He floated in the bright morning sunlight to the chicken yard outside his little house in the village in Guatemala. He could feel the sun’s warmth on his back and his neck as he squatted in the dust tossing feed to the chickens. Their copper bodies and emerald green tail feathers and bright scarlet combs glowed in the morning light. The world seemed so beautiful, and so safe.
12
JOE CARVER FELT good in Kapak’s guesthouse, his sense of well-being dramatically improved by the fact that he was resting in comfort unseen within two hundred feet of his enemies. He wasn’t completely sold on the style that Manco Kapak had chosen—or more likely, just paid a decorator for—to furnish his guesthouse. There was a heaviness to it. The sideboards, dressers, and nightstands all had a curvy line to them, so they were narrow at the top, then widened like bass fiddles, and then went inward again near the bottom to sprout legs. Carver couldn’t name the style, but his prime suspects were the French. Being in a room with that furniture was like standing in a crowd of elderly, fat women dressed in pastels. But he liked the bones of the house—the solidity of the doors and placement of the windows.
The guesthouse had a very good shower in the bathroom, and the linen closets had a generous supply of soft, thick towels. If he had wanted to cook, the kitchen would have been more than adequate for a dinner party. The living room had a big set of bookcases, but Kapak’s decorator had chosen to fill them with questionable Chinese pottery to play off the view of the bamboo through the windows on this side. Like all the pottery he’d seen in southern California, it was stuck in place by a gummy puttylike substance intended to hold it still in an earthquake.
Carver had studied everything closely. There was no dust on the pottery, no scent of unwanted moisture in the shower that might cause mildew. At some point during the week, the place must be visited by a serious cleaning service, so he wouldn’t be able to really move in and live here. He would have to sleep somewhere safer. This could only be a forward observation post he could use to watch his enemies.
This evening, he had lain down in his clothes and dozed off on the big couch in the den. Now he was lying on the couch slowly returning to full consciousness. Suddenly, he was surprised by the sound of an engine. He opened the shutter to see a moving glow of headlights on the far side of the house. He watched two more sets shoot into the sky as the cars came up the driveway, then lower as they reached flat pavement.
He moved quietly through the living room and out to the yard. He assumed that Kapak came home late every night from his clubs. But something more must be going on tonight. He walked up toward the main house along the narrow path through the bamboo grove.
He emerged from the bamboo and stepped quietly through the tropical garden to the side of the house, trying to listen for voices but not hearing anything through the closed doors and windows. He kept moving until he was beyond the edge of the tropical garden, where he could see in the large back window.
Kapak walked across the room, his hair curly black and wild tonight. It looked as though he had been tearing at it. He went to the bar, poured himself three fingers of vodka, drank some too fast, coughed, and put the glass down on the bar. When he called, “Spence!” it was loud enough for Carver to hear through the glass.
The man who came in from another room was thin and seemed to be about three inches taller than Kapak, but still shorter than the big Russian, Voinovich, who arrived after him. Spence was wearing his sport coat open, so Carver could see the butt of a pistol protruding from the inner pocket. Kapak shouted, “Everybody get in here.” Men began to walk into the room.
Carver started to move toward the next, unlit window. He hurried to the French doors outside the living room, used his knife to flip the latch upward, and opened it a half-inch so he could hear.
“All right,” Kapak said. “So, Jerry. You got there and the guy in the ski mask asked for the bag. Did he seem to know who you were?”
“I couldn’t tell. He just said to give him the bag. I said there were three of us and one of him. He said ‘Look behind you,’ and I did. It’s this girl, and she opens up and hits Guzman. Corona goes down next. I toss the guy the bag, and the two of them run around their corner of the building. Nobody said names or anything.”
Kapak said, “You know what was in that bag. I lost thirty-eight thousand to these two tonight. In two tries they got about sixty-one thousand just for waiting around the bank at three in the morning.”
“You think this was the same guy—Joe Carver?”
The sound of his own name jolted Carver. What did they think he’d done? It sounded as though somebody had taken more of Kapak’s money.
“It could be,” said Kapak. “Or somebody else who just read in the paper that people are stupid enough to make deposits at three A.M. How do I know? But I’m going to put a stop to these night deposits beginning now. Each night we’ll put all the cash in a safe until daytime. We’ll leave that son of a bitch waiting at the night deposit forever.”
Spence said, “I think you shouldn’t stop sending people to the bank. You can stop sending money with them.”
“There’s an idea,” said Kapak. “We’ve got one guy thinking, anyway. We’ve got to keep trying to get this robber, but we don’t have to keep losing money.”
“I’d like to be on that one,” Jerry Gaffney said. “All we’d have to do is have a couple of guys in that parking structure before he gets there, and then send in the guys with the fake deposit.”
“But you wouldn’t want to be the one holding the bag again, would you?” Spence asked.
“No, I think it’s your turn.”
Kapak waved his hand in front of his face as though to clear away the irrelevant chatter. “Who was it in the first place who said Joe Carver was the one who robbed me?”
Jimmy Gaffney said, “We were all asking around for two, three weeks, and two different girls mentioned him. They said he had arrived in L.A. about a month before, didn’t say much about where he came from, and he was in the habit of spending a lot of cash. They said he might be the one. Nobody said anybody else might be.”
“Who are the girls?”
“Just regular girls we met. One is named Sandy Belknap, and we met her in a club. The other is Sonia Rivers. We found her in line waiting to get into a concert at the Roxy.”
“So you don’t really know either of them.”
“No. We were just asking around, giving out cards. Jerry and I said we were private detectives working for the bank. We took their names and numbers.”
“I can’t believe you two sometimes,” said Voinovich.
“You can find them again?”
“Sure,” said Jerry Gaffney.
“Good. I want an update on Carver. Have they heard from him or seen him since the last time? Find out where he is and what he’s doing. If you need it, take a thousand each from the jar on the bookcase and take them out to dinner and all that.”
“We’ll get on it.”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“Morning?”
“I meant when you wake up. Go get some sleep.”
Jerry and Jimmy Gaffney stopped at the big urn on the shelf in the hallway. Jimmy reached in and brought his hand out with some money. He counted it as they walked outside and closed the door.
Voinovich said, “Do you think he robbed himself?”
Kapak shook his head. “I could believe he did it. But Guzman wouldn’t let himself be shot in the leg for a third of thirty-eight grand. That’s not even thirteen thousand bucks. The hospital bill just for tonight should top that.”