“Idiots” he said. “It’s stupid not to call me.” There was a mixture of resentment and amazement in his expression.
Spence was aware that no answer was expected of him. He stood with the telephone in his hand and waited while Manco Kapak stepped to the large sliding-glass window that overlooked the sandstone path between Australian black gum trees and sago palms and through a jungle of tropical plants.
Kapak absently scratched his bulbous belly in front of the window. “I’ll get a shower in the guesthouse. Take the girl home, wherever that may be. Then come back and drive me downtown to Parker Center.”
“Got it”
Kapak opened the door, then walked naked down the path toward the guesthouse.
As Spence went back into the bedroom, he glanced at his watch. It was already a minute or two after 7:00, and he would have to get the woman moving if he wanted to get Kapak to the police headquarters on time. He closed the bedroom door behind him and assessed the physical evidence to decide how to proceed. The girl’s clothes were draped with a reasonable attempt at keeping them unwrinkled on the couch at the foot of the bed, so he was fairly certain she had not been drunk. She had worn a nice summer dress and a pair of relatively tasteful strapped heels—nothing that would make her look like a weakened nocturnal creature trapped in the daylight. The bra and panties were of good quality, a matching set of Easter egg purple with a bit of lace.
Spence cleared his throat and watched the woman stir, pulling the blanket up near her ears to preserve her unconsciousness. Spence walked to the bathroom, brought back a clean white Turkish bathrobe, and placed it at the foot of the bed where she would feel the weight of it on her feet. Then he walked along the wall beyond the foot of the bed, opening the curtains of the tall windows, pair by pair.
He heard her groan.
“Good morning, miss,” he said in a cheerful voice. “Good morning.”
She began to sit up, revealing for a moment a pair of breasts that seemed to be unaugmented but above criticism to Spence’s eye, then realized she was not alone and pulled the covers to her neck.
Spence said, “I’m afraid Mr. Kapak has been called away unexpectedly on important business. He asked me to give you his regrets and to take you home myself. There’s a robe at the foot of the bed, and the master bath is just behind you and to your right. When you’re ready, I’ll be in the kitchen at the far end of the house. Would you like coffee or tea this morning?”
The girl took a moment to look around her in the glare of reflected sunlight as though she had no idea where she was, so Spence began to fear this might be some kind of ugly surprise, but she said, “Coffee, please” in clear, unaccented English. Spence was relieved. If she hadn’t spoken English, the rest of this would have been very difficult.
Spence pivoted in place, went out, and closed the door. He walked the length of the house to the kitchen, and then entered the small office off the pantry and watched the row of high-definition color security monitors.
When the young woman got out of the bed and put on the bathrobe, he could see she had a very fine body— cream with a blush here and there. She cinched the robe around her waist and explored the master suite a bit, opening dresser drawers and cabinets, not methodically like a burglar, but randomly, like a snooping child. Spence didn’t blame her. She was a pretty woman in her twenties who had just spent the night with a sixty-four-year-old gangster who was a fearsome sight naked—an old boar. She was probably searching for something—a bit of compensation, maybe even a souvenir to prove the story was true if she chose to tell it. Let her.
He moved his attention to the cameras around the guesthouse. He could see a light on behind the smoked glass window of the bathroom, so Kapak must be in the shower out there.
In a few minutes the girl appeared in the kitchen. Spence treated her like a starlet dropping in for an appearance at a charity event. “What would you like in your coffee, miss?”
When he had given her the coffee and settled her on a seat at the granite counter to drink it, he said, “It’s already getting hot this morning. I’ll go bring the car around under the awning and get the air conditioning circulating.”
He went out. The biggest step was already over—getting her up, showered, and from the bedroom to the kitchen with all her clothes properly on her and secured without incident. Getting her from the kitchen to the car would also be a big step, though. This one was sober, well-behaved, and apparently sane, so he sincerely felt kindly impulses toward her. She wasn’t trying to keep from leaving. She knew it was time, and that there was no sense in her teasing and wheedling anybody but the man who had brought her here.
Spence returned with the car and made her take a second cup of coffee with her in a thermos mug. He sat her in the back seat and put the mug in the cup holder on the console so she could reach it. As he backed out of the long driveway, he said, “Now, miss. What’s your address?”
“I’m Kira,” she said. “I live on Coldwater.”
“North or south of the 101 freeway?”
“Practically on it, but a little bit north. It’s a big apartment building.”
“Okay,” said Spence. He pulled out of the driveway and headed for the freeway. It wouldn’t be too hard, he decided. He might be able to do it in twenty minutes if the traffic let him. Nothing about this one was hard. A certain percentage of Kapak’s women visitors were terrible. A lot of them had been nasty and crazy. Some had been drunk in that odd, unfortunate way that some women got drunk—they shouldn’t have been able to walk and talk, but they did.
Others that Kapak had brought home with him had been hoping for some kind of bonanza and seemed to feel that leaving his house in the morning would be relinquishing their claim to the reward. When Spence had become insistent, a couple of them had even started hinting at the possibility of making claims that they had been raped. Spence had no illusions about Manco Kapak’s ethics, but he knew that Kapak was prone to erectile dysfunction, and that Kapak’s appetites didn’t include anything as strenuous as overpowering anybody. Each time the blackmail strategy came up, Spence had said, “Think about him. Do you really want to be the person he sees as capable of sending him to prison for the rest of his life?”
He glanced at the girl in the rearview mirror. “Are you comfortable back there, miss?”
“Kira. My name is Kira. I’m fine. Have you worked for him long?”
“Nearly six years”
“Is being a gangster exciting?”
“Not for me.”
“You’re too tough for that?”
Spence chuckled. “I’m not tough at all. I’m not a gangster. I drive his car. I answer the phone. I make sure there are enough fresh vegetables and the garbage is taken out to the curb on Tuesday night.”
“You don’t get to go to the clubs or anything?”
“He doesn’t spend a lot of time in the clubs. They’re an investment. When he goes in, I usually stay with the car.”
“Aren’t you interested in women?”
“Sure. But there aren’t many women in a strip club, and the ones who are there are working.”
“If there’s nothing fun about it, why do you work for him?”
“Because he pays me a salary and health insurance and contributions to my 403b.”
“I heard he got robbed.”
“I heard that too. I wasn’t there.”
“Doesn’t it scare you?”
“You’re in a car with a man you never saw before, and it’s going over a mile a minute. Doesn’t that scare you?”
“Not really”
“Then you understand. Anybody can get in an accident any time. Anybody can get robbed. Changing jobs doesn’t do anything.”
“He’s different. He’s a rich old criminal. He’s a big target.”
“Then why did you sleep with him?”
“I was at Wash. It was kind of a slow night and I was just dancing with my friends. In comes Manco Kapak, and everybody in the place starts staring at him and telling each other who that is. He’s the guy who owns Wash and about three other clubs, and he’s this big, powerful guy with all these connections. After a few minutes he practically bumped into me in the crowd and asked me to sit with him and have a drink. It made my friends get all
