by G. M. Ford
None of the buildings in question had house numbers on the rear sides except the condos on the corner, which claimed to own numeros 5010–5020.
He didn’t say anything when I came abreast of him for the second time. The only thing that had changed was that he’d brought his hands out from behind his back and was now holding himself up by the balls. Other than that, it was all pretty much status quo.
I ducked around the corner and started waving my arms at Brandon, who was still painted onto the cottage wall like graffiti. “This way,” I hissed as I jogged past the entrance to the pier, down the angled ramp that passed between the South Beach Bar & Grille and the public parking lot that fronted the beach.
By the time I got down to Newport, I was moving at the speed of lava, and Brandon was hard on my ass. We swung right, moving against the beachward flow on the crowded sidewalks, skittering across Newport and diving into Mike’s Taco Club, where we found a couple of outside cube seats where we could watch our wake.
A minute passed. And then another. First person to roll down the ramp was a blonde girl on a skateboard, followed by a couple of tourists on motorized scooters. Then an SUV full of people. I kept watching until a blue garbage truck lumbered around the corner, made the turn, and groaned up the ramp like a ruptured rhinoceros. No one who seemed to be following.
I was panting like a terrier, so I pretended to be loosening up my neck while I tried to correct my oxygen debt. Brandon immediately got hip to me and smiled.
“Told ya,” he said. “Place is like a bank.”
“Mexican guy came out and tried to tell me it was private property.”
“Yeah . . . they got a bunch of them guys too. Mr. Muscles must be workin’ down at the other building.”
“What other building?”
“You know . . . top of the stairs at Santa Cruz. Right where, you know . . . you and I . . . all the blood tests and shit.”
I held up a stop the music hand.
“So . . . you’re telling me the muscle-bound janitor from the building on Santa Cruz works here too?”
“Nasty asshole. Real jerk. Likes to throw his weight around.”
“Guy named Russell?”
“Who knows, man. Got him a million of these mechanic-like shirts with names in circles on the front. All different names . . . like he bought a bunch of them on sale at the swap meet or something.”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out some cash. Brandon waved me off.
“I don’t need no money from you. I’m good.”
“You sure?”
“Preserving my integrity.”
“Howsabout a taco?”
“I never turn down a taco.”
Half an hour later, I was walking off a couple of spicy shrimp tacos on my way back home. I was strolling along Bacon Street when a flash of color caught my eye. Up at the end of Narragansett. A rental banner draped across the front of the three-story building. Without wishing it so, I veered in that direction.
Turned out to be the building at the end of the alley I’d filmed earlier. The one with all the bathroom windows looking down on the alley behind the house Brandon had taken me to.
I had a sudden spasm of lucidity. A flash of an idea sufficiently audacious to bring a smile to my lips. I took out my phone and told Mrs. Google to put the rental agency phone number on my shopping list. She did.
It was one of those rare occasions when I managed to get modern technology to work for me on the first try. I emailed my video recording of the alley to myself and then opened up a bigger, better version on my iMac. Voilà! Gaze upon my work, ye Spielberg, and despair.
“What’s that?” Gabe asked.
“Little film I shot today.”
I started to fill Gabe in on my day but only got as far as “you remember that guy threw us out of the parking garage?” when Gabe’s face clouded over.
“That son of a bitch. I haven’t wanted to kick someone’s ass that bad in years.”
I finished my tale.
“We know that asshole’s name?”
“No. But I’m betting we can find out.”
Gabe moved close behind my seat at the desk.
“Play the thing.”
I did. A minute in, Gabe grabbed my shoulder. “Stop. Back up.”
I did.
“Stop.”
Gabe tapped the screen. “Bullets. A shitload of them.”
“Huh?”
“The cameras. That whole end of the street is covered by bullet cameras . . . you know, like the kind they use on liquor stores and jewelry marts and that kind of shit. Eight of them that we can see. Probably more of them on the ocean side. Big-time overkill on a private residence. Big-time.”
Gabe pointed again. “Stop.”
“Look,” Gabe said. “Same brand of cameras on all three buildings. Look at the logos on them. They’re all ZOSIs.”
“Making it real, real likely the buildings are owned by the same person.”
“You betcha.”
“Let’s see if we can’t find out Mr. Muscles’s name and who owns that property.”
“Okay.”
“And . . . I’ve got another idea. Something I noticed on the way home.”
Gabe and I met Sergeant Saunders at Café 21 in the Gaslamp Quarter. She looked wrinkled and tired. She turned down a drink but downed a couple of tumblers of ice water before we got started.
“The janitor’s name is Ronald Reeves. Known to his friends as Heavy Ronnie. Years ago he won a couple of local powerlifting titles and has been trading on it ever since. Nothing on his record but a couple of misdemeanor drug busts and a couple of assault beefs that were mysteriously dismissed. He’s worked at the building for six and a half years. His driver’s license says he lives out in Lemon Grove.” She read the address out loud. Gabe wrote it down.
“And the property owner?” I pushed.
“That you’re going to have to get from the plat maps. They’re online, but you have to sign in in order to annex them, so it would be better if you two did it instead of me, since it’s not my case.” She held up a stiff finger and waggled it in our faces.
“You know that call I made about the restricted phone number?” she said.
“At the station the other day?” Gabe said.
She nodded. “Today I get a call from the deputy chief’s personal assistant wanting to know why I wanted to know who owned that number.”
“Is that standard procedure?” I asked.
“Couldn’t be further from standard,” she said. “I’ve worked for the department for eleven years, and nobody from the chief’s office has ever called me before.”
“What did you tell them?” Gabe wanted to know.
“I told them I’d typed the wrong number, and then . . . you know what he said?”
“What?”
“He said I better dial more carefully in the future. That careful dialing could possibly save me a great deal of trouble.” She waved a hand. “A very low-key, passive-aggressive threat, as far as I was concerned.”
Gabe stood up. “Gonna powder my nose.”
I poured myself another glass of water and watched as Gabe squeezed between tables and disappeared inside the café.
“You know,” Saunders began, “me personally, I couldn’t care less . . . But just out of curiosity, is Gabe . . . I mean, what does Gabe consider . . .”
I helped her out. “Gabe considers gender to be a highly personal matter.”
“Ah,” was all she said.
“I, on the other hand, am strictly a vive la différence guy myself.”
She shot me a look. “I’ve noticed.”
“You ever get a day off?” I spread my arms wide. “Leading medical experts have declared me fresh as a spring breeze. I thought maybe we could do lunch or something.”
She hid behind her water tumbler. All I could see were her blue eyes above the rim. “I’ve read your file, you know,” she said. “Ne’er-do-well son of a wealthy and very corrup
t Seattle politician. Spent twenty some years working the streets as a PI. Supposed to be a pretty tough guy. A pain-in-the-ass smart guy but supposedly somebody who can be counted on to do the right thing.” She took another sip of water. “Came into the family fortune a few years back and quit the biz.”
“So . . . what do you say?”
“Maybe,” she said after a moment. “I like the rich part.”
It’s not every city that’s got a three-thousand-pound lemon sitting on the corner of Main and Broadway. No sir. The citrus groves for which Lemon Grove was named had long since been squeezed out by suburban sprawl, but the world’s largest concrete lemon had defied the juicer for the better part of a century now.
We drove to the end of Cardiff Street and found Skyline Hills, the neighborhood we were looking for. We pulled to the curb and checked the houses for numbers. Most of the neighborhoods we’d driven through to get there were best described as where the sidewalk ends. The sort of places where netless garage hoops had been bent straight down and where people parked beater cars on their browned-out lawns.
But this end of the hill was a different matter. It looked out over Spring Valley and the looming mountains beyond. Quite a view by anyone’s standards. If Lemon Grove had a high-rent district, this surely was it.
“Gotta be another block downhill,” Gabe announced.
Santa Rosa Street snaked down the side of the hill in a series of tight loops. Gabe recited the progression of numbers as we slid by the houses, finally pointing to the house at the very bottom of the street.
“That one with all the bougainvillea,” Gabe announced.
I eased my foot from the brake and began to circle the cul-de-sac. Gabe reached over and squeezed my shoulder.
“Let’s stash the car and see what we can see,” Gabe suggested.
“Isn’t that usually my line?” I asked as I pulled over to the side of the road and set the emergency brake.
“Just trying to spread the blame around for whenever things go to shit like they always do.”
We parked on a little dirt lane and walked over to Santa Rosa Street. In the near corner of the property, behind the six-foot adobe wall, a huge ficus tree spread across the sky like a giant mushroom cloud. The rest of the wall in both directions was covered with a blanket of red, lending a colorful, festive quality to an otherwise somewhat forbidding landscape.
We stayed close to the wall. All the way up to the gate. I got down on one knee and peeked through the steel slats. Classic California mission style. One story. Red tile roof. Nothing very ornate, not like the humongous Tudor I’d left smoldering back in Seattle, but in this real estate market, it looked like several million bucks’ worth of terra firma.
We skittered past the gated opening and walked all the way down to the next corner. Same deal. Bougainvillea all the way down to the back corner, except for a little patch down near the center of the south wall where the bougainvillea was absent.
I started walking that way. Fifty yards down I stopped. A black metal gate. Lots of tire tracks. Big tires. Sets of two in tandem. Big rigs.
“Must be how they got the farm equipment into the grove,” Gabe offered.
“Hasn’t been a working grove for years now,” I said.
“Somebody’s sure as hell still using this one,” Gabe commented.
“Wonder what for?”
We wandered back up to Santa Rosa Street. We were on our way back to the gate when Gabe slid to a halt and turned around to face me.
“See it?” Gabe whispered.
“What?”
“The light. The blue light. We’re on CCTV.”
I swiveled my head but didn’t see anything.
“Up in that eucalyptus tree.”
Took me a while but I finally managed to see the light. Just a dot among the maze of branches. Bright blue. Gabe began to walk. The camera swiveled and began to track Gabe’s movement. “Motion activated,” Gabe whispered, then pointed toward the huge ficus tree at the far end of the yard. “One up there too. Probably a bunch more we can’t see.”
Gabe hustled up to the corner and looked up into the tree. Pointed.
“Bullet cameras. ZOSIs. Same brand as the cameras on the cliff house.”
We hurried back to the car; I did a K-turn and headed back up the hill.
Halfway up, a U-Haul truck was parked at the curb facing in the wrong direction with the back door wide open and a ramp hanging down like a metal tongue. I looped around the truck and pulled the car to the curb.
By the time I got out and walked around the front of the car, Gabe was standing on the AstroTurf that separated the sidewalk from the street.
“Those cameras,” I said. “They see all the way up here?”
“Set up right, by a pro, they can count your nose hairs from this distance,” Gabe assured me.
One house uphill, two Mexican guys were dollying a clothes dryer out of the garage. One house downhill, an older woman in a huge straw sun hat was picking litter from the manicured succulent garden that was her front yard.
From this vantage point, I could make out a series of terraces spilling down the hillside behind the house. Blotches of brown and green. Far as I could tell, the property went east and west as far as the hill would allow. Not your basic suburban house lot by anyone’s standards.
A combination of curiosity and gravity seemed to urge us back down the hill. Next thing we knew we were abreast of the woman gardener. One of the Mexican movers walked past us. “Senora,” he called. The woman turned his way.
He handed her the key to the house. “Dat’s it,” he said. “We got it all.”
She reached out and took the key in a gloved hand. “I’ll give it to the Realtor next time I see her,” she said.
“Gracias,” he told her.
We watched as the mover walked back up the hill, got in the moving truck, and rumbled up the hill and out of sight. We were standing on the sidewalk watching the truck crest the hill and disappear from view when the gardener spoke to us.
“It was the last lemon grove in Lemon Grove,” she said.
“The house at the bottom?” Gabe asked.
“Yes,” she said. “But the new tenant, he don’t like trees. Didn’t want to pay for the water, they say.” She shook her head sadly and removed one green glove. “The Martini family must be turning over in their graves. They spent five or six generations creating and tending that grove. And then they get behind on their taxes, the city steps in and throws them out.”
“Who lives there now?” I asked.
“A big muscle-bound moron, name of Reeves. More money than brains type.” She pulled a paper towel from her pants pocket and wiped her brow. “Couple years now. Mr. Martini was in the later stages of Alzheimer’s. The family needed the money for his care. They were behind in their taxes. Wasn’t the first time either, but this time the city came down on ’em like a landslide. Broke the ninety-nine-year lease and returned the property to the investment company that owned it. That’s when that Reeves fella moved in.”
“He friends with anybody? You know, like tight with any of his neighbors?”
She shook her hat. “Nope,” she said. “Not sociable at all. Just had that security system and an electric gate installed and moved in. Doesn’t, to my knowledge, ever say a word to anybody. Leaves early in the morning. Comes back after dark. I hear a big truck coming and going sometimes in the middle of the night.” She leaned back onto her heels and stretched her back out. “Whole neighborhood used to smell like lemons. Not anymore.”
She put the glove back on and went back to picking cigarette butts and bits of plastic from her cacti. Gabe and I headed back toward the car.
“What do you suppose that place cost?” Gabe asked as we chugged up the hill.
“Multiple six figures,” I guessed.
“On a janitor’s salary?”
“Not even close,” I said.
“So where’s all the cash coming from?”
“I’m th
inkin’ maybe we ought to find out.”
“Didn’t we pass city hall right after we got off the 94?”
“Yes. I believe we did.”
“Let’s find out what he paid for it.”
“Sounds like an idea,” I said.
At the time of the tax seizure, the Lemon Grove city auditor had valued the property at $659,000, and then, almost overnight, without any of the usual bureaucratic delays or paperwork snafus, they’d deducted the thirty or so grand the Martini family owed the city in taxes, voided the family’s long-term lease, and returned the property to the owner.
All I could think of was that the Martini family didn’t have a lot of wiggle room. The wolf was at the door. The city wanted its damn tax money. Their dad was wasting away in a six-grand-a-month elder care facility down in Spring Valley.
The joint turned out to be owned by a private trust called Allied Investments of San Diego. That’s where all the actual folding money had come from. Also interestingly, there was no record of Heavy Ronnie paying rent. If public records were any indication, Ronald Reeves was living on twenty-two acres of god-awful-expensive San Diego County real estate for free. Nice work if you could get it, but no matter how you looked at it, it didn’t make a hell of a lot of fiscal sense.
The other interesting aspect popped up when we decided to check the tax-related evictions for 2013, the year the property had changed hands. Lemon Grove had nearly sixteen hundred residents who were, at that time, seriously behind on their taxes. Some of them more than a decade in arrears. Some owing considerably more than what the Martinis had owed. But, in all that time, only three properties had been forcibly seized for tax liabilities. Two commercial properties back at the other end of the city by the freeway, which, I was guessing, were probably gas stations by now. And this one. Definitely looked like somebody had tilted the playing field in favor of Allied Investments. Especially since the records showed Allied was the only bidder, a fact which both Gabe and I found nearly inconceivable. Something was rotten here.
It was a little after noon when Gabe squeezed us back onto the 94 and started zooming back toward Ocean Beach. We chewed over what we’d found out and came to the conclusion that there were only two real possibilities. Either Allied had something very good to protect, or they had something very bad to hide. Nothing else made any sense. The way we figured it, the key to the puzzle was finding out who or what Allied Investments was. Simple as that.