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

by Paul MacDonald

  “Who is Salas?” I asked. Salas was the name listed on all of the transactions on Holcomb Street where Temekian and his thugs pressured the owners into selling. “So we have a mysterious guy buying up an entire block.”

  “I’ve seen this kind of thing before over in Hollywood during the revitalization movement,” Mike explained. “Developers would snatch up parcels of land under some shell corporation to keep the speculators off their track. They don’t want to tip their hand too early until they had secured all the land they needed for their project. The last thing they need is some opportunist grabbing a plot and then holding them over a barrel.”

  “Is this something Valenti might do?” I asked.

  “He perfected the technique. His work is particularly hard to piece together. It’s like a shell game — the ball is never where you think it is.”

  “This one seems too simple, then. We got a name, an actual person, not a series of phony corporations.”

  “We got a name but we don’t know if this is a real person,” Mike corrected.

  “Well, there must be an address on the transaction paperwork. Let’s go see who he is.”

  “He is a rental box out in Van Nuys with an owner who has standards. Fifty bucks couldn’t get him to give me any information on the box renter.”

  “Let’s stake out the place and see who picks up the mail,” I suggested.

  “That could take weeks. And they may never actually check it.”

  “We could ask the police.”

  “Screw them.”

  “But they could get a warrant to find out the rental box owner,” I reasoned.

  “I don’t want them nosing in on our story. They’re doing their job — a poor one I might add — and we’re doing ours.”

  “Okay, I just don’t want us to get mixed up with them. Obstruction of justice is a felony.”

  “I didn’t know you were an Eagle Scout. What are you nervous about, that clown detective we met at the Police Academy?”

  “No, the other one.”

  “What other one? That broad from Glendale?”

  “Go easy, Mike. She wants to help with the case. She told me to be careful and to let her handle it.”

  “Yeah, and steal our credit. No thanks. This is ours,” he said, pounding the table. “No chick wanting to make Lieutenant is going to take it from us.”

  Crass as he was, I still appreciated his drive even if it cut a little close to the bone. Of course, Mike didn’t dabble in scalpels. He preferred the machete.

  “Why are you talking to this Glendale detective anyway?”

  “No reason,” I stammered, “We are just kind of getting to know each other.”

  “Claire’s out, this new girl is in. I love it,” he laughed. “Resentment and revenge — the two great motivators. Well, at least I know you’re committed!” and he slapped me on the back, too hard. “Okay, how are you going to get information on what your ex-wife is working on?”

  “Don’t worry,” I assured him. “I will handle it.”

  * * *

  Bunker Hill was more of a plateau than a hill. The monstrous bases to the skyscrapers served as sheer, impenetrable bastions. The “ground” floor was actually four or five stories up where developers had flattened the crest of the natural hill and created an undisturbed oasis of plazas, water fountains, and public gardens. The design was deliberate — they wanted to keep the riff-raff at the bottom of the hill from mingling with the legions of corporate workers at the top. The last thing the city wanted were complaints from its corporate benefactors that the environment felt “unsafe.” Towards that end, they made it nearly impossible to get inside the complex unless you had a badge to drive into the underground garages or you had orienteering skills and a good set of lungs to navigate the maze of pedestrian accesses which involved dozens of flights of stairs and escalators that only went in one direction, down. The result of all this work was you almost never saw a homeless man begging on Bunker Hill. And if you did, he was quickly escorted down to the bottom of the hill by the purple-shirted downtown security force funded by the local businesses for just such work.

  As a result of this Byzantine design, it took me ten minutes to get down to the Fourth Street overpass even though it was literally in the shadow of my building. Under the off-ramp which shuttled commuters from the Harbor Freeway into downtown was a grassless stretch of dirt and rocks and a few park benches that served as the hub of the city’s downtown bike messengers. There were easily fifty of them milling about, swapping stories, filling out paperwork. It was nearing the end of the day when the beers were flowing and the medical marijuana was treating more than the individuals listed on the prescriptions.

  When I recently visited Claire at her office I noticed a bike messenger in the lounge. Despite the age of technology there was still a need for the old-fashioned delivery where a person’s signature was required. I called around to the various outfits and pretended to be from Claire’s office until I found a voice that recognized the name as a client. I then invented some story about a holiday bonus and needing to know the name of our guy so we could personalize the card.

  “You mean Rosie?” the voice on the phone asked.

  Apparently, our guy was a gal.

  “That’s a woman?” I shot back, which got a good chuckle out of the dispatcher. “Good God, all this time I thought she was a he.”

  “She sure acts like one,” he told me.

  I approached a group of messengers perched on the back half of a park bench and asked them where I could find Rosie. They eyed me suspiciously, as one might expect. I was a corporate-casual cog nosing around their turf, asking about one of their own. There was a code among bike messengers that went beyond the standard look of the hipster shirt and calf-high cargo pants. It was a code that I stood in direct contrast to. They were the urban esthetes, living a stripped-down existence where perpetual motion and the camaraderie of other messengers were all that mattered. Their bikes were expensive but simple, often single-geared and devoid of ornamentation. They viewed me as the life they rejected with my starched shirt, corner office, and luxury sedan, which they enjoyed cutting off on their daily routes. Many of these kids were from wealthy families, some were college educated, and none felt the need to help me in the least.

  “Never heard of her,” one of them shot back.

  “It’s important that I speak to her,” I said.

  “I’m sure it is,” said an older messenger with half-dollar sized disks in the bottom of his earlobes. Seeing the skin so stretched gave me a queasy feeling. “What are you going to do with those when you’re seventy?” I wanted to ask but knew better to keep quiet. He got a call for a delivery and quickly set off into the stream of buses and cars on Flower.

  “Rosie’s not here,” said a fresh-faced kid who looked like a USC undergrad. “What do you want with her?”

  “It’s between us,” I said tersely. I appeared to hurt his feelings.

  “Sorry I couldn’t help,” he said and drifted away. But he was more help than he realized. When he told me that Rosie wasn’t there, he subtly glanced over my right shoulder to a group by the Fourth Street ramp. It was an obvious tell, but I didn’t think he meant to give her away.

  I approached the group of ten, of which there were three women, and tossed out a casual, “Hey, Rosie.”

  A young woman, mid-twenties with a bob cut pulled back into a band, jerked her head in my direction. She dressed like a man, wore her hair like a man, but her eyes were all feminine. They were soft and green and led you to believe she’d make a good mother. When she saw me approaching, she subtly slipped a small, ceramic pipe into her pocket.

  “Do you have a minute to talk?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” she said. “What do you want?”

  “Can we go for a walk?”

  “How’d you get my name?” she asked warily.

  “From your dispatcher,” I told her.

  This seemed to put her at ease. She grabbed her
messenger bag and led the way over to the far recesses of the underpass. As I walked behind her I noticed the large tattoos of hula girls on both her calves.

  “He usually gives me a heads up before sending people over,” she said. “What do you need?”

  “I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”

  “A favor?” she laughed. “I’ll do you a big favor depending on how much money you got.”

  “Oh,” I said, a little confused. “I have money.”

  “Then let’s talk.”

  “You do deliveries for Jenkins Hollister Grubb, right?”

  “Sometimes but I share that route with another guy.”

  “What would it take for you to bring me any packages that go between that office and another office over on Olympic?”

  Her face blanched and her eyes narrowed into a sneer.

  “You want me to do what?”

  “I’ll pay you for it.”

  “I don’t want your goddamn money,” she fumed.

  “But you just said you’d do it for the money —”

  “I thought you were buying dope!”

  Rosie grabbed her bag and stormed off back to her group. I shouted out to her, “Wait! So dealing marijuana is okay but borrowing a few documents is not? I’m glad you have your priorities straight.”

  “Don’t talk to me about morals,” she reeled on me. “You dickwads may control the economy but it doesn’t mean you can tell me what to do.”

  Apparently she was a supporter of the protests against corporate greed that were a month-long nuisance before it ran out of steam.

  “Slow down on the rhetoric, Rosie. I’m not part of the one percent. I’m just a regular guy who makes an okay living and needs some information.”

  “Well, you’re not going to get it from me,” she said, and I watched the hula girls dancing on her calves as she stalked off.

  “That went well,” I said to myself.

  As I turned to head back up the ramp, I heard a commotion over by Flower Street where a growing group of bike messengers were confronted by a handful of the purple-shirted downtown security team. They were mostly wannabe cops who took their role of safeguarding the area’s streets a little too seriously. “The less authority, the greater the asshole,” Mike used to intone. These Purple Crusaders rode around on top-of-the-line mountain bikes despite this area under the overpass being the only patch of dirt in all of downtown. They wore black cargo pants which they tucked into their spit-shined jackboots. They had utility belts like the average patrolman but naturally no guns. The shirt of choice was a two-sizes-too small, dual-layered Lycra piece with the word SECURITY screaming on the back. The fitting conclusion to the ensemble were mirrored, wrap-around sunglasses.

  “You’re going to have to vacate the premises,” a member of the security force announced. All of his banter came from TV police procedurals.

  “Go fuck yourself,” my hooped-ear friend responded, recently returned from a delivery.

  The security member pulled the mini-microphone clipped to his collar closer to his mouth. “642, requesting back-up to Flower and Fourth.”

  “I don’t care how many of you come down here,” the messenger shouted. “I’ll piss on all of you.”

  That got a big laugh from the group.

  “Sir, did you just threaten me?”

  “No, sir, I didn’t threaten you,” the guy softened. “I threatened all of you pussies!”

  “You do realize that threatening me or a member of my team is a felony,” the guard explained just as five more of his team came riding up. They stood upright on just one of the pedals so as to quickly dismount in case there was trouble. Also, it would look silly using a kickstand when you were trying to be taken seriously.

  “Dude, you’re just a punk with nothing better to do now that the Occupy Wall Street protests are over.”

  That one stung. The protests had dominated downtown for several weeks. The lobby of our building was “occupied” for a few hours while the great unwashed tried to set up camp until the LAPD shuttled them out. They got washed a few minutes later when building security turned the sprinklers on as they pitched tents in the green space out front. In the end, it was all sound and no fury. Security outnumbered the rabble two-to-one. The real cops looked bored but content to collect triple time as they followed the group from building to building. For the Purple Crusaders, however, it was the event of a lifetime. They saw themselves as the last line of defense between anarchy and the civilized world. Little did they know that the people they were protecting were angrier at the Purple Crusaders than the protesters for making them use the back exit and having to walk an extra block to get to their favorite sandwich shop during lunch.

  Despite the wrap-around sunglasses, I could see a twitch in the head guard’s eye. He didn’t appreciate the insult to his group’s honor. It was time for him to pull rank and prove what kind of power he really had.

  “642,” he said flatly into his microphone, “requesting police backup. Code 83 — threat to a peace officer.”

  Even the bike messengers knew this meant a serious escalation to the situation. Part of the deal brokered between the downtown security force and the real force was a mutual support clause. Cops, although reluctantly, viewed any threat to a Purple Crusader as a threat to their own.

  “Come on, dude,” said the main instigator, “You’re calling the cops? No one threatened nobody.”

  “You said it yourself,” he replied. “I believe you referred to us as a derogatory term for the female genitalia.”

  Snickers emanated from the back of the messenger group and from my own lips. I decided to step in and diffuse the situation.

  “Listen, guys, let’s talk this out. There’s no need for threats and there’s no need to call the police,” I said, trying to be the voice of reason. “Both sides are wrong here. You got a little poisonous with the name calling,” I told the bike messenger. “And you guys were a little quick to escalate the situation,” I said to the security team. “Now, let’s just accept this and move on.”

  There was a long pause between the warring sides as my words sunk in. Perhaps all those years of conflict resolution training had its benefits outside of the office after all.

  “I’ll move on,” said a voice behind me. “After you accept this, bitch!” it concluded as Rosie flew past my shoulder and landed a clean right hook on the head guard’s chin. His legs buckled and he went down on one knee. The punch sparked a full blown melee with poor me stuck in the middle. I got spun around to the ground and was nearly trampled as the two sides converged over me. Few punches were thrown but there was a hell of a lot of shouting, shoving, and name calling. The police sirens grew louder and the bike messengers decided it was time to vacate the premises like they were originally asked. Clashing tires and gnashing chains crisscrossed the area as messengers melted into the evening traffic. Out of a cloud of dust, a bike skidded a few inches from my head. Rosie smiled down on me with those soft eyes.

  “A hundred bucks per delivery,” she said and flicked her card at me.

  B&E

  The house was located in Beachwood Canyon, a veined scramble of roads pumping out of old Hollywood and reaching far up into the hills below the iconic sign. Most of the streets twisted into the many crevices, narrowing as the elevation grew until they were just thin slits barely enough for one car to pass. There were no three-point turns in Beachwood Canyon.

  The houses clung to whatever land they could hold onto without falling into the ravine below, and when there was no suitable land they built elaborate stilts that cantilevered their entire place fifty feet off the ground. My house was a modest ranch that we had redone over the years. It was worth far more than it warranted. If a tornado somehow picked it up and dumped it in a beautiful community in Illinois or Oregon or Upstate New York, it would immediately lose at least a million dollars in value.

  Los Angeles was clearly a desirable place to live, mainly — or entirely — because of th
e weather. What I failed to realize was just how badly people wanted to live there and what price they’d pay to do so. A dumpy two bedroom home in a questionable neighborhood at its peak went for over a half million dollars. The entire market was puffed up beyond what a reasonable person would call sustainable, yet it continued to hover up in that unrealistic range like those foil helium balloons that never seem to deflate. Even the financial crisis that ravaged the real estate market didn’t have as great an effect on Los Angeles. The homes there were earthquake- and bubble-proof.

  Our house was dug into the hillside on a lot that sloped down from the road and as such offered an inauspicious first impression of a shingled roof and a satellite dish. Once you walked down a short flight of stairs and into the house, however, you were treated to a beautiful view of the lights of East Hollywood and, way off in the distance, the skyscrapers of downtown.

  The house was dark except for the hall light which was always on. Wednesday nights were GNO (Girls Night Out) for Claire and her friends. They were most likely splitting a bottle of Pinot at some trendy restaurant, but I wanted to make sure so I drove slowly by the house in case I saw any movement inside. Our street wasn’t one you drove through so I only did one pass. Any kind of cruising around would immediately draw suspicion. I looped back and parked down the road from the house in case Claire or any busy-body neighbors recognized my car.

  It was very quiet as I made my way down the front steps. I rang the doorbell just to be sure no one was there. Hearing nothing, I grabbed my old key which was still on my standard key chain and slid it into the lock. It only got half way.

  “She changed the locks?” I breathed to myself. Unless Claire had paid for 24-hour locksmith services, this divorce had been in the works for some time. I quickly tried to figure out another way into the house. Mike was right — resentment is a great motivator.