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

by Paul MacDonald

  “He knows him,” Cheli answered for me.

  “Let him speak for himself, detective. Why did he contact you, Mr. Restic?”

  “I’ve met Temekian a few times. He knows I was working with Ed’s family. He also knows I have uncovered information about him.”

  “He also sent his boys to straighten out your teeth,” Lopez added. “And now you are such close friends that he trusts you to orchestrate his surrender?”

  It was hard to overlook the skepticism in his voice.

  “Why does every question you ask me sound like an accusation?”

  “I’m sorry if you’re interpreting it that way.”

  “Come off it, Detective,” Cheli shot back. “You know what you’re doing and it stinks.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “You have some hunch Mr. Restic is involved in these murders but you don’t know how and instead of doing the hard work it takes to figure it out, you sit back and throw barbs and hope he says something wrong. That’s not good police work,” Cheli added.

  “What do you think, Terry?” Lopez asked Detective Ricohr.

  “Who cares what he thinks!” Cheli exploded. “You can’t just sit here and blow me off like this. We’re on a joint task force between our departments. Let me know if you don’t know what the word cooperation means and I will help enlighten you.”

  “Detective, I am just asking for someone’s opinion. Let’s not start a war over nothing.” Detective Lopez turned back to Ricohr. “Well?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “There’s some deep thinking,” she muttered under her breath which hopefully only I could hear. Detective Ricohr didn’t take any offense.

  “I say we go there with numbers and take him down and see what he has to say in the room, like Detective Alvarado has suggested.”

  “Finally,” Cheli breathed dramatically.

  “Okay,” Detective Lopez said, slapping his knee and rising to his feet. “Let’s talk about how we want to bring him in.”

  Cooler heads gathered around the coffee table and drew up the plan. I was to meet Temekian at the requested time in the parking lot. We worked out a signal for the detectives and uniformed men who would be close by should I need assistance. I was instructed not to get into any car and that I shouldn’t let Temekian into mine. We were to leave in separate vehicles and drive to the station on Western Avenue. We, naturally, would never make it that far. Units were to move in take Temekian into custody upon his exit of the parking lot.

  The detectives were meticulous in the details — they prepared a brief for the other officers that had all the information they could possibly need, including whether I was to be clean-shaven or with the slight stubble I was currently sporting. I made a note to shave before leaving for the rendezvous. I took comfort in the details, as if a long list of minutiae applied some sort of order to the chaos around me. If the three detectives had simply slapped their hands and said, “Let’s do this” without poring over a drawn-out plan, I would have felt a lot worse.

  We adjourned with a plan to meet at the high school parking lot a half hour before the scheduled meeting time. We would then go over last minute instructions before proceeding to the home improvement store. As everyone filed out, Cheli affectionately tousled my hair and gave some quiet words of encouragement, but they weren’t quiet enough as I noticed Detective Ricohr catch the gesture out of the corner of his eye. He didn’t say anything.

  I took a long, hot shower and shaved. After twenty years of shaving every morning at roughly the same time, an evening version of the same activity felt foreign. Even my face rejected the change in routine in the form of several rose buds on my neck. I dressed in a shirt Claire had bought me for Christmas — the loudest, brightest shirt I owned and one I never wore. I headed out early in case there was traffic. There was always traffic.

  It was the unmistakable combination of burnt orange and diesel that initially gave me pause. I was instantly brought back to that afternoon with Ed in my office. There was such clarity to the memory as if I were reliving it all over again — Ed admitting he used the Resting Room for personal calls, wiping away a tear with his thick, hairy finger, calling me “Mr. Restic.” For a few seconds I was actually there in my office. But what I struggled to comprehend was why the smell of Ed’s awful cologne was now in my own car.

  Then came the voice from behind me.

  I was so startled my foot jerked down the accelerator and the engine whined in a piercing shriek as only a hybrid car can do. Luckily, I was still in park or I’d have driven the car right through my neighbor’s fence and into his chicken coop.

  “Take it easy,” Temekian instructed. “Just do what you were supposed to do.”

  “I’m not sure what that is,” I said.

  “What did the cops tell you?”

  “We’re meeting at the Burbank High School parking lot.”

  “What time?”

  “Nine-thirty.”

  “We have time. Take the 5,” he instructed. “And give me your cell phone.”

  I fished my phone out of my pocket and handed it to him. He was scrunched down on the floor of the car with his feet extended to the spot directly behind me. In that position he had a clear angle of me and could watch all of my moves.

  We took Griffin over to the freeway on-ramp. There was a bottleneck at this portion of the freeway where the road dipped and curved around downtown and crossed two major mergers with the Santa Monica Freeway and the Arroyo Seco Parkway. I eased my way into the sea of red taillights and inched along with the rest of the tide. The hybrid was on electric power now and unsettlingly quiet. For once I wished I had a gas guzzler with a big engine to provide a little noise. Instead, I was left to contemplate the situation while listening to the uneven breathing coming from the back seat.

  “What’s going to happen tonight?” the voice asked eventually. “At the parking lot.”

  “I’m supposed to meet you and convince you to come with me to the Burbank police station.”

  “And what if I don’t want to?”

  I thought over my response and decided there was no use trying to make something up. “The police are going to arrest you before you get out of the lot.”

  “They’re going to kill me,” he said.

  I caught a brief glimpse of Temekian, his face illuminated by a big rig’s lights as it changed into our lane behind us. The rig made one more move to exit, and Temekian was again in darkness. The face I saw looked much younger than I remembered. It stared disconsolately at the floor of the car.

  “Don’t do anything foolish and you won’t get hurt,” I advised. “They just want to talk to you. And by foolish I mean trying to run, or fighting your way out. The word is you are armed and dangerous.”

  “That’s what they said?” he scoffed. “Now I know they are going to kill me.”

  “No one is getting killed if we just do what we’re supposed to do. Are you armed?” I asked.

  “You think I’m going to give them an excuse to shoot me?” he answered. I assumed that meant he wasn’t but I couldn’t assume he was telling the truth. It did put me a little more at ease, however.

  “Why don’t we just call the police and tell them I’m bringing you in.”

  “No. Drive to Burbank like I said.”

  We crawled along a little further then came to a dead stop.

  “Why do you think they are going to kill you?” I asked.

  “Because they are in on it.”

  “In on what?”

  “Everything,” he said.

  My mind immediately raced with possibilities. It was well-established that Valenti’s influence extended deep into the power structure of this city but it never crossed my mind that it included the police. It was a fantastic allegation but one I couldn’t dismiss outright. I rattled off the names of the players, from Valenti to Claire to McIntyre — anyone who was remotely connected to Ed’s disappearance. Nothing registered until I got to one name.

&
nbsp; “Yeah, I worked with him,” Temekian responded when I asked him about Langford. “I helped him on some jobs. He fixed up apartments in bad neighborhoods and sometimes there were people living there who didn’t want to get out.”

  “So you helped them. Is this what you did on Holcomb?”

  “Yeah, that fat guy was stubborn,” he laughed. “Took four of us to get him off that chair. He sweated so much he was slippery to hold onto. Big fat fish on the floor,” he chuckled.

  “Why did Langford buy those buildings?”

  “I don’t know. Because he wanted to make money?”

  “Was he buying for someone else? Does the name Salas mean anything to you?”

  “Salas? No, I don’t know a Salas. Langford paid me in cash and that’s all I care about.”

  “Did Langford hire you to work on Ed?” I asked. This time Temekian was silent, so quiet that I glanced into the back seat to see if he was still there. “What happened to Ed?” I repeated.

  “They want to blame me for everything,” he sulked.

  Over the years in my role in Human Resources, I noticed a trend among the guilty where they would succumb to a sickening level of self-pity in the moments immediately after being caught. We labeled it “WIM” for “woe is me.” During WIM, associates would lament the decisions that got them there and then apply those decisions to some seemingly long list of misfortunes they had suffered. While admitting fault, they also deflected blame by attaching their actions to some higher force at play that was orchestrating their lives towards further hardships. Listening to Temekian sulk felt like textbook WIM.

  “Did you kill Ed?” I asked. “Answer the question,” I said after a prolonged silence.

  “I was there,” he said non-committedly.

  “Where? The Deakins Building?”

  “Yeah. I asked him to meet me there.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he was being a pain in the ass about the deal. I was just going to scare him a bit. Tell him it was better to sell.”

  “Did Langford ask you to bring him there?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Was he there when Ed was killed?”

  “No, he wasn’t there.”

  “Who else was there?”

  “I didn’t shoot him,” he said instead of answering. “I hit him but I didn’t shoot him. I never killed no one.”

  “Langford. Did you kill Langford?”

  “No, no —”

  “What about Mike Wagner?” Again he denied it. “If you didn’t kill these people then someone else did. Who was it?”

  “They’re going to kill me,” he repeated.

  “Who is? Who is going to kill you?”

  Temekian was becoming more and more distraught. He was looking like a man who hadn’t slept in days. I kept the pressure on and repeatedly asked him more and more questions but he slipped into a mumbling mess, all crumpled up on the backseat floor. At one point, he erratically reached for the door handle and tried to get out of the car. The child safety locks for the children we never had kept him inside.

  “Take it easy,” I told him in a soothing voice. “Take it easy, okay?”

  “I’m tired,” he said.

  “Okay, just take it easy.”

  As we moved past Dodger Stadium the traffic eased up and cars began jockeying for position for the frantic rush out into the Valley. I stayed in the slow lane.

  “I need help,” he said. “Rafi told me that you know lawyers. I need a white one, someone I can trust. I don’t want no Armenian. They’re crooks.”

  The blanket condemnation of Armenian lawyers was telling. Rafi had made a similar comment when he was seeking help. Their insistence on a white attorney depicted a complicated world for the newly-arrived immigrant. They knew how to navigate the system enough to steal from it but when it came time to legitimately manipulate it for his right to a defense he was completely lost. I was torn between two duties — the one I had with the authorities to fulfill our commitment of delivering a suspected criminal and the one I had to a man who, according to the rule of law, was still innocent and had the right and need to prove it.

  “I can make some calls,” I told him.

  We pulled off the freeway at Colorado and swung around into Glendale. There was a run-down motor lodge not far from the exit. It was a remnant of the pre-freeway days when Colorado was still a major throughway. I pulled into the parking lot which they shared with a small donut shop.

  “Let’s get a coffee and talk options,” I said.

  I stepped out into the sparsely-populated lot. As I shut my door I heard a voice call out from behind me.

  “What are you doing?” Cheli asked as she got out of her car.

  Just then Temekian stumbled out of the backseat. He looked up and saw Cheli. His eyes flashed as he shouted out something in Russian.

  “Don’t move!” Cheli shouted and positioned herself behind the car door. She pulled her gun and trained it on Temekian.

  Temekian shot me a look, one filled with contempt as if I had lured him into this trap he was now in. Although I had done nothing, I felt like I had betrayed him.

  “Cheli, wait!” I implored. Turning back to Temekian I could see him contemplating his next move. “Hold on. Don’t do anything —”

  But he bolted towards the back of the motor lodge before I could finish. Cheli immediately gave chase, and I was left powerless to do anything other than watch. I drifted slowly in the direction of the pursuit. Temekian whipped around the back corner and disappeared into the darkened alley behind the lodge. Cheli threw herself into the corner of the building, carefully peaked around, then shot off after him.

  The night deskman cautiously poked his head out from the lobby. I shouted for him to call the police.

  “Call 911!” I told him. “Tell them there’s a —”

  A shot rang out. The desk man and I shared a look but neither made any move. It was followed by another shot a few seconds later. This time the man ran back inside to call the police.

  A FINE MESS

  I cautiously made my way towards the back of the motor inn. I crossed the lot and crept along the walkway between the lower floors of rooms and the parking spots immediately in front of them. The few people who were staying there peered out through dusty blinds but no one dared venture out from behind the door. Apparently they knew a gunshot when they heard one. When I got to the back corner I did like Cheli and slowly peered into the dark alley. I let my eyes adjust to the change in light but still could not discern any movement.

  Using the building as my guide, I worked my way deeper into the alley where dumpsters and a cinderblock wall framed out the one-lane stretch. At the far end a busy Pacific Avenue glowed with the passing headlights. Suddenly, a figure in silhouette appeared from behind one of the dumpsters. But I couldn’t make out the face. Whoever it was held a gun and scanned the alley. Then they saw me and turned and walked in my direction. My heart said stay and confront them but my feet said run like hell. I tripped over part of an old engine block. Scrambling to my feet —

  “Chuck!”

  It was Cheli. She hurried over to me.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “He’s dead,” she replied. “I need to call this in,” she said and dashed off towards her car.

  My eyes went back towards the dumpster where I now noticed two feet protruding from behind it. Curiosity drove me closer. I kept my distance but angled around the dumpster to get a look at him. He looked deflated. His head and arms were in an unnatural position that you only see with the deceased. His eyes were open. I then noticed the shiny, black pool that began from under his torso and formed a rivulet that bent and banked all the way towards me.

  “What are you doing?” Cheli shrieked. “You’re standing in the blood.”

  Only then did I realize that my foot had stepped into the stream, which now coursed around me like a real river would around a boulder. Cheli pulled me away from the scene and led me back towards the
parking lot.

  “I’ll stay with the body. You go wait out front for the arriving officers,” she instructed. “Tell them I’m back here. I don’t want some hot-head to shoot me.”

  I stumbled back towards the light of the parking lot. The sounds of the sirens, louder now, signaled to the people behind the dusty blinds that it might be safe to come out. A pool of bystanders congregated near the front office where the night desk man filled them in on the little that he knew.

  The first patrol car roared around the corner and nearly took out a minivan whose driver was surprised by the sudden flashing lights and stopped in its tracks. The patrol car angled towards us and pulled partly into the parking lot, effectively blocking one of the exits. The young officers jumped out of the car where the night clerk met them. One unholstered his pistol, the other manned a shotgun. The desk clerk pointed to the back of the building and they sprinted off in that direction. I tried to tell them that Cheli was back there but they never heard me as two more patrol cars came bearing down on us from the opposite direction and drowned out my voice. Luckily, I heard no more shooting and Cheli eventually emerged from the back alley with two officers in tow. She barked out a few orders that sent them scurrying off to do some thankless job but happy to do it and feel like they were a part of something important. Cheli was all business now. I kept to myself until they were ready to talk to me.

  The scene quickly devolved into a chaotic mess. The drivers of each responding patrol car insisted on keeping their lights flashing despite the lack of a need to do it. News choppers descended on the event and hovered noisily overhead. The crowd of onlookers grew to the size of a small mob but were held back beyond the sanctity of the yellow tape. News vans and stick-thin reporters set up at various positions on the block. More police personnel arrived — everyone from the crime scene photographer to the medical examiner who eventually removed the corpse in a non-descript van with no markings to indicate what it was used for. I stayed by my car and took it all in. If this was indicative of all crime scenes, the process was disorganized, inefficient, and extremely protracted. Three coffees later I found myself leaning against my car in an exhausted state, lulled almost to sleep by the rhythmic pop-pop of the camera flash emanating from the back alley.