“You mean I’m invited?”
She turned and met his eyes. “Yes. Any time you want to come.”
“I don’t know what’s going to happen today. The last couple of days have been kind of complicated.” He watched her face turn down to look at the floor in disappointment. “But it’s nice to know that at the end of it I’ll be with you again”
She hugged him, then pulled away and went into the bathroom and came back with a thick white bathrobe, which she cinched tightly at the waist. “I’ll walk you out.”
22
KAPAK SHOWERED IN HIS master bathroom and dressed in fresh clothes. He wished he had time to shower in the guesthouse, but he was in a hurry this morning. Just as Kapak finished brushing his teeth, he heard the doorbell. When he came out of his suite, Spence was already moving toward the door, but he waved him off. “I’ll take care of this. Just stay out of sight.”
When he opened the door, Lieutenant Slosser was standing in front of him, a bit too close, and looking down at him intently. Kapak was too old and had seen too much to allow himself a startle reflex. He kept his face empty. “Hello, Captain.”
“I’m a lieutenant.”
“Did you hear we got robbed again?”
“I heard that. It’s getting to be an expensive habit.”
“Expensive, yeah. It better not be a habit. Come on in.”
Lieutenant Slosser stepped inside, and Kapak closed the door. Kapak followed Slosser’s eyes and saw the tray with two cups and a pot of coffee. “I see you’re just having coffee.”
“You want some?”
“No, thanks. I already had enough today. I wasn’t sure you’d be up. But since you are, would you like to go up to Siren with me? I’m going now to take a look around.”
Kapak hesitated. This couldn’t be anything but an attempt to entrap him. But he needed to know what Slosser knew and what he thought. “Maybe I’ll take you up on that. Let me just get my wallet and keys.”
Slosser stepped into the living room. His eyes never stopped moving, collecting details, making their way from one end of the room to the other, then through the French doors that led out to the garden of tropical plants among big stones that looked as though they’d come from far away, and on to the other windows. There seemed to be nobody here but Kapak, which Slosser judged was highly unlikely for a man who was under a barrage of attacks. He would have at least a bodyguard or two. And if Slosser had come with a warrant, he knew he would have been able to find plenty of weapons without much of a search.
Kapak returned, putting things in his coat pockets. He went to the front door and held it open for Slosser.
“I’m just curious,” Slosser said. “Don’t you have people with you?”
“Right now? No. I usually have a driver to take me places, and I sometimes have one or two club security people around at night if I’ve got reason to be worried. But everybody stays up late and sleeps late. I’m only up because of the robbery, and I don’t think the bastard will kidnap me today. He’s already got my money.”
“He?”
“It’s just a way of thinking. There’s always a ‘he.’ He’s the one who thought of the plan and told the others what to do. He’s the one we have to outsmart.”
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.