Detective Ricohr sat on a set of stairs that led up to the second floor of Langford’s building. He was in his mid-fifties and had few distinguishing features. He watched over the proceedings like a bored foreman on an assembly line.
“Larry,” he called out to one of the technicians as I approached, “Run a GSR test.”
A thin, Asian man came up with a tackle box and asked me to hold out both of my hands.
“Just a test to see if you’ve been firing any guns lately,” Detective Ricohr answered before I could ask the question.
“Is this legal?” I asked.
“Do you refuse?”
“Can I refuse?”
“Do you want to?”
“Um, sure.”
“Smart move,” he said and waived away the technician. He patted the spot next to him on the stairs. “Sit down here. I have plantar fasciitis and it hurts for me to stand too long.”
“Did you really think I shot this man?”
“We found your card in the deceased’s coat. Rather than trek out to wherever the hell you live, it’s easier for you to come to us.”
“Glad I could help. It’s not like I had anything better to do on a Saturday night,” I complained even though I really didn’t have anything better to do.
“You’ll get over it. How well did you know the deceased?”
“Not well. I’ve only talked to him a couple of times.”
“When was the last time you two spoke?”
“Earlier this evening,” I said, though the encounter in the parking lot seemed a long time ago.
“And where was this?”
“At the Elysian. We attended a charity event.”
“About what time was that?”
“Seven-ish.”
The uniformed officer from earlier came over with a plastic evidence bag which looked like it contained a wallet.
“We found this in the dumpster down the end of the alley,” he said, “No money in it.”
“Poor guy,” Detective Ricohr lamented. “All for a few bucks. Who carries cash anymore?” he asked to no one but he waited for an answer. “How much do you have on you?”
“Is this another trick?” I asked.
“Not you,” he said. “I was talking to the officer.”
“Sir?” the patrolman muttered.
“Maximum, I carry fifty bucks at a time. Plus an emergency fiver in a fold in my wallet in case I get robbed or I blow all my dough on Scotch. My mother taught me that trick because the kids used to take my lunch money before I could even get to school. I’d put a quarter in my pocket and two quarters hidden in my shoe. They took the quarter but never knew about the other ones. Stupid kids — lunch was thirty-five cents but they never made the connection. They saw me eat lunch every day but never figured I had to have more money on me to pay for it,” he laughed. “Anyway, leave me that watch before you head back to the station.”
The officer stared at him, unsure how to respond.
“Don’t embarrass yourself further, son,” Detective Ricohr said in a very understanding voice and held out his hand. The officer quietly slipped off the watch and handed it to his superior. Detective Ricohr held it out like he was an admonishing a sixth grader.
“Smarten up, young man,” he said and deposited the watch not in an evidence bag but in his own pocket. The young officer stalked off. “Good detectives have to be good criminals. That kid is too much of a dope to be a good crook. Though he almost sent us looking down the wrong path. Did you notice the deceased’s wallet? It’s one of them breast pocket types. A guy isn’t going to go through all the trouble of rolling over a dead body to get at it and not spend an extra five seconds to get the watch right there in front of him. Especially when watches are so easy to hawk.”
“So you don’t think it was a robbery.”
“I don’t know what I think. Tell me about this Deakins Building,” he said casually. I shot him a look. “They’re still looking for the file but so far there’s nothing there. Maybe you could fill me in?”
I told Detective Ricohr about my initial meeting with Langford and the encounter we had at the charity event. He half-listened and wrote nothing down. I shared what little information I had on Ed’s disappearance as well.
“The Armenians are connected?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Langford seemed pretty nervous when I spoke to him earlier tonight. We were going to talk later but —”
“He winds up dead,” he finished for me. “Interesting…sort of.”
“Do you want the Vadaresian family’s contact info? They might have the original documentation on the building transaction.”
“You’ve been a great help, Mr. Restic,” he said, dismissing me. “Thank you for coming out.”
Detective Ricohr didn’t seem all that interested in what I had to say, but then again, he didn’t seem like the type to reveal too much of what he was thinking. He reminded me of my first boss at the company. He was the only person I ever met who used the word “nonplussed” correctly. That’s because he was the antithesis of the word. Tell him the building was on fire and he’d casually say, “Well, I guess at some point we should make our way downstairs.” Nothing bothered him. And it was an approach I worked hard to mimic but could never quite replicate. During his retirement party, I pulled him aside and asked him how he could remain so calm through all the corporate chaos he’d encountered over his long career. He answered in the same breezy way he always did: “It’s pretty simple,” he told me. “I just didn’t care.”
The local news vans had descended on the scene and were doing live reports at the entrance to the alley. The scrawny character with the drug hit theory was pontificating in front of the camera. Even they got bored with him and cut him off mid-sentence.
As I slipped under the yellow, police tape I noticed a familiar face approaching.
Detective Alvarado, looking casual in jeans, flashed her shield to the uniformed officer and ducked under the tape. I watched her make her way down the alley and take the seat on the stairs I had just vacated.
Perhaps Detective Ricohr cared more than I gave him credit for.
LOVE WHAT YOU DO
One of the most devastating — and reprehensible — acts against members of Corporate America was committed by the self-help guru who convinced workers that in order to be happy they needed to find a job they loved. In a single stroke he doomed millions of mid-level cogs to an eternal search for something that didn’t exist.
The numbers simply didn’t support the guru’s panacea. Every company has a core set of roles that is central to what it does as a business. These jobs are the main circuit that gives a company life, and the people in those roles feed off the energy of “feeling a part” of something. But for every role on that circuit, there are twenty more in areas that have nothing to directly do with the company’s business — Senior Account Liaisons, Meeting and Planning Specialists, Content Development Coordinators — roles that have a function but little value and ultimately are wholly unsatisfying. The guru makes his fortune from this group as they gobble up iteration after iteration of the same false promise.
The true believers quit their stable, well-paying jobs to open up a hand-crafted candle business out of their garage. The rest play an endless game of switching careers in the hope of finding that elusive one where every paycheck brings a big dose of happiness. That search is so common that anytime someone shows up at work wearing a suit you naturally assume they are going on an interview. When they leave at mid-day for their “doctor’s appointment” it is natural to wish them good luck.
The week after my very brief stint as a private detective, I found myself roaming the halls a bit more at work. My daily duties had lost some luster from their already fairly luster-less base. On one of my rounds I noticed someone emerge from one of my legacies at the company — the Resting Room. Expecting a woman in her second trimester, I instead saw a young man carrying a portfolio. He saw me and sheepishly slinked back t
o his cubicle. Everyone knows to fear HR. The poor guy hadn’t remembered to tuck his resume back into its folder. So he was using the room for a phone interview, highlighting the challenge of legions of cubicle dwellers — how to actively job search when your supervisor can hear everything you say and see everything on your screen. It comforted me that the Resting Room provided such a valuable service — unintended, sure, but still valuable.
Then I remembered Ed and his admission when I confronted him about his cologne. He thought I was reprimanding him for using the phone in the Resting Room. This piqued my curiosity. Working backwards on the dates, it appeared that Ed disappeared on the day I had spoken to him. And perhaps those calls he made would provide some clues about what happened to him. After all, if they were “I’ll pick up bread on the way home” calls he would have placed them from his cubicle. But to search out privacy, like our young interviewee had, spoke to something larger.
I pulled the phone records on the days leading up to Ed’s disappearance. It took a little maneuvering to get this information because of privacy concerns, but I used the young interviewer I discovered misusing the room as an excuse to dig deeper into other potential issues. The list of phone calls was surprisingly long. I settled in at my desk with a big cup of coffee and started making my way through the list.
The calls could be broken down into two main groups: the Job Seekers and the Personal Crises. The first group was your typical set of corporate recruiters, resume builders, life coaches, and HR folks at other firms. The Personal Crises group laid out neatly on a seriousness scale starting with the minor (Quit Smoking Hotline), elevating to the grave (Planned Parenthood clinics), edging into the critical (Free STD Testing), and culminating with the dire (a phone-sex line with lactating women). I imagined the heightened sense of pleasure this particularly-disturbed individual must have gotten from placing the call from a room dedicated to mothers.
Once I eliminated those two groups it was easy to isolate which calls were placed by Ed. The day before he went missing, there was a call placed to Emerald Properties, undoubtedly to Langford who was working on the deal for the Deakins Building. Within minutes of making that call, two more were made in succession. There was a lapse of about five minutes and then a final call. After that there was a three hour interval before the next call was placed. I assumed that the first two calls and possibly the third were all made by Ed.
The first number led to a surprising location — the Glendale Police department. It was the number to the main switchboard so there was no way to tell with whom he spoke at the station. The call lasted only a minute and so it was likely he never made it out of the automated recordings. It made me wonder if Ed knew he was in some sort of danger and sought help from the police.
I dialed the next number on the list, and a heavy, accented voice mumbled something incomprehensible when he answered. There was a lot of indistinguishable noise in the background. It sounded more like a business than residence.
“Hello?” I said hoping he would repeat what he said when he answered the phone.
“Yeah,” he said instead.
“Who’s this?”
“Huh?”
“With whom am I speaking?” I said full of formality.
“What happen?” a confused voice replied.
“What’s your address?” I asked.
“Oh,” he answered and his voice brightened at his finally being able to understand what I was saying. He rattled off an address to somewhere in south Glendale on San Fernando Boulevard.
The third and final number led to a voice recording for Signature Homes. According to the pitch, they offered an oasis of comfort living in an urban landscape. I finally got a live voice on the line and immediately wanted to return to the recording.
“How might I make your dreams of home ownership come true?” she offered. When confronted with these types of personalities, my instinct is to turn overly sour.
“I live in Lincoln Heights with my mother,” I blurted out.
“We have a number of options to fit any lifestyle,” she replied so quickly that I wondered if she had even listened to what I had said. “So are you and your mother looking together?” Apparently, she had.
“I have bad credit.”
“You’ll be surprised at the range of loan servicing options available to you.”
“I’m recently unemployed,” I tried again.
“We can always work something out where your mother would be the primary borrower,” she said. “Why don’t we set up a time to walk through some wonderful opportunities.”
A stint at the Guantanamo detention center couldn’t break through her relentless cheerfulness. I made an appointment with a phony name and Claire’s cell phone number and hung up. I took stock of my one lead, the address in Glendale, conjured up a doctor’s appointment, and headed out. My co-manager Paul caught me in the elevator lobby with my laptop bag. As I stepped onto the elevator he wished me luck.
* * *
San Fernando Boulevard wound like a steel river through the industrial areas of Glendale with its unmarked warehouses and occasional low-end strip joint. The address led me to a dingy tire repair shop where everything looked like it had been smeared in charcoal. As I approached, the proprietor glanced at the tires on my car as a barber would eye the hair on your neck.
“How much to fix a slow leak?” I asked.
He gave me the once-over, twice, then quoted a price that was at least five times the normal one. And people claim discrimination only targets minorities. My tolerance for the “white guy price” was at its limit.
“Great!” I said and pointed out the culprit. As he worked on the tire, I probed him for information. “A friend of mine recommended this place — Bedros Vadaresian.” I watched for a reaction and got none. “Do you know Ed?”
He leaned on a steel rod and walked like a mule around the hand-cranked wheel mount, pausing briefly to dip his hand in a pool of grey water, which he rubbed on the tire to check for leaks.
“There’s no leak here,” he said accusingly.
“Oh really? I’ve been having to fill it up —”
The office door opened and five Armenian men poured out. None of them worked there as evidenced by their spotless clothing. One of the men stopped to get a better look at me.
“I know you,” he said. Of course he knew me. He was the man I had seen with Ed’s son on the front porch to his home. “What are you doing here?”
Before I could continue with my story, the mule with the steel rod rattled off something in Armenian. The only words I picked out were Ed’s name. The other men grew interested and formed a half circle behind me.
“Fellas,” I said, which sounded like an invitation for a beating. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
“What you want with Ed?” he asked me and yanked the steel rod out of the wheel mount. It clattered and scraped on the concrete.
“Nothing,” I started out well but my composure soon devolved into blabbering. “The family asked…you know…I’m just…with the tire here… and a slow leak…”
I bolted. I ducked between two of the thugs behind me and ran. I ran out of the tire shop, turned north on San Fernando and never looked back. I had to stop three blocks later because my lungs felt like they were being shredded with razor blades. The pain from running was nothing compared to the shame at having chosen to run in the first place. Twenty years as a HR executive had earned me a black belt in passive aggression but it had also completely erased any capability in the old-fashioned, violent kind.
I sulked along for a few blocks and tried to blot out the last fifteen minutes. I would have gone home and dropped the whole matter except for a small detail — my car was still back at the garage. I decided to check in with Detective Alvarado leaving out, of course, the part about running away. She was at the precinct so I took a local bus up to the station.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, why?”
“You don’t
look so good.”
I told her about the discoveries I made from the Mother’s Room phone records and my run-in at the tire shop.
“They assaulted you?” she said and sprung to her feet ready to confront the assailants.
“Well, I wouldn’t choose that word,” trying to temper her a bit.
“Which word would you choose? Did they threaten you?”
“Verbally?”
“I can’t think of any other way unless they wrote it out on index card.”
“It was a threatening environment, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say they threatened me.”
She was amused by the parsing of words.
“I don’t think we could make environmental threatening stick. You’re sure about the man being the same one you saw last week?”
“Positive.”
“Then let’s see if we can put a name to a face.”
I spent the next thirty minutes poring over mugshots of balding Armenians. After about a dozen or so it became hard to distinguish one from another. But then I saw him. His hooked nose stood out. I pointed him out to Detective Alvarado.
“Ardavan Tomekian,” she read out loud.
“You know him?”
“Somewhat. He’s a junior Vor but moving up the ranks.”
“I wonder why Ed called him. It’s a pretty big coincidence that he disappeared a day later.”
“Enough coincidences strung together stop being coincidences,” she said.
“And now Bill Langford getting killed,” I added.
She cocked her head to one side.
“When did you hear about that?”
“The other night when I spoke to Detective Ricohr. He called me a few hours after the murder. What did you guys talk about?”
This time she laughed.
“You really do get around.”
“I saw you coming in as I was leaving. One thing I wanted to ask you,” I said. “When I first mentioned talking to Langford, you never mentioned that you knew him. How come?”
Smile Now, Cry Later (Chuck Restic Mystery Book 1) Page 6