Strip (17 page)

The waitress reported to the manager that the man said his name was Richard Cane. One of the other waitresses served him during the daylight lull and reported that he had a mild Southern accent. Kapak’s English was nearly perfect after thirty years in the country, but he wasn’t capable of placing regional accents unless they were extreme. And he doubted that the waitress could have heard Spence so clearly, even during the day, unless the music was turned off.

He kept coming, spoke politely, bought enough drinks to keep the waitresses happy, and drank few enough of them to keep the bouncers happy. The problem was that to the manager and to Kapak, he seemed to be the ideal cop.

A moment of clarity finally came, as Kapak had assumed it would. A man walked in the door while Spence was at his table. The way Ray the manager described it, Spence was like a hunting dog in point. He didn’t make a move, just became abnormally still and looked at the man.

Once the new man stepped inside, his attention inevitably shifted away from the crowd around him to the girl working the brass pole on the nearest stage. He was drawn inward, walking closer to her until it happened. Spence came for him. One moment Spence was at his table, and the next he was about eight feet from the man and moving toward him. The man caught motion in the corner of his eye, looked, and saw him.

The new man was tall, and he was wearing a pair of cowboy boots that made him look taller. But the second his eyes focused on Spence’s face, he began to shrink down to a crouch and back up. Neither man made any attempt to speak. There was no threat or explanation, just motion, as though the two had both known exactly what they would do if they ever met. Spence advanced, and the new man did his best to get out and away.

The man got out ahead of Spence and sprinted for a car parked at the far end of the lot. Ray made it outside with the two doormen, thinking he was about to see a fight. Instead he saw Spence step out, watch the man leap into his car and drive off, then get into his own car and drive after him.

There was nothing in the newspapers the next day that might be a mention of what had happened. There wasn’t anything all week. It took about two weeks before the report appeared. A man’s body had been found in a parked car in the hills above Tujunga. It had been driven about a hundred yards up a narrow, winding dirt road that led onto a parcel of undeveloped land rarely visited by a real estate agent working for the company that owned it. The agent who found the car could see that the victim had been shot once through the forehead.

Spence had not returned to Siren. But now Manco Kapak’s curiosity had been stimulated. He and the manager studied the security tapes from the cameras mounted outside the building. Eventually he found a tape of Spence getting out of his car in the parking lot, brought it up to full magnification, and read the license number. Kapak went to the mini-mall where one of his minor businesses, Money Today, had its office. The company granted short-term loans that came due on the borrower’s next payday. He asked his clerk to run a skip-trace based on the license number. After a half hour, he had the name Richard Spence and an address.

Kapak took both Gaffney brothers with him to Spence’s apartment. He knocked on the door, and when Spence opened it, he asked if he could come in and talk. He made sure Spence saw the others before he and Spence went inside and closed the door. He told Spence that he knew he had killed the man in the abandoned car.

Spence didn’t argue with him or seem concerned. He said simply, “I can put you down and get out of here before your men know what happened.” He paused. “I also know that you’ve got bagmen coming into your clubs every day with money that you mix in with your receipts.”

Kapak said, “You’re smart and observant. I hope you’re not going to leave town.”

“I haven’t decided.”

“You want a job?”

“Not if it’s killing people for you.”

“No,” Kapak said. “I’ve never wanted anybody killed and don’t now. But if you work with me, you’re my friend and brother. If an enemy comes for one of us, we do what’s necessary.”

That was the beginning of an understanding between them that had held for six years. Kapak had kept Spence close to him whenever he went to the clubs or other businesses. Spence was not a bodyguard, but a brother-in-arms, and sometimes a surrogate. Kapak trusted in Spence’s strength and courage because he had killed at least one enemy. Half of their unspoken understanding was that Spence would be able to kill if the need arose. The other half was that Kapak would never ask him to do anything but choose Kapak’s life over an enemy’s when the time came.

Kapak sat in his living room and looked out the French doors into the tranquil, fern-shaded garden outside. Was this the time and the enemy? Having an understanding with Spence was like carrying a hand grenade. He had to be sure, because he wasn’t going to get to use it twice.

J
IMMY GAFFNEY HAD TO DRIVE
in the morning traffic, because his brother, Jerry, still had not gone to pick up his car from the police impound lot. Jerry was anticipating a time-consuming and irritating interview before the police let him have his car.

Jerry stared out the window at the steep slopes to the right and left above the road. The thick foliage seemed to grow in the shadowy, cool canyon wherever it wasn’t lopped off. It would have overrun the road in two weeks if it weren’t for the twenty-four-hour traffic. Everything in southern California seemed to grow instantly when there was water and to turn brown in a day when there wasn’t.

Jimmy steered the curves on Laurel Canyon like an unskilled race car driver. “This is bear country,” he said.

“This?” said Jerry. “You’re crazy.”

“I’m not. It was in the paper that one of the very best places in the whole country to hunt grizzlies was Laurel Canyon.”

“Could you be more full of shit? There isn’t one grizzly bear in the whole state at this moment.”

“I said ‘was.’ I don’t mean now, you idiot. They said this was around 1860 or so. This canyon, right where we are, was full of bears. You can sort of feel where they must have been—right on those shady spots along the sides of the hills. Right up where you cross Mulholland there’s a place where water just seeps out of the hillside and trickles across the road. That would probably be the spring that fed the stream in dry weather.”

“Jesus, Jimmy. These are bears that got shot a hundred and fifty years ago.”

“Places are what they are. Just because some people came and shot all the bears and changed the canyon into an unofficial freeway doesn’t make it any less bear country.”

They came out of the shade of the canyon into the bright glare of Sunset and headed west toward the clubs where they had met the two girls who knew Joe Carver. “Keep your eyes open,” said Jerry. “We’re getting into the part of town where Carver used to go—Carver country. We could easily stumble on the bastard and end this whole problem. He won’t be wearing a mask today.”

“We’d be better off if he was wearing one.”

“What?”

“Well, neither of us has really seen Carver.”

“I saw him from a distance the night he was chucking two-ton Hummers at us with a crane.”

“You wouldn’t recognize him, though.”

“Yeah. So?”

“I was just thinking. A mask makes you stand out. So at the bank, Carver must have known everybody there would know it was him. The mask says, ‘I’m Joe Carver and I’m robbing you.’ So why wear a mask at all?”

“How the hell do I know what that deranged shitweasel might have been thinking when he went out to pull an armed robbery? He was with this madwoman who opened fire on us. Maybe he didn’t want her to see his face. Ever think of that?”

“Jerry, we’ve both met a lot of peculiar girls over the years. Did you ever meet any who would go anywhere with a man without ever seeing his face?”

“I don’t know. There are girls who will talk to somebody online and then agree to meet him someplace without seeing him first. What about them?”

“Think he met her online and said, ‘I love long walks by the beach, candlelit dinners, and discharging firearms at Jerry Gaffney’s fat Irish ass’?”

“This isn’t about me,” Jerry said. “It’s about Manco Kapak. Carver has it stuck in his head that Kapak is his enemy, and he’s concentrating on getting him in every way possible.”

“I don’t know. It just seems to me that it doesn’t make sense that this guy in the mask is Carver. He let Kapak see his face when he broke in, and that was to prove he wasn’t the one who robbed him the first time. Why wear a mask now?”

“Jimmy, by now you must have guessed that I can’t explain to you how this guy’s fucked-up mind works. He just does what he does.”

“That’s your excuse for not wanting to look at things too closely.”

“It doesn’t matter if it is or it’s something else. We’ve got a really simple thing here. We work for a guy, and he wants us to find out whether those girls know anything new about Carver. We find them and ask what they know. We’re not getting paid to persuade our boss that what he asked for isn’t what he wants. We’re getting paid to do what he asked, even if it’s pointless, like moving bricks from one pile to another and back.”

“This isn’t moving bricks. It’s killing a guy. I think it would be smart to figure out if he’s really the right guy. Otherwise, we take on a lot of risk and might have to go out all over again and kill somebody else.”

Jerry shrugged. “That’s what we do. And if we have to do it twice, he’ll have to keep us on the payroll that much longer.”

“There’s the club up there. That’s where we found her.”

“I don’t think she’ll be there this time of day. It’s not even noon. But pull over anyway, and I’ll go check it out.” Jimmy glided to the curb and Jerry jumped out and trotted to the front door of the club. Jimmy sat for a few minutes, staring at the club and reflecting on how bad a building painted black looked on a bright summer morning.

Jerry came out and got into the passenger seat. “Not there, of course. I know she works in a car place during the day. It’s not far from here.”

Jimmy pulled away from the curb into traffic. “What does she do in a car place?”

“Sells cars.”

“Yeah? What kind?”

“Toyotas, mostly.”

“She know a lot about cars?”

“I don’t know. I suppose she probably has to know something. I mean, people ask questions before they shell out for anything as big as a car. If you don’t know the answers, they’ll go to another lot.”

“So where are we going?”

“I’m checking it out.” He fiddled with his iPhone, poking the screen with his finger, turning it and tweaking it to enlarge the display, and staring at it intently. “Got it on the map. Her Toyota place is down La Cienega not more than ten minutes south of here.” He held the phone up to show Jimmy. “See that red dot?”

“Get that out of my face. I’m trying to drive.” But he couldn’t help glancing at it. “There are dozens of red dots on that map.”

Jerry pulled it back and studied it. “But only one is her red dot. Turn and go west on Santa Monica Boulevard, left on La Cienega, and keep going until we’re there.”

They inched along in traffic for twenty minutes before they freed themselves from the congestion. They were driving through the sudden range of strangely shaped hills south of the city that sprouted oil wells, and then in the flatlands that must have been swamp before the airport was put in. The businesses by the road were all big—plazas, carpet warehouses, car lots. Then they reached the Toyota dealership.

Jimmy swung his car into the entrance, found the visitors’ parking lot, and parked. They got out and walked toward the showrooms. When they were only halfway there, a trim man in his thirties wearing the pants from a dark suit and a white shirt and red tie blocked their way. “Hello, gentlemen. What can I show you today?”

“Not sure,” Jerry said. He glanced at his brother, then at the long aisles of shiny new automobiles in twenty shapes and sizes and a dozen colors. “You’ve got a lot of cars.”

Jimmy said, “Is this the lot where Sandy Belknap works?”

“Sandy … Belknap?” He looked as though he were trying to make out the shape of a distant object in a dense fog. The Gaffney brothers silently agreed that the man was a terrible salesman, that Sandy Belknap did work there, but that he really wasn’t interested in letting her get a sale he wanted.

Jerry stepped into the space in front of the man’s eyes. “Yeah. You know. Twenty-five, about five feet five with long blond hair, the only woman car salesman on this lot, and probably one of three you’ve ever met?”

The man’s body took a step backward without his volition, and his mouth began to smile, but not his eyes. “Oh, I know who you mean. Let me see if she’s here this afternoon. Maybe she’ll be free to help us find the right deal for you.”

As soon as he had enough room, he turned and began to walk quickly toward the showroom.

Jimmy said, “I don’t think you had to scare the shit out of him.”

“He’s going to get her. He isn’t standing here wasting our time and making us crazy with his pitch for a car we don’t want.”

“I don’t want to look like a pair of thugs. We should look like regular, sane people, and see if we can get to talk to Sandy.”

“Look what he found.” Jerry nodded in the direction of the showroom door.

Sandy wore a blue summer dress with straps that left her smooth, tanned shoulders bare, and as she came closer they could see a pair of blue stud earrings with small sapphires that made her eyes look bluer. She seemed to have recognized them through the big showroom window, so when she reached them she gave each of them a quick hug and an air-kiss. “Hi, guys.” She looked at Jimmy. “It’s Jeremy, right? And you’re—”

“I’m Jimmy and he’s Jerry.”

“Close. How have you been?”

It was clear to the Gaffney brothers that their first meeting with her was not coming out of her prodigious memory as clearly as she wished. “We’re fine,” said Jimmy. He stepped closer to her, shouldering Jerry out of the way, and took her arm gently. “I’m a little nervous about maybe wasting your time, because I’m not sure whether a Toyota is what I want.”