His life required that he be a paragon of self-discipline and consistency. His families could count on him. He had not always been present for every piano recital or championship game, but few parents were, and he always made an effort to spend time with the child whose event he’d missed, and listen to the story or see the videotape or hear the piece replayed for him alone.
He even took both families on vacations. He had a police career punctuated by long, unexplained undercover missions, and while he was undercover he couldn’t be reached by phone. Now and then he would be sent on training assignments run by the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security. There were even a couple of Western Hemisphere Anti-Narcotics conferences at Cancun and Puerto Vallarta.
Slosser had been disciplined. He was always aware that he could be unmasked and destroyed if he got careless. Even a single word in the wrong place could do it. He allowed himself no vices or even luxuries, so he could support both households. He grossly understated his salary to both wives to make it easier, and he encouraged them to invest most of their own income, just in case he was caught and they had to live on their own after that. The system had worked because he had willed it to work. The well-being of the women he loved and his five perfect children depended on it.
The disaster that had been creeping toward him since the beginning was drawing very close now. He had begun trying to avoid it more than ten years ago, but he had been unable to do it. His two eldest children, Nick of the Woodland Hills family and Martha of the Burbank family, were high school seniors, and both had been accepted to expensive, competitive colleges for next fall. Nick had decided to go to the University of Pennsylvania, and Martha to Stanford. Slosser had managed to avoid their going to the same college, but only narrowly, by telling Nick that a Western student needed to broaden his background by going East, and Martha that Silicon Valley was where the future would be designed and built. Tuition, room, and board at each of these institutions was over fifty thousand dollars a year. That meant he would need to come up with a hundred thousand dollars a year, while he still had three more children to educate.
There was financial aid available, but between the federal forms and the ones supplied by the College Board, there was no way he could apply without committing perjury and unmasking himself. The forms required an incredible amount of personal and financial information, starting with the parents’ Social Security numbers. False Social Security numbers, in his experience, never happened without a crime being committed, and so if the feds caught it, they would not shrug it off as a typographical error. They would begin to dig. His fraud trial would lead smoothly into his bigamy trial, which would invalidate his marriage to Christa, and then to the proceeding when Mary divorced him. Then there would be prison.
He had saved money, but if all five children went to private colleges, the tuition costs would be over a million dollars. Even if he managed to borrow that kind of money, through mortgages and the police credit union, it would only stave off the disaster for a time. And then retirement was looming ahead. When he was no longer working as a detective lieutenant, his income would shrink dramatically. But even worse, he would no longer have a plausible reason to give his wives for spending three or four nights a week away from home.
Time was tightening its grip on him. Tuition would be due at the end of the summer. The normal retirement age at the LAPD was fifty-five, and he was fifty-two. There had to be more lies, and that meant more chances to be caught. His five kids were all getting older, smarter, and more worldly. At first all he had to worry about were the two women watching him and comparing his words with what they observed. Now it was seven people.
He had been thinking about this impending disaster for years. It hadn’t taken very long to realize that the only way to avoid the conflagration that would destroy him was to get more money. He had tried to save enough, tried to work extra hours and temporary part-time jobs, and invested the money he made. It was never enough, and could never be enough.
His wives and children were his share of the best the world had to offer. His job was the best he could do for the world. He was about to lose it all. And as far as he could tell, the only choice he had was to keep his family happy as long as he could. When the secret was revealed, all he could do would be to stand up straight and try to protect them as his life disintegrated around him.
8
MANCO KAPAK LISTENED to the music, always heavy on the bass and terribly loud so the girls wouldn’t lose the beat in the noise of the club. Whenever they lost the rhythm, their bodies stopped moving, and they looked like marionettes—not still, but sort of hanging from invisible threads until they caught the beat again and let it animate them.
Usually he fled the music and kept his eyes off the girls after their first day on the job. The girls were only his way of ensuring that customers came. The men paid the cover charge that didn’t even guarantee them a seat, let alone a table, and they were still forced to buy the minimum two watery drinks. They didn’t have to tip the dancers and the waitresses, but nearly every one did, because denying a partially clothed woman anything was beyond most men’s power of self-control.
There really was no need for Kapak to personally screen every dancer who worked for him. There were more beautiful young women in Los Angeles than there were in heaven. They came from everywhere in the world looking for something to do that would put them in front of people’s eyes. Siren and Temptress had hundreds of applicants a year. Any of the managers could have chosen well enough.
And Kapak wasn’t so much interested in operating that part of the business as he was in keeping it credible. A reasonably intelligent observer had to be able to believe that the dance club in Hollywood and the two strip clubs were the main source of his income. That was all he really needed them to accomplish.
What he was doing was taking the money he made from other enterprises and combining it with the nightly receipts from the clubs. Each night at 2:00 A.M., when the state required him to close, he and his people would go to the clubs, count the night’s receipts, and prepare a bank deposit slip for the money. Added to the money that had come in from each club would be a few dollars that had come in from his short-term loan business. But the rest of the money was cash he was laundering for Manny Rogoso’s drug business.
He’d had a call from Rogoso on his home phone today while he was out, and it was making him a bit uncomfortable. Rogoso had never called him there before, and it showed a new kind of recklessness. Drug dealers were a volatile, unstable bunch, and Manny Rogoso was worse than most. It seemed to Kapak that he had become more violent and crazy in the past couple of years. Kapak didn’t get involved in any direct way with the world of drugs, but anybody who could read a newspaper knew that the big gangs of drug suppliers just over the border in Tijuana had been fighting among themselves and against the authorities for years. There were assassinations and kidnappings, and big gun battles every week involving dozens of men on a side. Army troops were stationed on the streets to keep order. Rogoso seemed to be taking on the mannerisms and attitudes of the big narcotrafficantes he dealt with. Kapak liked to keep things quiet and peaceful, and, when possible, legal.
A long time ago Kapak had learned an expensive lesson. The way the government got people they couldn’t catch in the act was catching them with money they couldn’t explain. When he was young he had left Romania for Hungary, and then gotten to Czechoslovakia with his wife, Marija, early in the brief summer of 1968 that ended when the Russian tanks rolled in to remove the liberal government. It had taken them until 1979 to make it to the United States. Then he had gone to work with a group who smuggled stolen cars from the upper Midwest into Mexico to sell them to Central and South Americans. The buyers were supplied with papers saying they had driven into Mexico and were simply returning home with their cars.