He glanced at the girl in the rearview mirror. “Are you comfortable back there, miss?”
“Kira. My name is Kira. I’m fine. Have you worked for him long?”
“Nearly six years”
“Is being a gangster exciting?”
“Not for me.”
“You’re too tough for that?”
Spence chuckled. “I’m not tough at all. I’m not a gangster. I drive his car. I answer the phone. I make sure there are enough fresh vegetables and the garbage is taken out to the curb on Tuesday night.”
“You don’t get to go to the clubs or anything?”
“He doesn’t spend a lot of time in the clubs. They’re an investment. When he goes in, I usually stay with the car.”
“Aren’t you interested in women?”
“Sure. But there aren’t many women in a strip club, and the ones who are there are working.”
“If there’s nothing fun about it, why do you work for him?”
“Because he pays me a salary and health insurance and contributions to my 403b.”
“I heard he got robbed.”
“I heard that too. I wasn’t there.”
“Doesn’t it scare you?”
“You’re in a car with a man you never saw before, and it’s going over a mile a minute. Doesn’t that scare you?”
“Not really”
“Then you understand. Anybody can get in an accident any time. Anybody can get robbed. Changing jobs doesn’t do anything.”
“He’s different. He’s a rich old criminal. He’s a big target.”
“Then why did you sleep with him?”
“I was at Wash. It was kind of a slow night and I was just dancing with my friends. In comes Manco Kapak, and everybody in the place starts staring at him and telling each other who that is. He’s the guy who owns Wash and about three other clubs, and he’s this big, powerful guy with all these connections. After a few minutes he practically bumped into me in the crowd and asked me to sit with him and have a drink. It made my friends get all agitated and warn me not to go, and so I couldn’t resist.”
“But later on, you were disappointed?”
“Well, you know. He’s got money and power and all that, but those things don’t come to bed with him. What’s there is a sixty-five-year-old fat guy with a hairy back and trouble getting hard. So I guess that’s what I get out of the experience. I learned that.”
“I suppose that’s worth something,” Spence said.
“Yeah. I suppose.”
Manco Kapak stood in the shower in the guesthouse, feeling the jets of warm water scouring his body, then running down in soothing streams to his toes. He had mixed feelings about this shower. It was perfect in every way. It was much better than the ones in the various bathrooms in the main house, because he had decreed it. He had not merely bought this one when he bought the property. He had talked with the architect and the contractor during the building of the guesthouse and made sure they understood what he wanted. He had also made sure they understood that Kapak wanted what he wanted, not something they thought was similar to what he wanted. The more he enjoyed the beauty, tastefulness, strength, and even warmth of the shower, the more resentful he became that it was so much better than the ones he usually used. Was he supposed to walk all the way out here to the end of the path every time he took a shower, or stay in the main house and use inferior facilities? The whole idea made him furious. He was going to have to remodel the main house.
His train of thought brought him to how much money it would cost, and how much money he had been losing lately. His mind struggled with the thought. He was beginning to feel the unfamiliar sensation that he wanted to go see the police as quickly as possible. They seemed to know what had happened last night, and he certainly didn’t. This morning he could hardly call any of the five men he had sent after Joe Carver. That police lieutenant might very well have forgotten to mention that his five men had found Carver and killed him or something.
But Kapak knew his luck wasn’t that good. This guy Carver was an unknown. The man had simply appeared beside Kapak one night wearing a ski mask, stuck a gun against his head, and said he would pull the trigger if Kapak didn’t drop the bank deposit pouch and stand with his hands on the wall of the bank for five minutes while he disappeared. At first Kapak had almost laughed. He had considered saying it out loud: “You really don’t want the one you rob to be me.”
But small-time characters were the most likely to panic and shoot somebody. There was no point in incurring that risk. For five minutes Kapak could be silent and stand there. After that it would be different. It would be his turn. It still seemed perfectly fair to Kapak. He had been robbed of cash receipts, so he had asked around about new people with a lot of cash and come up with the name Joe Carver. Kapak had never seen or heard of the robber before, and he had never seen or heard of Joe Carver, so it seemed like a match. It had to be somebody new if he didn’t know who Kapak was.
He had to admit to himself in the solitude of his guesthouse shower that he had probably been overconfident in being satisfied with Joe Carver as the robber. The truth was that he had not really considered it absolutely essential that he catch and punish the right man. It was essential that he find and punish some man and get his money back, if only so that everybody knew he had done it. If he had the wrong man, it wasn’t the end of the world. These things had happened to people before. Carver could either put up with the loss or go find the real thief and get the money back from him.
Kapak dried off and walked naked back up the path toward the big house. He was sure the girl would be gone by now, and he could get dressed for the police interview in peace. The tedium of these interviews was their most striking quality, and this made it difficult to maintain the level of concentration he would need to avoid their purpose, which was entrapment. The cops obviously knew something was up, and the two cars registered to his company proved he was somehow connected with whatever had happened, and they needed to wear him down so they could fool him into incriminating himself. Actually, the process was more like being nagged than fooled.
Kapak came into the house through the sliding door into the living room and padded along barefoot on the polished hardwood floor for five paces before his eye caught the unfamiliar shape and identified it as a man.
The man was about forty, with a short beard that looked as though he hadn’t had a chance to shave. He wore a pair of black jeans and a T-shirt with a long-sleeved cotton shirt open over it like a jacket. He was standing absolutely still near the fireplace.
Kapak was naked and unarmed, and there was no way to retreat unnoticed, so he resorted to bluster. “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m Joe Carver.”
“You’re …”
“Yes. I came this morning because I wanted you to get a chance to look at me. Now you know that I’m somebody you never saw before. I never held you up.”
Manco Kapak’s mind was stalled, caught up in the contemplation of details. It was absolutely undeniable that this Joe Carver did not seem to be the man who had stuck a gun against his head a month ago. He hadn’t seen the man’s face, but the voice seemed different, and the shape of the body. But had Carver forgotten he’d been wearing a ski mask? Kapak tried to follow these thoughts to some kind of conclusion but was distracted by the feeling that he was exceptionally vulnerable.