name of a man I’d met in a club a couple of days before. I just heard that Mr. Kapak was told I thought this was the man who had robbed him. I never thought that, and never meant it that way. It never even occurred to me.”
“I understand,” said Spence. “And just to make sure I get the story straight for Mr. Kapak, what is this innocent man’s name?”
“Joe Carver.”
“Joe … Carver,” he said, pretending to be a man at a desk writing things down. “Do you have an address or anything for him?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Then, your name and address, just in case the police would like to talk to you?”
“Sonia Rivers.” She recited her address and phone number. She marveled at herself for doing it, but this man seemed so bright and businesslike.
“Thank you, Miss Rivers. I have no idea whether this Mr. Carver was a serious suspect or not, but you can never be too careful with someone else’s reputation.”
“That’s just how I feel,” said Sonia. She detected in herself an unexpected curiosity about this man, and realized that she had been stalling to give him time to say something to reveal more about himself. “Well, goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
She should have been in her cubicle at work, staring out the part of the window she could see from her desk. Today there was a thin copper-colored smear of smog hanging near the tops of the tall buildings of Los Angeles, all in a little clump in the center of the million low buildings that covered the basin. She decided the man she had spoken to was probably nothing as interesting as a criminal. Kapak owned several businesses. Of course he would have a few dull, serious people like Spence to run things for him. She wondered if she should go in to work late, but the moment had passed. She took off her gray suit and hung it up for tomorrow.
At Kapak’s house, Spence moved from the kitchen to the small maid’s quarters where he had been sleeping. He picked up the backpack that still held the disassembled .308 Remington, pulled his .45 pistol from under the pillow, and put it into the backpack too. He looked at the address he had written down, went out the back door and locked it behind him.
A half hour later, Spence had found Sonia Rivers’s apartment. The only reason Sonia would have made the call to Kapak’s house today was if her relationship with Joe Carver had improved since she’d talked to the Gaffney brothers a few weeks ago.
He studied the neighborhood and began to search. In another half-hour he had found a vacant apartment with a clear view of the windows along the side of Sonia Rivers’s apartment building. He went in and used a lock pick to defeat the cheap doorknob lock, then stood at the window. From his second-floor window he could see down into her apartment. In the front was the living room, then the smoked glass of the bathroom, then the two bedroom windows near the back. As he went through the vacant apartment, he found an easy chair with torn upholstery in the living room, undoubtedly left by the last tenant. He moved it to the window and tried it, then looked around for a few more minutes before he decided to go out and buy a cup of coffee for the wait. On his way out, he unlocked the door to save time on his return.
25
AT 10:15 A.M. Lieutenant Slosser stopped his unmarked car in front of Kapak’s long, low house. Kapak pushed his door open and slowly swung his feet to the curb as he had seen frail old men do, then stood. “Thanks for the ride.”
“If you hear anything else that might be useful to us, give us a call,” Slosser said.
“Joe Carver. If you can find Joe Carver, this will be over.”
“Maybe,” Slosser said. “But usually, in my experience, if somebody you never heard of makes a full-time job out of making your life miserable, usually he’s working for somebody else—somebody you know.”
“He’s the one I’m sure of. I’ll take my chances on people who might be telling him what to do.”
“We’ll see.” Slosser’s window closed and he drove off. Kapak turned and went up the walk to his house. He liked the lush plantings of palms and bananas, bamboo and eucalyptus, bougainvillea and ferns and orchids around the house. Now and then the gardeners would surprise him with a new planting of something colorful and exotic.
He caught sight of one of the gardeners across the front yard and waved his arm. They always tried to do their work unobtrusively, like stagehands in a theater, but now and then, on a rare day when he was awake in the morning, he would glimpse one or two of them from a distance. He seldom saw the cleaning crew either, but he noted that their van was parked at the curb this morning.
He went inside and listened. He could tell that the cleaning women were working in the kitchen end of the house, so he went the other way, to his bedroom suite. The room was finished, with everything in order, the floor polished, and the bed linens replaced. He turned on the television set and found the local news, and tuned his ears to listen for the words
It was nearly eleven, and he was getting hungry. This was before he usually had his breakfast, but he’d been up most of the night and then was up again at 6:30, so his body wanted something. He knew it was ridiculous that he was intimidated by the thought of going into the kitchen and having to talk to the cleaning women while he made himself a sandwich.
He supposed they had a very specific idea of how he lived, and had opinions about it, but that only bothered him if he had to go in there and think of things to say to them.
He lay on his bed, closed his eyes, and listened to the 11:00 news. There was an Asian Pacific festival, a report from the USGS that a huge new fault had been found under the northern part of the city capable of generating massive earthquakes. There was always some kind of festival to celebrate some other country, always a series of threatening reports from scientists about what people ate or where they lived. There was a police shooting in one of the southside cities, where the police had mistaken a thirteen-year-old for an armed fugitive. Then he heard “A fire in the Malibu home of a local man with a record of narcotics trafficking,” then the words “After this.”
He sat up, propped a pillow behind him, and watched the commercials. They went on and on. There were cars, then a motorized wheelchair that the government could be called upon to pay for. There were more cars, a clothing store, and then a diet drink that melted off the pounds.
At last he saw the burned ruin he’d seen this morning, and the coroner’s white van with the blue stripe and the words LAW AND SCIENCE SERVING THE COMMUNITY. The reporter was the middle-aged black woman they always sent when somebody died. She stood in front of the charred pile and the ocean beyond.
“Sheriff’s deputies say that sometime after midnight last night, an intruder shot and killed three men in this Malibu beach house. He then set the house ablaze. By the time the fire trucks arrived, no more than ten minutes after the first call, the three-story house was fully involved. Firefighters managed to remove two of the victims from the building, but both were dead on arrival at County-USC Hospital. The third body was in a stairway that firefighters couldn’t approach. He is believed to be the owner of the house, Manuel Rogoso, age forty-five. The other victims were reported to be employees of his. The house, which had recently been purchased for fifteen million dollars, was a total loss.”
As she stepped back from the camera, it panned to survey the pile of blackened wood on the charred, cracked foundation. “The police have no theory as to the cause of the triple murder-arson. They ask that anyone with any information call the nearest police station.”
Kapak aimed the remote control at the television set and the screen went black. He lay back and stared up at the ceiling. He had killed them in self-defense, but he knew that was a technicality. The killing had been the end of a disagreement among criminals engaged in a scheme to launder drug money. There were no innocent parties, only some dead criminals and a living one. Even if he could have argued that he’d had no choice, that argument vanished once he had burned the house.
Marija entered his mind. She would have glared at him and said, “See? That’s the kind of man you are.” No,
