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 Rogoso and Malibu.
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, but the idea of her would have, the Marija inhabiting his memory. The real woman would have denied to all bystanders that she’d ever known him, and then hurried away. She had wanted no part of the shame he brought her.
He was sure she had told his children things that had kept them from trying to see him. If they were people of ordinary curiosity they would have come to see who he was, at least. If they were like him and most of his relatives, they would have come looking for him to see if he had serious amounts of money.
He was sure that she had not even hinted at the truth. She had probably told them he had died when he was in jail. That way, when she had started going to bed with the periodontist who had lived next door, she wasn’t a faithless whore, she was a pretty young widow who had found a reliable, respectable man to protect her children. Her children. They were her children, not his. He had not gone to claim them. When he got out of jail, he had been so angry that he wanted to imply to her that he no longer believed he had been the one to conceive them.
If he were to search for them now, he would have no clear path to them except through her, or if she was already dead, through the hated periodontist, Dr. Felder. He had no idea what city they’d been living in all this time, or if the children had kept his name or been given the name Felder. All he knew was that he had stayed in Los Angeles and kept the name Kapak. If they had ever wanted to see him, he would not have been hard to find.
Thinking about Marija and the children was like thinking about people in another century. It seemed to have taken several lifetimes for him to change from Marija’s young, foolish husband to the man he was now. He thought about what he had done. He had obtained money. That was good, but not as good as he had thought it would be when he was young. And now the business itself was not the same. Last night, when he’d had to kill his most important and oldest ally, he had felt a change.
He had chosen nightclubs because so much of the money that came in was cash, and he could use that legal cash to hide a stream of illegal cash. Laundering money for drug dealers had made him a potent and dangerous man, someone with connections. But now he had killed the source of the illegal cash and the power. If he wasn’t going to be laundering money anymore, what was he doing? Was he going to spend the final years of his life just running some honest bars? What for—to add a few more dollars to the bank accounts that would go unclaimed after his death?