In the driveway was the big, plain blue Ford that Kapak had expected. Slosser opened the passenger door, and Kapak ducked in. Both men were aware that Slosser had the habit of putting his hand on a prisoner’s head to keep him from bumping it on the car door frame, and that Kapak was trying to slip in too fast for that.
Slosser drove in silence for a few minutes before Kapak said, “You might want to take the freeway to Sepulveda. That’s how I go.”
“Oh. I just need to make a quick stop before we head to the club. I figured you wouldn’t mind.”
Kapak shrugged. “The money’s already stolen. It’s not like we could stop it if we got there now. You got cops already at the club, right?”
“Sure. Detectives, fingerprint people, photographers, crime scene people, the whole crew.”
“Then I can wait. They have to be out of there before I can clean up and put the pieces back together.”
“You know where we’re going?”
“How would I?”
“Sometimes people will make a lucky guess.” Slosser stared at Kapak, but he couldn’t quite tell whether Kapak was reacting or not. If so, he was good at hiding it. For days Slosser had been sure Kapak was in a war with somebody. Maybe what had happened last night in Malibu was Kapak’s counterattack. “Sure you don’t want to guess?”
“Pretty sure.”
“The sheriff’s people asked me to stop at another crime scene for a few minutes, and then we’ll go up to yours.”
“Another robbery?”
“No,” said Slosser. They reached the Santa Monica Freeway, and Slosser headed west. He drove until the final exit, where the freeway ended in the incline onto the Pacific Coast Highway. “Wow. The ocean. You can feel it when you go down that incline. And all of a sudden you’re in another, better world. The air is fresh and clean. The temperature goes down about ten degrees just on that ramp. Know anybody who lives along the ocean, like in Malibu?”
“I don’t think so,” Kapak said. “A house on the beach has got to cost quite a few million. I don’t know anybody with that kind of spending money.”
“I would have thought you could live there yourself. Maybe you could get a few of the girls at your clubs to chip in, and you could live down here with them, like a harem.”
“The dancers?”
“Sure.”
“Girls like that don’t need to buy a beach house. They get invited.”
“You said you don’t know anybody living there.”
“Not now. A few years ago there was a girl named Alisha Dolan. She danced under the name, what was it? Tiffany Rose. She got hired to be an extra in a movie, and she caught the eye of the director. She played him right and became his girlfriend. It lasted a long time. They lived in Malibu. I think he died, though.”
Kapak could see the house coming up on the left. It didn’t resemble a house now. The fire he had set had simply devoured the building. He kept himself from betraying any knowledge of the place by staring openly at it as Slosser drove past. “There must have been quite a fire there.”
Slosser was uncertain. If Kapak had pretended not to notice the black pile of charcoal where a big beach house had once stood, he would have known. But Kapak had not.
“Yeah. They say it went up quick. The firefighters came right away, but all they could even try to do by then was run in to search for survivors and wet down the two houses on either side.”
Kapak said nothing, even when Slosser turned across the two left lanes and came back toward the burned ruin.
Slosser glided to a stop behind another plain police car and a white vehicle that had LOS ANGELES COUNTY CORONER stenciled across the door. He got out and went to talk to the detective in the other car. He leaned on the car and spoke to him with his face turned away from Kapak for a few minutes, then turned around and came back to Kapak. “Come on. Let’s look around.”
Kapak got out of the car slowly. If he refused to look, Slosser would think he was feeling guilty about killing the three men and burning the building. He felt a small, hot spot of anger in his chest. When he was young he had felt bad if he had to harm someone, even if they had brought it on themselves. But he felt no guilt about Rogoso. He had been a betrayer, an enemy who had set up a trap and then spoken to him with contempt before sending him off to be killed. Kapak was proud of killing him. But he reminded himself that the pride was worse than the guilt, because the natural impulse was to hide guilt and flaunt pride.
Slosser walked close to the foundation of the building, which was now just a rectangular wall around a deep hole, mostly covered with fallen lengths of charred wood and dust, and below that, a glimpse of the blackened frames of Rogoso’s Bentley and his Maserati in the garage under the house. The only remnants of the upper floors were a frame of steel I-beams that supported those levels, a few pipes, and the brick chimney.
Kapak followed Slosser as he walked along the side of the foundation away from the road. He could feel the concrete give way to gravel, then to loose, grassy soil, then to pure, fine, salt-white beach under his shoes. Once he could see past the ruin, the blue ocean dominated his vision. The destruction was an improvement.
“You see Rogoso’s cars?”
“What?”
“The cars he had in the garage when it went up.”
“Rogoso? Is that the name of the owner?”
“Yeah. Very fancy cars.”
“Too bad. But I suppose they’re insured.”
Slosser went on, walking in the sand on the ocean side of the ruin, looking at everything as though it meant something to him. Kapak wasn’t giving anything away, but Slosser knew he was guilty. The perfect detachment of his reaction was almost an admission. He pretended to know nothing, and he asked nothing.
Slosser could see the coroner’s crew who had been working in the rubble now had something in a body bag, and together they lifted it onto their stretcher. The two men rose on a signal and stepped out of the wreckage carefully, their eyes on their feet. Slosser said, “I guess that must be the third one.”
“The third what?”
“Body. The firefighters got the first two out right away when the fire hadn’t reached them yet. But then the ceiling went, and this one wasn’t reachable. He was a distance from the other ones on the stairs.”
“Three killed, eh?” Kapak seemed to be showing only polite interest. “Too bad.”
Slosser knew Kapak wasn’t going to lower his guard. He had said nothing that would give Slosser an opening and made no slips. “That’s all I needed to see,” said Slosser. “Let’s drive up and see your robbery.”
They got into the car again and Slosser drove back toward Santa Monica along the Pacific Coast Highway. He tried again. “Did you ever hear of Manny Rogoso?”
“I don’t think so,” said Kapak. “Is he famous?”
“Why would you say that?”
“People who live in places like this have a lot of money.”
“He was a drug dealer. Nothing special about him. He wasn’t the biggest or the scariest. I would guess that if he hadn’t gotten shot to death, his next big problem would be the bank foreclosing on that house. He paid fifteen million for it.”
Kapak said nothing, but he thought about Rogoso. It was typical that he would exaggerate how much the new house had cost, when most people would have respected him more if he had paid less. “I suppose if he had been sensible, he wouldn’t be a drug dealer, and he wouldn’t be dead.”
“Just out of curiosity, where were you last night from, say, midnight on?”
“Is that why you brought me all the way down here? You think I killed some drug dealer?”
“No need to get upset. You weren’t at Siren last night. Where were you?”
“I was at Wash, my dance club on Hollywood Boulevard, until one or so, and then I went up to Temptress, my gentlemen’s club in the west Valley. I don’t get to every place I own every night.”
“But I hear you sent the cash from all your clubs to Siren last night for the first time to put it in the safe.”
“That’s right, and I didn’t think it would help to have me and everybody else show up there at closing time. It
