“My name is Joe Carver. I’m trying to reach Sandy Belknap. Is she in this morning?”
“No, I’m afraid she’s not coming in today.”
“I wonder if you could possibly give me her number.” He knew the receptionist would never do it, but he also knew that salespeople didn’t want to miss calls.
“Please hold and I’ll see if I can connect you to her personal number.”
There was a series of clicks and dead seconds, and then he heard a ring signal. The phone was snatched up immediately. “Hello? Joe?” It was Sandy Belknap’s voice, but it sounded oddly distant and unclear.
“Hi,” he said.
“This is a surprise,” she said. “I haven’t seen you around lately. What have you been up to?”
“Do you have me on the speaker?”
“I’m sorry. Most people don’t notice, but it keeps my hands free. I was just getting dressed.”
“Just give me a second to picture that.”
She laughed. “It’s okay, but only if you have me wearing a nun’s habit or a space suit.”
“That ruined the moment.”
“It’s supposed to. So what’s up? We’ve missed you at the clubs.”
“Who’s the rest of ‘we’?”
“The girls. Nobody’s that fun lately. That’s the consensus.” There was a hum in the background, as though someone were whispering to her.
“Is somebody there?”
She didn’t answer directly, but he heard a distinct irritation in her voice. “Just a sec. Let me turn the TV off.” He heard a change in the sound as she turned off the speaker and picked up the phone. “Hi. Still with me?”
“Yes,” he said. “Let me tell you the reason I called. Since the last time I ran into you, I’ve been having trouble. There’s a powerful man named Manco Kapak. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him.”
“Manco Kapak? No. What an odd name.”
“He owns Wash, on Hollywood Boulevard, and a couple of strip clubs in the Valley.”
“That’s who owns Wash?”
“Yep. What happened was that he was out late depositing money in his bank’s night drop, and a guy robbed him at gunpoint. He got mad. He sent a few of his goons out to find the robber. So they asked a lot of people—mostly girls in clubs—if they knew somebody who had just moved here and was spending a lot of cash. I think you might have seen two of them. They’re both tall, with red hair.”
“Oh my God.” It was quiet, just above a whisper.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. Just what you’re saying. It’s so scary. They think you did it?”
“Yes. I’ve been trying to find out how they even heard I existed.”
“I … can’t imagine.”
“It doesn’t matter how, I guess. I just wanted to call you in case the rumor reached you. I’ve never robbed anyone in my life. It’s true I was new in town when I met you, and I guess I was spending more cash than I usually would, so it might seem odd to people who didn’t know me. I had just flown in and paid to have my furniture shipped, and put a lot of other charges on my credit cards. But I had cash from closing my bank accounts in the East.”
“Look, Joe. We really should talk.”
It was the kind of statement he had been waiting for to confirm his suspicion. Next she would say she wanted to meet him someplace at a particular time to discuss the past relationship they’d never had and the future that would never come. “That’s really all I wanted to say. I’m on a pay phone and I’m out of change. If you hear any of those rumors, please tell people I’m not a thief, I’m a mass murderer. That way they won’t want to get near me.”
“Oh, I will. I promise.”
It took Sonia Rivers three calls before she got the right number for Manco Kapak’s house. It rang a few times, and then a man’s voice came on. “Mr. Kapak’s residence.”
“May I speak to Mr. Kapak, please?”
“I’m sorry, miss, but Mr. Kapak isn’t at home right now. Can I take a message?”
“My name is Sonia Rivers. I think there’s been a misunderstanding, and I’d like to correct it as soon as I can.”
“My name is Richard Spence. I’m Mr. Kapak’s assistant. If you tell me, I’ll be sure your message gets to him as soon as possible.”
Sonia hesitated for a second or two, until she felt the awkwardness increasing. She had to talk or hang up. “A month ago, two men who work for Mr. Kapak began talking to me while I was waiting to get into a concert. One of them asked if I happened to know a man who was new in town and who had been in clubs spending a lot of cash. I thought—I don’t know exactly what I thought—maybe this was somebody they knew and they were going to tell me something funny about him, or they had met a man like that but didn’t know his name, or something. So I said the 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.