The Silent Second

by Adam Walker Phillips

  “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 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’re 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!” He slapped me on the back, too hard. “Okay, how are you going to get information on what your ex-wife is working on?”

  Bunker Hill was more of a plateau than a hill. The monstrous bases to the skyscrapers that ringed it 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 riffraff at the bottom of the hill from mingling with the legions of corporate workers at the top. If a homeless man somehow navigated the maze up to the top of the hill, a purple-shirted downtown security force funded by the local businesses would quickly escort him back to his rightful spot at the bottom.

  In the shadows of my building was a grassless stretch of dirt under an overpass where one segment of the riffraff hung out—the city’s bike messengers. They used this spot to fill out paperwork while waiting for the next call, and when no call came, to smoke enough dope to give pedestrians across the street a contact high.

  I had called around to the various messenger 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.

  As I approached, a group of messengers perched on the back half of a park bench eyed me suspiciously. There was a code among this set that went beyond the standard look of the hipster shirt and calf-high cargo pants, and was in direct contrast to my corporate code. These messengers were the urban esthetes, living a stripped-down existence for which perpetual motion and the camaraderie of their peers were all that mattered. They viewed me as the life they rejected, with my starched shirt 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-size disks in his earlobes. Seeing the stretched skin made me queasy. “But she’s not here,” he said and headed off on a delivery.

  As he left, I saw him subtly glance over my right shoulder to a group by the 4th 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, jerked her head in my direction. She dressed like a man, wore her hair like a man, but her eyes were 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 said, laughing. “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.

  “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 weed!”

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

  She reeled around to face me. “Don’t talk to me about morals—you dickwads may control the economy, but you don’t control me.”

  The main beneficiaries of the economic recovery were the very people who started the financial crisis in the first place. Underneath were legions of very bitter people.

  “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.”

  The hula girls danced 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 was being 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, even though this area under the overpass was 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 conclusions to the ensemble were mirrored, wraparound sunglasses.

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

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

  The security member pulled the mini-microphone clipped to his collar closer to his mouth. “Six-forty-two, requesting backup to Flower and 4th.”

  “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 a
s 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 were at least seven years old but were still held up as the Purple Crusaders’ finest moment. At the height of the protests, the lobby of my building was “occupied” for a few hours while the great unwashed tried to set up camp. 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 at lunchtime.

  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.

  “Six-forty-two,” he said flatly into his microphone, “requesting police backup. Code eighty-three—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 defuse the situation.

  “Listen, guys, there’s no need for threats, and there’s no need to call the police,” I said. “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. “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 the office after all.

  “I’ll move on,” said a voice behind me, “after you accept this, bitch!” 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 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 canyon’s many crevices, narrowing as the elevation grew until they were just thin slits barely wide enough for one car to pass. There were no three-point turns in Beachwood Canyon.

  The houses clung to whatever land they could grab without falling into the ravine below, and when there was no suitable land they’d built elaborate stilts that cantilevered the 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.

  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 made only one pass. Any kind of cruising around would immediately draw suspicion. I looped back and parked down the street in case Claire or any busybody 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 slid my key into the lock. It only got halfway.

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

  The house was alarmed, and if Claire had changed the locks on the doors she had certainly changed the code to the alarm. The last thing I wanted was to trip that system and have Claire, and the police, get a notice that someone was breaking into the house. Then I remembered one of the arguments we’d had earlier in the year.

  Claire was a stickler about natural light. “Why live in LA if you are going to sit in the dark?” she would say. Although our house had an expansive southern exposure out the back, the front of the house was fairly dark, as it bumped up into the hillside and was encased by retaining walls that kept the earth from washing us away during the next big rainstorm. No matter how many lamps, hanging fixtures, or LED strips we bought, Claire still complained it was too dark and insisted on putting in a skylight. I fought it; she won. Since the skylight was installed after the alarm system was put in, the unit itself was not linked to the circuit. And Claire always forgot to lock it, despite my numerous reminders.

  I went around to the side of the house and climbed onto the retaining wall, now slick with ice plant and ivy. It was a simple step onto the roof and three more steps to the open skylight. I unhinged the latch and pried the bubble open. It was situated right above our bed, which was the root of another argument we had after installation when I was awoken at six in the morning by a searing ray of light reserved for epiphanies. I double-checked that the bed was empty. The thought of jumping down onto Claire, and someone else, gave me the shudders.

  It looked quiet, so I jumped down and was met with the stiff resistance of a memory-foam mattress. I rolled off the bed and drifted through the house in the dark. Muscle memory guided me around sharp-edged coffee tables and over rugs that had started to curl up in spots. Nothing had changed since I’d moved out, and yet it felt different. This house that I had built—or at least hired a contractor and interior designer to renovate—was no longer mine, a reverse déjà vu in which everything looked familiar yet nothing felt it. Things that I had bought or hung or sat on were all still exactly where I had left them, but they had lost all traces of me. It felt feminine, like the house had undergone a sex-change operation in the few months since I had moved out. And tromping through it in the dark gave me the unseemly feeling that I was violating it.

  I found Claire’s laptop in the living room and powered it up. It’d be better if I had her iPhone, but that would have to be surgically removed from her hand. Lucki
ly, Claire was a Mac snob and insisted on using her home computer for work-related stuff because she did not like using PCs. She also used the same password for all of her sites. It was the name of her childhood imaginary friend and the year she graduated from high school. A psychologist could have a field day with that.

  I pulled up her personal email and waded through thousands of shopping emails, sale announcement emails, coupon emails, and more shopping emails. Claire had to be on every e-blast list in the greater Los Angeles area. Ninety-five percent of her time spent communicating was filtering out all of the noise around the one or two personal emails in her box, and it didn’t seem to bother her. Claire had embraced the digital age, while I tried to hide from it. I once tried to get the username “UNSUBSCRIBE” for my personal email, but unfortunately it was already taken.

  I sorted the emails by sender and scrolled down until I got to Todd McIntyre. There were several emails, but the most intriguing was a long string with the word “ARROYO” in the subject line. An arroyo is a creek bed or wash. The common reference in Los Angeles was the Arroyo Seco—dry riverbed—that ran through Pasadena, skirted downtown, and had the country’s first freeway running parallel to it. A quick scan of the emails led me to believe the Arroyo was some sort of development Claire was helping McIntyre with. The real arroyo was somewhat close to the set of buildings in the Deakins area, but not close enough to make a direct connection. It just seemed too much of a coincidence, so I forwarded all of the emails to my personal account and then went into the “sent” folder to delete any record of this transaction.

  Just as I was about to shut down the computer, I noticed another string of emails to McIntyre but sent to a different email address. The former were to his work email but the latter were clearly to his personal. They had subject lines like “This weekend” and names of restaurants and the one that made me feel queasy, “Last night.” I resisted the urge to read them. Instead, I sorted them by date to find out when the first email to the personal account was sent, which should mark the beginning of their affair. I needed to know how long it had been going on.