Strip

“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 downward 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.