Smile Now, Cry Later (Chuck Restic Mystery Book 1)

by Paul MacDonald

  “My husband knew him,” she started after a long pause. Her voice trembled slightly. “He passed away not too long ago and I guess I am still having trouble getting over it. These reminders of him keep coming back.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s probably better for me to get it out.”

  “Why did the detective want to speak with you, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “You are definitely persistent. I shouldn’t discuss this with you but Bill Langford called me before he was killed.”

  “He did? What did he want?”

  “I don’t know. He left me a message that we needed to talk. I haven’t spoken to him in years. I never did get ahold of him.”

  Langford had looked pretty shaken when I saw him in the parking lot. Perhaps he’d called in an old acquaintance for help.

  “Are you still thinking Ed killed himself?” I asked.

  “I’m much less convinced than I was yesterday,” she answered.

  Detective Alvarado walked me out of the police station. She promised to follow up on the call placed to the Glendale station but she didn’t have much hope as the main line wasn’t tracked like the one to 911.

  “Where are you parked?”

  “Around the corner.” I lied to avoid having to explain why I needed to take the bus.

  She kind of hovered like she didn’t want to part just yet.

  “I don’t know your situation,” she began, “but maybe one of these days we could go grab a drink?” For the first time since I met her, the controlled Detective Alvarado suddenly looked vulnerable.

  “I’m married,” I blurted out.

  “Oh,” she blushed. “I didn’t know that.”

  “But we’re separated.”

  “Okay.”

  “So I’d be up for that drink.”

  She smiled, but I could tell she was regretting the decision to ask me out. If the conversation was a fraction as awkward as the last thirty seconds, she knew she’d be in for a long night. As I walked off, I realized I didn’t know how to pronounce her first name.

  “Ar-ree-sell-ee,” she said. “But just call me Cheli.”

  I took the bus back to the tire shop. It was well after six and the shop was shut tight. My car had been courteously pulled out onto the street with the added benefit of a deep gash in the tire.

  CLOCK RUNS OUT

  There was a moving truck in front of Ed’s house. A couple of day laborers hefted a couch onto the front lawn and left it there in the hot sun. They were equally careless with the other pieces of furniture. Neighbors watched through slits in their curtained windows. That would be the second time they had done it — the first when the family moved in and they were too shy to introduce themselves, and now, as they moved out and they were too embarrassed to face a family that had lost their house to foreclosure.

  I scanned the yard but didn’t see Ed’s son or father-in-law. As I got out of my car to go investigate, I heard a voice call out behind me. Ed’s son sat on the hood of his car on the opposite side of the street. He watched over the proceedings like a detached observer.

  “What happened?”

  “What do you think happened?” he said. “The bank took the house. It’s my father’s last gift to the family,” he said bitterly.

  “I’m sorry, Rafi.”

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “I want to give your grandfather an update on your father’s case. I’ve been speaking with the detective in charge and although they don’t have any good news, there have been some developments. Is he around?”

  “Patek?” he laughed. “No, he took off.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He grabbed his stuff the other night and left me with this mess to deal with.”

  “Do you know where he went?” I asked.

  “He’s probably staying with my uncle out in the Valley. In Van Nuys or somewhere.”

  “Where are you going to stay?”

  “Not there,” he said. “They don’t have any room. Plus, I doubt they want to see my face. It’ll remind them of all the money my father owes them.”

  So the relatives served as a source for the seed money in Ed’s real estate deals. I didn’t blame Rafi for wanting to steer clear of that group — there’s nothing worse than the glare from someone you owe money to.

  “Relax,” he said, anticipating my question, “I’m going to crash at a friend’s.”

  Rafi leaned back against the windshield and surveyed the scene. More than once there was movement behind the various curtains, shutters, and blinds as his eyes passed over his neighbors’ homes.

  “They’re all afraid this is going to happen to them,” he said with a wry smile. No longer was Rafi the detached observer. He was a willing participant in a housing game he never knew he was playing. Where his grandfather slipped out in the middle of the night, Rafi put himself on display in the hot sun until the very end.

  “Why did you lie about talking to your father when I first came out here?” I asked him.

  “Who said I lied?” he shot back but the fight wasn’t in him.

  “You never spoke to him,” I stated more as a fact than a question. Rafi simply shook his head. “Were you just being a punk or was there a reason?”

  He suddenly remembered another lie he had made.

  “Whatever happened with that detective that called asking about you?”

  “The one you told you never knew me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She put me under arrest,” I said.

  “Because of me?” he laughed.

  “I don’t find it funny,” I said, pretending to be angry.

  “I do.”

  I let him enjoy the moment. It wasn’t that he found the episode all that amusing as it was a way to thumb his nose at all the prying neighbors. Maybe he did lose his house, but at least he could laugh about it.

  “My friend wanted me to say that stuff about talking to my dad,” he offered up.

  “Why?”

  He shrugged it off.

  “How do you know this Temekian character?”

  “How do you know him?” he asked.

  “I know he’s a crook.”

  “Ain’t we all.”

  “Aren’t we all, what?”

  “I’m Armenian, man,” he said, trying to make light of my question. “Shady is in my blood.”

  “Don’t be a smart ass. Temekian is in the mob and not a person you should be associating with. He’s involved in some pretty rough stuff, Rafi. You’re better than that.”

  “Who the hell are you? This guy does all right as far as I can see.”

  “I’m telling you what I know,” I started to lecture. “There are better ways to make something of yourself.”

  “I don’t see anyone taking his house,” he said. The resentment towards his father was going to take a long time to get over. “He’s helping me.”

  “With what?”

  “With money.”

  I didn’t answer and let him fill in the blanks.

  “We can sell some property before the bank takes it,” he explained.

  “Which property? The Deakins Building?”

  He nodded.

  The poor kid was being taken for a ride. There was no way he was going to make any money off the sale of that building. I then realized why he lied about speaking with his father. You need a live person to conduct a real estate transaction, unless you falsify the documents.

  “If you forge any documents, you are the one going to be left holding the bag,” I warned. “Trust me on this, Rafi. They are playing you. These guys don’t care about you. There’s something very fishy going on with that property. Don’t get involved and we’ll try and work this out.”

  Rafi pretended not to listen, but I think I was getting through to him. Avoiding Temekian and his associates was a start, but it certainly didn’t help the kid out with his current situation. I made a motion for my wallet, but he stopped me.


  “I don’t need your money,” he said and jumped down off the car.

  * * *

  GVK occupied the back unit of a mini-strip mall on the northern end of Verdugo. There was no sign to identify the company. It was situated next to a gift store that sold fake crystal figurines and other tchotckes that were doing a brisk business collecting dust. The strip mall apparently collected rent every month but where these businesses were getting the money from was a mystery. I had no trouble finding a parking spot.

  The office was a narrow space with several desks angled on each side. There were a couple of people inside but largely the desks were empty. No one greeted me when I entered. In fact, it was like I didn’t exist. One man whispered into the phone. Another stared at a piece of paper like he was trying to hypnotize it. At last a third man came out of the back room. He walked right past me towards the exit but turned back, almost like he was surprised someone was standing there. He didn’t speak; he just arched his eyebrows which was my cue to start talking.

  “Is there someone I can talk to about a building you represent down on Asher?” I asked.

  The man shouted out some name and immediately turned for the door and left.

  “How can I help you?” boomed a new voice from the back room. Out came a large, well-dressed man with one of those shirts where the collar and cuffs are a different material than the rest of the shirt. The cuff links were either lapis or plastic. “You had a question about a property?”

  “I represent a client who is interested in one of your properties. The Deakins Building in Lincoln Heights.”

  “Yes, a new listing for us,” he smiled. “Come, let us get a coffee,” he said and led me outside.

  We walked out to the front of the strip mall where a small cafe catering to middle-aged Armenian men served Turkish style coffee and brazenly ignored the city’s no smoking laws. The men inside were more fixtures than patrons. How this business subsisted was another mystery. The only activity was the lighting of more cigarettes and the occasional shifting of chairs to stave off developing bed sores.

  We used two tables to spread out the myriad of documents he brought over on Deakins. The man had told me his name but it was so long I already had forgotten it. All the Dale Carnegie memorization techniques combined couldn’t come up with a trick to remember this one.

  The man rattled off a string of details on the Deakins Building including net operating income, cap rates, and a figure on occupancy vouchers. It seemed buildings carried this number as a way for the city to control congestion and high-density issues. As a former manufacturing unit, Deakins carried with it a very large number which, by the way the man kept talking about it, seemed to be worth something.

  “This is a relatively new listing for you?” I asked.

  “Less than a year.”

  “Can you fill me in on its history? I see it sold for quite a hefty price six years ago.” Ed had paid top dollar times ten for this building.

  “The economy,” he lamented, but even the Great Recession couldn’t justify the magnitude in price drop we were seeing.

  “Even so,” I pressed, “the last sale seems a bit out of line with the comps. It’s a real outlier.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” he deflected, then added, “We had high hopes for that building when we first bought it.”

  “Are you a part owner of the building?”

  “Now? No, no, we’re not owners.”

  “But you were?”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” he said. “We were involved in the original sale.” Everything was starting to feel incestuous. Sensing my confusion, he added, “We didn’t work directly on that deal.”

  “But you worked indirectly on it?”

  “I can’t remember. We may have done an assessment of the property,” he waved like it was barely worth mentioning. I remembered Easy Mike’s point about the role of the assessor on mortgage fraud schemes. The players were starting to fall into place.

  There was a risk the man would shut down if I got too aggressive with my questions. One of the best interviewing techniques I learned was to identify the tone the interviewee was taking and mimic it.

  “Oh, okay,” I said casually, waving my own hand like he had. “So you weren’t really involved in the original deal. You seem like a smart man and I was wondering why you’d be involved in a deal like that!”

  And he laughed right along with me.

  “Remember the times,” he explained. “There was a real boom going on and the downtown revitalization was just starting up. The Brewery Lofts had opened and were a huge success. We wanted to mirror that success with the Deakins.”

  The Brewery project took an old factory in a seedy part of downtown Los Angeles and converted it into lofts and artist studios. Hipsters living on daddy’s dime gobbled them up and lived the poor artist’s life in a half-million dollar condo where parking was extra. This scenario was being played out all over downtown. Development money funneled into the three-mile radius. Abandoned buildings were converted into lofts and restaurants and galleries. But it all felt so tenuous. Intermingled with these celebrity-designed restaurants were methadone clinics, transient hotels, and homeless shelters. All it took was a hiccup in the market to bring the whole thing crashing down. That hiccup was more the burp of 2008.

  If you left out the part about the heroin addicts urinating in front of your building, you could see how someone like Ed could fall for a pitch like this. Lincoln Heights was the next downtown. The Deakins was the next Brewery. There were millions to be made. But the people Ed listened to had no intention of seeing the Deakins turned into the next urban oasis.

  “What’s the ownership structure?” I asked.

  “One owner.”

  “An individual or a corporation?”

  “Individual.”

  “Is he motivated? I am going to need a smooth transaction and want to avoid any ugliness from the seller’s end.”

  I got a look that warned me to slow down.

  “There shouldn’t be any problems,” he simply answered.

  We walked back to his office, and I promised to be in contact soon. A voice called out to me as I was getting into my car.

  “What are you doing here?” Claire asked and came striding towards us.

  “Hello Arshalouys,” she chirped and did the two kiss greeting. Apparently her name remembering skills were more honed than mine. “Do you know Chuck?”

  I tried to remember if I had given my real name. I hadn’t, but Arshalouys didn’t seem to notice.

  “I never got your card,” he said to me. Maybe he did notice.

  “Actually, I must have left them at the office.”

  “Anytime someone uses the word ‘actually’ it means they are lying,” Claire felt the need to add. “You told me that once, Chuck.”

  “Yeah. OK. Anyway, I have to run —”

  “Hey Chuck, did you hear about what happened to Bill Langford?”

  The mere mention of that name gave Ashralouys whiplash. He glared at me.

  “Yeah, tragic.”

  “Right after we talked to him,” she said.

  “I don’t know about right after,” I corrected. I snuck a peak at Ashralouys whose eyes were locked on me and not letting go.

  “You guys were chatting it up. Did he say anything? The Times said it was ruled a homicide.”

  “Just small talk.”

  “It’s crazy,” Claire babbled on. “How you can be talking about a cheese plate without a clue that it’s the last conversation you’ll ever have.”

  “Well, that’s life,” I said and jumped into my car. I was desperate to extricate myself from this conversation. As I pulled out of the lot, I could still feel those eyes boring in on me. Only until I was half way home did I realize I was so busy trying to deflect Claire’s questions that I didn’t have time to ask the more important question.

  Why was she meeting with this man in the first place?

  HEROES

  The Los Angeles P
olice Academy was a rambling complex of about twelve buildings and a shooting range nestled in the hills beneath the giant plateau that is Dodger Stadium. It was more than just a training ground for new recruits, though on any given day you could see them jogging around the grounds in their t-shirts like enlistees at Parris Island. The Academy also had a Revolver and Athletic Club that included a swimming pool for officer families and a café that was open to the public. I was surprised Mike chose this place to meet for lunch as he wasn’t particularly fond of the police in general and they weren’t fond of him either. Over the course of three years he had written a series of scathing exposés on corruption and incompetence — two traits that seemed to go hand-in-hand with the Los Angeles Police Department — that earned him N.F.F. status (no friend of the force) among the upper echelons of Parker Center.

  We sat in one of the empty Naugahyde booths along the window. Aside from the waitresses and busboys, we were the only two people in the room without a gun. We got a few looks when we came in but it was more to see if someone of higher rank was worth kissing up to. Mike and I didn’t look like cops, and the room immediately lost interest in us.

  “This place gives me the willies,” Mike said.

  “Then why did we come here?”

  “They have a good patty melt,” he said.

  The waitress brought us menus and waters and innocently asked Mike if he wanted a straw.

  “Of course, I do,” he replied. “You think I want to put my lips on the same glass some pig drank out of?”

  More than a few heads turned in our direction.

  “Jesus, take it easy, Mike,” I whispered and slunk low in the booth.

  “I’m just busting balls,” he said.

  “Why do you have to be so antagonistic?”

  Mike scanned the room.

  “These guys walk around with chips on their shoulders with no one left to knock them off and keep them honest,” he explained. Keeping the police in check was a favorite topic of his. “The worst development of the last twenty years,” he went on, “is the cozy relationship between the press and the police. This is supposed to be a system of checks and balances. Now The Times reads likes a glorified Benevolent Society newsletter extolling the virtues of these everyday heroes.”