Strip (22 page)

“The singer?”

“The fucking legendary singer,” he said. “It cost me eighteen million bones. Do you see what I’m saying, Manco?”

“You have an expensive house.”

“That I’m building an empire. And let’s talk straight here. I’m not a nightclub owner, and I don’t have a few chicks pole-dancing and wiggling their asses to pay my bills. I’ve got over three hundred dealers on the street. If the cops get something on you, they’ll fine you. At the worst, they’d take your liquor license so you’d have to retire. You know what happens if they get me?”

“I didn’t find you and tell you to become a drug dealer. You were already doing everything you’re doing now when I met you.”

“You’re missing the point, Manco. I’m not surprised, because your thinking is old-fashioned, like you were still dancing around a gypsy campfire in some part of Europe that God forgot a thousand years ago. I’m an important man, and that puts me in the center of the target. I can’t have somebody who handles any of my money making this kind of spectacle of himself. You’re attracting little small-time guys to come and steal from you, and that’s a sign that they know you’re weak. And when you try to fight back, you don’t even win. All you do is attract the cops. Alvin, Chuy? Come in here.”

Out of the living room came the two big bodyguards who went everywhere with Rogoso. As always when he’d seen them at night, they both wore lightly tinted shooting glasses to cut the glare from headlights and floodlights, and black sport coats that covered their weapons.

“Hello, Alvin. Chuy.”

The two bodyguards nodded at him and waited in the doorway.

Rogoso said to Kapak, “I’m sorry I have to do this, but you and I can’t do business anymore. You’re too old and soft, and you’re putting everybody in danger. Take him somewhere and get rid of him.”

Kapak had been studying the two girls for the past minute—their exact positions, the clasps on their purses, even their breathing patterns. Kapak’s left hand shot out and grasped Ariana’s thin arm. He tugged her to him, reached around her into her purse, and pulled out her gun. He fired once into the center of Alvin’s chest, twice into Chuy, and pushed Ariana away from him. He was already moving fast into the living room.

Rogoso was only about ten feet ahead of him, sprinting for the staircase. Kapak wasn’t as fast, but he fired once, hitting him in the back. As Rogoso’s dash became an uneven stagger, Kapak ran him down and shot him in the back of the head.

Kapak turned and moved to the wall of the living room, hurrying back toward the foyer. He reached the portal and stopped to listen, then spun around into the open marble space. He fired one round into Chuy’s head and one into Alvin’s. Then he took out his handkerchief and carefully wiped every surface of the gun.

The two girls were cowering in the corner of the room, their eyes wide and their mouths open. “Please don’t,” said Irena.

“I won’t hurt you,” he said. “I wouldn’t have hurt them either. I just couldn’t let them kill me.” He stepped close to Irena so he could watch her expressions. “Is there anybody else in the house?”

“No. He thought he might decide to kill you, and he didn’t want anybody but Chuy and Alvin to be around.”

“Do you know where he kept his books?”

“Books?”

“The papers where he kept track of his business—the money that came in and the money he paid to other people.”

“He would never let us see anything like that,” Ariana said.

“All right. Do you two have a car?”

“No.”

“Those two cars along the highway in front of mine. Whose are they?”

“Alvin’s is the black BMW.”

Kapak stepped to the spot where Alvin’s body lay on its back, bent over, reached into the jeans pocket, and produced a set of keys. He tossed them to Irena. “I’ll give you two ten minutes to get as far from here as you can. If you ever say anything about this to anyone, you’ll have to die too.”

“We know that,” said Irena. She and Ariana backed their way to the door. As Irena opened it, she said, “And thank you.”

“Thank you,” he said. “For telling me about the gun.”

They both went out, and a moment later he heard the sound of a car pulling away toward the city. Kapak looked at his watch. It was 12:36. He began to search the house, moving from room to room, but he could see that the task was hopeless. There were too many spots to hide something important, and too many reasons not to keep searching. He looked at his watch, and it was 12:45. He found an office on the second floor, but he had seen nothing in it that might contain the records he wanted. He went to the desk, pulled the drawers out, and piled them up on the floor against the big wooden desk. He threw all the papers he could find around them. He opened the windows so the breeze from the ocean blew in and ruffled his hair. Then he moved on.

In the kitchen Kapak found the stairway down to the garage beneath the house. Two cars—a Maserati and a Bentley—were parked in the narrow space facing outward. He sighed. How could Rogoso have been foolish enough to buy such visible, obvious cars and drive them to this ridiculous house? Did he think the Internal Revenue Service wouldn’t wonder where all the money was coming from? How could Kapak not have continued to check on him and found out about it? He was ashamed. He looked around the garage, found a can of paint thinner and a can of charcoal starter, and set them aside. He found a length of hemp rope, cut it into two twelve-foot lengths with a hedge clipper, then opened the two cars, popped the fuel doors, opened both gas caps, and stuffed the ends of both ropes into the tanks. Then he soaked the rest of the ropes with charcoal starter and left them trailing across the floor to meet near the steps.

He took the two cans with him as he climbed the stairs to the top floor. It was furnished as a recreation room, with a pool table, video games, a telescope on a tripod, an aquarium with three little spotted sharks gliding over lighted sand, and a full bar. He put a few bottles of liquor on the floor beneath the bar, poured some paint thinner over the wood, and opened the window. Then he lit a match to start the fire. When the flames went upward and began to lick the ceiling, he hurried out and descended the stairs into the office. He poured the rest of the paint thinner on the desk and empty drawers, lit another fire, and moved on. When he reached the bottom of the stairs to the garage, he splashed the last of the charcoal starter over the walls, lit the two ropes that led to the two cars, then tossed a match against the nearest wall. In a second there was a sheet of orange flame rolling up the wall. He turned and ran up the stairs, went out the front door, got into his car, and drove.

He kept listening for the two explosions that might occur when the fire reached the gas tanks, and he thought he heard a thud, but he was already a half mile away with the wind blowing and the car windows closed, and he thought it might be his imagination. As he drove back the way he had come, toward the start of the Santa Monica Freeway, he looked at his watch again. It was 1:10. He had given the girls plenty of time—much more than he had promised.

It wasn’t until he was on the Santa Monica Freeway and moving into the right lane for his exit, climbing up on the elevated half-loop to swoop down again onto the northbound San Diego Freeway, that he felt the lightness in his head and the fullness in his lungs that he had known would come. In sixty-four years he had felt it many times. The fear-induced adrenaline that suddenly flooded the bloodstream eventually burned itself up with the exertion—the fighting and running—and then left him feeling weak and shaken.

He was an old fighter, a man who had arthritic knuckles because he’d fought with his fists, three long knife scars on his arm, chest, and back, and light-colored spots on his body where fire had turned skin into scar tissue, because this was not the first house he’d been in that was no more. Tonight had been a near thing, an unwarranted, unexpected attack that he had fought off, and he had known that his body, the animal self, would need to take these deep, sweet breaths to recover and reassure itself that no harm had been done to it. He opened the car windows a few inches and deeply inhaled the night air that rushed in.

But almost immediately his mind began to bring down his pulse, slow his breathing. He had not died. But the futility of this night’s work, the stupid wastefulness of it, was impossible to forget.

The men he had outsmarted and killed weren’t supposed to be his enemies. They were allies. For years Rogoso had been paying him big commissions for moving his drug profits through the banks, to make it clean. Rogoso had been a regular, dependable source of money. And having an alliance with a man like Rogoso had probably been one of the things that had protected Kapak and his businesses.

That was gone now. Rogoso and his closest friends were dead. The big wooden beach house would be burning furiously now, would probably be dust and burned timbers in another half-hour. There wouldn’t be much left to conceal any papers that referred to Kapak or laundering money. For all Kapak knew, he might also have burned millions of dollars in cash and drugs, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that Rogoso had decided he was weak and betrayed him.

He was heading toward his house, but then he changed his mind. He didn’t want to go back and sit around in an empty house tonight. He needed to be out, to see people. He needed an alibi. If he hurried, he would be in one of his clubs in the Valley in fifteen minutes. He steered toward Temptress, which was a bit west of Siren, and closer to the 405 freeway. He took the exit at Sepulveda and drove along the straight, long road, timing the lights and keeping his eyes open for police cars.

When he arrived outside Temptress, he parked his car close to the building, locked it, and hurried inside. He looked at his watch again. It was only 1:24. That was a little bit early for him to pick up the cash for the evening, but perfect for him to establish an alibi. He needed to be seen. He made a casual circuit of the bar and the tables, nodding at his employees or calling them by name and asking them how things were going.

He took a seat just inside the bar and looked around him. The pounding beat of the music and the sight of the four girls who were on the small black stages across the big room didn’t hold him in the present. He looked at the club and remembered the first time he’d seen it.

He had bought this building fifteen years ago, when he already had Siren and wanted to expand. The building had been a small factory and warehouse that made heavy packing cases for steel machine parts and screws and other devices that didn’t travel well in cardboard cartons. It had served the aircraft plants in Burbank and Long Beach, electrical equipment manufacturers in Hawthorne. But one by one, the big places had shut down until there wasn’t much to ship anymore.

Kapak had picked up the property cheap and remodeled the building quietly, using small crews one at a time. On opening day he had carpenters bring in the refinished bar from a failed German restaurant and install the four brass stripper poles. At 5:00
P.M.,
before the sunset, the sign that said
TEMPTRESS
in red neon script went up on the roof. The first girls had been hired as dancers for Siren.

Kapak watched the bar traffic for the final half-hour of the night. There were the usual number of young men who wanted to cheat the clock by ordering extra rounds of drinks at the end of the evening. He watched the waitresses scurrying from table to table to fill the last legal orders, scoop up their tips, and move on. He caught sight of Sherri Wynn across the room and thought about the payments on her Volvo. His gift to her hadn’t slowed her down.

He got up and moved slowly through the crowded room past the girls working the poles. They seemed to have caught the same sense of urgency as the night ended, trying to attract the attention of the customers who were just breaking bills of large denomination they hadn’t planned to spend and receiving cash back from the waitresses and bartenders. He saw a couple of men decide not to put the money back in their pockets, but tip one or two of the dancers.

The office was at the back of the building near the end of a corridor past the dressing rooms and the storerooms. Beyond it was only the kitchen, where he could see the cleanup was almost finished. The busboys and the kitchen floor man were mopping and wiping, and the dishwashers had the machines running hard. After closing, all that would be left were the last few racks of glasses from the late drinkers.

He opened the office door and stepped inside. Dave Skelley was on his feet, counting and banding the night’s take and setting the bills in stacks. He said, “Salinas from Wash brought his night’s take over here. He said you were busy tonight and asked him to do it.”

“That’s right. It turns out I’m not busy anymore. Somebody asked me to meet him, and then never showed up. Was Salinas worried about me?”

“No. The only reason he told me was that I asked him where you were.”

“Wasting my time is the answer. I’ll be back in a minute.” Kapak stepped out of the office into the bare corridor, but just as he was taking out his cell phone, the four dancers came toward him on their way to their dressing room. “Hi, Mr. Kapak.” “Hi, boss.” “Long night.” “So long.” They carried bits of fabric that had been parts of their costumes they’d picked up from the stage area as they’d left.

He spoke in the direction of the whole group, his eyes at the level of their foreheads. There was an etiquette to talking to four naked women. “You’re doing a nice job for the club, ladies. I hope the tips were good.”

“Not good enough.” It was the blond one whose name he kept forgetting. Mary Ann? Marian? Better not to guess and get it wrong.

Kapak snatched his wallet out of his coat pocket and extracted four hundred-dollar bills. “A tip from the house. Thanks for your effort.” He handed each of them a bill and shrugged off two attempts to hug him. “Good night.”

As soon as they disappeared into the dressing room, he used his cell phone to dial Salinas’s. “Hey. It’s me.”

“Hi,” said Salinas.

“Hey, pal. I wondered if Rogoso ever called the club tonight.”