We all know and agreed ahead of time.”
“You’re both ready to shoot Kapak, who’s been pretty good to us, ready to shoot anybody who stumbles in, and then put all their bodies in Dumpsters. Are we all supposed to agree on where the Dumpsters are?”
“Don’t worry about any of that, Jimmy” said Jerry. “He’s not going to be able to cause trouble or anything. We’ll walk in, and nothing he does to stop us will work.”
“Why is that?”
“For the same reason we have to do this in the first place. He’s not the old Kapak. He’s lost his luck. He’s a magnet for trouble and ill fortune.”
“You’re really sure about that?” asked Jimmy.
“I’m so sure I can feel it and taste it and smell it.”
Jimmy looked at Voinovich. He was at the workbench loading extra magazines for his gun, pointedly pantomiming that he considered this a private dispute between the brothers. It wasn’t his business.
Jerry leaned close and spoke quietly. “You don’t want to be the one who sticks with the old man after his luck is gone and the money has been taken, and all the others have bailed out.”
Jimmy could see that their mother’s expression of clairvoyance had appeared on Jerry’s face—the wide-eyed expression of conviction and absolute confidence in his vision. It brought back the many times when their mother would lean close that way to impart her latest prophecy. Jimmy’s spine chilled and he felt a little shiver. Jerry and their mother had been born with the terrible gift, but Jimmy hadn’t. He had never felt a half-second of envy, but the sheer strangeness of it had created a distance with him on one side and his mother and only brother on the other. Maybe Jimmy’s only gift was to feel the chill to warn him that his brother was in a state. “Okay, then,” he said. “If you’re so sure, then we’d better be going.”
They walked out of the garage to the driveway and climbed into Voinovich’s SUV. The big vehicle backed out into the street, and Jimmy heard Jerry cycle a round into the chamber of his gun. He hoped that didn’t mean Jerry’d had another premonition.
33
KAPAK SPOKE into his cell phone. “I just spent nearly an hour talking to Lieutenant Slosser. I need you to come and pick me up at the Parker Center.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.” Spence pressed the red phone symbol to end the call and put his phone away as he stood up. “He’s at the police station downtown. That lieutenant is bugging him again.”
“It’s an opportunity. You know what you want him to feel,” said Joe Carver. “So you say the things that will make him feel that way. If you run out of ideas, call. I’ll be right here in the guesthouse.”
“Just stay out of sight. I’ll probably be bringing him back here.” Spence went out the door of the guesthouse and made his way up the path through the tropical plants to the back of the house. He went right to the garage, got into the black Town Car, and backed it out of the driveway.
Spence drove downtown quickly. He had planned to pull up near the Parker Center where he had waited for Kapak during his first police interview, but when he reached North Los Angeles Street, he could already see him. Kapak was standing on the sidewalk in front of the white stone with the weathered brass letters: DEDICATED TO WILLIAM H. PARKER, CHIEF OF POLICE. Spence stopped in front of the sign, leaned over, and pushed the door open, and Kapak climbed in looking irritated.
“See if the bastards follow us,” he said.
Spence drove a couple of blocks, turned, and went back the other way, then made a U-turn and then a series of right turns until he was near a freeway entrance with a split ramp that sent cars on the 110 freeway or the 101. He went onto the freeway, stayed to the 110 side until the last second, then changed lanes to go onto the 101. “Nobody was following. What did they want you for?”
“Lieutenant Slosser got the idea that I killed Rogoso last night and burned his house in Malibu.”
“Somebody did that?”
“Yeah. He had two men with him too—Alvin and Chuy. Slosser got the idea that it was me. I put up with the accusations as long as I could, until he got on my nerves. Then I said I wanted my lawyer, and he told me I could go.”
“I guess you must have been incredibly shocked to hear about Rogoso to begin with.”
“Not so much.”
“You did it?”
“I wouldn’t tell you, but since you did Joe Carver and didn’t make any big thing of telling me, I have to. Yeah, I did it. He was a rotten, crazy, greedy son of a bitch, and he was getting worse every day. He decided I was drawing attention to myself by letting Joe Carver rob me over and over. I’m listening to a man who had just bought a fifteen-million-dollar house on the beach at Malibu telling me I’m drawing attention. What he really thought was that I must be too weak to fight him off. That he could take over my clubs and kill me.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. He told his two monsters, Alvin and Chuy, to take me out for a ride and kill me. There wasn’t much choice.”
“If they’re dead and you’re here, you must have done the right thing.”
“That’s what I think.”
“And you killed everybody there and torched the house?”
“Well, there were a couple of girls—drug mules, no more than seventeen or eighteen, I think—who had come to take me to meet with Rogoso. I guess he used them because they didn’t look scary. And maybe because nobody wants some guy frisking him for weapons, but a girl can get away with checking everywhere.”
“Let me get this straight. What you did last night was kill Manuel Rogo
so and Alvin and Chuy, and burn down the house. But there were also two witnesses, girls who worked for Rogoso.”
“Yeah.”
“Are they dead too?”
“No. I gave them the keys to Alvin’s car and told them to get out of there. I gave them time before I lit the fires in the house.”
“Holy shit. Where are they now?”
“I saw them a little while ago back at the police station.”
“Oh my God.”
“They’re drug mules. They could be in the station for anything—possession and sales is what they do—or maybe they’re out of work since Rogoso died, and they were caught turning tricks or boosting things from stores.”
“The day after the killing?”
“Young kids don’t know how to save money anymore.”
“They had to be in the police station ratting you out.”
“Could be,” Kapak admitted.
“It’s got to be,” Spence said. “Talking to the police is probably their only shot at staying alive.”
“Think so?”
“If Rogoso’s people know the girls were in the house when you killed Rogoso, how can they not think the girls helped you?”
“I guess you’re right. The police will protect them, maybe get them out of town.”
“How are we going to get you out of here?”
“What do you mean?
“You can’t stay in L.A.”
“Wait a minute. I haven’t decided anything like that. I mean, think about it. We’ve all had a rough week. It’s all just part of the Joe Carver problem. He robbed me a month ago, but we didn’t find him in all that time. That was what caused all this trouble for us. The worst thing it did was make that rat bastard Rogoso think he could kill me and take over. But you got Joe Carver, so he’s not going to be a nuisance anymore. I got Rogoso last night, and so he’s not a problem. There was a war going on for a few days, but it didn’t bring us down. We won. Our enemies are dead. It’s over.”
Spence said, “If you killed three men last night and the police have two eyewitnesses, then your trouble is only beginning.”