Kapak looked down at it. “You don’t need to open that. It’s his shirt. I recognize the pattern. That’s the one he was wearing the day he came here. We don’t need to get any of his blood on anything.”
“I just figured you’d like to see proof that it’s over.”
“Did you get the girl too—the crazy one who helped him with the robberies?”
“Sure. But I didn’t bring back any souvenirs from her. Carver is the one we want to prove is dead.”
“Thanks. And great work. I was beginning to think this was going to go on forever. You’ll be getting some kind of bonus, when I think of something that would be big enough.”
He retreated from the kitchen and walked back toward the living room. He stopped in front of a big leather couch and let his legs give way to deposit him in the middle of it. For comfort he stared out the window at the enormous translucent ferns above the stubby sago palms. Even though the tropical plants were out of proportion and came from a distant, alien place, they were natural and green, so they made him feel calmer.
Spence had surprised him. It shouldn’t have been a surprise. He had been ranting for weeks that somebody should be able to find this Carver guy and get rid of him. But now Spence had done it. Kapak was beginning to feel a bit scared of Spence. He was like a genie. If you stated a desire in front of him, he would make it happen. But in the stories, the genie wasn’t benevolent. He was cunning and dangerous, and asking him to use his power was a risk. If you didn’t think carefully before you made the wish, there were terrible consequences.
Kapak tried to decide whether he had done the right thing. He was the one who had killed Carver and the girl, really. Spence’s disinterested violence was a kind of innocence. Kapak was the one who made the decision and the one who received the benefit. He had committed murder. It was the first time in a long life of struggling and fighting that he had done that. He had killed a couple of men before last night’s work at Malibu, but it had always had a fairness to it. Two men fight with grappling hooks on a moving boat, and one falls in. Maybe the propeller got him, maybe he drowned, and maybe he swam underwater to the far side of the boat, then ducked again to swim to the next boat. Never seen again wasn’t the same as dead. Running another car off the road didn’t mean he had killed the driver, or that the driver was even dead. If he was, he had certainly had a part in killing himself.
Joe Carver was the worst thing Kapak had ever done. He had ordered a man and his girlfriend killed merely for strategic reasons. It was what a king would have done. He had felt he had no other choice. He couldn’t afford to let people all over town believe that he had allowed a solitary stranger to keep robbing him over and over in different ways. It would have made him a victim to anyone in the city who owned a gun. As it was, he had waited one day too long and tempted Rogoso to kill him for being weak.
Telling Spence to kill Carver had been a bad thing. There was no doubt about that. But that wasn’t all there was to say about it. Life was more complicated than that. By having Spence kill Carver, he had put out a clear notice that anyone who attacked Manco Kapak was placing himself in terrible jeopardy. Kapak’s men would search until they found him, even if it took a very long time.
Spreading that story was a good thing to do. It would not only protect Kapak, but also his enterprises and all of his people. He wasn’t just thinking of the men like the Gaffneys, Spence, Guzman, Corona, and Voinovich, but also the bartenders, waiters, busboys, cooks, bouncers who worked in the clubs. If a bunch of men got up the nerve to pull a full-scale assault on one of the clubs, there would be shooting. In a crowded club, bullets could hit anybody, and they were far more likely to hit the people who had the least experience of gunfire. By making the decision to sacrifice Joe Carver, he may have saved ten or fifteen other people who depended on him for their livelihoods and their safety. He did not succeed in convincing himself.
He stood. The work was done. It wasn’t as though he had a chance to undo it. Now what he needed was to keep the killing from being wasted. He went back to Spence in the kitchen. “Have you told anybody that Carver is dead?”
“Nobody but you.”
“What did you do with the body?”
“I had rented a boat in Marina del Rey when I started looking for him. After I got him and the girl last night, I took the bodies about ten miles into the channel, almost midway to Catalina. I weighted them with chains and scrap iron I had collected and kept around for this kind of thing, and let them go. There’s a chance they’ll surface some time, but it won’t be soon.”
“All right. That’s good, I guess. We don’t want to get caught. But is there any way to let the word out that Carver has been found and killed?”
“There’s his shirt and his wallet, with credit cards and license. We can leave all of it where it will get found, if you like.”
“That ought to work,” Kapak said. “We’ll have to put some thought into where we want it found and who finds it.”
There was a sudden, loud pounding on the front door. It startled Kapak so much that he gave a little jump, then felt embarrassed because Spence hadn’t. He felt different about Spence today, and he’d only had a few minutes to sort it out.
Spence got up and looked at the monitor in the maid’s room. “It’s cops.”
“What cops?”
“Take a look.” He pressed the remote control and five of the small squares that shared the screen disappeared, so the view of the front steps took up the whole screen.
Kapak could see two men in sport coats and a woman in a pantsuit. “It’s that Lieutenant Slosser who’s been on my ass since the construction site thing. I just went for a ride with him this morning. You hide the shirt and stuff, and I’ll go talk to him.”
“Right.” Spence snatched up the plastic bag, opened a cupboard, stuffed it into a covered pot, then closed the door.
Kapak hurried down the hall toward the living room. He took a deep breath, then opened the door. He smiled. “Hello again, Lieutenant. Did you find the people who robbed my club last night?”
“Not yet. I’m sorry to bother you again, but I’m afraid we have to go talk downtown.”
“What about?”
“The deaths of Manuel Rogoso, Alvin Tatum, and Chuy Sanchez. We still have to clear some things up.”
Kapak couldn’t believe it. Here he was in his own house with the bloody shirt and the wallet of a murdered man, and here were three homicide detectives. But all they wanted from him was exactly what he wanted—to ride downtown a few miles from here to talk about something else. His luck must be returning already.
He smiled, almost laughed. “Of course. Just let me get my sport coat.”
31
KAPAK SAT in the back seat of the car beside Lieutenant Slosser. The two detectives, Timmons and Serra, sat in the front. The male, Timmons, drove the car, and the female was beside him in the passenger seat. It seemed the same to him as riding in a car with his parents when he was very young. His father had bought an old East German Trabant when Claudiu was young. His father would spend every Friday night and Saturday trying in vain to tune it properly or making the repairs to keep it moving, Sunday morning washing the fiberglass exterior, and the afternoon driving it with the family all dressed up, sitting stiffly and listening to the engine, waiting for it to cough, stop spewing black smoke, and glide silently to the side of the road.
He could feel tension in the car now, emanating from the front seat. Maybe it was because these two were partners and they were driving their boss in their unmarked car. He sensed that they were uncomfortable sitting this way, with the man driving and the woman beside him, because they knew it suggested to the eye that they were a couple. That had to be forbidden. They never spoke, only listened for some comment from the back seat that would distract everyone from the way they looked.