“I think you were at Rogoso’s house, and that you shot the three men and burned the house to cover it.”
“I didn’t do any of those things. I wasn’t there.”
“Where were you last night between midnight and three o’clock?”
“We already talked about that this morning. I was at Wash, then at Temptress until two. I talked to my guys at Siren a few times.”
“Anybody see you in any of those places?”
“A lot of people. Dozens of them,” Kapak said. “I talked to them, and they talked to me. I stood around a long time watching bartenders to see how they were keeping up with the demand. I spent time talking to my manager at Wash, Ruben Salinas, and his assistant. I talked to waiters, busboys, even a few dancers, the security guys.”
“Sounds like an awful lot of people. It seems almost as though you were trying to construct an alibi.”
“It might seem that way, if I didn’t do it every night. But I do—seven nights a week. You’ll find out when you start talking to the people who work for me.”
“I have no doubt your lawyers can bring in lots of people to swear you were in sight all evening, but it doesn’t mean you were. I’ll level with you. I’ve got really strong reasons to think you did this. I also know you did it in self-defense. If you’ll just tell me exactly what happened, it will save us both a lot of time and effort, and you a lot of money. The law will also go a lot easier if you’ll be honest about it. You and I both know what Rogoso was like. He was arrogant and vicious. He was trying to kill you right then. All you have to do now is agree with me.”
They sat and stared at each other across the table for a long time. Finally Kapak said, “I’d like to call my attorney now.”
32
JERRY GAFFNEY and Jimmy Gaffney and Vassily Voinovich were in the garage of Voinovich’s house. Since he had come to Hollywood, Jimmy Gaffney had seen these little old houses with high-peaked roofs that made them look like witches or goblins lived there and wondered what sort of person really did. It turned out that the sort of person was Voinovich. Whatever it reminded him of in his Russian life, it seemed to make him calmer.
The garage was far too small for his SUV, and so it served as a workshop and storage space. Jimmy Gaffney pulled his body armor over his head, then blew out a breath of air. “Man, this is hot. I feel like I’m in some kind of press.”
“It’s not there to be comfy” Jerry said. “If you take a round in the chest, you’ll be damned glad you’re wearing that thing.”
“Not always,” Voinovich said. “I saw two bulletproof vests pierced in one fight when I was back home. It was a war between the security forces of a bank and a department store.”
Jerry stared at him thoughtfully. “Well, probably nobody is going to be firing military ammo around here. If they do, at least now we’ll know why we’re dead.”
Jerry put on his shirt over the armor and buttoned it. He had the same squared-off barrel torso that Voinovich had with his vest on. He put on a shoulder holster to hold his Glock pistol, then knelt to put a small ankle holster under his right pant leg to hold his .380 pistol. He put on a thin windbreaker over his gear and shrugged a few times to shift everything into the right places. He went to the workbench to pick up his ski mask and one of the three radio receivers.
Jimmy Gaffney began to pick up his gear and stow it in his pockets.
Voinovich stood fully armed and equipped, his head nearly to the lower rafters of his little garage. He tried pressing the Talk button on his radio and listened to the static sound as the channel came to life, then nodded to himself and put it in his jacket pocket. He said, “I’d like to talk about the plan some more before things start happening.”
“All right,” Jerry said. “We’ve got to stay loose. First we find out where he is. We take him in our car and drive away. Probably we keep moving. We call, or let him call, the club managers to arrange a ransom. All three managers have signature power for major accounts set up to run the clubs. None of them has the kind of history that would make me worry. They came up to where they are by making sure there are enough cocktail napkins and olives behind the bar. They’re managers. So we give them something they know how to manage—getting us some cash. We pick it up, let Kapak go, and take off”’
“Okay,” Voinovich said. “We agree on the general outline. That’s how it’s done. It would be easier if he had a family, so we could deal with them and have them tell the managers what to do.”
“Then there would be more money around,” Jimmy said. “The kind you can put your hands on.”
Jerry said, “Look, you’ve got to kidnap the guy you have, not make up some imaginary guy who would leave more cash lying around.”
“It’s all right” Voinovich said. “We’ve got to think about the details. We’ll need plastic restraints for his hands and feet. We’ll need a cloth sack to put over his head so he can’t recognize any of us and doesn’t know where he’s been taken. That’s important.”
“We should try it on first,” Jimmy said. “We want to be sure he can’t see, but he can breathe.”
“Not too well,” Voinovich said. “If he can breathe easily, then he can yell too. We don’t want that.”
“No, we don’t want that” Jerry said. “If we’re quick and do this thing right, he won’t have to wear it for long.”
Jimmy looked at his brother. “What if everything doesn’t go right?”
“What do you mean?”
“What I said. You’re talking about everything going right. What if instead it all goes wrong? What if he doesn’t come with us just because we point a gun at him? What if they can’t come up with the money in one day? What if he does something stupid? Do we shoot him?”
“I guess we’d have to.”
“Then what do we do with the body?”
“What?”
“You heard me. You’re planning to go in with your guns drawn, and the whole thing depends on everybody saying yes and jumping to do what we say. If he doesn’t, I guess you’re saying we have to kill him. We can’t just sit someplace with his body and hope it walks away on its own. We need to have a plan for getting rid of it.”
“Well, if you’re going to kidnap people, you have to be ready for bodies,” Voinovich announced.
“Okay,” said Jerry. “We’ll just agree that if things go wrong we’ll shoot him, and then hide the body. We’ll put it in a Dumpster.”
“What about the other people—say, people who work for him too, like Spence, or the waiters, or the bouncer?”
“We shoot them too, obviously, if it comes to that. We have to protect ourselves.”
Voinovich thought for a moment. “Maybe the thing to do is just make him disappear. If we kill him we don’t have to worry about him yelling or running away or getting his hands on somebody’s gun. We just collect a ransom and give him back dead.”
Jimmy Gaffney said, “When we started, we were just hanging out with him for a while. He might not even know he wasn’t free to leave. Maybe we’d go to a bar or a restaurant. That’s what you said, Jerry.”
“I know. I did. And that’s the way we all want it to be. We just breeze into his place like nothing’s up. We tell him we want to take him somewhere and then go there, stop in the men’s room to call the clubs for the ransom money. The other stuff is just in case it sours. Vassily feels more comfortable if he knows what to do in the worst case.”
“Are you saying I’m a big coward?”
“No, Vassily,” Jerry said. “I would never say that about you. Never.” He turned to Jimmy. “He was just being prudent.”
Jimmy was animated by frustration. “Being prudent isn’t finding out that there’s only a half-assed plan, and then going ahead with it. Prudence is stopping before it goes bad.”